37.9 mi / 12.4 mph / 876 ft. climbing
Home: Hostal Neby’s

It was a balmy 43°F inside our hotel room this morning (compared to the freezing 41°F yesterday), but the more-consequential improvement was that there was no snow or ice, and yesterday’s fog-blanket had given way to clear skies. We returned to the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast, and again got the same “you’ll just eat what I serve” treatment, though unfortunately the menu wasn’t quite as good as yesterday’s: some sort of flattened fried chicken (I think!) over rice-and-beans. Cinnamon had been added to the smoothies, but the bananas were less-smoothed, making them even more-intolerable to Rett’s banana-hating nose. I was happy to have two though!

Today’s ride is the beginning of something new for us in Peru: a multi-day stretch of relatively-flat paved-highway riding into the big city of Huancayo. It’s probably the main style of riding that we do in the US, and that wasn’t the only similarity to our native country. The high plain that we were riding along, with mountains mostly confined to the horizon, felt very much like the Intermountain West regions of Montana or Wyoming. And even the road surface itself contributed to that psychological teleportation: the white shoulder stripes, orange center lines, embedded reflectors, and even even the darker snaking patches to seal cracks in the asphalt, made it feel more “American” than any road we’ve been on in Peru.

The smooth and easy-riding highway meant that we would also be dealing with more traffic than we had become accustomed to in Peru. The yellow centerlines reliably alternated between dashed and solid to indicate no passing zones, and like on US highways, were paired with “no passing” signs. But unlike the the US, the Peruvian addiction to passing (partly instilled by the large speed differential between the higher diversity of vehicle types here) meant that the signs were universally ignored. Most annoying was when an oncoming car would pull around a truck and head straight for us, but after a while it seemed like moving demonstratively toward the center of our lane would cause (most of) them to tuck back in and wait until it was actually safe to pass. So we certainly had our fair share of close passes (both oncoming and overtaking), but overall it felt comparable to what we’d experience on a US highway.

Across all the empty gravel roads, Rett and I have been allowing more distance to open between us than ever before, but here I wanted to be right back on her tail in my normal position, both so that my brighter bags and taillights could make us more visible as a pair (though conveniently the cool temperatures allowed her to comfortably wear her bright rain jacket), and so that I could use my rear-view mirror to communicate about every overtaking vehicle. The tradeoff was that it removed the ability for me to stop (and catch up later) whenever a photo scene presented itself, but there were fewer of those scenes anyway, and the feeling of pushing to our destination as efficiently as possible held its own attraction.

Huayre’s amazing plaza forced us to stop there for lunch (peanut butter sandwiches, now that we know we can replenish our precious peanut butter stock in Huancayo!) Every town plaza in Peru has had its own unique character, but Huayre’s was next-level. Based around an enormous glass rendition of the locally-grown maca plant, it’s clear that the designer was also a fan of the whimsical insanity of “Alice in Wonderland”, and the small details hidden everywhere reveal that the construction was closely-managed by passionate artists and not just a construction company.

The area apparently enjoyed/suffered an insane boom/bust cycle a dozen years ago when China decided that Peruvian root was some sort of aphrodisiac, though it doesn’t seem that that influx of cash is what paid for this flight-of-fancy, since the structures obviously predate that period. Maybe it’s the reverse, and the existence of this bizarre monument became part of the story that sold the “wonder drug” to Chinese consumers?

The day’s 12.4mph average speed was nearly three times what we had been averaging on the gravel mountain roads, and was our fastest average in Peru so far (despite being mostly-flat, with a lot of embedded small climbs, it was even faster than the day we did a steep 4000-foot downhill on pavement into Chacas, where we needed to squeeze the brakes on the curvy switchbacks). Our conditioned disbelief that such speeds were impossible in Peru meant that we got to town surprisingly early, and our chosen hotel (the highly-rated Hostal Neby’s) looked all closed up.

But a ring on the doorbell soon brought over the smiling proprietor from across the street, and he quickly got us into a wonderfully-comfortable room (with our bikes parked in his first-floor event-space). At 13,500 ft., Junin is only 400 feet lower than Colquijirca (our true downhill won’t start until tomorrow), so it’s only fractionally warmer. But the windowed wall of our north-facing room was exposed to the sun from nearly dawn to dusk, making it feel luxuriously heated compared to the icebox we’d slept in in Colquijirca. Combine that with the in-room gas-powered on-demand water heater for the shower (that our host had to enter the room to manually enable, and supposedly it was limited to 20 minutes, but that might just be “please don’t use more than 20 minutes of gas”), and it made for a day where everything felt wonderful and easy, an unusual feeling while bike touring in Peru.

Finding necessities returned us to the usual Peru “challenges” (even though it’s a good sized city with a ton of vendors surrounding its very active central plaza). We did our usual exploration of multiple tiendas to collect groceries for tomorrow, only to find one near the end that had the highest amount of gringo-food (Pringles, peanut butter, Snickers bars) that we’ve seen since Huaraz. Then for dinner, the stylish “restobar” place Rett had found turned out to be closed, so we tried something new, getting “hamburguesas de pollo” (stuffed with french fries) from a street vendor, for a shockingly cheap S/6 (~US$1.70) for three. In the now-cold evening, we raced back to our still-toasty room to eat in comfort.