San Jose de Jachal
Crossed over 30 degrees south latitude.
It didn’t necessarily look particularly exciting. However, since I started at 70 degrees North, this makes it 100 degrees of latitude crossed.
Had a great breakfast in the hotel with all four of us touring cyclists. It was cold, but fortunately no wind! I stopped to take a photo at the statue as well as put on mittens.
There was a low water crossing. There was a sign warning of such crossings for next 60 kilometers. Also numbers on the road starting around 190. It wasn’t until later that I realized that this meant 190 different small creek crossings in those 60 kilometers. Fortunately, I believe this was the only one with water, but in wetter season, one needs to be careful.
There was road construction. Mostly putting concrete in the low water crossings as well as some paving. Was able to stay on asphalt almost all the time.
Just an occasional diversion like this one where they were cleaning up from the construction work.
An example of one of those 190 small dry wash crossings.
Ernie and Laura came by. Good example of the long straight road that mostly went through this dry area.
At 74 kilometers a traffic circle and then a big change. I took the back road (491) to San Jose de Jachal. It was a great little road that went through a canyon and then climbed steeply up a view point.
The road was narrow and even went through a small tunnel.
At points the road was marked with a width of 4m (13ft) for the entire road. Not much traffic and a great cycle ride.
Came past this church on the other side.
The wind picked up the last 10km into town. It was a long but nice ride as I found the hotel in town. Walked to the town square. Most everything was closed, but the ice cream place was open. Will come back later and hopefully restaurants are open. From here a ~160km gap to the next town, so will look carefully at the weather forecast – particularly the wind in deciding when to cross.