Juli sits on the south-western shore of Lake Titicaca at close to 3,900 metres, and the air is so thin and clear that the far side of the lake, in Bolivia, seems close enough to touch. The town is nicknamed the Rome of the Americas for its cluster of colonial churches, built by Dominican and Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with carved stone façades and dim interiors full of paintings. Just outside town, the segment of Inca road between Juli and Cruz Pata Ccaje is part of the Qhapaq Ñan, the Andean road system inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2014. This route, the Urcosuyu branch, ran along the lake towards what is now Bolivia.
The landscape is the altiplano: wide, open, with stone-walled fields, adobe farmhouses, herds of llamas and alpacas, and the deep blue of the lake always at the edge of vision. The people here are mostly Aymara, and the markets are full of women in bowler hats and colourful layered skirts selling potatoes, chuño, the freeze-dried potato of the Andes, and fish from the lake.
The main road, PE-3S, runs from Puno along the lake to Juli and on to the Bolivian border at Desaguadero. It is paved and mostly straight or gently curving, but the altitude affects everything: your body, your engine's power and your judgement. Take a few days to acclimatise before riding hard here. The wind can be strong and cold, especially in the afternoon, and the sun burns quickly. The dry season, from May to October, has clear skies and cold nights, sometimes below freezing; the wet season brings afternoon storms.
Traffic is moderate, with buses, trucks, minibuses and tricycle taxis. Watch out for animals on the road, especially near villages, and for speed bumps, which are frequent and sometimes unmarked.
Juli has fuel, small hotels and simple restaurants, and Ilave, thirty kilometres away, is a larger market town. Try trucha, trout from the lake, fried or grilled, and a hot mate de coca, the coca leaf tea that locals swear helps with the altitude. Sunset over the lake from one of Juli's hills, with the churches glowing gold, is not something you forget.