We must reunit the team!

 

Sunday dawns at Truquillo, on the beach at the VistaMar Hotel and restaurant. The sun shines, there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Chris is fishing off the rocks for a dorado.

We had all hunkered down for the night in a single room, with beach view. It was  slightly strange hotel, soulless but with a great location. Anyway beggars cannot be choosers and we were mighty relieved to find a room, a shower and something to eat and to drink.

Nigel went for a long walk to think through the options and upon his return immediately departed into town to talk to truckers and police about what options might be available to us. Chris and I caught up with sleep and it might surprise our many readers when I say that there were no reports of snoring!

Chris has finally had enough of being served incinerated scrambled eggs and much to the surprise of the cook took proceedings into his own hands and cooked his own. I wasn’t there but reports were extremely favourable.

Nigel returned to inform us that firstly the road would take 6-10 days to be passable to traffic and that according to an old and wizened police officer the roads through the mountains are passable. We made the call, we would, like the cavalry coming to the rescue of the besieged homesteaders, attempt to break through the mountains.

It was 100km back down the Pan-American highway to Huarmey where Route 109 goes up into the mountains, joining the 3N and taking us up to Huaraz. From there we can drop down to Chimbote and onto Trujillo to join up with our stranded co-drivers.  It was a plan and better than sitting on our hands for 10 days, and who knows it might just work, despite all the water from Yaku still being dumped onto the very mountains we are now heading for.

Things got off to a slightly ropey start when the Rolls ran out of fuel after about 50km. We had filled all the cars the night before and there was no leak so that was worrying when we are heading off into the mountains. The contents of the jerry can was deposited into the fuel tank and that got us to the fuel stop just after the turn off into the mountains. The parting words from the barman at the VistaMar was to apologize for the fellow guests and the only conclusion we could come to was that some bastard had syphoned Chris’ petrol overnight.

Fully fuelled, jerry cans full, bladder tank full we were ready for whatever the mountains had to throw at us. Unfortunately as the rain grew heavier and heavier what was thrown at us was an increasing number of enormous boulders and torrential amounts of water. We drove through increasingly bad weather go about half way to the junction with the route 3  and decided that it wasn’t safe to go any further. It wasn’t safe to go back down either. We were extremely lucky to find Hospedaje El Tambo del Chaskey which unsurprisingly had four clean, if slightly depressing rooms available. We will stay the night here and set off early in the morning (first light) and see what progress we can make.

 

Hang in there Bumble and Didier the cavalry are on their way!