I was not looking forward to traveling the one hundred miles of rough gravel road from Cajamarca to the Pan American highway, since I knew what to expect, more or less. However it seemed it was a little easier to travel this time.
I had a couple of scary moments when I encountered a couple of Lorries traveling in convoys up the mountain in groups of four or five. As they blazed up the mountainside road they would create “white outs” with clouds of dust and sand. The clouds would be so thick that I was not able to see anything in my path, including the road. It would have been a long way down to the bottom of the mountain if I had gone off the edge of a cliff. The return trip to the Pan American Highway took me approximately three hours.
To this point most of my trip had been traveled in mountainous areas with green jungles or forests. Now I was in a treeless desert with bare mountains and sand dunes. It was an amazing change. It also seemed that the trash along the road was not as bad as before. The cross winds were strong in the desert and at times the sand would build up on the highway. Work crews would scoop up the sand with tractors as if it were snow.
I finally reached the City of Chimbote, on the Pacific coast, and called it a day.
