Andahuaylas, PE to Chullquisa, PE

19.1 mi / 5.2 mph / 3700 ft. climbing
Home: Gravel Pit Wild Camp

The Peruvian Andes have no shortage of big climbs, but we’re currently in a 350-mile stretch where the elevation profile does little beyond climbing 6,000 to 7,000 feet to a pass, and then descending the same amount. We’ve completed two such ascents, and will finish with two more, but this middle one we’re climbing the majority of today, is the “small” one, only 4,300 feet from bottom to top.

But apparently due to its inferiority complex, it felt the need to tip its slope up to a 290-feet-per-mile grade (5.5%) instead of the 250-feet-per-mile (4.7%) that we’ve become accustomed to. And despite our five days off recuperating in Andahuaylas, Rett was struck with a bit of an aftershock, cutting her energy, similar to how I felt leaving Ayacucho (when I could barely keep up with her).

At least the escape from the city wasn’t too chaotic, and even when we had to take a construction-mandated detour, it was on a street I had been looking at on the maps anyway, because it didn’t take us out of our way at all. But at one mentally-and-physically low point further up the hill, Rett lost control at 3.5mph and had to awkwardly dismount in the middle of the road to stabilize herself.

By that point, temperatures that had been comfortable in Andahuaylas had dropped to a chilly 51°F by 11am under cloudy skies. It warmed a bit from that after a light drizzle passed during our lunch break, but we received no real sun at any point of the day, making for a somewhat dull ride.

Climbing above the suburbs of Andahuaylas.

The rural area outside Andahuaylas had more pigs than we’ve seen anywhere else.

A bit of bright color stands out on this gray day.

This bird was much less-bothered by me taking its photo than the nearby dog who was barking violently at me (thankfully we’d already passed him on our bikes without incident, and I was on foot at this point).

Over the last few rides, I’ve seen these standard-design “buildings” sprinkled within rural settlements. I suspected they were some form of government/NGO-provided toilets (they all also have the wash basin attached), and the sign/diagram (“Basic Sanitation Unit, Biodigestor – Absorption Pit”) seems to confirm it.

This is where we filled water in preparation for our wild camp. While it sort of looked like a small natural waterfall, looking up shows that the water is flowing down a concrete canal. And with a relatively-high density of rural residents and their animals in the area, it’s certainly not a pristine alpine spring, but we always filter or boil such sources.

“Promise fulfilled! Technified Irrigation Project”, benefiting 11,000 families. We passed several of these billboards today. Is it touting the system of canals from which we just skeptically acquired water as a big technological advancement? Or something different?

Approaching on the left, the strange maybe-ghost-town of Tirpa (Terpa?) It’s barely-labelled on maps, and I can find no info about it to explain it’s unusual wide-spaced grid layout or reason for being. (Edit: according to Google Earth historical imagery, there was literally nothing here as of May 2021, and then the town was fully constructed by October 2022! That just deepens the mystery! Why drop a town here in the middle of nowhere in 2021?)

Today’s wild camp (once again scouted by the Shaws and revisited by Timothy Tower) was nearly half-a-mile off our route, much further than most of our previous wild camps, but the distance was a big part of the value. The gravel road that switches back off the highway continues the climb at the same rate, so even though we walked the bikes up due to the variable surface and plant-growth, it didn’t require a lot of physical work. And while our tent was likely visible from various points a mile away, the bushes growing in the middle of the road suggested that vehicles never come up here (in general, it’s lucky how long it takes gravel roads to become overgrown high in the Andes; perhaps a decade after its last significant use, many parts of the road still looked like they’d been recently mowed). Even though I logically have almost zero concerns about people in Peru disturbing our camps (almost every report I’ve read about locals encountering campers says the locals seem totally unbothered), it’ll still be nice to not even need to stay alert to the possibility.

A flat area opened up at the top of the climb, which included a stone fire ring (and even some kindling next to it), but we continued up just a little further to a little sheltered hollow. Skies were darkening, and shortly after we got the tent set up, it began to rain. Good thing we’d arrived before 2:30pm, earlier than usual!

Our remote but easily-accessible campsite, with our tent pitched in perhaps the exact same spot as our virtual guides.

I later realized that in the racing chaos of covering the bikes and grabbing everything I could think of to bring under cover, I had somehow lost my bike computer. I knew I had taken it off its mount and put it in my pocket while walking up the gravel road; had it fallen out somewhere down there? Or maybe it fell out while I was laying down on our groundsheet to check the flatness of our chosen tent spot, and now was sitting somewhere under the tent and our mattress and all the other stuff inside? Either way, both searches couldn’t be conducted until our departure tomorrow, so I was dreading the sleep-interruptions that would surely come with my mind obsessing over search-strategies or generating other theories of where it could have gone. It would have been easier if I knew it had been stolen, or if I had left it back in Andahuaylas, but knowing that my needle was hidden in a nearby haystack, which would remain undisturbed through tomorrow, meant my mind wouldn’t let go of the issue. So it was a great relief when, an hour later, I found it sitting underneath my handlebar bag inside the tent (which always sits above my head as my “headboard”). The relief was only 40% that I hadn’t lost my bike computer, and 60% that I wouldn’t have to spend the night thinking about losing my bike computer!

The rain stopped in an hour or so, finally giving me a chance to explore our “property” for the night (while we each ate an appetizer of crackers given to us by our AirBNB host’s dad when we departed this morning!) For such an obvious campsite (at least for people who know how to look for such things), there was almost no trash, and a line of evergreen trees running up to the lumpy boulders surrounding us made it feel a lot less-desolate than the “gravel pit” moniker (it’s not even clear to me that it was ever actually a gravel pit, though I couldn’t discern why else the road would have been built up the hillside). And while the view from our tent was limited, ascending another 40 feet brought me to the top of the ridge and a spectacular view down the other side and the highway that had brought us here.

For a former gravel-pit(?), there was an unusual amount of natural life, including this tiny-but-colorful ground-cover.

Some species of Fuchsia grows down from a large boulder looming over our campsite, here over 13,000 ft.

Fuchsia closeup.

From the ridge above our campsite, we can look back and still get a good view of the strange town of Tirpa, which we passed at 11:30am (it’s 1400 feet lower and 3 crow-flies miles away, but more than 8 riding-miles).

It’s hard to know how many mountains are hiding in the clouds.

Another section of road that we would have seen ourselves riding up, had we been both here and there an hour ago.

With Rett already curled up in the tent hiding from the rain and cold, I heated up our pre-made pasta dinner, ran back up the ridge to see an incredible sunset (which Rett also briefly emerged to enjoy), but with temperatures down to 40°F by 6pm, it wasn’t long before I joined the huddle inside.

Riding our bikes to a place above the clouds is always magical, but seeing the sunset lighting the *tops* of the clouds truly makes it feel like we’re flying.