52.1 mi / 7.7 mph / 2586 ft. climbing
Home: Hostal Mirella

The whole concept of yesterday’s unplanned off-day was that it would be more like half an off-day. Thankfully the dance-and-drinking party didn’t rope us in, and we were able to get to bed early enough that our 4:13am alarm didn’t feel quite as brutal as it sounds. It also helped that at this 9,500 ft. elevation (lower than 90% of our nights in Peru), it was 63°F inside our room, and 48°F outside, so shorts were again comfortable.

A big reason for our 6:30am start was simply so that we would have time to complete the very long route before it started getting dark, and there was also the hope of beating some of the traffic that had been a bit annoying on the ride into Izcuchaca, with the dreaded double-passers being the biggest concern. I initially thought the latter goal would be futile, since I’d been able to see from our hotel room the lights of big trucks continuing down the highway at all hours (maybe even heavier in the darkness!) But Izcuchaca turned out to be the point where the highway narrowed, losing its center stripe, which meant that drivers generally become much less-aggressive (since a truck coming around a blind curve could blow them off the road). And simultaneously, the traffic volume decreased significantly, with much of it presumably splitting off toward the bigger town of Huancavelica. We didn’t have a single truck overtake us for the first 8 miles, an hour into our ride.

The benefits of the early start that we hadn’t thought of were the pleasure of riding in the cool morning (because “avoiding the heat of the day” hasn’t been part of our mindset at all in Peru!), and the atmosphere created by the rising sun indirectly lighting the mountains and increasingly finding gaps through which it could shine a spotlight.

Six miles in, we crossed to the other side of the river and rejoined the railroad tracks at the village of Mariscal Caceres, a place even more blindsiding than Izcuchaca. How can a place this small, this remote, have some of the richest roadside placemaking we’ve seen anywhere in Peru? They even had a hospadaje (Rett had a middle-of-the-road chat with a woman doing the morning cleaning while I took photos), which made us wish we had stayed here…except that then we would have missed Izcuchaca. Argh, there are too many places in Peru worth stopping!

The narrow river gorge meant that we were on another of those “paved” roads that rockfalls and landslides have partially-succeeded in deconstructing. Sometimes the damage was limited to easily-avoidable shallow holes in the asphalt, but more frequently a rough cut dropped us into a section of gravel, sometimes 10 feet long, sometimes much longer. Even though there were probably more than 100 such discontinuities (each requiring a big slowdown), they somehow felt less-debilitating than the similarly-decaying road between Huari and Chavín de Huántar; maybe the gravel wasn’t as rough, or maybe lowering our tire pressure made it seem less-rough, or maybe just experience and expectation made it more mentally-manageable.

I don’t have a picture of the Tablachaca Dam because there was a sign saying photos aren’t allowed, and the guard at the dam’s employee entrance was carrying a machine gun (first time we’ve seen that in Peru). And while he didn’t shoot the dog that started harassing me, he did at least make an effort to get him to stop, which is more than a lot of people do.

After Quichuas and the dam, we started hitting some more-seriously degraded road, often with bits eroding straight down into the river. In the complete absence of guardrails, we often needed to come to a stop to let even oncoming vehicles pass, lest we get squeezed right off the cliff.

We soon learned that our fears were not overblown when we encountered an active-landslide section that was randomly sending small pebbles clinking down the gravel-coated hill looming above the road. The recently (re-re-re-)flattened road surface at the base of the slide was pretty rough, so we were walking the bikes across. I told Rett to walk as quickly as possible, and keep her eyes up in case something bigger broke loose. Which is exactly what happened!

High up, the clattering got louder and more-insistent, a cloud of dust grew, stones came raining out of it, and we fled, running with our bikes to get clear of the danger zone as quickly as possible. Once safe, I could look back and get some pictures; it settled again after maybe 30 seconds, and while it wouldn’t have killed us or rolled us off the cliff into the river if our timing had been even worse, it certainly would have hurt to get bashed by hundreds of rocks.

The area is clearly a long-term instability, but the fact that the road surface was basically “clear” when we started crossing, and then covered with 100+ lbs. of rocks afterward, suggests that even minor slides like this must be pretty rare. Especially since there was no road-grading equipment stationed nearby to do a daily clearing. On the other hand, wads of used toilet paper on the roadside extending from either end of the unstable area suggests that at least one lengthy traffic-stop has occurred here recently. Perhaps it was the vibrations of the three heavy trucks passing through 5-10 minutes before us that got the proverbial ball rolling?

The morning’s turnoff to Huancavelica had reminded me that we were closer to the famed Peru Great Divide bikepacking route than we had been since Oyon. And it reminded me of a quote that had helped me come to peace with skipping that challenging route, written by someone coming to peace with their choice to leave the route (paraphrased): “it’s just a route a couple people rode a while ago and happened to write about”. The point was that there are a million potential routes through the Peruvian Andes, and there is no reason to believe that the PGD is “better” than any of the alternatives, though there is definitely reason to believe that it requires more suffering.

So all through the morning I was grinning in satisfaction, thinking of the poor saps illogically committed to the PGD, when they could instead be riding through the spectacular Mantaro River gorge just a few mountain ranges over. Because it was hard to believe that the PGD riders could be seeing anything substantially more-impressive than we were, and they definitely would have been working harder for it.

But by the time we stopped for lunch at 11am, 29 miles in, the challenges began outweighing the beauty even on this route. Mostly it was the heat, which affected Rett much more than me (just finding a shady spot to eat took a long time), but it was also the knowledge that we still had more than 20 miles of hard work to do. I had further deflated our tires for the lengthy section of deteriorated road whose asphalt/gravel ratio was low enough that I agreed with OpenStreetMap’s designation of the stretch as “unpaved”. Once through those miles, the return of more-consistent asphalt correlated with OSM’s opinion, so while Rett stripped off her long black layers (trading bug-protection for cooling), I pumped the tires back up. Only to have the road immediately switch back to miles of low asphalt/gravel ratio (this time unmarked on OSM). Ugh. So after a bit I dropped the pressure once again, and stuck with that for the rest of the ride.

The rudest bit of the long day was the 600-foot climb at 40 miles, that took us far above the descending river. But at least it gave a dramatic perspective the red/purple water-eroded mountains, giving a bit of a Grand Canyon feel.

Rett was in her normal late-ride pessimism spiral, piling mental stress on top of physical stress, over how late we would be reaching our destination. I was trying to convince her that she should instead be incredibly proud of the plan she created (resting yesterday and getting a super-early start today), because, while it certainly didn’t make today’s ride “easy”, nothing could have done that, and any other approach (including anything I would have come up with) would have made it much harder.

We finally rolled into the town of La Esmeralda, and quickly saw several more hotels than I had been expecting from Google/iOverlander (whose reviews were pretty grim). Before we continued out to the far end of town where Timothy Tower stayed, we turned around and I asked at place right on the main crossroad. While it only had a cold shower, it was in a private bathroom, for S/40, and there were no reports of heated showers at any other places in town anyway (I sort of believe our host’s attitude that this is “normal” for La Esmeralda, because it’s warm enough here that a “cold” shower really isn’t too bad). So overall the new and clean room exceeded my expectations for La Esmeralda (it was even wired-up for a “suicide shower”, making me passively wonder if we could just buy a heated showerhead in town to finish the job!)

For Rett, a positively-ironic result of low-elevation heat here is that bodegas actually have refrigerators for their drinks, so she was happy to be able to get not just sparkling water, but cold sparkling water. I even bought an ice-cream bar for a pre-dinner snack. We walked kiddie-corner to a restaurant just setting up for dinner, and both ordered “aeropuerto”, a mix of fried rice, chow mein, chicken, and vegetables. Following our soup starter, the aeropuerto came out in giant mounds, and it was easily the best aeropuerto we’ve had in Peru.

Of course our hunger might have played a small role in that assessment. We knew that it was going to be a long ride before we’d even begun, and at the end, I’d known that our 6+ hour pedaling time was pretty rare for us. But it wasn’t until I looked up that stats that I realized, until now, we had only exceeded 6 hours three times in the last four years, with two of those happening here in Peru! (the third was in Wyoming). They were all in the range of 6h21m to 6h25m. Today was 6h46m, so we completely smashed our previous “record”. Whoops! No wonder it was so tiring!

Day 2

We pretty quickly made the decision that we’d need another day off before continuing, because the next stage of our itinerary, while easier than yesterday’s, was still far from easy. And the heat affecting Rett would be just as bad, or worse, so a repeat of yesterday’s super-early start was the strategy.

We got breakfast in the hotel’s first-floor restaurant, where we met a dump-truck driver who surprisingly spoke English (with the explanation that he had worked in India for a period), so we had a nice chat while he “interviewed” us (recording on his phone, I’m not sure for Instagram or something, or just for English practice). Otherwise we just did our standard four-store supply-acquisition (this time getting a small bottle of 96% alcohol to prime our stove, in addition to food).

And then it was a return to the same restaurant for a repeat of our excellent “aeropuerto” dinner, though this time, without nearly 7 hours of bike riding, it was much more work to get it all down. Rett didn’t even finish her plate, and I probably shouldn’t have completed the job for her, since it left me feeling bloated and overstuffed for the rest of the night…