March 9, 2017
to horse camp - 2940m: all day climb
The rain continued most of the night and it is still threatening when we get up. The views are awesome this morning with clouds hanging in the Maranon Valley below us. We fix our coffee and oatmeal while packing up a wet tent. We start to climb and it starts to rain again. That pretty much sums up the whole day.
We climb, sometimes in drizzle, sometimes in rain, and every once and a while the sun tries to break through, but the clouds prove too strong and move back in. We do not get the awesome vistas we saw on some other cyclist’s blogs, but it is very pretty none the less. The valley is very steep, and the one lane road clings to sometimes almost vertical mountain sides. We often cannot see the bottom because of the clouds.
A couple of km from camp, the landscape changes and becomes green, vegetation everywhere and running water in the gullies. There are no villages along the road today, just the one restaurant in Saullamar, at about 88 kilometers from Celendin. Further down in the valley is a village, but you’d lose at least a hundred meters vertical going there. The restaurant was at about 2400 meters and had some flat area you could camp. It is too early for us though, we’d like to gain another 300 meters before stopping for the day. We meet three other American travelers today, a couple from Oregon riding in a “collectivo” minivan that stops at a small restaurant just as we set off again, and a guy from Minnesota riding a motorcycle for six weeks around Northern Peru.
We were told about a restaurant at 2650 meters where it would be possible to camp, but when we pass it there does not appear to be any good campspots. Our next goal is a village at 101 km from Celendin. About two kilometers before we get there though, at the end of a large hairpin (see map) we see a nice blocked-off trail that makes a perfect campspot, except maybe that there is no water. Patrick rides, unloaded, about 500 meters back down the hill to where there was a small stream crossing to fill the bladder.
Our timing is perfect, we have about a half hour of dry to pitch the tent, dry the rainfly and get settled. Then it pours for a couple of hours in which we are comfortable inside reading. It clears up again around dinner time, but after finally having the fuel pump so the stove works, we are not motivated to cook our noodles. So tuna salad with bread and coffee it is.
We are now at about 600 meters from the summit of Calla Calla Pass, our plan is to get the Leymebamba tomorrow, hot shower, cold beer and a restaurant await us. The name we picked for our campsite came to us overnight. It was already dark and we were reading a bit when we heard scraping and munching sounds coming from outside our tent. Patrick shone the light out and saw two horses, probably a mare and her offspring three feet from the tent, looking at that green thing in their way. “What the hell” is probably what they were thinking. Our tent almost completely blocked their path to greener pastures. It took them some time, but eventually they did pass by on the foot or so of solid ground between the edge of the tent and the drop down. They did not go far, several times during the night we hear them graze very close, and sometime just before dawn they pass back. Horses must have good night vision.
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Today's ride: 31 km (19 miles)
Total: 28,887 km (17,939 miles)
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