22.6 mi / 5.0 mph / 2700 ft. climbing
Home: Hotel Quichas

It was 48°F inside our tent when we woke up, and 44°F outside. But ‘outside’ was still inside, because we were set up inside Antacallanca’s municipal building! Since our bikes (and thus 2nd thermometer) were also conveniently inside with us, I don’t know how cold it was in the “real” outside, but despite a lack of frost, it surely would have been much colder camping out there, especially since the decent breeze that had been blowing last night was still going. (Also, it was interesting information that learn that our body heat enclosed under the rainfly in windless conditions creates a 4°F temperature differential.)

Making breakfast again felt as luxurious as making dinner last night, because we had been able to leave all the kitchen gear just sitting out, with no worries of rain or animals messing with it. As we were packing up, the mayor knocked on the door, and came in with a couple of guys to collect the stacks of plastic chairs and arrange them out on the town’s green square, presumably for some sort of event related to the upcoming “Fiestas Patrias” holidays, the biggest in Peru.

Today’s “climb out of town” was more than just “out of town”. It would continue for 10 miles, elevating us to 15,600 ft., some 2200 feet above our start. So this was the big boy of our push from Banos to Oyon, equalling the elevation of our east-west crossings of the Cordillera Blanca, even though we were now on a southward route that roughly parallels the line of the Andes. But the Andes aren’t as organized as the global view of them would suggest!

The climb began gently, on good gravel, following a chain of beautiful lakes linked by the Lauricocha River, but unfortunately the surface worsened as the grade increased.

Laguna Tinquicocha is the last lake before the road climbs to the pass, and at its far end we got our first view of the Raura mining operation (initially one of the large buildings looked like a National Park lodge perched over the lake…maybe someday it will be converted!) Once we reached the first entrance to the mine, the road surface improved considerably; for the rest of the day we encountered few loose sections. We still needed to do a lot of walking though, especially when the 6% grades combined with the 15,000 ft. rarefied air to make riding more exhausting than 10% grades on sea-level pavement would be.

It’s counterintuitive, but logical, to find some of the most-developed infrastructure and technology in Peru around this remote mountaintop location. It wasn’t just the well-maintained road surface; there was also some semblance of “guard rails”, and fences, and even semaphore traffic lights to manage one-way sections of the road. Many of the buildings used modern construction materials and methods, and of course there was more mechanized equipment than anywhere else we’d seen in Peru. It all makes sense, the mines are where the money is (silver, zinc, and lead are among the elements mined here), so they support substantial investments. It’s just quite a contrast from the guys riding horses up the road.

The mining company drivers, whether in their ubiquitous Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, or giant dump trucks, are universally safe and respectful. But Rett nearly got run off the road by a civilian driver on the way up to the mine (to pick people up at the end of their shift?) Traffic got a lot heavier once we reached the high point (and the main mine entrance), because the city of Oyon on the other side is much more of a population- and mining-support-center than anywhere on the north side of the pass.

We had a massive 4000-foot descent ahead of us, where the first phase was a steep set of switchbacks to drop us quickly down to the flat valley visible far below. Each hairpin was filled with a powdery sand, which I’m sure is the best way to manage the forces applied to those corners by all the trucks, but it makes for some treacherous riding on a bike, and combined with the heavy braking necessary on the straighter sections, Rett was not having much fun.

At one point Rett called out “truck and moto up!” The truck went by, but I thought it was strange how long it was taking for the motorcycle to get to us. It turns out it’s because the cycle didn’t have a motor, its engine was a fellow human pedaling up the mountain! It turned out to be a couple of German guys, the first on-the-road bike tourers we’ve encountered in Peru, after several near-misses. We had a good chat for 10 minutes, especially useful since we were going in opposite directions. They recommended the hotel I’d already been shooting for in Oyon, saying there had been 9 bike tourers there during their stay(!), including a couple of Brazilians who weren’t far behind them on the way up the mountain (we didn’t stop to chat with them, now being pressed for time.

After a relatively-comfortable traverse along the valley floor, the road took the next sharp turn downward, this time without the benefit of switchbacks. Water trucks were wetting down the gravel in places, and the surface had the congealed, rock-hard quality that seems to develop from regular watering, but also with longitudinal bumps carved by the draining of the water. For most of the descent there was a narrow non-bumpy strip near the edge (usually the left edge), so we were still able to keep up good speed, but it took a lot of concentration.

Halfway through our descent, it had become pleasantly warm following the chill at the top of the pass (and really warmer than anything we’d felt over the last couple days), but then suddenly a cold wind began ripping up the valley and it chilled us right back down.

While the climb and descent had been another absolutely stunning day in the Peruvian mountains (and perhaps the most unexpectedly-stunning day), it had also been exhausting, and when I mentioned to Rett that there was a report of a hotel in the town of Quichas, 7 miles short of our destination of Oyon, her mind and body grabbed onto that lifeboat.

The problem is, for most places we stop at, we’re heavily leveraging the knowledge shared by travelers who have gone before us. But it seems almost no one has stopped in Quichas. The initial “review” of the hotel on iOverlander only stated that it was visible from the main road, but they hadn’t entered town to investigate any further. So that left only one actual review, which at least was quite positive (and from bike tourers). Neither Google nor iOverlander had mention of any stores or restaurants, but we could see by looking down on it from the main road that it seemed to be a reasonably large town (definitely bigger than the last two places we stopped), so surely we would be able to find whatever we needed. We turned in, taking some encouragement for the fact that now we could be the explorers, whose knowledge future travelers could leverage.

Hotel Quichas, while unusually built around a cavernous new community center, was in fact unusually modern. Since we were the only ones staying, check-in/management was a bit ad-hoc and confusing, and our room hadn’t exactly been cleaned, but it was outfitted with more cabinets than we’ve seen in all previous Peruvian hotels combined, a Samsung QHD TV (which we didn’t turn on), an area rug(!) on the cold tile floor, and a big bar of soap! The room was very cold, but the shower ran hot and hard, so it felt like we’d made the right choice.

Until we went out to find dinner. We first tried the “restaurant” in the hotel, but it seemed to be a very limited affair (drinks and sandwiches). After a bit of fruitless wandering, Rett remembered a place we’d passed at the entrance to town, so we walked back there. They clearly had a kitchen, but no place to sit and eat, so it was unclear what the situation was there, and it became even less clear when the friendly old woman began offering us some sort of fermenting plant in a jar. We bought some packaged snacks and warily backed out. It turns out there was actually one restaurant shown on Google Maps, so we walked back that way, but found nothing near the pin on the map. Not surprising, since Google Maps is often off/dead-wrong in Peru. By that point we resigned ourselves to a cold dinner assembled of bodega products, but first we needed to find another bodega.

While searching, I finally worked up the courage to ask some teenagers if there was a restaurant in town, but before I could do that, a guy driving by in an SUV stopped and said “buenas noches!”, so I asked him instead. “Si!”, he replied, and on his phone, brought up the Facebook page of the very restaurant on Google we had failed to find. “Where?!”, I asked, having no idea how I would understand any directions he gave. But instead, his passenger hopped out and directed us to follow him. Excellent! We walked up a passageway near our hotel that we hadn’t tried, but it was just a different route to the exact place shown on Google Maps. Huh? Our guide knocked on the completely-unmarked door of the building we had looked at previously, and after a short wait, it was opened by the SUV’s driver, also the owner of the restaurant!

In celebration of this coincidence, I decided to go with cuy (guinea pig) out of the few choices rattled off by our host (the name of the the restaurant is Tradiciones Quichasinas, so it seemed right to go with something traditional!) Rett chose the same, and when we invited our brief guide (Dario) to join us, that made it three guinea pigs! Quite the turnaround from our expectation of eating crackers and chips for dinner!