43.0 mi / 8.5 mph / 2585 ft. climbing
Home: Hotel Santa Eugenia

Our week off the bikes meant we were ready for a more-challenging ride that our downhill entry to Huancayo, but we would need good fuel for the long day, so as a final bit of cultural comfort food (literally!) in this big city, Rett crafted an exquisite French Toast breakfast for us. In Mexico, “pan frances” had been fairly common on menus, but the closest thing we’ve seen here in Peru are the “panqueques” that Rett got in Chavin. This, despite the key ingredients all being quite common here; maybe it’s simply because “bread” here is almost exclusively formed in single-serve buns, rather than sliced loafs?

The ground-level garage had been the perfect setup for us and the bikes, and true to Peruvian architecture, there was no door separating it from the rest of the space: simply walk down the stairs descending from the living room, and you’re in the garage! That made loading up easy, and pushing out the big door even easier.

We had some seven miles of urban riding to do before we reached the edge of Huancayo, and overall I was quite pleased with the route I mapped out (helped by Strava cycling heat maps; Huancayo is big/wealthy enough that the compiled data is significantly more-useful than many other places in Peru). It certainly wasn’t “relaxing”, but overall we were on calmer roads than the crowded and chaotic main highway we rode into town.

Despite Huancayo having at least four US-style super/hyper-markets, it doesn’t seem like the have (yet?) had much of an effect on changing the traditional way that Peruvians shop (combining trips to a central open-air market with stops at small corner bodegas). Because the crazy “three bodegas per block” density common to all Peruvian towns continues to exist here, and given the size of Huancayo, the city must literally have thousands of such bodegas.

We actually passed through some “suburbs”, which we haven’t really encountered in Peru until now. I’m not saying we suddenly reached lands of single-family homes with manicured green lawns; the density and building styles remained the same (and continuous with the central city), but we reached plazas with different town names that worked as new focal points for the farther-flung parts of the metro area.

After 9 miles of mild descent, we began a climb that would take us up 2200 feet over the next 11 miles. That works out to a 3.8% average grade, and with a paved road that largely stuck to that average, it was a relatively-gentle reintroduction to the world of climbing. I had taken a gamble by not dressing with tights under my shorts (for the first time in weeks), and not only was it plenty warm for that when we stepped out of the AirBNB, but by the time we began the climb, I added bare arms to my bare legs. Two rides ago I was wearing my down jacket for most of the day! And it’s 90% elevation/location that’s responsible for the temperature difference; there tends to be very little day-to-day variation here.

Past the top, and near a rural cemetery, we saw a crowd of 30 or 40 people sitting on a hillside next to the highway. And then noticed a big flower arrangement on an easel standing in the the highway. And then noticed, in front of the flowers, nearly in the middle of the road, a white casket, smaller than adult-sized. Is this how they do funerals here? As we continued down, it looked like villagers were still walking up to pay their respects, including the two guys carrying the plastic crate of beer bottles between them.

While the climb wasn’t super-challenging, it still took a lot of time, and it wasn’t filled with “Peru”-level views that we’d become accustomed to. But 1,300 ft. into a descent that was even bigger than the climb, we encountered the greatest set of switchbacks we’ve ever rolled down. Rather than simply zigzagging down the slope of a single mountain face, as most do, these wound around a whole amphitheater of complex curves, seemingly vaulting from one mountain to the next as the road hopscotched its way down to the Mantaro River. From one hairpin we would see a distant road on the opposite side of a valley, and think “there’s no way that’s our road”, but then minutes later, it would be us on that no-longer-distant road. Ok, maybe the switchbacks that brought us down from Punto Olimpica were better, but there the ascent gave us some clue as to what was coming, while here, the dry linear ascent had set our a low bar for our expectations that was then cleared with a mountain’s-worth of space.

At the bottom lies the Mantaro River, the very same river that we had followed for four days into Huancayo. But between Huancayo and here, there is apparently no room in the river gorge for the road (though the railroad continues to stick with the river), so instead we needed to climb 2200 feet and descend 3000, a lot more work that it would have been to just hop in a kayak to reach the same point (though the river is raging with quite a high flow here, so it would have made for a pretty wild kayak ride!)

We crossed a modern vehicle bridge to enter the small town of Izcuchaca, and in another block, were in its enclosed, Euro-style town square. Our chosen hotel could be reached only on foot, by following the train tracks out from the square for a block. While this sounded romantic to me, Rett was just looking to get the long day over with as quickly as possible. For the second time in a week, the innkeeper wanted to show us two rooms at two prices, but Rett was happy to just take the S/60 room on the first floor, where it would be easy to get our bags into the room. But I’d read enough about the hotel that I was at least curious to check out the S/80 room on the fourth floor. Rett reluctantly trudged up to look at it too, and as soon as the innkeeper opened the door, Rett immediately decided that lugging our bags all the way up would be worth it, even before the innkeeper opened the door to the balcony and arranged a couple of chairs out there for us.

The upgraded-room (and the town) had given Rett an idea, too…