19.9 mi / 6.0 mph / 2800 ft. climbing
Home: Bary’s AirBNB

It’s been three weeks since we’ve done a proper Andean mountain-climb (on our bikes; we’ve done some on foot!), but today was the day to see if we remembered how. It was time to climb out out of the Sacred Valley, and then (partially) back down to the Inca capital of Cusco. The city is also the tourist hub of modern Peru, and we’ll finally be entering it via the back door (I’d guess that we’re among the 0.1% of foreign tourists who visit Machu Picchu before passing through Cusco).

We crossed the river, and immediately began the mountain climb. Traffic was moderately heavy, which we knew would be the case from being able to observe the highway snaking up the mountain from the kitchen window of our AirBNB over the last few days. Probably 80% of it was tourist vans, shuttling customers between Cusco and Pisac (and/or other sites in the Sacred Valley). Not that I’m complaining, but it’s a mystery why there aren’t more buses on the route; from a transportation-efficiency perspective, it seem like it would make a lot more sense to replace every four vans with one bus, since they’re all running the same route. As Peruvian mountain roads go, it’s not especially steep or twisty, so it would be perfectly navigable by buses. But overall for us, it was probably safer to be passed by the dozens of more-maneuverable vans, rather than big wide buses.

After 1800 feet of climbing, the grade relaxed and we reached our mid-morning target of the Cochahuasi Animal Sanctuary. While Rett was interested in all the rescued animals, I was most interested in the Andean condors, and the chance to finally grasp the scale of these birds that we have been lucky to see wheeling in the mountain skies above us a couple times.

The Sanctuary is a relatively-informal place, and we seemed to be the first visitors to turn up for the day, so after handing over our 2x S/25 (~US$7.50) admission fees, one of the workers was found to take us on a guided tour. For some reason I wasn’t allowed to use my “professional” camera, but cell phones were fine? While the pumas weren’t visible, we saw quite a few Peruvian animals we would never see otherwise, since many come from the Amazon jungle regions that we won’t visit.

They have at least half-a-dozen condors, held within an enclosure large enough for them to briefly take flight, which was magnificent to see the couple times it happened. Our guide brought us into the enclosure, where the great birds remained static while we sat and watched, but then he brought us close to a second pen where a large male put on quite a wing-spreading performance for us, with his guttural noises indicating that he was clearly enjoying the mutual interaction.

We ate an early lunch at the sanctuary parking lot, and then continued climbing for another 1000 feet. Overall this route out of the Sacred Valley was much less-scenic than our entry route, and also contained no hint of Inca ruins (until we nearly reached Cusco), suggesting that this pass was seldom used until modern times.

We crested the pass, caught a glimpse of Cusco spreading out in the valley far below, and soon arrived at the Inca sites of Tambomachay and Puka Pukara. Relatively-small sites, they would have been amazing if they were the first Inca ruins we had seen, but at this point it’s good that admission was included in our already-paid-for Cusco Tourist Ticket, otherwise we probably would have felt ripped off. It also didn’t help that it started raining soon after we arrived at Tambomachay, and stopped only after we left Puka Pukara.

With rain gear on now to keep us warm as much as to keep us dry, we made our final descent into Cusco (getting glimpses of the much-more-impressive Saqsaywaman site on the way). I’d spent at least an hour analyzing maps trying to figure out the most-efficient way to get us to our AirBNB at the northwest edge of both the city and its historic area. Cusco is even hillier than the average Peruvian city, and many of the “roads” on the map are actually stairs. We briefly stopped at a point just 0.1 miles from our AirBNB, where I thought there might have been a possibility to descend a steep staircase or three and then ascend another one to reach our place, but on arrival nothing looked obvious and I felt that going on a scouting mission, and then manually lugging all of our bags and bikes down and up the stairs, would have taken more time and effort than just continuing on the road. Even though the stair-free route would also require us to go down and then back up, for an extra mile-and-a-half!

It turned out that we still needed to walk, because the downhill was too steep, and then the stone-paved streets were simply not very rideable. Touring bikes are frequently one of the best ways to carry loads through tight spaces (even if we’re forced to walk them), but on Cusco’s narrow historic streets, they were the worst. Some of the streets are completely car-free, and many more should be, because they are just wide enough for one car, and two two-foot-wide sidewalks. That meant the sidewalks were generally too narrow for us to walk our bikes along, so we were holding up cars as we heaved them slowly uphill. Pulling off to the side was essentially impossible, because the sidewalks were raised above the center channel, and Rett hurt herself multiple times when she attempted to do it anyway. It took us more than 40 minutes to complete the 1.5-mile loop, and it gave us a tiny taste of the challenges that people in wheelchairs must feel.

Despite the challenge, everything else about our unasked-for tour of the historic streets of the Inca capital convinced Rett immediately that she wanted to spend more than the week we’d initially allotted to Cusco. There certainly would be plenty to see, and simply absorbing the atmosphere of the city’s unique built-environment would count as an activity!