49.9 mi / 13.4 mph / 765 ft. climbing
Home: Hostal El Rinconcito II

We again were out of the hotel looking for breakfast earlier than anywhere was open, so we finally settled on a street vendor serving caldo. But then we noticed there was a sit-down restaurant open right next to the food cart, so we grabbed a booth in there instead. But then, our food was just brought in from the cart outside anyway. Ha. Did we pay more for the more-comfortable seating? (the street carts frequently have a few stools around them where people sit and eat.) Who knows, but if so, it was surely worth it! Caldo (not our favorite) was still the only thing on the menu, but at least that menu showed that you could order it in this place “without prey” (meaning the chicken leg normally included in the broth). It’s quite a challenge to pull any meat off the bone of the tough old hen leg, and I’m still not clear if/how you’re supposed to do it, so Rett was happy to forego the challenge entirely, while I gave it another shot (and had some success this time).

The low gray clouds unexpectedly started dropping some light rain on us soon after we started riding, at one point getting persistent enough for Rett to stop to put on her rain covers, but thankfully it never fully wet us down (I just wore my down jacket the whole day rather than my rain jacket, though that was also a chance to test how “highly water resistant” the Pertex Quantum Pro fabric on my new Cumulus jacket is…it at least passed this test). Nearly an hour into our ride, my thermometer was still showing 43°F, which, combined with light drizzle, sounds absolutely bone-chilling, but somehow we both remained rather comfortable.

After a couple days of dropping elevation in fits and starts, today we would have the most-consistent and most-gradual downhill we’ve pedaled not just in Peru, but perhaps anywhere! For fifty miles, the Mantaro River descends at a perfectly-steady 0.5% grade. This steadiness is rare even in more geograpically-tame regions, but in this country of twisted mountains where change is the only constant, it’s utterly baffling. But we won’t complain!

And neither did the railroad builders. While our (railless)-road builders didn’t follow the river perfectly (inserting some uphills into the profile), the guys who built the railroad on the other side of the river surely kept their grade as steady as possible. Our route had joined with the tracks way up in Cerro de Pasco, so we’ve been riding alongside them for more than three days, and haven’t seen a single train. The tracks appear to be well-maintained, so they must still be used, just extremely infrequently. Which fits with my theory: there was never actually any need to build a railroad here, it was just such an ideal place to lay tracks (particularly in contrast to the rest of Peru) that they did the work just to avoid being shamed by railroads who worked 100 times harder to send their tracks up into a mountain range.

Despite the day’s 50-mile descent, we knew that we would drop “only” 1200 ft. over that distance. So once again we thought it would be an all-day effort. But our 3rd Peru speed-record in a row counteracted our new Peru distance-record, and we reached Jauja by 1pm. A couple weeks ago, on a very different ride, it took us until 3pm to do just 16 miles!

It wasn’t too surprising that our chosen hotel (Hospedaje Monaco) looked all sealed up at this hour; what was more-surprising was that when a guy finally emerged from the mini-door, he told us they were all booked up! Rett quickly found another highly-rated place on Google Maps (Hospedaje El Rinconcito II), still on the southeast edge of town (we entered from the south and would be leaving the same way). It was in an even-more no-mans-land of dusty residential blocks, but when we turned up a stylish woman was out cleaning the porch of a gleaming new building, and she immediately welcomed us in. She showed us two different rooms at different prices (a pleasant first!), and we went with the S/60 one, since it covered our needs just as well as the larger S/100 one. Clean, bright, comfortable bed, and with the all-too-rare hot water in the sink (rather than just the shower!) Her husband showed me where to put the bikes in the fenced, covered, but open-air parking lot across the street (locked to a pole, and with the few remaining items removed after seeing curious sheep inside), and they helped carry our bags up to the 3rd floor. Their 10-year-old son is learning English, partly via Duolingo, so it was funny and mildy-confusing to hear all the app’s characteristic dings and chimes coming from a phone that wasn’t Rett’s! (he hesitantly asked me “what is your name?” in English, and I sadly did the same thing some Spanish-speakers do to us: responded with a sentence that was far too fast and complex for him to understand).

In the dark evening, we headed out for a long walk toward the center of town. With our headlamps, we walked up the shoulder of the highway that defines the eastern edge of town, which wasn’t very pleasant, and we capped it off by watching a car crash into another at a busy 4-way intersection. Yikes. It made us even more glad that we completed the walk (and the day’s bike ride) without incident! The nice “restobar” with good drinks that we had targeted was…you guessed it, closed!, so we trudged along a wide boulevard to the real center of town. A small fancy-looking place with a picture of a hamburger outside (“El Aliso Broasteria”) drew us in, and the Harry Potter items on the shelf told Rett we were in the right place. Our burgers were pretty small, but the big cinnamon roll Rett spied behind the counter was maybe the best baked good we’ve had in Peru (heated up and augmented with a Cusqueña Negra beer), and finished the meal nicely.

Our host/chef/waiter spoke perhaps the best English we’ve encountered in Peru (we’re clearly nearing a big city!), and Rett leveraged both his friendliness and bilingual skills into not just teaching us how to take a trip in one of the ubiquitous mototaxis, but he even flagged one down for us, communicated our destination to the driver, and determined the price (S/3, about US$1).

These three-wheeled vehicles are called autorickshaws in India, or tuk-tuks in Southeast Asia, but here in Peru’s mountains they’re fully-enclosed, making them feel a lot more like tiny cars (their fiberglass caps often emulate the taillight designs of actual sports cars too, adding to the illusion). I always wondered how two passengers and the driver can all fit within the enclosed space, but it was actually quite comfortable, and in the dark, felt little different than a normal taxi ride. He expertly brought us right back to our hotel, maybe helped by the giant glowing “H” on the rooftop, which we had only noticed just now.