29.0 mi / 5.8 mph / 2222 ft. climbing
Home: Hotel Santa Rosa

The thermometer said it was only 35°F when we woke, but it felt a lot warmer than in our urban campsite, sheltered from any wind by two walls and a roof. We still didn’t see anyone from the church to ask belated permission from (or give a donation to), so the only real difference between what we did and “unilaterally squatting next to an unoccupied building in town” is that a couple people on the Internet wrote about pitching their tents at the same spot some years ago. Which honestly makes it feel like you could adopt an intentional strategy of pitching your tent near unoccupied buildings in Peru and have a reasonably-high success rate.

With no one to pay, it made it our eighth free campsite of the month, helping to keep our lodging costs for the month of July to a record-low US$481.35. But even without those free nights, the month still would have been incredibly inexpensive, since our 23 hotel nights averaged just US$21/night, with a high of US$34 and a low of US$5.60. There have been places in the US where we burned through that monthly total in 2 nights, so even though I’ve known for a while what a drag US housing costs have on everything else in the country, it’s opened my eyes even further to how reducing those costs would unlock so much opportunity.

Unlike the standard morning “climb out of town”, which usually starts near the edge of town, Uchumarca is laid out along the climb, and it was steep enough (with enough in-town minor chaos) that Rett walked until the houses began thinning out. At that point, the gravel road became almost perfectly-smooth, meaning that the 5% grade and thinning air were the only things we had to fight on the 1600 ft. climb.

We topped out onto a high plateau, suddenly spreading flat in every direction all the way until distant mountains met dark clouds on the horizon. It felt like a preview of the Bolivian Altiplano, and while the llamas and alpacas seemed comfortable in the 48F winds that swept across the grasslands, it was less-welcoming to us, especially since the road deteriorated into some powdery, tire-sucking sections.

The road improved again after a few miles once our relatively-gradual (~2.5%) and relatively-minor (~800 ft.) descent began, though when we hit the very dumpy town of Pacoyan, heavy dump-truck traffic had turned the surface into something new: water-hardened but pocked edge-to-edge with shallow 2in.-diameter holes, something that car tires could fly over without noticing, but that was absolutely brutal on bikes. We stopped for a chilly lunch in their once-nice town park, with the wind slamming the decaying blue fiberglass wind-blockers against the cold concrete shelter where we nonetheless huddled behind a modicum of protection. I watched the regular passage of dump trucks continuing down the slope ahead, trying to gauge how far they were going, and thus how far we would have to ride with our bones and bikes rattled, while Rett watched a group of dogs alternately fighting and fucking.

Thankfully, the terrible pockmarked surface existed only through town, and once we walked down some of the steep downslope to exit the miserable place, we were back to relatively-easy riding again. After a few miles, active construction zones reappeared, again with workers directing traffic through one-way zones. At only one were we made to wait for a minute or two, and that was one where big piles of new dirt had been dumped on the road, and a grader was in the initial stages of smoothing it down. It was one of a couple of places where we essentially waited for the grader to complete a pass, and then darted into the somewhat-flat channel he had just created, before he turned around and buried us in the outwash from his next pass. In the US they would never allow traffic to pass through an active zone like this, but here in Peru, where the whole rest of the road is full of surprises and ever-changing conditions, this is just one more thing, so why not?

After the low point and the end of construction, pavement returned as we climbed through the very-linear town of Quiulacocha. We continued upward and curved north toward the big mining center of Cerro de Pasco (by some measures the highest-elevation city in the world), but instead cut off onto a steep switchbacking gravel shortcut to get us over to Highway 3N and heading south instead.

For the first time in weeks I was running navigation on my phone (because I knew I wasn’t battery-life-restricted), so I initially thought it was incredibly-lucky that it alerted me that we’d missed a turn on our shortcut-bypass of Cerro de Pasco. But investigation revealed that the turn it wanted us to go down was barely-a-road, and the backtracking and back-backtracking cost us a lot more time and effort than if we had just continued on the road that our eyes told us was “the road”, which is exactly what we would have done if I hadn’t had navigation on. A more-personal reminder that technology can sometimes hurt more than it helps!

Traffic was pretty wild on PE-3N (surely augmented by our complete lack-of-recent-experience with high-speed, moderate-volume traffic), but it was just two miles of downhill to our destination. Our chosen hotel looked all closed up, but eventually searching and knocking led to a woman coming out of the restaurant up front and finding a kid at the office next door to show us to a room. Despite descending 300 feet from Cerro de Pasco, our 14,000 ft. elevation was still very close to “the highest city in the world”, so at mid-afternoon it was only 50°F inside our room! Nonetheless, we decided to stay for two nights, to recover from our wild 3-day push from Oyon.

Day 2

Last night when walking back from dinner, the black sky was briefly lit purple by the lightning of a high-altitude storm. Once again we were lucky to dodge any weather (besides the cold!) by getting under our roof, but we soon heard some form of precipitation tapping away. When we woke up, our room was down to 41°F(!!!), but that’s still better than outside, where we were greeted by a layer of icy snow and heavy fog.

We went to breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, where some tough miners were eating breakfast wearing fingerless wool gloves just like us, even with a wood-fire burning in the fireplace (the first time we’ve seen anything like that, and the only form of heating we’ve seen in Peru!) Interestingly, the server didn’t even ask us what we wanted, she just started bringing out food, which worked well enough for us! (except the drinks were some sort of roasted barley instead of coffee, and the smoothie was banana-based, which was great for me but less-so for Rett.)

Even though it doesn’t actually get too much colder here overnight than the 10-11,000-foot cities we’ve been in (near or slightly-below freezing), the big difference seems to be that the daytime temperatures never rise much above 50°F. So that means that everything (tables and chairs, beds, dishes, toilets, walls, floors, etc.) just holds onto a chill and sucks away warmth in a way that is entirely different than anywhere else we’ve been. So we spent most of the day wrapped in our clothes and jackets and under the 4 heavy blankets and flannel sheets.

We returned for dinner to the same place we’d been last night, after almost walking out the first time. A waitress had come over and said some words we didn’t understand (but implying they had very few choices available), and then walked away. But before we could find a different place, her far-cheerier (and more-perceptive) co-worker bounced over to our booth with a proper menu and made it clear most things were available. We got heaping servings of chifa (fried rice, noodles, chicken) the first night, and then went fancy with beef (lomo saltados) the second. Both nights our orders came with a hot noodle soup starter and hot drinks, which were very welcome. And unusually for Peru, the place had a door that closed to keep the cold wind out! (though only 50% of the customers closed it behind them when coming or going). All the miners “pay” for their meals (both here and the hotel restaurant) by signing in books sitting at the counter, but of course we have to pay cash. Our grinning waitress (who knew some words of English and found our bad Spanish funny) asked if we would be returning for a third night, but it’s time for us to get lower!