A Nightmare In Juliaca

We have traveled 30,000 miles in 13 countries over 21 months and I am happy to report we have put behind us the worst traffic of any city we have passed through. 

Juliaca is the largest city in southeastern Peru with a population of a quarter of a million people living at 12,500 feet and if you look the place up you will see the usual colonial Spanish architecture highlighted around the center of town. We on the other hand followed Google’s blue line across town. Lucky us.

We drove into town planning to simply come out the other side. We wanted to buy drinking water but the store was closed so we compromised and bought a Peruvian scotch egg for lunch.

They call it a stuffed potato (“papa rellena”) a fried ball of mashed potato surrounds a boiled egg and it comes with Chinese fried rice and a salad for $1:40 each  and that friends is another reason to enjoy Peru.

The road into the city from our wild camp  40 miles away was a better quality than the rest of the way from Arequipa had been so we made better time across the altiplano, the high plains. We had to pay a toll, $4:25. which seemed outrageous for such a crap road surface. The rather sweet toll taker in the tiny booth assured me they are preparing to resurface the highway…and the money will be used to improve the surface. 

This is mining country, clearly: 

Why the road signs are so tall I couldn’t say but perhaps they are designed to prevent graffiti. If so it works. 

These are your basic Peruvian truck stops, an area of dirt to park on and billboards advertising alpaca or pork main dishes or chicken or lamb stews. These meals typically start with a bowl of soup and include a fruit drink. For a few dollars you can be pretty sure you’ll have leftovers for dinner. 

It takes a  braver soul than me to try raw fish this far from the ocean.  

Another unstaffed customs checkpoint. We have never been hassled by any officials along these highways. Peruvian cops have a terrible reputation among overlanders but we have never had a problem. 

It looked abandoned but Layne went to check it out and a lady came over to explain what “kanchako” is and it turns out it’s roast alpaca chunks served in a plastic bag with a boiled potato and the largest corn kernels you’ve ever seen. We shared it as I drove, lunch on the go. 

I have to say I was rather freaked out at first eating alpaca, the pretty white wooly animals seen grazing here and which I have photographed all over the place. 

The fact is they are an economic necessity here. Their wool is prized and their meat tastes like beef and is not at all gamey and they thrive at ridiculous altitudes living well off the ghastly scrub grass that grows here. Such are the cultural adaptations you have to make to explore these countries properly. It’s a dive into their  culture to eat the local food and Peruvians are superb cooks. Some eateries are a bit too basic even for us:

There are, as you will see, a ton of gas stations in Juliaca.  Some are closed, many look badly run down and some are first class. We filled with gas at a clean modern gas station and weirdly we got the best price in town, purely because Layne knew it was likely to be among the cheapest. She watches these things and scored $3:60 for a gallon of regular. 

In Peru for some reason gas stations are called “grifos” which is totally unique and weird and I have no idea where the word comes from. Tuk tuks at these frigid altitudes have totally enclosed cabins:

Your bus breaks down so you fix it on the street. And a gringo drives by snapping a quick  picture of your efforts. Such is cultural adaptation. I was reading on a Promaster  forum how Costco refused to install new tires on a van as it was too big for their lift and “policy” did not allow them to change the tires in the parking lot outside the workshop. South America is the land of the free these days…

These are the suburbs of this city of a quarter of a million people near Lake Titicaca, and it just highlights the poverty of this region:

Peru is proud to claim they grow 4,000 varieties of potato. I counted around a dozen different kinds of potato in my soup the other day. Brown and purple knobs alongside big yellow slices of the more familiar King Edward style which I still prefer. 

Google Maps has a passionate desire to save us seconds on our journey so sometimes we end up taking absurd direct routes that don’t take into account the realities of life in the streets. How could they? But I still feel lucky to have electronic mapping in my phone. I remember struggling with paper maps and having a map in my phone seems miraculous. Our van is the older model and doesn’t have integrated dashboard mapping and I don’t really mind as my phone is good enough. 

The trouble with announcing boldly that this city was a nightmare is that the most nightmarish bits are impossible to photograph. 

Those are the moments when you need eyes in the side of your head as a stream of traffic like debris in an overflowing river just pushes up against you and swirls around like a log jam. 

Photography is perforce limited to times of least stress. 

Imagine pedestrians (with small children) bicycles, motor tricycles and pedal tricycles, tuk tuks and cars all coming together at once all the time and shoving and trying to force a passage. This is truly third world driving. 

And it’s not a video game. You can’t stop and press pause and go get a juice from the fridge. It just goes on and on for an hour or two, with both of you looking for gaps in the flow and trying not to hit anything while also avoiding potholes. 

We are going to have to recheck the alignment on the van as I sideswiped a broken speed bump and wrenched the front wheel. Our $300 KO2 all terrain tires are too expensive to allow them to wear out prematurely.  

This is how you replace tires when you’re not at Costco: 

Finally we crossed the river out of town. 

“Don’t contaminate. Take care of the environment.” It’s not their fault the city government has no waste disposal services. Which cost money. 

If you come to Peru on a tour you won’t see this as the tourist sites are swept clean. They know you don’t want to see this crap. 

We expect pull outs to be garbage strewn wherever we go. It’s life in poverty.  

“Don’t dump trash.”

Enough of Juliaca and I hope you enjoyed the lesson on getting stuck in Peruvian traffic. Our next job was to find a wild camp so we could finally reach the gold star I have placed on my Google Map: 

We are on our way to the highest town in the world. Put that in your record books. 

16,340 Feet

Apologies for no posts. I have photos and words and weird, very very odd places to write about but I am exhausted from extreme high altitude, long hours driving very bad roads and no time at all to sit and think. The stories are there and I will take you to a place no sane tourist goes. 

The Road To Titicaca

We left the campground at Las Mercedes in Arequipa before nine o'clock yesterday and Google figured we’d be close to the lake by 3:30.

However we soon discovered no way were we going to cover the 140 miles, because Highway 34A is awful.

It’s hard to see in photographs but the pavement is patched to death, unevenly in a way that makes a heavy van bounce. All day long. It was exhausting. 

The scenery was very nice and all but this is a major artery between the coast and the interior. Technically it’s called the Inter-ocean Highway connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic across Peru and Brazil. 

The amount of traffic on a Saturday was amazing and it was mostly heavy trucks which will also explain why the asphalt is so badly wrecked. 

In rainy season you can get mist (“neblina”) in these highlands. Arequipa is at 7,400 feet and the road here topped out at 14,600 feet. 

They call this area the high plains (“altiplano”) and it’s an area that stretches riches from here south across Bolivia, indeed most of that country is between 12,000 and 14,000 feet.  

It’s a rough place to make a living. Temperatures drop to freezing pretty much year round at night.  We’re far above the tree line and though we’ve been lucky so far it can be unbearably windy. Other than that it’s lovely.

This was the first time we’d seen vicuñas. The animals you know as llamas (“yamas”) are really broken down into four so called camelids, inasmuch as they are rebated biologically to camels. In a continent devoid of horses they were quite handy before Spaniards introduced horses.  

Thus far we had met llamas, taller with fur in shades of black and brown, and the dbler white alpacas with the soft coat that you wear, and down south the burly guanacos in Patagonia. And now these gentle deer-like dainty vicuñas. They are said to run fastest of all. 

It’s a protected reserve for them but we drive through a small town or two up there in the high plains of the vicuña. 

The town of Imata on the River of the sand band next to a bridge called…Imata. 

They will fix your bike and charge your batteries here. We had a pretty decent phone signal up here which surprised me. It didn’t last of course. 

A hotel (“hospedaje “):

A cone but no police; we breezed on through. There was also supposed to be a fruit checkpoint but that wasn’t staffed either. 

If you need a toilet this town is for you: 

And here you can get fried alpaca chunks. A street vendor sold us a bag of meat chunks, nicely spiced with a boiled potato and boiled corn in a plastic bag. It was delicious d Pugh I forgot to photograph it. 

But the meat chunks were wrapped around suspiciously small bones. It was not at all handy and could have been beef but I am pretty sure it was alpaca. It seems odd eating these animals but it’s a case of what you are used to. And they live well. 

The altiplano: 

Bolivia is off to the right in the map below.  The Pacific Ocean is off the bottom and Lima the capital is a long way off to the left. 

Laguna Lagunillas: 

There were a couple of iOverlander spots on the lake but one was a goat track for bicycles and the other looked great but campers were not wanted obviously:

Not clear in the photo is the Eire across the entrance. We drove on. 

We went through an inhabited patch with farmhouses, men and women and their dogs by the road doing things that looked like hanging around waiting for a bus to me. 

I can’t imagine enjoying living in this wilderness but just to make it better we drove through a critical zone. Actually the road was no better or worse in this area where flooding had torn down the hillside. 

14,000 feet, 60 degrees and sunshine dappling the hillsides. Despite me getting grumpy about this crap road we both appreciated how specialist strange landscape really is. 

We found another place to stop, and even though it was 2:30, three hours to total darkness we were ready to take a break for the night. We were 86 miles from the place wanted to camp on the lakeshore but on this road that could be four hours of exhausting bouncing.  

Access was via this rather splendid “temporary” bridge installed in 2016. The car below is on Highway 34A.

We rumbled up the hard packed dirt track and in a few minutes we were parked on level ground. 

Rusty and I went for a walk among the strange tussocks of grass that the guanacos had vicuñas call lunch. They remind me of boggy Scottish landscapes minus the bogs and the heather.  If you see what I mean. 

He enjoyed looking around. 

So did I. 

This wild camp has easy access. 

I could see rain building in the distance and sure enough it fell on us later, not a lot but enough to make us feel snug as we ate Layne’s homemade pizza for dinner. 

We could hear the trucks a quarter mile away on the highway late into the night. 

Cerro Hermoso (“pretty hill”) behind our flat spot for the night. 

Rusty got roast chicken and hot dogs and kibbles for dinner.  He sat out for a while sniffing the air blowing across the altiplano. He snored deeply into the night filling GANNET2 with a sense of peace after that horrid road. 

Happy dog. He’s come a long way from South Florida and he loves the fresh cold mountain air. We love living with him on the road.