PowerCycle

05/03 What a day. Everything was fine until I saw Karin on the road and she jinxed me. She said something like, “At least you didn’t get a flat.” Sure enough, not an hour later, my front tire goes flat. No idea why. In fact I don’t think I’ve found the cause of the last year’s worth of flats. Oh, and I somehow managed to break my cheap sunglasses I bought less than a month ago (kind of amazing they lasted this long).

After a quick repair I finished the climb on a not too bad dirt road up to the pass at 12,351 feet and started heading down to what I thought would be my home for the night, Encanada. I already knew there was no hotel but another cyclist wrote that he found a place that rented out rooms. It took me forever to find it because half the people I asked, including the police officer at the station, didn’t know where it was.

I finally found it but no one was there. Well, almost no one. 2 large stupid dogs hang around the building and thought it would be fun to come tearing after me. One of them clamped onto the back of my pannier which brought me to a quick stop. I reached down to find the biggest rocks I could and let lose. Unfortunately I missed. No damage to my pannier thankfully.

I gave up on the room and decided to just ride out of town and find a place to camp. The road is paved to Cajamarca so I took off with a little over an hour till sunset. The only place that seemed like it could have been OK to camp was a school but the guys wouldn’t let me pitch my tent there. The only other options were private houses and I wasn’t big on that. Cajamarca was about 15 miles away so I decided to just head there. Traffic was light and there was a shoulder so even if it got dark I would have been safe enough.

The ride was easy enough and it had just gotten dark when I arrived. Banos del Inca is a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. Picking a hotel was an easy decision. The first one I saw is my home for the night. Cajamarca is only a couple miles away which will make for a short ride tomorrow.

If you like guinea pigs (in a non-culinary way) DO NOT keep reading… on one of my rest days in Celendin I happened upon a restaurant that serves the little critters. I knew eventually I’d end up eating cuy (guinea pig), maybe without even knowing it because sometimes the set lunches in small restaurants include all kinds of weird things. Peruvians have been raising them for food for maybe as long ago as 7000 years ago, long before people started thinking of them as pets which means it was time to put my Westernized inhibitions aside. Anyway, it was quite tasty. Kind of like a cross between chicken and pork. It’s a shame the pet thing is keeping a perfectly good meat replacement from gaining a bigger foothold. Guinea pigs are high in protein, feed on kitchen scraps, breed profusely and require much less room and maintenance than traditional domesticated animals.

GPX track