I am all for people protesting for their rights. I don´t mind a riot now and again. But for the sake of God why all the glass? All travelers on inflated tires suffer… even the common man. An otherwise beautiful day of riding was punctuated by 5 flats!

You never know what a day will bring you. When I left Cusco the day wore on like any other with long climbs and long descents. Traversing the Andes proved to be alot of hard work. At the end of the day I had been ascending for about 4 hours when I arrived in the small town of Curahausi with a flat tire when I got an unusual invite.

I descended out of Tinqui in a cold rain with a fever on my way to Cuzco. After a few hours of high rises and long descents I could see the fertile valley of the pampas thousands of feet below and prayed my brakes were going to land me safe and sound far below.

The last thing you want to do when you know you have a climb ahead of you is to start the day going downhill. Leaving Maracapata I quickly lost hard climbed altitude with a long muddy decent. I didn´t realize exactly how far I´d be going up until I reached the Abra Pirhuayani pass at 4,725 meters.

The previous night´s thunderstorms left the route to Marcapata, at just over 10,000ft, a muddy disaster. However, the mud was very different than along the TransAm and didn´t jam my wheels. I slipped my way up, and up, and up…