28.9 mi / 10.2 mph / 657 ft. climbing
Home: Marleni’s AirBNB

This morning’s breakfast was even more of a challenge than yesterday’s; when we walked out to the main street, we couldn’t find any open restaurants or street vendors. We walked back and forth a couple times, getting increasingly frustrated with each other and the town, but that gave time for my hypothesis to be proven correct: in this higher-altitude town, things just get going a bit later in the chilly mornings than do in warmer places. So on our return towards the square, we found a whole host of street vendors still setting up, and the one we selected happily made us coffee and egg sandwiches while we waited. I was going to walk all the way back to our hotel to get the condensed-milk pouch that Rett needs to add to her coffee, but then realized I could just buy another for a few soles at the bodega across the street (which I think is the same place that our vendor went to get the eggs for our sandwiches!)

Today’s ride would mark a shift: since La Oroya we have been riding exclusively on National Highway 3S. While it has rarely been busy with traffic, today would be our first time on a more-minor road in more than a month. Perhaps even more shocking, we would be diverging from Timothy Tower’s route for (I believe) the first time in all of Peru! (He headed directly to Cusco, while we’ll be diverting north to visit Machu Picchu first). Even crazier, I couldn’t find reports of any cyclists taking our “shortcut” route, which included a four-mile section of unknown-quality gravel. Of course, none of this is actually all that crazy; in plenty of other places I’ve charted our own path with limited knowledge of what is to come. But like anything else, once repetition becomes a habit, it’s difficult and disconcerting to break that habit.

But while we left the familiarity of the highway, it was immediately and unexpectedly replaced by a new form of familiarity: the flattest farmlands we have seen in Peru continued from yesterday, but now down at their level and looking up to increasingly-tall mountains in the distance, it suddenly felt like the Snoqualmie Valley, our favorite area to bike when we lived in Washington. And even without the mountains, the broad farmlands had a comforting Midwestern atmosphere, a feeling I didn’t even know I was missing until a facsimile of it was presented here in South America.

Just as I was feeling satisfied with our newfound route independence, my pride got smacked down by a construction barrier at the far end of the town of Zurite (aka Andenes). I knew the road was supposed to turn to gravel at this point, but it turns out only for a little while longer: they’re in the process of paving it! Great news for future cyclists, but terrible news for us right now. The woman manning the gate directed us to another gravel road off to the right that would presumably detour us back to the highway we were planning to join eventually, but I knew even less about the road-quality and distance in that direction than I did about our planned route. A sign said the road had a daily passable period between 12-1pm (and after 5pm), but that was still a couple hours away. We used Google Translate to try to get some more information about the detour, and glumly decided to head off that way.

But, just as we were leaving, the guard reached an engineer on the phone, beckoned us back, and said we had permission to pass through! It was yet another example of Peruvian people going out of their way to be helpful to us. It would have been so easy (and completely expected, in the US) for her to just say “No. Detour is that way”. And while we had certainly showed disappointment and frustration, we didn’t make any actual request for an exception. She just took it upon herself to do the extra work to help us out. Amazing!

And that was before we even comprehended what a gift she had actually given us. It turns out that ever since we left the highway, we were on the roundabout route that the Incas would take through the mountains to get from their imperial capital of Cusco to Machu Picchu. So this road that they were paving was once a part of the renowned Inca road network, and it runs right along the Andenes de Zurite, supposedly the largest set of terraces in the world. On top of bringing us into Inca history, much of the route was currently a smooth compacted gravel, surely better than what we would have been riding on had there been no construction.

If any of the workers were surprised to see us, nearly all of them regarded us as fun curiosity, with friendly greetings, pointing out the way through the really tight sections, and even quickly pausing their work to allow us to pass. When we thought we had made it through all of the substantial blockages, Ernesto (perhaps the engineer who had been called) caught up with us and walked at least a quarter mile just to personally show us the turns we would need to make to detour around an actually-fully-closed section. Having once worked on European cruise ships, he spoke good English, and it was nice to talk with him about the area as we walked. Only in Peru would an unexpectedly-closed road turn into such a positive experience!

Near the town of Huarocondo, we returned to a paved road and our originally-planned route, and that’s also where we returned to Peru, leaving behind the broad open valley and feeling the mountains close in around us again. An easy descent along the river (with a few embedded climbs) continued our really-enjoyable day. And while it was a bit mysterious that there wasn’t more traffic on this historic-and-modern route from Cusco to Machu Picchu, I wasn’t raising any complaints!

The gorge we were following northward aimed directly into a sheer mountain wall, where our unnamed river joined the Urubamba at the settlement of Pachar. Now officially in the Sacred Valley, we made a sharp left turn at the T-intersection. Traffic definitely got busier, but it was also a rare case in Peru where the road was so narrow that there was really no chance for anyone to try to pass us unsafely.

Ollantaytambo is basically a pre-colonial Inca city that modern people have moved into, and its history remains visible at every turn. We certainly haven’t been anywhere like it in Peru (or anywhere!), and it feels like a South American Venice: completely impractical for modern life, but that’s exactly why it has the magical power to take you back in time. The stone-paved road leading into the city is incredibly bumpy, and even walking the bikes for the half mile couldn’t prevent them from clattering. But walking is what we wanted to do anyway, since there was so much to look at and absorb.

The historic atmosphere of Ollantaytambo (and its position on the route to Machu Picchu) draws a large number of foreign tourists, so it was bit of a culture shock to hear other people conversing in English for the first time after more than three months in Peru. But we immediately took advantage of the rich-tourist-focus by visiting one of the restaurants Rett had researched, Chuncho, for lunch. There we ate by far our most-expensive meal in Peru, but also the best, on-par with high-end restaurants in the US, so still an incredible value. We ordered their tasting menu, and part of the value was that the waitress could explain each dish to us in English. So while we sniggered unchairitably at some of the other extremely-gringo guests, shepherded by their personal tour guides from the airport to Cusco to here, for experiencing almost nothing of the “real” Peru, we were also quite happy to take advantage of this “unreal” version of Peru they have enabled!

After picking up some groceries at the mercado and returning to our loaded bikes, we dropped into an easy conversation with Hank and Cerise from Michigan. Again, it just felt nice to talk to some Americans besides ourselves or our families for the first time in months, and see that the natural opening that our bikes provide still works, it just needs people who speak our language.

Our AirBNB is up past the north end of main section of town, which means we don’t get to stay in an Inca-era building, but it means that we get to walk through the magical pedestrian “streets” every time we go in and out of town. We got a friendly and laughing welcome from our host’s mom (and their dog, Chocolate), and settled into this place where we’d be happy to stay for a month (or a year!)