We were both tired when we woke up and could have slept longer, but we tried to get to breakfast by 8:00ish as they stopped serving breakfast at 9:00am. Andrew felt slightly nauseous and felt like a headache coming on and he took some panadol and he only had toast with butter and jam and did not feel like eating anything else. I had a full breakfast with eggs on toast and a banana pancake stack with honey and two pieces of orange cake.

We packed up slowly and left the hotel by 11:30am. Andrew’s front tyre had a flat and a few streets away from the hotel, he said it felt like really low air pressure. We stopped and checked and the tyre gauge read 0psi 😳. Andrew pumped the tyre up to 28psi and we googled recommended motorcycle repair stores in Puno and Andrew found one 1.7km away and we rode there and explained to the guy what had happened – the tyre pressure was already down by 4psi in the 10 minutes it took us to get to the tyre repair shop – he made room for Andrew’s bike and suggested to put a new inner tube in. He put the bike on a stand so that the front wheel was off the ground and took the front wheel off. I showed him a picture of a rim lock and he seemed familiar with them – he went into his workshop to get the tyre off the rim on the dirty ground and I had parked my bike a little further down the street and took both dry bags off in order to access my pannier with our spare inner tubes. I discovered that my entire toiletries bag was saturated wet and also the compression bag with my clothes was wet too. Turns out that stupid mosquito repellent for the tropics which we had bought in Vienna at the doctor who refused to give us the second dose of the dengue fever vaccine, had leaked completely due to the pressure difference and there was almost nothing left in the bottle – I threw the whole bottle out and dried my stuff. I found our spare heavy duty inner tube and we gave it to the mechanic to use our inner tube. We found the hole on the tube that was in the tyre – a clean small puncture, probably from a wire or something thin and easy to patch. The mechanic was not interested in patching it for us, so we flattened the tube and decided to take it with us as a spare as we can patch the tube if required with our patch kit. After I had everything packed up again, the front tyre had been fixed and was back on the bike 👍😉 and he charged us 25 Sol. We then tried to get out of Puno but the phone and Andrew’s Garmin gps both sent us up steep roads and then dirt roads which we did not take and then it tried to send us up a staircase 😳😡- we eventually made it up to the main road and out of town. We did not get far on a two lane highway, when Andrew said he needed to pee and it also looked like it would be raining ahead. We stopped on the side of the road and Andrew found an abandoned house where he went to pee and I ate two hard boiled eggs I had taken with me at breakfast the day before. We put our rain jackets on and continued riding. We only rode a few kilometres when I noticed Andrew falling back and I asked if he was ok, and he said he was going to be sick and we pulled over again – Andrew took his helmet off and said he had hurt his left lower back (this was unusual as Andrew normally has issues with his right lower back not his left 🤔) when getting on the bike and he was very nauseous and breaking out in a cold sweat from the pain in his lower back 🥺😳. He sat on the ground and I gave him some neurofen and I charged my phone as it was down to 40% of charge. After sitting for a while on the ground, Andrew vomited a little bit but not much. He stood up and leaned against the bike for a while and then needed to pee another little trickle. He was so pale and clearly in agony and we waited quite a while – I started thinking that it may be something else rather than an issue with his lower back🤔😳 – the rain clouds passed over us and it sprinkled a little, the phone was charged to 70% before Andrew felt well enough to get back onto the bike to continue. It was after 3:00pm and we had over 230 km to go which would take over 3 hours and we had not even reached Juliaca yet, the first large town outside of Puno. When we got to Juliaca, it was a very large and chaotic town with cars, 3-wheelers, bikes, commuter buses and cars all pushing and cutting us off and it was free for all – the kind of traffic chaos you would expect in South East Asia or India – the trucks were very smelly and put out black exhaust fumes which did not help with Andrew’s nausea. Then the phone app directed us to do a detour from the main road to go right and then a km later turn onto a parallel road for quite some time – there was less traffic but it looked like a very commercial and poor area and not the best part of town. Eventually, it wanted us to turn left to get back to the main road, but all roads were dirt and completely covered in mud with huge puddles and I am not sure how we made it through that before turning onto what we thought was the main road but we were still parallel to the main road and had to cross train tracks on another unpaved road before we were finally back on the main road out of town. Then there were lots of large trucks in convoys travelling the opposite way and cars overtaking in dangerous manners pushing us almost off the road but we were glad the trucks were all travelling in the opposite direction to us. There continued to be speed bumps every few kms where we needed to brake and reduce our speed to less than 30km/hr. We continued until there were many petrol stations one after the other on the other side of the road – by then we had travelled about 80km and we decided to pull in at the last one of them to fuel up so we could make it easily to Sicuani where we had a hotel booked for the night. After fuelling up, Andrew headed to the toilet again which was quite a walk across the large petrol station on the side of the building. I brought my bike over to park next to the toilets and could hear Andrew throwing up again. I went back and got his bike and brought it over next to the toilets. I went to the bathroom too to empty my bladder. We put warmer clothes and our balaclavas on and decided to keep riding. We rode into the setting sun and it was getting cold quickly and there were more dark rain clouds ahead. We pushed it a bit to make some kilometres while we still had daylight and we came through another town (Pukara) and I suggested we should stay but we did not see a single hotel and continued riding. It was getting dark and quite cold by now and we approached another larger town (Ayaviri) as we could see the lights of the town. We pulled into the first petrol station and I tried to see if there was anything on booking.com and only one hotel came up that did not have parking and had very low ratings. Andrew searched and found one hotel in a renovated chapel that had great reviews. I put the address into my phone and we had to turn off the main road onto a dirt track – it was dark and we followed the dirt track for 1.7 km before we stopped at what looked like a chapel but it was all locked and dark – Andrew walked to the door and saw a message in English to call or contact the owners on WhatsApp. I typed the number in and sent a message that we were outside and needed a room and parking for the bikes for the night. The message was received and read and a guy (Jaime) opened the door speaking only Spanish asking us to wait- a few minutes later a woman (Michaela) came out speaking perfect English – she was Canadian and she rides a motorcycle herself and she said we could stay the night 🙏🤗 – she opened the gate and we could ride into the courtyard and park our bikes next to her BMW which was covered. She showed us the large historic property which she and her husband are renovating. Her husband brought us two cups of hot tea and she showed us a living room we could use which had an alpaca inside as a pet. Our room was upstairs with a separate bathroom around the corner through a door and a corridor. Andrew went to the room to curl up in bed while I did 3 trips up and down the stairs to get the essentials we needed off the bikes and into our room. Michaela messaged about places to eat dinner in town and asked what time we would like breakfast. I told her that Andrew was too sick to go out and that I would stay with him and we would not go out for dinner and I booked breakfast for 8:00am. I tried to cancel our booking in Sicuani but I was 16 minutes too late to get a free cancellation – I messaged the property several times but did not receive a reply and I could not cancel the booking on booking.com. I put some voltaren cream on Andrew’s back and then got out of my motorcycle gear and put everything on to be charged. I ate the two plain bread rolls we had taken with us at breakfast and the two hard boiled eggs from today’s breakfast and started writing the blog. Andrew was still in a lot of pain and could not sleep and I gave him more Panadol and made him drink more water and then he started drinking Powerade. He fell asleep for two hours and then woke up saying the pain was better and I made sure he drank more Powerade as I was quite certain at that stage that Andrew’s pain was from the kidneys and that he had passed a kidney stone which explained all his symptoms and luckily he started getting better after having the Powerade as I had started to look up hospitals to go to in town. Andrew went to the bathroom and then fell asleep. I finished the blog drank some water and brushed my teeth before turning off the lights – hoping that the next day would be a better day but having serious doubts whether we would make it to Cusco for our booked tour. We were both so very glad and relieved we made it through the day and found this amazing place to stay for the night🙏🏍🏍🤗🇨🇦 Given how sick Andrew was, there are limited pictures and videos from this day. The ones trying to get out of Puno are worth watching to get an idea of Peruvian roads in cities and the hazards navigating them 😉👍