28.1 mi / 11.8 mph / 437 ft. climbing
Home: Piero’s AirBNB

The final day of our 4-day, 4000-foot descent from Cerro de Pasco would bring us to Huancayo, Peru’s 5th-largest city. Yesterday we had curled slightly north to enter Jauja, but since our hotel was well south of the city center, and we would be exiting south, we did something we haven’t done yet in Peru: left our hotel without first eating breakfast. Rett had found a “Restaurant Campestre” (country restaurant) on Google in the next village four miles south. I wanted take the remaining city streets out of town because I figured the chances of us finding a small place in Jauja’s outskirts serving breakfast were greater than the chance of any “country restaurant” being open (I’ve almost never seen one open, they’re usually spacious open outdoor sites that seem more like weekend/special-occasion places). But I followed her lead and we headed straight to the highway out of town.

We passed a a couple not-open Restaurant Campestres before reaching Rett’s target, which was also closed. So we continued onward. Not a big deal, since we weren’t climbing a mountain, but we tallied nearly 8 miles before we found our first option. It turned out that it even further increased our morning-efficiency, because while there was a normal “restaurant” space there, when we asked the man if he had “pan con huevos”, he directed us to a case he had sitting on the patio, with various premade “pan con…”s inside. We just took the whole stack of five, along with a couple coffees, at one of the patio tables. Ah, how unusual and wonderful to be sitting comfortably outside at 8:30am eating breakfast!

The next 20 miles (ok, and really the first 8 too) would take us through built-up areas, where the Peruvian addiction to speed-bumps would really test our patience (which I supposed is the point). They come in all shapes, sizes, and conditions, and you really never know how much it’s going to jolt you until you’re going over it (presuming you see it coming; some are barely marked). It’s not really clear what purpose they serve; like most speed-bumps in the US, there is enough space between them for vehicles to return to high speeds if they’d like to, but honestly Peruvian drivers don’t seem that obsessed with speed (certainly there are exceptions). And in the US, where they’re usually confined to side-streets in residential areas (often as a way to make a “shortcut” painful enough to keep cars on the main roads), while here they’re laid across National Highways, the main thoroughfares for moving people and goods throughout the country.

In practice, they tend to cause vehicles to get bunched into groups (which sucks when those groups attempt to pass us as a unit), and also generate a lot of chaos at the bumps themselves, since lighter vehicles see them as a good opportunity to pass heavier vehicles, so you’ll sometimes see three vehicles spread across the entire roadway crossing the bump simultaneously (and as we get closer to a city with more of a car-culture, guys with their dropped suspensions will go over them diagonally to avoid smashing their undercarriage.

Anyway, perhaps due to all those shenanigans, but more-likely due to the relatively-high traffic volumes, these were some of the roughest speed bumps we’ve dealt with, where frequently the asphalt before and after the bump would be busted up, and the bump itself would fractally contain bumps within.

A bit more than halfway through the ride, we got relief from our war with passing vehicles: the highway widened into two lanes in each direction! That meant we had a lane all to ourselves! Though we quickly learned that we needed to sit in the middle of the lane, otherwise we’d get squeezed anyway (not that there even seems to be a particularly strong norm of “slower traffic stays to the right” here). It it didn’t take long before traffic volumes increased, effectively making the two lanes at least as busy as the one lane had been previously. And when it widened to three lanes, we didn’t even get a grace-period. At that point, the collectivos had aggressively taken over the right lane. These vans are sort of a cross between a taxi and a bus, and in other cities and countries, they seem to relate to customers the same way that taxis and buses do: it’s sort of the customer’s job to let them know they’re looking for a ride. In Huancayo, it’s the opposite. They all have a guy (thankfully not the driver) hanging out the side door, looking for people to lure onboard. And just when we thought we had become fluent in Peruvian honking, we encountered a whole new dialect: 80% of the honks coming from behind us had nothing to do with us, it was the collectivo drivers “talking” to people on the sidewalks, saying “hey, I’m here, don’t you want a ride? Get in, quick!” (because as much as they want paying customers, they barely want to stop for them).

Somehow we survived the chaos (again, chaotic roads that prime drivers to be prepared for anything are actually safer for us), and once again underestimated our speed and arrived at our AirBNB at 10:40am. Whoops! Thankfully the Peruvian flexibility with check-in continued, and a friendly older man soon emerged from the unit next door with the key and…an automatic garage door opener! I hit the button, and we rolled our bikes straight into the garage. We’re definitely in the big city now!

Until now, Huaraz was by far the biggest city we’ve been in in Peru. But Huancayo has more than three times Huaraz’s population, nearly 500,000. We allotted ourselves a week here to take advantage of big-city resources, and to treat ourselves after five weeks of riding through rural Peru.

Our first priority was the mall! Of which Huancayo has two! Two more than we’ve seen in the rest of Peru combined! We walked to the one with the Burger King (and KFC, and Pizza Hut, but we were there for the Burger King!) Upon walking in the glittering mall entrance and mounting the escalator, Rett noted that it immediately smelled like a mall, but didn’t feel like one because there was no blast of air-conditioning. It was surprisingly-crowded for a weekday afternoon, though maybe the fact that it was a National Holiday contributed to that?

If everything else hadn’t yet told us that we were in a big city, the way everyone in the mall reacted to us certainly did. Which is to say, they had no reaction at all. Not even brief stares or hidden giggles, much less anyone calling “gringo!” This despite the fact that we were the only gringos I saw during our week in the city. So in fact it was us who were the gawkers! It was strange how many of the stores had slogans/ads in English, and I was also struck by how many people were wearing glasses. One old woman with glasses in tiny Antacolpa had stood out a couple weeks ago as the exception that proved the rule, but now returning to a place where glasses are commonplace (they hadn’t been a rarity in Huaraz either) makes me think that there are a whole lot of people in rural Peru walking around half-blind.

And, the girl taking our order at Burger King knew some English. The fast-food worker! Later on at the Plaza Vea “hypermarket” grocery store (inside the mall, New Zealand-style, and the first grocery store we’ve been to that would feel utterly familiar to any American), a guy wanting something off the shelf I was looking at said “excuse me”, in English!

The ATM in the mall gave me a 200 soles note! I didn’t even know 200 soles notes existed! I have no idea how I’m going to get rid of it in this country where finding a vendor with change is a crapshoot!

While our Burger King lunch contradicts it, one of our main goals in Huancayo is to fill ourselves with a week of healthier eating, particularly getting more fiber in our diet. We ended up collecting so many groceries at Plaza Vea (including a glass casserole dish and a baking sheet) that walking the 1.2 miles back to our AirBNB would have been a real challenge. So Rett did a great job of hailing our first cab, unassisted, in Peru, and the S/8 (~US$2.50) he asked for was both reasonable, and a great value.

When we returned home we were distressed to find that the combined washer/dryer had unexpectedly continued on into dryer mode and heated the crap out of our clothes (and simultaneously leaked water all over the basement floor (tile, with a floor drain, so no big deal). And the oven (the other key appliance that we filtered for when searching for this AirBNB) was finicky too. The electronics holding the gas valve open were flaky, so it would randomly shut off. We bought a big bag of frozen ravioli for our first night’s dinner, and the asparagus(!!) Rett roasted with that cooked up well, and taught me that if the oven temperature knob remained depressed, the valve wouldn’t close, so I eventually figured out a way to keep the knob depressed without me standing there for an hour.

Rett made herself six mornings of broccoli/bacon breakfast casserole (which she would have been happy to share with me, but since I like my oatmeal, that let her eat healthy for longer and less effort). And then she made four nights of a pasta and ground-beef (!!) casserole for us both, to go with our giant pile of roasted vegetables.

Days 2-7

The 150 miles we covered over our four paved-highway days into Huancayo exceeded the 146 miles we managed over the first 10 days (9 riding) when we departed Huaraz. And it took us 12 hours of pedaling to do that 150 vs. 25 hours for the 146. So clearly the latter chunk was far-easier riding, but we still were happy to do a fair amount of layabout resting that we do whenever we’re in a comfortable place for a period.

We’re still above 10,000 feet (and a bit higher than Huaraz), so the bed still came equipped with two of the heavy wool blankets under the puffy comforter, but after weeks of wearing pants (and sometimes socks) in bed, it was a luxury to sleep in just my underwear and a short-sleeved shirt. And after enough sun had come in over days to really heat the place up, I even took one of the wool blankets off! Whoa!

We did catch up on some chores, particularly Rett, who washed all of her panniers after weeks of dusty gravel roads, and even washed her bike! At the Zona Xtreme bike shop, we were happy to meet Frank, a friendly English-speaking customer who intermediated with the shop workers to help get everything we needed: gloves (a cheap Chinese brand, but better than nothing after I lost my left fingerless Specialized a few weeks ago), chain lube (they carried the exact Finish Line Dry that I always use), brake pads (brandless Chinese as well, so they’ll be the backup-spares!), and a few patches.

Our one big outing was to Memorias Brewery, who were celebrating (worldwide) “IPA Day” by serving IPAs from three other Peruvian craft brewers, and having local bands perform. They also brew some very Rett beers (eucalyptus! lemon verbena!), but for whatever reason (Peru!), those only come in bottles, and they didn’t have any bottles available. Their Belgian and Irish Red were both really good though (having a wonderful “brewery-fresh” mouthfeel that I haven’t felt in forever, or is it just that it’s been unusually long since I’ve had a draft craft beer?) The IPA flight was also very good (it was funny reading the word “dank” in an otherwise-Spanish description), and Rett stuck with their excellent Irish Red-based cocktail.

The first band we saw thought they were much better than they actually were, but I give them credit for their ambition (the bass player with the Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt was certainly wearing his influences). And unfortunately we never saw the second (mask-wearing) band, because the host decided to do a 30-minute public IPA taste-test with a table. Rett and I had plenty of time to play a Spanish, commercial version of “Never Have I Ever”, which, like the Sexy-Jenga game we played at an Oyon pizza place, was 20% for having fun and learning things about each other, and 80% for practicing our Spanish!

It was cool to see the girlfriends/relatives thing works about the same for young local bands here in Peru as it does in the US, and there was a guy wearing a Bathory hoodie (and under it, an Anal Vomit t-shirt, so representing both Peruvian and international extreme metal bands), and on our way out there were a group of kids talking about “Keeling ees mee buyznayss” (the Megadeth album), so I probably should have stuck around!