What an arduous day. We were on the road for over 12 hours (6:00am to 6:30pm) and covered 550kms over yet another amazing road. The scenery was simply awesome, and the road surface generally excellent. But the topography - has to be seen to be believed. The high point on the road before the town of Puquio was just on 15,000 feet, but altitude alone does not give the full picture. At least three times the road descended to 6,500 ft before climbing back to 13,-14,000 and each time both the climb and descent was achieved by what seemed like never ending switch backs. The climb out of Abancay was perhaps the most impressive of all. The town was at 6,500ft and within 30 km of road travel and no more than 10 kms of actual distance we were back at 14,000ft.

Mid afternoon we came upon a small community that looked to be deliberately burning the vegetation on a round conical hill. As we descended towards this we thought nothing of it as we had seen many examples of people burning the grass near where they farmed. But we soon realized that the road passed directly below the fire and burning vegetation and rocks were falling onto the road surface. The representatives of the local fire department in attendance (we could tell by their red pickup trucks and uniforms) were carefully monitoring the situation but doing nothing, just watching as traffic (including us) threaded its way through the fire debris.

The last 100 kms into Cusco was a bit of a race against the clock as we wanted to make Cusco and find the campground before dark. We found it but not before dark. It will be nice to have a restful day tomorrow.