Final preparations

So the time has finally come for us to leave the world of wifi Internet and Starbucks coffee behind, mount our bikes and enter the wilderness of the Peruvian Andes.

But before that we needed a route to follow. After much procrastination,  the route planning situation reached critical levels with our impending departure within 24hrs and we sat down and had a really productive planning session. I'm pleased to report that we now have a week's worth of cycling planned and saved on 4 different GPS devices (3 phones and a garmin). We also basically know how to get to our finishing point and how long it will take although  we will need to spend some hours on rest days to nail the finer details.

We leave cusco tomorrow morning and hope to reach the next big town of Quinota in 3-4 days time where we should have Internet access, or at least phone signals. The route involves a few pretty major climbs, a mixture of road surfaces and a maximum altitude of 4400m. It is difficult to get an accurate estimate of the total distance because there are no good paper maps of peru and google maps cuts right across the switchbacks on many climbs. In any case, we are expecting somewhere between 160 and 200km of riding before Quinota and you can download our planned route from here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11163229/route.html. its not exactly what we'll be doing but it follows our plan pretty closely. We hope to upload exact route details recorded by GPS from Quinota.

So the daily blog updates will become rare from now on but we will try to upload info and photos whenever we get the opportunity. Hopefully you'll hear from us next when we reach Quinota!

Photos:
Pre departure clothes wash
Delicious pasta cooked by Toby in the hostel kitchen
Altitude profile of planned route to Quinota (altitude and distances not entirely accurate but good enough)
Serious route planning
Route to Quinota
Feeling guilty after giving in and buying Starbucks less than 7 days away from home