23.0 mi / 6.1 mph / 1935 ft. climbing
Home: Hotel Inca

We began the morning with a becoming-customary wander around town in search of a place serving breakfast (Google seems particularly useless for this task in Peru). After 20 minutes with no luck, we resorted to asking our hotel host for a recommendation. He (with the help of his wife on the phone) recommended the central market, on the second floor. Ah, that makes sense, we’d seen such places in Huaraz’s central market, but been too timid to try them at that point.

As promised, we found a counter-serve restaurant with an outgoing host offering Caldo de Gallina (hen soup). Rett isn’t quite on board with soup for breakfast, so I suggested we could go to one of the regular restaurants that we now saw were all gathered around the market, but to my surprise she decided to embrace being a Peruvian. It came with some unknown sort of tea, Peruvian popcorn as garnish, and it soon became clear in this place where mornings are always cold, why hot soup is popular for breakfast.

Today’s ride was supposed to be easy, since we were back on pavement the whole way. However, there were dozens of rough gravel sections sundering the asphalt, and they greatly reduced our speed and increased our effort. On the way out of Huari, Rett’s sky-high biking confidence from yesterday was deflated when she dropped the bike (without damage to herself or Claire) on a steep corner in view of (sympathetic!) onlookers. That, combined with tires reinflated to “smooth pavement” pressure, meant that she was walking through most of these sections. And even if she would have been able to ride through them, they still would have necessitated a slowdown to 4mph every time.

Timothy Tower reported 20 such gravel sections six years ago. And while I’m sure he wasn’t doing a precise count, my count was closer to 70. I saw zero evidence of repaired pavement, so the overall feeling is that the transportation department is just letting landslides slowly reclaim the road, negating all the work that went into paving it in the first place. Sad, but maybe an inevitable outcome of paving a road through such steep terrain without spending 100x more to engineer massive retaining walls.

The (relatively!) low elevation certainly made the day warmer than we’ve been used to, but even locals were saying “calor”, so it must have been unusually hot. And even though the road was (mostly) paved, there was an atmosphere of dry dustiness hanging over most of the route, another new-in-Peru for us.

We had trouble finding a good place to eat our packed lunch, with a sequence of settlements too small for public plazas, but too built-up for a scenic rural vista. Eventually we had to just give up and stop right on the roadside 100 yards short of the next set of buildings. With a vehicle going past every three minutes, and several dogs questing for scraps/handouts, it wasn’t the most-comfortable place to assemble avocado-and-tuna sandwiches, but it got the job done.

Eventually the settlements led to San Marcos, a much-larger city than I was expecting. Upon crossing the bridge into town, I was surprised that the direct-route “shortcut” (that avoided a looping switchback) didn’t appear to go up an insane hill like I expected it would. So we decided to take it, but soon saw it was completely blocked by huge construction equipment. Along with several motorcyclists, we turned around and followed the “correct” route. But then at the hairpin, we suddenly found ourselves at the end of a line of stopped vehicles. After a couple minutes of no movement, I went ahead on foot to investigate.

As far as I could tell, there was no road closure, no crashed vehicles, no protest, and no parade. I think it was literally caused by impatient drivers, unwilling to take turns through a section of the road narrowed by a couple of parked cars. So two vehicles had come face-to-face from opposite directions, and both were unable to back up because other vehicles immediately packed in behind them.

I went back to Rett, and while unfamiliar with Peruvian waiting-in-line etiquette, we decided to try to walk our bikes through it. We mostly walked along the narrow sidewalk, but when that became too narrow for even our bikes, we squeezed alongside stopped vehicles. At one point we were trapped, and crossing to the other side of the road was the only option. But the vehicles were literally packed bumper-to-bumper (just making the whole situation worse!), so it took some time for a gap to open that we could squeeze through. But then we were largely home-free! It took maybe ten minutes to walk a quarter-mile into the clear, but by the looks (and sounds!) of it, it would take hours to untie the self-inflicted knot and allow vehicles to flow again. Score another win for bikes!

When we got to Chavin, we entered town up a bumpy-but-attractive cobblestone-ish street taking us directly to the gorgeous flower-lined plaza, and the Timothy Tower-recommended Hotel Inca, whose flower-filled courtyard, friendly dog, and talkative parrot quickly won us over. We were initially shown a somewhat-dismal interior-hallway room, but then for the same price (a shockingly-expensive S/120, 3x more than San Luis, and the most expensive nights in Peru so far, equivalent to…US$34) were shown #105, a courtyard-entry room one over from Timothy’s. Much better! Water heaters visibly sprinkled throughout the rambling property suggested hot showers would be no problem. With our two bikes, it would have been too obtrusive to lock them to the rail right in front of our room like he had, but I found an out-of-the-way spot under an avocado tree where I could lock them to some rebar. We booked in for four nights, to accommodate both some rest and exploration of the ancient culture for whom the town is named.