Making Cajamarca

The riding in northern Peru continued to astound us as we made our way to Celendín. This sure beats the Panamerican!!












(we even made friends in the little town where we stopped for lunch along the way. They invited us for a beer, but something about these roads, motorcycling, and beer just doesn't seem good)

Celendín has had some violent protests recently against the Conga mine. Newmont, a Denver based mining company, is planning on extending an already existing gold mine by moving the water from 4 lakes to reservoirs, that Newmont would build. The community is against it as they say the reservoirs do not adequately replace the lakes, which also provide groundwater for agriculture and irrigate pasture for livestock. In Celendin, several hundred people were involved in a protest that left 3 of them dead. The state of emergency was lifted just 3 days before we passed through. There was still plenty of evidence of people's sentiments, but all was mellow.







Besides all the Andean culture, Quechua influence, and curious looks, what we appreciated most was finding a restaurant that served all sorts of different foods all in one place - Peruvian traditional plates, Chinese, pizza, Italian (heavily influenced by the Chinese), burgers, ahhhhh it was overwhelming! SO we ate there twice.

Riding out of town was beautiful again, but much of the way to Cajamarca was construction, only allowing cars to pass at noon and after 5pm. Thankfully, we were rolling out of town at about 11am, so it worked out. In fact, as a motorcycle, we may have been able to just go through at any time (they love making you feel like you are a part of the construction work). Instead, we got a 5 minute head start. Which just meant that a lot of crazy fast Peruvian drivers were passing us within about 10 minutes. It wasn't too crowded or hectic, just dusty.

Cajamarca was another city that we enjoyed checking out. Sadly, we followed our pattern of mostly seeing it on a Sunday (how do we keep doing that?). Even so, many of the restaurants were open and there were people out enjoying the day. We had planned on soaking at the Baños del Inca outside of town, but after taking a hot shower (!!!) at our hostel and getting dressed again, we lost motivation to get back out there. So we wandered the streets for a bit.