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Burning Brakes and Waiting Games - Peru, Part 1

We’re David & Charlotte - once ordinary travellers, now full-time overlanders picking routes as we go, changing plans when reality demands it, and writing it all down honestly as we pass through. Expect culture, chaos and beautiful places that don’t feature on glossy lists. This is our roadbook from the real world: what happens when you set off overland with a bit of planning and a lot of curiosity. 

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Blog Link	Country	Points of Interest
Burning Brakes and Waiting Games - Peru, Part 1	Bolivia: Ollagüe border crossing Chile: Atacama/high-altitude border region Peru: Arequipa, Lima, Cusco, Andes, Lake Titicaca, Inca Trail, Machu Picchu Belgium: replacement-parts origin	• border closed • −7°C engine start • 100 km dirt road • steep descent • brakes catch fire • major brake repairs • US visa interviews • Bee Gees radio culture • truckless travel • altitude and local dress • delayed parts • accommodation scam • floating reed islands
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/bolivia-when-the-road-runs-out-of-freedom	Bolivia  (Santa Cruz, Sucre, Potosí, Uyuni)	mennonite buggies fuel shortages political blockades 13-day captivity water rationing gated village shops jump-starting truck state of emergency rebel escorts black market diesel underground mines 6-hour fuel queue freezing border
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/brazil-not-for-begginers	Brazil  (Foz do Iguaçu, Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, Copacabana, Ipanema, Chapéu Mangueira/Leme, Pantanal)	border delays speed bumps sweetcorn fields portuguese shift night drive panic damaged mirror sleazy beaches 9-year-old guide favela shooting drug stall queues glock-wearing farmer horseflies & caimans
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/chile-argentina-the-road-made-itself	Chile & Argentina (Valparaíso, Patagonia, Chile Chico, Mendoza, Chubut Valley, Cafayate, Asunción)	shipping delays lemon muggling wrong ports split rim panic welsh tea roadside shrines steak and empanadasyerba scenic route 40
Thailand Pt2: No Alternative Route – Driving Blind Through Thailand’s Floods	Thailand (Southern)	active flooding, impassable roads waist-deep road crossings submerged vehicles, invisible roads petrol station refuge emergency boats, displaced residents instinct vs judgement, survivor guilt forced flight toward Malaysia
Thailand, Part 1: An Easy Country, Until It Isn’t	Thailand (Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phuket, Khuek Khak)	temples, selfies, sacred queues monk chants White Temple, gold palaces, spectacle staged villages, souvenir traditions Phuket bars, expat bubbles tsunami ruins, beach memorials
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/india-part-two	India (Varanasi, Ganges River, Delhi, New Delhi Railway Station, Jaipur)	burning ghats, death at arm’s length Diwali smoke, fireworks, and collapsing air tuk-tuks, street logic, and rented survival rats, flies, and drawing personal limits
India Part 1: Ziro to Kolkata – At the Fading Edges of India	India (Hyderabad, Ziro Valley, Kolkata)	tribal tattoos, vanishing traditions Durga Puja chaos vs quiet hills rickshaws, dignity, and biryani regret
A Christmas Thankyou…	Journey recap + what’s next (Europe → Middle East → SE Asia; next leg: Chile / South America)	Maps of our journey so far Map of next leg
Between Borders and Brothels: A Brief Drift Through Laos and Thailand	Laos (Boten, rainforest, Vang Vieng, Vientiane) Thailand (Bangkok)	SEZ sleaze and karaoke brothels rainforest nights and red-mud roads paperwork derailing “freedom”
Seventy-Two Bends and a Few Too Many Tyres	China / Tibet (Khunjerab Pass, Tibet, Lhasa, Nujiang “72 Bends”)	oxygen masks and prayer flags riot police outside holy temples tyres exploding, visas expiring
China: Border, Control, and the Long Road to Tibet	Pakistan → China → Tibet (Khunjerab Pass; across China; into Tibet)	map interrogation, deportation threats SIM cards as surveillance a 34-hour mechanical race against visas
Escorted Across Pakistan: Guns, Landslides and a Narrow Escape to China	Pakistan (Gilgit, Hunza, Karakoram Highway, Sost, Khunjerab Pass)	armed convoys and sirens mountain roads that kill sneaking under live power cables
Tea with the Taliban: An Overlander’s Passage Through Afghanistan	Afghanistan (border region, Kunduz, Kabul)	Taliban tea and “customer feedback” razor-wire hotels and AK-47 dinners secret schools and banned books
Tajikistan – On the Roof of the World	Tajikistan (Pamir Highway, high-mountain villages, Panj River)	diesel alarms at 4,500 metres villages burning cow dung for heat Afghanistan across the river
From Paperwork to Pastures: A Hard Lesson in the Road Ahead	Kazakhstan → Kyrgyzstan → Mongolia → Turkmenistan → Uzbekistan (Bishkek, Ulaanbaatar, Silk Road cities)	lost at the Kyrgyz border visa chaos and forced separation archers, deserts, and broken air-con
All change – people, places and weather	Türkiye (Pontic Mountains) → Georgia (Batumi, Tbilisi, Gori) → Spain detour → back to Georgia → Armenia (Yerevan) → Russia (Astrakhan) → Kazakhstan (Almaty)	snowbound, Stalin Museum, visa limbo, steppe
Back in Saudi and heading for Iraq...	Oman → Saudi Arabia (Al-Ula, Jeddah, Dakar Rally) → Jordan (Aqaba, Wadi Rum, Petra, Dead Sea) → Iraq (Baghdad, Babylon, Samarra) → Türkiye	Petra, Babylon, military escort, desert camps
Leaving Iran and starting on the Arabian Peninsula	Iran (Bandar Abbas) → UAE (Dubai/Sharjah) → Saudi Arabia (NE) → Bahrain → Qatar → Oman (Muscat, Nizwa, Wadi Bani Awf)	oil wealth, malls vs. bazaars, desert shock
Iran	Türkiye → Iran (Tabriz, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz)	hospitality, mosques, headscarves, paradox
We are off… To an uninspired start	United Kingdom, Europe	Europe dull after Africa, long transit
We are ready to go!	The Scarborough Arms pub, Sunderland Street, Tickhill, Doncaster (UK)	restart, pub car park, community
400 + days and counting	UK (Doncaster; planning: Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Caspian Sea, Mongolia)	truck repairs, twisted chassis, waiting
We didn’t have 1.25 million dollars in cash strangely?	Kenya (blocked) → Zambia → Namibia (Caprivi Strip) → Angola → DRC → Congo → Cameroon → Nigeria → Benin → Togo → Ghana → Côte d’Ivoire → Guinea-Conakry → Morocco → Spain → UK	16,000 km detour, gangs, corruption, despair
It’s been a while since the last one…	Tanzania (Mbeya) → Kenya (Nairobi) → Uganda (Kampala) → Rwanda → back to Tanzania	Rwanda cleanliness, Nairobi extremes, fatigue
What is it with Elephants and Chilli?	Zambia (Livingstone northwards; rural maize fields)	elephant deterrents, chilli, maize fields
Hello, I’m Fabulous, pleased to meet you	Zimbabwe (Victoria Falls)	Victoria Falls, resilience, currency chaos
Gimme hope Jo’anna, give me hope	Botswana (Francistown, Maun, Okavango Delta, Makgadikgadi salt pans, Chobe, Kasane)	elephants, lions, salt pans, wild camping
Red Red Wine	Namibia → South Africa (Cape Town, wine country)	vineyards, comfort, repairs, “a different Africa”
Send a bolt of lightning. Very very frightening me!!	Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville, jungle tracks)	storms, rivers, isolation, raw nature
Life is full of surprises!	DRC (towards Kinshasa)	corruption, mud, bribes, survival
It’s life Jim, but not as we know it!	Senegal (Dakar, coastal towns) Angola (Luanda, rural roads, waterfalls area)	first West Africa, heat, traffic, culture shock, malaria talk, police kindness, washed-out bridge
It’s been a while…	Senegal (Ziguinchor) → Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia → UK	catch-up, road rhythm, settling into Africa, Balkans, war scars, daughter’s wedding
All change!	The Gambia (Banjul) → Guinea-Bissau	border crossing, desert, sense of isolation, yellow fever jabs, visas, constant resets
Cooling down, wind in our hair…	Western Sahara (Atlantic coast) Senegal (east) → The Gambia (Banjul, Atlantic coast)	coastal drive, wind, relief from heat, river country, heat, fantasy cocktails
Hitting the road in Senegal and turning up the heat	Senegal (Dakar, Bassari region, Atlantic coast)	arrival, bureaucracy, intense heat, Bassari initiation, flamingos, village life
Moving on, shipping out	Morocco (Tiznit, Casablanca) → Senegal (Dakar)	shipping the truck, paperwork, waiting game, drone hiding, first separation
Travels through Morocco and Western Sahara	Morocco (Tangier, Tiznit, Agadir, Taroudant) → Western Sahara (Atlantic coast)	long drives, sand, first taste of Africa. Berber wedding, sandstorms, hospitality, visa limbo
Made it to Morocco and 15 minutes of fame	UK (Doncaster, Harwich) → Netherlands (Hook of Holland) → Belgium → Luxembourg → France (Normandy) → Spain → Italy (Genoa) → Morocco (Tangier Med)	arrival, press attention, excitement, media, Channel 5, emotional departure, Covid border dash

Losing My Nerve in Peru - Peru, Part 2

“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.”— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters

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The truck had now been in the garage for three weeks. The parts were somewhere between Europe, DHL, Peruvian customs and the garage in Arequipa; the bills were mounting, and nobody could tell us when it would be finished. There is only so much walking, sleeping and waiting you can do, so if we couldn't move the truck, we would move ourselves. We flew northeast to Iquitos, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

Iquitos sits in the Peruvian Amazon and is often described as the largest city in the world that you cannot reach by road from the outside. You either fly in or arrive by river, which made it about as far removed from our normal overlanding life as we could get. As soon as we stepped off the plane the heat and humidity hit us. After weeks high in the Andes it felt like walking into a wall. Private cars seemed few and far between. Instead, the streets were full of mototaxis - Peru's version of a tuk-tuk - buzzing around everywhere, weaving in and out of each other and competing for space. Engines rattled constantly. The heat, noise and traffic seemed to merge into one continuous background hum.

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The many tukTuks around Iquitos.

Then we went to Belén market. Charlotte and I have spent years wandering around markets around the world. We have seen all sorts of things, eaten things we probably shouldn't have eaten and coped with smells that would clear a room back home, but Belén was something else. It was vast, unkempt, hot and full of outrageous smells. Salsa music came from every direction. Pigs' intestines were pickled, boiled and fried on street corners, piranhas were sliced and diced ready for cooking, huge catfish lay with their whiskered heads cut open and, worst of all for me, there was turtle meat for sale. We even found a food stall using a turtle shell as a serving dish, with hungry Peruvians gobbling down large platefuls beside it. Everyone seemed to have a swagger, so we joined in and tried not to stand out, which was a bit difficult when we appeared to be the only two white people around.

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Belen market -Pigs intestines, Some rodents, possibly water rats and Kaiman (Aligators) tails, all for sale.

A hardy stew cooked and served from a Turtle shell.

They mince the meat and cook it in the shell. Its a delicey ?

Normally I can cope with all this. You look, smell, occasionally hold your breath and get on with it. It is part of travelling, particularly the sort of travelling Charlotte and I have chosen to do. This time I wasn't. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the smell. Maybe it was five weeks of things slowly getting on top of me. Things that I would once have found fascinating were beginning to feel oppressive. Bolivia had worn us down, the truck had nearly gone up in flames, and now our home was still sitting in pieces in a garage hundreds of miles away. My capacity for this sort of travelling suddenly seemed to be getting less.

Maybe it's time for the end of this type of travelling for me? That thought had actually been building for a while. I won't let an emotional low make us stop. We set out to finish this journey and we will finish it. I also think things will become easier once we reach Central America. But the thought was there.

We hired a boatman and went out onto the river to see some of the communities living along its banks. Houses stood on stilts over the water and people carried on with their lives around us. The toilets emptied into the same river that people were using for everything else. We have seen poverty all over the world, and I think after a while your mind develops a way of blanking some of it out. Perhaps it has to. Then something small happens and suddenly it becomes real again.

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A few views of Iquitos and the shots from the river

The boatman eased us closer to the bank where a woman was washing in the river. I smiled and raised my hand to wave. She just looked back at me. For whatever reason, that look stopped me. There I was in clean clothes and decent sunglasses, paying somebody to take us along the river looking at other people's lives. I suddenly wondered what I looked like to her.

I felt embarrassed. Not because we had done anything wrong, but because the difference between our lives was so enormous and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Life really is a postcode lottery. Charlotte and I were born where we were born. She was born where she was born. None of us chose it. We tipped the boatman generously and went back to our air-conditioned room. That contrast bothered me more than I expected it to.

A simple shared river toilet

Eventually, after five weeks and three days, the truck was ready. Not that I was counting. The garage had taken around two weeks just to establish that the rear brake drums, pads and associated parts couldn't be sourced in Peru. We eventually found what we needed in Europe and thought we were getting somewhere. Then DHL entered the equation. As foreign nationals we weren't allowed simply to import the parts ourselves, so paperwork had to be sorted to make the garage the importer. Nobody had told us that beforehand. Then came bank holidays. Then the garage took its time fitting everything. And finally they couldn't accept payment from a foreign bank account. Individually, none of those things sounds disastrous. Put them together and you get five weeks and three bloody days.

Getting back into the truck felt good. For most of this journey movement had been the cure for almost everything: start the engine, point the truck somewhere else and whatever happened yesterday usually begins to recede. We left Arequipa, headed back towards the coast and began the long drive north towards Ecuador. The truck was moving again. I wasn't quite resetting with it.

Directly ahead of us were the Nazca Lines, the enormous ancient geoglyphs scraped into the desert floor and best seen from the air. We had planned to take one of the small aircraft that fly over them, a short thirty-minute trip that gives you the proper view. We found a truck stop in Nazca, parked up for the evening and were due to fly the following day. Charlotte settled down to read and found the news: earlier that day a tourist aircraft flying around the Nazca area had crashed. All thirteen people on board had died.

There was very little discussion. We both knew immediately that we were not getting on a light aircraft the following morning. For years we have accepted a certain amount of risk because that is part of travelling the way we do: bad roads, questionable ferries, remote areas, borders, breakdowns and plenty of situations where afterwards you think perhaps that wasn't particularly clever. But by then the brake fire, altitude, breakdowns and everything else had accumulated somewhere in the background. The Nazca crash was different because it was exactly what we were planning to do the next morning. It could quite easily have been us on another day. We had got away with a lot already, and both of us felt that being a bit more risk-averse from now on was probably sensible.

…and I've got to say, the Nazca Lines looked pretty damn fine to me from that observation tower.

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The Lines of Nazca

By then Peru was beginning to wear on me. We hadn't found people particularly friendly on much of our route and, spoilt Westerners though we undoubtedly are, the everyday food available to us had often felt fairly limited. There were exceptions. Ceviche was one - raw fish cured in lime rather than cooked with heat, and something we enjoyed several times. Pisco sours - Peru's national cocktail - were another. We managed those several times as well.

The road took us through the outskirts of Lima, where we had already spent time while sorting out our American visas. Central Lima had felt safe enough and was an okay place to hang out, but driving through the outer suburbs was different. They seemed to go on forever: dirty buildings, dust, rubbish, traffic, more buildings and then more rubbish. Eventually Lima disappeared behind us, but the scruffy, unkempt feeling carried on. Much of the coast was desert and in places plastic waste was everywhere, caught along the roadside and spread across the sand. At times a putrid smell hung in the air and came straight through the truck.

Lima Gold museum

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The roads themselves were mostly okay, but there was endless heavy lorry traffic and the drive north started to get to me. The trip to the Ecuador border would take several days, yet even early on every lorry coming towards us seemed too big, too fast or slightly too close. Roadside shrines also seemed to become more frequent. Or perhaps I was simply noticing them now.

I found myself looking at each one and wondering what had happened there. Had it been a lorry? Had somebody come around a bend too quickly? Had a driver lost his brakes? A few months earlier I would probably have driven past without giving any of it much thought, but now my mind was filling in the gaps. We have driven difficult roads all over the world and dealt with conditions far worse than these. I knew that. It didn't stop me looking.

I think I am losing my nerve.

A few weeks after we had passed through, mudslides and rockfalls blocked the Pan American highway, between Atico and Ocoña and more than 300 trucks were reported stranded. We had already driven that road. In the past, I would probably have looked at the news and thought, lucky escape. This time my first thought was how easily we could have been stuck in the middle of it. That probably didn't help.

Just in case you wanted more from Iquitos market ?

It wasn't one particular thing. It was everything accumulated together. And perhaps age has something to do with it as well. Risks that I might once have dismissed seem to stay in my mind longer now. That doesn't mean we are stopping. We have to finish. But maybe finishing and taking every risk put in front of you are not the same thing.

One thing did puzzle me before we left Peru, though: Paddington Bear.

After all those weeks we had seen remarkably little evidence of him. Given the British obsession with a bear supposedly coming from darkest Peru, I expected somebody to be exploiting it?

The drive north towards Ecuador took several days, although by then it felt more like several weeks. Eventually the desert began to disappear. There was greenery again. The air became more tropical and the Ecuador border grew closer. I don't mind admitting that leaving Peru was no hardship.

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The costumes were amazing

But I wasn't sure Peru itself was entirely the problem.

We were still moving and we were not stopping. We had come too far for that. But somewhere along the road I had stopped assuming that because we had got away with everything so far, we would keep getting away with it.

Maybe that is experience. Maybe it is age.

Or maybe I really am losing my nerve.

Either way, Ecuador was ahead of us.

So we kept going.

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Story below...

Some faces tell a thousand stories

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The lorry driver came past us flashing his lights and pointing towards our wheels.

I knew the brakes were getting hot. What I didn’t know was that they were actually on fire.

Luckily there was a lay-by just ahead, and I pulled in. By the time I got out, one set of brakes had properly caught light. I went for our fire extinguisher, but the lorry driver who had warned us had already stopped his truck, jumped out with his own extinguisher and put the flames out.

It all happened very quickly.

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The moon scape hills between Bolivia and Chile.

Once it was over, Charlotte and I just stood there looking at each other.

The brakes had been on fire.

And I mean on fire.

Perhaps I should go back a day.

We had finally reached the Ollagüe border crossing out of Bolivia after a difficult couple of weeks. We had spent thirteen days being held up by road blockades, constantly waiting for somebody else to decide whether we could move. By the time we reached the Chilean border we were more than ready to leave all that behind us.

Naturally, the border was closed.

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These are the hills that did for our brakes.

We arrived late afternoon at around 4,000 metres and had to spend the night there. The bigger worry was whether the truck would start the following morning. Altitude and cold are not a good combination for our truck and, after everything else Bolivia had thrown at us, being stuck at the border because the engine wouldn’t start would have been about right.

The following morning it was minus 7°C, so we waited until mid-morning for things to warm up a little before trying.

The engine turned slowly and we just managed to get her going on what must have been about the last of the battery’s energy.

Normally you turn the key and don’t think much about it. At 4,000 metres, with a cold diesel engine and a weakening battery, if it doesn’t start you simply aren’t going anywhere.

Customs was its normal pain, but eventually we cleared Bolivia and crossed into Chile.

Freedom again.

Or so we thought.

Google Maps then sent us onto an unpaved road. We assumed it was just a bad patch, so we lowered the tyre pressures and carried on. By the time we finally found tarmac again we had driven around 100 kilometres on dirt and were very pleased to see a proper road.

Then came the descent.

We had been travelling at around 4,000 metres, so sooner or later we had to lose all that height. In a big truck that brings its own problems.

Hard braking is not good, so I was using the gears as much as possible to hold us back, but there were sections where the brakes were unavoidable. I knew they were getting hot and had already started looking for somewhere to pull over and let them cool when the lorry driver came past us flashing his lights.

Then we discovered the fire.

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There was a lot of flat areas, but a lot of hills as well.

The driver told us to let everything cool for about an hour and then move on. He also warned us that the area was known for theft because lorries regularly had to stop there with hot brakes, making them easy targets miles from anywhere.

That was comforting.

We stayed anyway. We were shocked and neither of us wanted to move the truck until we were happy everything had cooled properly.

It wasn’t the most peaceful night we have ever spent, but nobody robbed us.

The following morning I crawled around underneath and looked at the brakes. From what I could see, everything appeared okay.

It wasn’t.

We wouldn’t discover the full extent of the damage until later, when the brakes were stripped down in Arequipa. The pads were in pieces, some of the springs and rubber covers had been damaged and one 20-inch brake drum - a lump of metal I can only just pick up when it is in one piece - had broken into 32 pieces.

Quite how we had carried on I’m not sure.

Our favorite Peruvian meal. Ceviche - Raw Fish cooked in Lime juice.

Before getting underway we had a few truck jobs to do, including putting the last 80 litres of diesel we were carrying into the tank.

I held the fuel container while Charlotte held our funnel, although calling it a funnel is being generous. It was a two-litre water bottle we had cut up.

Diesel splashed over her hands. Her nails were already black from working around the truck and now her hands stank of fuel as well.

These were hands that had spent years tending to some of the best-tended heads in the world. Now they were holding half a plastic water bottle while I poured diesel through it.

How life changes.

Our journey through Chile was brief and we carried on towards Peru. Crossing that border gave us an odd sense of relief. There wasn’t any particular reason for it. I think instinctively we just felt we had finally left the latest set of problems behind and were heading north again, towards the eventual end of our journey.

We followed the Peruvian coast for a while because we wanted to stay away from altitude. The coastline was barren and, in places, filthy, and eventually we headed inland to Arequipa.

Arequipa was a pleasant surprise, an attractive old Spanish colonial city and surprisingly busy with Western tourists. We assumed many were heading to or from Machu Picchu.

The restaurants certainly seemed geared towards visitors. Guinea pig and llama appeared regularly as things tourists were apparently supposed to eat.

We had trout.

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There are some beautiful buildings in various towns

Sightseeing, though, wasn’t the main reason we were in Arequipa.

The truck needed serious attention after the brake fire, and we also had American visa interviews booked at the US Embassy in Lima.

The appointments had been made months earlier and the blockades in Bolivia had already messed with our timetable, so rather than risk driving we left the truck with the garage and flew to Lima.

The visa interviews had been weighing on both of us.

We dug out the poshest clothes we owned, which weren’t very posh. I had a haircut and beard trim and we even checked our social media in case there was anything on there which might offend somebody, knowing full well there wasn’t.

Amazing what bureaucracy can do to you.

The interviews went well and our visas were approved, although they couldn’t be prepared before we had to leave Lima. That meant another trip back later to collect the passports.

One job done. Nearly.

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A lot of ladies still wear traditional clothing

One strange thing we noticed in Lima was the Bee Gees. Their music seemed to be everywhere. After hearing them yet again, I Googled it to find out if we were imagining things.

We weren’t.

Back in the late 1970s, Lima’s Radio Inca started a programme called Quince Minutos con los Bee Gees - fifteen minutes devoted entirely to the Bee Gees. It became so popular that fifteen minutes became thirty, and eventually a full hour. For a time the station was playing so much Bee Gees music that they seem to have become part of Lima’s radio history.

Of all the things I expected to discover in Peru, a long-standing Lima love affair with the Bee Gees wasn’t one of them.

Back in Arequipa, the news about the truck wasn’t good.

Once the brakes were stripped down, the damage was far worse than we had imagined and some of the parts simply weren’t available locally. The truck was going nowhere for a while.

So neither were we, at least not in the way we normally travelled.

Rather than spend our days watching mechanics, Charlotte and I flew to Cusco.

It felt strange being without the truck. For all its faults - and there are plenty - it is our home. Our clothes, our food and pretty much everything we use while travelling are in it.

Suddenly we were carrying bags and using buses and taxis again. A bit like our backpacking days.

Cusco is the gateway to the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu, although we decided not to go there. Charlotte had visited about thirty years earlier and I wasn’t particularly interested in joining the masses at what, to me, looked increasingly like another tourist theme park.

I know plenty of people will disagree with me, and that’s fine.

There were other places around the Andes that interested us more. Walking through the old town rather confirmed my mood when, amongst all that Inca and colonial history, we found Paddy’s Irish Pub in a prime position. I did wonder what the Incas would have made of that.

Because we weren’t in the truck, we rented an apartment away from the main tourist area. It was basic, semi-clean and in a normal residential neighbourhood.

Cusco sits at around 3,400 metres and walking uphill quickly reminds you of it. Every now and then one of us would suddenly become short of breath. It only lasted a few seconds, but it could be quite disconcerting. We were also becoming semi-bored. That sounds ridiculous when you are sitting in the Andes in Peru, but it was true.

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This time nobody was preventing us from going anywhere… we were just filling time because the truck had stopped for us, but the result felt strangely familiar.

We were stalled again.

Living away from the tourist centre also made us think about how fortunate Charlotte and I are. We travel the world in a huge truck with water, electricity, a proper bed and all sorts of creature comforts, and then get fed up because that truck is sitting in a garage.

Around us were people living very different lives. I don’t pretend to know what they thought about us, and I certainly don’t know why some of us end up with so much more than others.

Is there an answer? If there is, it’s beyond us.

We caught buses and travelled further into the Andes, spending much of our time just below 4,000 metres. We kind of got used to the altitude, although every so often that sudden breathlessness would return and remind us where we were.

Many of the older women we saw still wore traditional clothing: bowler hats, woollen leggings and raised skirts. It wasn’t being put on for us or for a photograph. It was simply what they wore.

Their faces were deeply weather-beaten from the conditions. Meanwhile, there was still no sign of the truck being ready. We flew back to Lima to collect our passports, now complete with American visas. That was something at least.

Then we went back to waiting so we walked a lot, slept a lot and tried to keep busy. Nobody could give us a reliable completion date. That also meant we couldn’t book accommodation for any sensible length of time, so we kept moving from one place to another.

Some of the brake components had to come from Belgium.

We ordered them using DHL’s five-day express service.

They took thirteen days.

Not very express.

Charlotte was rather partial to a Piscoe sour or two. The Peruvian national drink based on the Piscoe liquor and Egg white. I muddled on with beer.

That delay pushed us into a week containing a two-day bank holiday, which made accommodation scarce as well. Then we fell for a scam.

We found what appeared to be a beautiful apartment at a reasonable price and jumped at it. When we arrived, the apartment simply wasn’t there. You couldn’t make it up.

Morale was getting low. Overlanding normally works because, however bad a place or situation becomes, eventually you move. There is another road, another town, another country. Movement changes things.

Instead, our lives were now being dictated by a garage, unavailable parts, DHL, visa appointments and whichever apartment happened to have a bed free.

After Bolivia, that began to feel depressingly familiar. There was still Peru to explore while we waited, so we headed for Lake Titicaca. I remember the name from my childhood, although I’m still not entirely sure why. Perhaps Titicaca is simply one of those place names a child never forgets.

We took a boat out to visit the floating islands made from reeds. The visit was interesting, although very tourist driven. At one point the rest of our group paid extra to go for a ride in a large two-storey boat shaped like a swan if you can imagine that? Disgusting!

We declined and stayed behind on the island…which turned out to be the most interesting part.

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With the tourists gone, we watched some of the men laying fresh reeds onto the surface of the island to keep it maintained and afloat. It was ordinary work rather than something being demonstrated for visitors, and for a while we saw something that felt completely different from the organised tour. Then the swan boat came back, followed by other tourist boats doing slow laps of the island, presumably to make the fare feel worthwhile. With the tourists returning, makeshift tables appeared and out came the souvenirs.

Business as usual.

I understand people need to make money, and we were tourists ourselves, so we were part of the whole thing whether we liked it or not. Even so, I found the contrast disappointing. The bit that had interested us most was what happened while the organised experience had briefly stopped.

By the time we left Lake Titicaca we were into week three. The truck still wasn’t ready.

We had spent thirteen days trapped in Bolivia waiting for other people to allow us to move. Eventually we escaped, crossed into Chile and thought we had our freedom back.

Now, several weeks later, we were stuck again. Different reason. Same result.

Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me...

So we needed another plan!

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