Pan-American Highway road trip memories 8

Team 68
We’d now driven 440 km to Yucay. The landscape is changing dramatically. You can really tell we’re heading towards the equator. After every bend, we drove into yet another picture-postcard scene. I can tell you that 3-metre-tall sanseverias are quite something. Magnificent trees with fiery red clusters of flowers and children herding llamas. And of course cows, pigs and all sorts of other animals just wandering along the road. It was getting dark and we still only had our high beams. Luckily, we managed to squeeze in between two other lorries, because driving between lorries without rear lights is a recipe for disaster.

I thought we’d be sleeping in a cowshed. I hadn’t seen anything else along the way. Suddenly, we turned through a gate and found ourselves at a fairytale-like lodge hotel. Stunning gardens, beautifully lit, charming little cottages: so lovely!

Team 68
In Argentina we saw the odd llama now and then; in Chile, horses joined the mix; but the variety of animals you come across on the road in Bolivia and now in Peru is something else. We see: cows, goats, sheep, donkeys, rocks (that have rolled down from the mountain) but above all: dogs. Loads of dogs. It really does seem like a plague. The locals don’t seem to mind them much. The advice is to honk your horn if they’re walking on the road, and it works. They then move out of the way. We’re now tackling the second mountain pass of the day and heading towards Nazca. We’re at 4,000 metres and heading up to 4,500.

 

Team 41
Today’s journey was breathtaking (and not just because the air was thin). Stunning mountain passes and high plateaus. We also saw lots of wildlife. At an altitude of 4,300 metres, by a mountain lake, we spotted flamingos: we hadn’t expected to see them there. Due to the high altitude combined with the temperature, a total of 15 cars broke down because of the now infamous ‘vapour lock’ in the fuel pump.