Day 26 Bushcamp NP to Bushcamp near Huallanca

We awake to skies not as nice as the day before, overcast and cool.  One problem we also face while we are still relatively near the Equator is that the days and nights are about 12 hours each and the nights are much colder.  This is a nightmare for someone like me, I don't do long sleeps!  So last night was quite amazing, I went to my tent about 7pm, wrote my daily log, uploaded my photos onto my laptop and still managed to sleep for about 9 hours!
After breakfast we set off for the highest pass of the trip.  Today is also a day for taking lots of pictures as well as tackling the 41K on un-paved track whilst climbing over two peaks of 4800 metres plus!  Not long after we leave camp we see our first Puya, a strange plant native to only Peru and Bolivia.  It takes about 30 years to grow and "bloom" and its "leaves" are more like wood than normal leaf texture.  See the picture to get an idea of how tall they are!  The other thing we start to see and get close to are some quite large glaciers, see another picture.
However, the main thing is to get up over the first pass and get to the lunch stop.  This one is only 4805 metres and just a few K before lunch.  As I approach lunch Didier is driving the truck back towards me, some of the riders are experiencing headaches and he goes to check them out.  I am feeling okay and stop briefly as it is quite cold and the sun is still not happy enough to come out to play today!!
In about 12K I reach the second summit of 4865 metres and know that it is now all downhill to the end.  One other thing about being up so high and on a rough road is you have to stop to take a drink from your bottle!  There is no way that you can steer, and have enough breath to even think of it even on a flat or slightly downhill stretch!  Dirt track continues until about 20K from the end we join a main road and apart from it being cold, damp and windy to start with it is great to be on paved road again.  One serious attempt by 2 dogs to get me going downhill into a hairpin fails, luckily, and soon the temperature rises as I get down towards the end at just over 3500 metres.  Unfortunately it's another bushcamp, the hotel had booked a load of road workers in, so we had to make do with a bushcamp just outside town.  Baby wipes come into their own again as you try to keep yourself clean after another hard day!!  Altitude sickness had let me off, thankfully, and Francine was almost back to feeling normal again.  The two faces of what can happen at these seriously high altitudes whilst trying to do something as simple as riding a bike for 70K and climb 1330 metres in the day!

My bike at the base of the right-hand Puya!

A Glacier on the way down after second summit.