Passage to the Andes

It was the journey from Acre in the Amazon up to Cuzco in the Andes that was most extreme. Moving from hot humid tropical conditions, crossing the border from Brazil, with an English friend, Dom, we met a Quechua speaker from Cuzco, called Henry, and left Puerto Maldonado at 6pm to spend 24 hours climbing the worst roads in Peru...

It was an earth road all the way from the border up to the valley of Cuzco, through swollen rivers, past waterfalls, along cliff edges and climbing up over passes that reached over 4500 metres within 500 km distance of the rainforest. An unbelievable contrast, we were able to feel the edge of the Andes as it plunges into the steaming jungle and as we climbed, the climate got colder and vegetation got thinner. After passing an area of small thatched stone houses with scrubby fields, sheer drops surround the road as it passes the peak of Ausangate (over 6000m) and a tongue of glacier...

I was shivering as I had only a T-shirt and light jacket from the rainforest but luckily our driver knew the road and he leant me a thick coat until we made it to a remote community in a high valley were we were received thanks to Henry, our Quechua speaker, for a breakfast of herbal tea and boiled local potatoes in the tiny communal house, made up of one single long room. There are hundreds of types of potatoes in the Andes, they originated here and still provide the basic staple of most mountain communities.

Eventually the road continued up towards the valley of Cuzco but as the morning progressed we were held up by a group of trucks carrying tropical hard-woods and fuel that were stopped in the middle of the road... they refused to let us pass by rolling a little to the side of the road on the hand-break and our driver began to fume in Spanish- so I stepped forward, wearing the official badge of the government in Acre and tried to negotiate our passage through. The local truck drivers took me for an official road engineer and acknowledged my concern, they even appeared to agree to move so i returned triumphant to our 4 wheel drive pick-up truck... nothing happened. A little later, a genuine engineer arrived and had the same experience, there was a clear disregard for authority in the mountains!! Then suddenly when we were no longer expecting anything, there was a flurry of movement by people carrying stones and wooden beams. The driver of the truck with the broken gearbox decided that he would roll his truck off the road and down to the next bend 20m below rather than simple pulling aside!