Rainbow Mountain

I still think it’s a Mario Kart course.

We left the Canyon and started making our way to Cusco, first with a stop at a nice thermal, great condition, burning hot, also with specific pools for tourists and others for locals. Had it all to ourselves at first then a division of frenchies showed up. By then I was hard boiled so we left. Once again, it’s a bath, so no pictures. The drive to Cusco was very very adventurous, but no problems.

Couldn’t find a place to eat but found some lady on an absolute random corner selling donuts filled with dulche de Leche. Delicious and cheap. Best part was, she could only speak her local language/dialect. No Spanish. Funny. That and a truck driver stopped to ask us directions. Good idea, ask the gringo, he is obviously a local.

South of Cusco we started seeing signs of civilization again as we turned off to head up to rainbow mountain. There were tiny tiny little towns on this tiny one lane dirt road where one side was cliff up and the other side straight into a very roaring rocky river. Hubi had no problems. Tons of blind curves, just honked my way through, no oncoming traffic. Up and up and up we went until the towns stopped but the road continued and it’s condition getting worse and worse. Eventually we reached a huge parking lot, with a ghost tourist town on top. All restaurants and shops permanently closed. There was one farmer up there though, his dogs stayed outside our car all night. Parking lot was at 4480 meters. Cold night. Was snowing.

So basically the original entrance to rainbow mountain was at the bottom of the long winding street up here. Would have been a hardcore hike. So they built this huge parking lot as the tourist attraction. A few restaurants and shops opened here to make money. They then continued the “road” to go further up, closer to the mountain. Finally they built another road on the north side closer to Cusco where all the shops moved. All this tourist build up and fall within a year or two. Funny. We took advantage of the southern path, had it all to ourselves.

We fed the dogs our expired bacon. The next morning before 5 we drove another 200 meters up to the final parking lot. 30 minute winding serpentine mountain road. Two of the dogs knew where we were going. The ran straight up, beat us there. Fit dogs.

We then started the “easy” hike. Just an hour walk up, 200 more meters over 2km or so. The dogs knew exactly where we were going. One ran straight to the top, the other waited for us as we went so slowly, step by step, no air.

About 15 minutes after sunrise, the fog started intense till we couldn’t see 100 meters. We reached some sort of station and the last 50 meters were up up up. Slowly and surely, we made it up there, above 5000 meters now.

At the top, lots of fog. Couldn’t see a damn thing. But after waiting an hour or so (was very cold) it started to clear up. Some locals starting appearing at the top to sell stuff, took a few pictures and left, was not getting warmer or easier to breath. Also wasn’t nothing special. Michelle did some heavy photoshopping on all the pix. The colorful mountains in Purmamarca Argentina were waaaaaaay more colorful, no photoshop needed.

Lots of really nice pix on the way back though 🙂

On the drive down we did run into opposing traffic. A tourist 20 ATV tour. Despite not liking the massive tourist groups, that looked like a lot of fun. This gave us an idea…