The Worst Road In The World

There must be worse roads somewhere but Highway 12 and Highway 3 in Peru have to constitute the worst drive we have ever made so permit me some hyperbole.

The most famous section is called Cañon Del Pato (Duck Canyon) and I only wish photographs could do it justice as the mountains are so tall and the canyon so narrow and intimidating it makes the Grand Canyon look like a ditch. The road such as it is, is mostly one lane dirt or torn up asphalt laid down a lifetime ago. 105 miles from the coast at Santa took us ten hours to drive to Caraz at 7500 feet at the base of the Cordillera Blanca (White Mountain range). We made it but never again.

Obviously there is no cell signal, no services, only a handful of villages including one with a real gas station which also boasted a police checkpoint oddly enough but they ignored us as we drove through Chuquicara. 

The iOverlander app shows spots where people have stopped to spend the night parked next to stores or restaurants of which there are a handful along the way but wild camping is not advised as robberies by masked armed men have been reported. That was comforting as you might imagine. I will say that had I known what was coming we would have stuck to the coast but ignorance leads you into some pretty odd situations from time to time. There is also a warning about the road from Alex an American who loves to off road in his Transit van whom we met in Colombia. He understates the case and someone called roaming dutchies dismisses the warning altogether.

So as you can see other travelers didn’t think too badly of this road. Indeed we met a German couple in a van similar to ours who blithely said they have seen worse in southern Chile so you have every reason to view my rather jaundiced comments about this national highway with scepticism. Perhaps but I stand by my view of it. Ghastly. 

As you can see much of the road is one lane which can lead to passing situations. There are pull outs, some of them rather precarious dangling over the lip of the canyon and twice I had to reverse in tunnels where we met traffic head on. I pride myself on being able to back the 21 foot  Promaster and I got put to the test as locals don’t seem very keen to show off their reversing skills.

The easy tunnels are the straight ones. The ones that curve in the middle are a black hole and backing round a curve I found was rather tricky. A local told us there are 35 of these horrors. We lost count. 

Better to stop and let them by…

I could not believe a tanker truck made it through. That made me feel much more secure we could make it through the narrowest bits. Luckily we met him on an open stretch of more or less two lane. 

Pull over and wait. To their credit some locals did that for us. 

Being patient is a critical skill here. Speed really does kill.

Walls of rock. 

I don’t think the photos capture the awesome depth of the road in a vast network of cliffs and canyons. 

The other thing to bear in mind is that while this is a grand adventure and all mock heroic for us overlanders, locals cope with this crap every day. For them it’s just a matter of corruption as usual. One guy who stopped to chat while we paused for breakfast said he wished Peru would elect a man like President Bukele of El Salvador whose anti crime campaign has been noticed all over Latin America. Other people noted money had been set aside to improve the road but the leaders of this sad country pocket the cash and leave working people to cope with garbage infrastructure. We gave a lift to one guy walking up the road carrying a cooler of ice creams back to his village. Fidel Allegre is one tough dude but he snugged down on the floor in back  and fell asleep for most of his journey. We feared he might be dead at one point but happily he revived and asked to be let off near the hydroelectric station. 

We passed a minibus stopped in a pull out with people standing around. Apparently the brakes had failed and the driver was waiting for help to arrive. We did the only thing we could do and passed our water jug around with cold water from our fridge. They had been waiting an hour with more to go before help arrived.  

These people are tough. 

This is the hydro electric dam that has been built in this narrow canyon: 

And we knew we were getting to the top when we saw afternoon sunlight. Yes, I have no idea where we would have pulled over had we met oncoming traffic. Imagine backing up with the drop off to the side and no guard rails. People do die here and I would never think of driving this mess in rainy season; too easy to slide off into the void. 

Looking back I’m glad we did it but it was a stressful day. We left the coastal gas station at 6:45 and stopped for chicken sandwiches and an hour break mid morning. Once we realized the road was never getting better we just drove, constantly worrying about getting to Caraz before dark. In the event we made it just before five and found to our delight the campground had room for us and had a restaurant. We got dinner, drank a locally brewed beer and passed out at Apu Eco Lodge where we plan to stay a few days and tour the mountains. Sunday we sleep. 

A giant wash with dans bulldozed to funnel water in rainy season. Everywhere there was a gully the road was washed out and left unrepaired. The deeper we went up the canyon the worse the washouts became and the greater the deterioration. Of the road surface. 

At the start of the road the gullies were paved with cement and cobblestones but that effort soon petered out. 

A home. Imagine living there. 

It looked more like pictures I’ve seen of Central Asia or Afghanistan. It was intimidating. 

A road bridge connecting highway 123 to highway 12 wrecked impassable and abandoned. Take the long way round. Sorry, we pocketed the money for the replacement. 



















Rainy season delights, fords that in dry season are nothing. 

But in the wet season could be a hassle. 

Chan Chan

The Moche or Mohica people thrived on the coast of Peru from about 900 to 1470 when the new Inca Empire spread from Cusco and the original 100,000 Incas took over the lives of ten million South Americans. 

The Moche capital was Chan Chan, a vast walled adobe city in the heart of their nation that is still being explored and uncovered today. For three bucks apiece we got to wander at will and check out this extraordinary spot pretty much by ourselves.

It was a relief to leave modern Peru in the parking lot and take a walk in a clean serene environment that filled us with wonder.

This was a well ordered society built as always on sacrifice (often human) and work but the details of how they lived are mostly gleaned from how they died and their belief in an afterlife that required entombing wealthy people with items from their daily lives, including killing and burying their personal slaves to attend them in the afterlife. 

The Incas are often portrayed as rather kindly empire builders but from what I’ve read that is not exactly so but they were nowhere near the barbaric greed and cruelty of the illiterate Spanish who showed up in 1532 and murdered enslaved tortured and terrified on an epic scale. 

The lust for power and wealth through slavery and Christianity led the Spanish to not only wipe out ancient lives and customs but to not record what had gone before. 

The friars that accompanied the invasion made some notes and left partial written histories of what they found but that’s how we know some stuff about the Incas. These people who came before got no write ups and it’s a shame.

Peruvian archeologists are still at work but I can’t imagine it’s easy finding funding in a country that won’t provide the basics for its people. I find it hugely ironic that the Moche provided food, water and shelter in this arid climate and gave their people a coherent and ordered purpose for living but modern Peru is a huge step back for inhabitants we can see struggling to manage the basics. 

I imagined some bricklayer a thousand years ago doing the same work we see them doing today. You can even see finger marks in the adobe cement. It made the Moche very real. 

A short distance away is the associated museum where artifacts are catalogued and put on display. The Moche art we saw had a level of refinement that surprised me.

They sculpted  wood and used colored stones as inlaid adornments. These people were driving large on the coast of Peru a thousand years ago. 

And after all that we drive 40 minutes through modern chaotic Peru to the temples (huaca) of sun and moon. This is Cerro Blanco and you might be surprised to learn God lives there, at least the Moche deity did. 

On the lower slopes of the white hill lies the excavated temple of the moon.  In the valley below that was where hoi polloi lived and carried out the functions of living that allowed the rich and the priests to carry out the necessary obeisances to the deity. Across the valley is another mound which is the temple of the sun reserved for upper class Moche. 

In between we stopped for a lunch of home made chicken rolls aboard GANNET2 in the shade of a feeble thorn bush adorned with the usual plastic detritus.

This one is guarded by a statue of the Peruvian hairless dog that is such a cultural symbol. 

Real live ones freak out our poor Rusty who seems to be firmly of the opinion that normal dogs should have hair. He’s right too, this isn’t the climate for these poor creatures and cast off t-shirts while well meant don’t add to their dignity. 

Back to the museum with its examples of refined Moche art. 

When the weather turned to crap and wrecked crops the Movhe leaders didn’t simply shrug and say oh well but they acted. El Niño years when rains came and flooded or went and caused drought perturbed them such that they did what shy right thinking leader would do. 

They organized ritual sacrifices to kill off a few young warriors and offer up their blood to the god that lived in the hill. As cure all I have no idea how well it worked but it was a big deal, an epic production. The hand picked young warriors would fight with clubs and shields and those who lost their helmets and got grabbed by the hair lost. You can see them above bound naked with the rope of shame round their necks. Below you can see one getting led to jail by the winner. 

Then they’d wait in the condemned cell a few days until the priests figured the signs were right and they’d be led to sacrifice. Below you see the wooden club used to beat them to death. The black markings thousand year old human blood science tells us. Alternatively the  priests cut their throats and trained their blood for use as an offering. 

Then they chopped them up and bury them. As a response to bad weather it seems a bit extreme to me but most people do need their rituals. 

Aside from the drama this was an orderly society that left behind traces of true civilization and I keep

pondering what Peru would be capable of if its leaders trusted its people. These genes can’t all be lost surely. 

Check this out and this fascinated me. It’s what muralists call a cartoon, a plan sketched on an adobe tablet for wall decorations for a building.  Someone actually held this while damp and drew in proportion what the boss wanted in a wall. 

Some people claim they sense spiritual energy in these places but for me the connection to the past, the similarity in the details to our lives today is what fascinates me and the immutable nature of simply being human.

We drive back to the rather unpleasant city of Trujillo which enjoys the reputation of not being safe after dark. There is a Costco like store in Peru called Makro and we wanted to check it out but Layne found it not really useful for us as it sells too much stuff in bulk. I cleaned GANNET2 in the peace and quiet of the guarded parking lot while she shipped and Rusty napped in the grass. 

Interestingly enough two creeps yelled at us as we drove with the windows down yelling that we had a problem with our tire. It’s a common trick in Latin America as the idiot gringo stops and either gets jumped or gets his tire punctured and has to pay to get it repaired. I smiled and gave both of them the bird. Their hearts weren’t in it anyway but it’s the first time so done has tried that on this journey and a flea pit like Trujillo was the perfect spot for it to happen. 

A nice highway for two hours south to the town of Santa was our reward. We’d got dog food and filled our water tank and Trujillo was far behind. Lovely. 

IOverlander mentioned this gas station as a safe overnight spot. 

It was busy until about ten and then after an easy  dinner of ramen and some TV we slept until five when the trucks left. And we followed heading inland to the city of Caraz in the Cordillera Blanca - the White Mountain Range