It isn’t every day that we get to go underground at a 3,000-year-old archaeological site, but that’s what we show you in our latest video! Our journey through the Andes in Peru led us from Cajamarca to the town of Chavín de Huantar. To get there, we had to go above 14,000 feet of altitude and cross the continental divide through a tunnel.
Watch now:
This is a big video that covers two weeks of time. We see the Pacific coast of Peru for the first time, and all the sad, terrible things we heard came true. It was dusty; the truck traffic was heavy; and there was trash everywhere. Even though it would have been faster to take the coast, we weren’t in that much of a hurry. We escaped back to the mountains!
We spent a week in Huaraz, gateway to the Cordillera Blanca and very popular with backpackers. Then we made the beautiful drive across the continental divide to Chavín. We didn’t see another foreign tourist during the two days we were there, which is mind-boggling considering the amazing archaeological history it holds. We hope you enjoy everything we saw and learned at the ruins and museum.
DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, MEANING WE GET A COMMISSION IF YOU DECIDE TO MAKE A PURCHASE THROUGH OUR LINKS, AT NO COST TO YOU. PLEASE READ OUR DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO.
What’s new?
We are still in Chaclacayo, just east of Lima. We have been in a waiting period for the past two weeks. Camped at a mechanic’s shop, we have been waiting for the government to activate our temporary import permit, so we can legally drive in Peru again. Eric went to the office with two other overlanders to plead our case: please let us drive and see your country! But we are still waiting with no sign of when the green light will come.
In the meantime, we have been dealing with Jeep issues–planned and unplanned. Unexpectedly, we had to replace the cranking battery under the hood because it was dead when we got back. The Jeep Gladiator actually has two batteries under the hood, so we also had to find and replace the smaller auxiliary battery. That was a two-day project.
The next morning, we woke up to a flat tire! We used our ARB tire repair kit to plug the leak. Obviously this repair took place during a rainstorm because, well, that’s just what our life is right now.
So those were the two unplanned repairs, but we also had two planned projects. We brought back a replacement fuel pump from the United States, and thankfully we were able to get that installed. Before, we had 17 gallons of fuel stranded in our LongRange America auxiliary fuel tank because the pump had gone bad! Very glad to have that fixed.
We also planned to receive and install new solar panels from REDARC Electronics, one of our gear sponsors. We don’t know when it happened, but the prototype solar panels on our roof (not from REDARC) went bad sometime last year. You may remember a sensor went out in our electronics system. We didn’t know the solar panels had also gone bad until the sensor was replaced and everything else was running again.
REDARC generously offered to send us two of their new solar panels. We thought they would be here when we arrived, but they got held up in customs. If you can believe it, at one point we were even told they were destroyed by customs! So we didn’t know if they’d ever get here, but they showed up a couple of days ago. Yay!
The next hurdle is to find the adhesive and hardware we need to mount the panels, which is not easy in Lima like it would be in the United States. Today we took a taxi for a two-hour roundtrip into the city (remember, we can’t drive our Jeep yet) to visit the biggest hardware store we could find.
Never a dull moment around here! We are praying we can properly install the solar panels tomorrow AND that our TIP will be reinstated tomorrow. We can’t wait to get out of here and get back on the road!
-B
Leave a Reply