34.5 mi / 12.8 mph / 568 ft. climbing
Home: Hotel Los Balcones

In the United States, if you woke up and your bedroom was 55°F, it would immediately drop you into a terrible mood because it would mean figuring out why your furnace stopped working, and how much it would cost to get it repaired or replaced. Here in our Junin hotel, it was a grin-inducing luxury. Because 55°F is a massive 14 degrees warmer than the 41°F we woke to in Colquijirca! Does this mean that if/when we’re back in a settled American life and our furnace fails, that remembering how happy we were in Peru at 55°F will allow us to take it completely in-stride? Probably not, because relativism works in both directions, but maybe it will help a tiny bit!

It seems the rest of the town waits a little longer than us for the sun to starting warming things up before they get out of bed in the morning, so finding a place open for breakfast on the quiet streets took a bit more searching than average. Many of the businesses in Peru have big steel doors that cover the entire front of the store, like a garage door would, and they often have a (sub)-human-sized door embedded within the larger door to allow initial access. Crouching to see into one such 4.5-foot-high portal is how I saw a few guys sitting inside eating breakfast, so we ducked through as well for our pan con huevos. As we were finishing up, the woman was opening the entire garage door, something it felt like she might have wanted to do some time ago, but people following her in through the tiny door and demanding food kept taking priority.

Today’s ride brought us through the southern end of the flat Junin valley, so the return of nearer mountains made it look a bit more Peru-like than yesterday’s ride, though it also could have just been a slightly-hillier part of Wyoming than the part we were in yesterday. Like Wyoming, it’s certainly a place where horses can run freely, and so was the site of an important cavalry battle of Peru’s War of Independence in 1824. There were a lot of signs in the area commemorating last year’s bicentennial, though when we got to the battlefield monument, the imposing entrance gate and bronze horse sculptures looked so fresh (and still somewhat under-construction) that I’m not sure if their recent addition made it in time for last year’s celebration (coincidentally, the 201st anniversary, and one of the country’s seven Peru-specific national holidays, is just three days from now).

There were no live horses today, but a littler further south on the battlefield, I spied a couple of vicuñas on the opposite side of the highway. Then a couple dashed across the road, and then Rett saw there were more, and more, dozens of them spread across the grassland and drinking from a watering hole. Unlike the domesticated alpacas and (more-recently) llamas that we’ve been excited to see, vicuñas are fully wild, and much more frightened of humans than curious. We’d actually seen groups of them a couple times up near Pastoruri Glacier, but they had dashed off before I could catch them with my camera. This time, while they still were in a hurry to move away, I managed to snare some.

At the end of the valley, the mountains rejoined us, and the highway began winding a downhill path between them. While we had a bit more of a shoulder today than yesterday, it still mostly felt safer to us to ride to the left of the white line, since that tends to paradoxically force the vehicles to give us more space. At least least that’s how it works in other countries, we honestly didn’t even really experiment to see if Peru’s driving culture also assumes that if something is on the other side of the white line, they can run right up to their side of the line. The strategy worked reasonably-comfortably for us until a disabled mototaxi in the shoulder appeared ahead while a big truck approached from behind. Most drivers would have slowed to let us go around the mototaxi (and frequently drivers of big trucks seem to be the safest here), but this asshole barrelled on ahead, at the same time traffic was occupying the oncoming lane. Luckily Rett braked to a stop behind the mototaxi and let the truck blast by, rather than getting smeared, but the fact that she did the right thing to protect her life didn’t stop her from fuming in rage about it for the next hour (the fact that a death-scare came on the fourth anniversary of her mom’s death was not a helpful coincidence either).

We apparently didn’t trust yesterday’s blazing-fast ride (“we must have had a huge tailwind!” “maybe there was more downhill than the maps showed?”), and so repeated our “mistake” today, reaching our destination before 12:30pm (our 12.8mph average broke yesterday’s Peru record)! This time it might have literally “cost” us something, since when I checked-in at the hotel, the clerk was very specific about “until tomorrow?” The list of rules in the room stated that the rooms are booked for 12-hour durations, and we were charged an unusually-high S/70, so it’s possible that it could have been cheaper had we turned up later. But since that’s still less than US$20, who cares?

We had to bring our bikes up one level, where they were stored in a hallway, and then hike our bags up to level three, past a wall mural of a half-nude couple on a beach, and into our heavily-mirrored room with a cute pink bedspread. Hmm, maybe that explains a bit why the clerk softened once she realized that my wife was waiting outside, and I wasn’t just a single guy asking for a room for two?

The problem came when we tried to do a midday exploration of town, and we were locked into the hotel. We needed the clerk to buzz us out from the second-floor reception desk, but she was nowhere to be found. I had given her a S/100 bill for our S/70 room, but she said I would need to wait for her to get change; maybe she was out collecting it? (No, because after multiple queries throughout the day/evening if she’d had our change yet, I finally just came up with with an exact S/70 and traded it for my S/100 bill she still had). Eventually she turned up from somewhere and let us out, and she was on-the-ball enough that all our other entries/exits had minimal waits. But getting in and out of hotels is definitely an issue in Peru! (at least here we got a key to our room, unlike our hotels Colquijirca and Hullanaca, and it implies that our bikes would be reasonably secure inside.)

Despite being a fairly grubby mining town, La Oroya surprised us with a few cute pedestrian alleys hidden away, and another grocery store with a ton of gringo products, similar to Junin (here the owner gave us a 2-minute soliloquy about Peru, of which we understood maybe 5%). For dinner we got burgers at a chicken place, and their melty American cheese really hit the spot. Another sun-facing room meant that it was still 58°F inside when we climbed into bed…luxury!