Now the night was cold, very cold indeed. I had really bad dreams, dreams of losing my hand, I was almost always in a state between sleeping and being awake. At 4:30 am my feet got way too cold in the under proportionate sleeping bag, so I had to get out of the bag, had to put on another 2 pairs of socks and get inside again – takes a lot of overcoming, the fight against your own laziness.
Here a few panoramas my father had taken, from the small island in the glacier lake I had shown in the last Peru posting.
Before these pictures he had climbed up a “hill” to more than 5100 m altitude to take the following panorama which I’ve eked out a bit.
First we pushed the bikes down from the glacier to the path on which we could ride again. The area her is the former bed of the glacier as described vividly in the last Peru posting and admittedly this monster had done massive work over the last glacial period! When we could ride again we jumped on the bikes and cycled back towards the main road, in the background another incredibly big and ice covered mountain chain.
In this world we were the ants and the glaciers sleeping on the backs of their mountains could have played with us in the same way. We had to master a test of courage when one of these white giants was hanging right over the road we had to take and the path was covered with cow sized blocks of stone that had destroyed a big protection wall on our left without any difficulty. How big was the risk. I guessed that statistically it was small, but also that we’d been there probably at the wrong, the warm time of the year, which again would increase the risk by a fair amount.
I thought I had seen a antenna on the top of a small hill right beside me, but the antenna followed our movements as we continued riding and later I found out that a curious lama or vicunha (wild lama) had actually been observing our paths 
The breakfast had been tiny: hot tea and porridge. Now our hunger grew bigger and bigger with every pedal stroke. The legs got heavier and slowly but forcefully we hit the wall. Time to refill and with what a view:
While I proofed my cooking skills by preparing yet another meal consisting of the ever same spaghetti with a tomato, onion and garlic sauce my Dad went for some exploration, to find some nice stones and plants. He brought back some incredibly normal stones and I was confused as I had been cooking right next to this wonderful colleague:
We’re not sure whether the gold layer was real gold and even Lorenzo, a Swiss cyclist with PhD in geology couldn’t tell from the picture.
Now was time to say good bye to queen Cordillera Blanca: In a long, steep and fast downhill our bikes took us down from almost 5000 m altitude to less than 3000 in a often very narrow valley. Even though there’ve even been sporadic shepherds on 4700 and 4800 m now we really felt the presence of humans again: First the really massive mines for gold and other precious metals, then the poor private miners beside the road who went for coal veins in the rocks on their own.
Here we could buy food again and we stopped at the first tienda to wolf down insane amounts of chocolate. We continued through a valley with overhanging side walls and started cooking next to a 10 m cliff at a nice animal-mown lawn.
Later on Lorenz and Evelyne, two Swiss touring cyclists, passed by and agreed to camp with us at this amazing spot. First they had been a bit concerned because of bad stories from other touring cyclists about robbed equipment or even worse, but then they decided that the possibility to hide was sufficient and it’d be safer as four.
They had cycled 10,000 km in 10 months South America with a tremendous load on their bikes, but also with the best gear available, really nice bikes (Rohloff Speedhub, Ortlieb bags, Magura hydraulic rim brakes).
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