21-Jan-2010

Puno, Peru. We left Cusco this morning. It was a little overcast, but nice. It seems like we can't leave anywhere without going up. This was a gradual climb out of Cusco but we are following a river upstream so we know were going up. Pretty soon it's cold, the bike is telling me that we are over 14,000 feet and its raining. I really don't mind. I do mind if its raining when we leave in the morning. Having to get up and gear up to go play in the rain, cold and mud is harder than getting up to a nice day and then having to deal with some rain later. It really rained and hailed some and rained some more. We were up over 15,000 feet when we decided we weren't coming down for a while and decided to put the heated gear on. Good decision. My new thermostat program works, just plug and unplug, but for quite a while the temp was in the low 40's so no need to unplug. The terrain widened and straightened over time today until we reached the shores of Lake Titicaca at Puno. Very cool.

I decided that all the pics I take are of the good stuff. When the weather gets bad the camera stays in the waterproof pocket. Guess I should make a point of getting it out for the bad stuff. Something else is weird here. I left Utah for the winter with the intention of being where it is really warm for a long time and what do we do, chase high elevation bike rides(15,000 feet plus), look for glaciers, look for 22,000 feet peaks, and lakes and rivers that consist of glacial ice melt. I'm near the equator riding through 40 degree temps. Something's really wrong with that. It may only get worse for a while. One of the passes I want to go though is over 17,000 feet, and so far, these passes are not just a go over the top and then down again. We may be there a while, or we may be down and back again several times.

I seem to have been on the wrong side of the law today. The local police didn't take to kindly to my climbing on top of the Incan gate we came across. No sense of humor. And later, we got stopped by the highway police, they seem to think we should have this piece of paper that we don't have. This is about the 4th time we have been checked for this since we have been in Peru. Today they started talking about a fine or something, which is their way of trying to extort money. I just told them we had all the paperwork we needed to get through their country and waited. I won, they let us go.

The pics. The Incan gate was cool. The rock work is amazing and this was border station for the Incan empire over half a century ago. A little boy and his family gathering crops while we put on our rain gear. The train tracks. I decided that these tracks were used by Butch Cassidy and Sundance when they were on their way to Bolivia. They loaded up their horses to give 'em a break and kicked back in the comfort car. We're on our way to Bolivia to look for the bastards that killed 'em. We stopped and got a cup of coffee and these boys were hamming it up. The shore of Lake Titicaca.