26.0 mi / 15.5 mph / 162 ft. climbing
Home: Michaela’s AirBNB

Our hunt for breakfast was at least as difficult as our hunt for dinner had been last night. While I love being back in rural, small-town Peru, Cusco and its surroundings certainly spoiled us with restaurants with predictable, published hours, and reasonably-familiar foods. The biggest obstacle this morning was Rett’s need for coffee; certainly there would be no pistachio lattes like in Cusco, but in Santa Rosa no one seemed to have any coffee at all. Finally in frustration she capitulated and sat down at a food cart in the street right in front of our hotel. While the woman and her teenage son running it didn’t have coffee either, they surprisingly had a written menu on a small whiteboard, which is more than many sit-down restaurants have! So that was a big help to us, except we recognized barely anything that was written! It seems the “standard” dishes have changed as we’ve moved south in Peru. We went with “costillas fritas”, which turned out to be a plate of rice, a grim-looking “salad” (now back out of Cusco, we wouldn’t have eaten the lettuce even if it looked perfect), and a good chunk of meat on a few pork ribs. It was actually pretty good, and while still a strange “breakfast” for Americans, it was certainly more breakfast-y than fried trout, or hen soup!

I had no problem getting the meal down, but my bowels were still quite-unsettled, so I took an anti-diarrhea pill to hopefully keep everything in for the day. My energy had certainly improved from the end of yesterday’s ride, but I was also glad that we had a short and easy day today.

Yesterday’s piercing blue skies had been replaced by a dark layer of clouds, and even before we left Santa Rosa we stopped to put our rain covers on all of our bags, in anticipation of getting wet. Once we emerged into the open valley, we could see several black patches of rain falling on nearby mountains, but luckily it seemed like our road was running us away from them. And boy, could we “run” on this road! After crossing the 14,000 ft. pass yesterday, we’ve truly entered the “altiplano”, and if we wanted to, we could spend the next three days speeding down a nearly-flat, slightly-downhill highway all the way to Lake Titicaca. We’ll diverge a bit from that simplicity tomorrow, but for today, we enjoyed the ease, and with the tailwind pushing out from the storm cells, cranked out not just our highest average speed in Peru, but the highest in four years of our nomdacy!

The “problem” with our speed is that we reached Ayaviri by 11:30am, well before the room in our AirBNB was cleaned and available. We hit a grocery store, got some half-assed lunch fixings since my stomach wasn’t feeling restaurant food (yogurt and crackers hit the spot though), and then found a bench on a nice pedestrianized street to kill some time. We’d been heading for the main plaza, but a big loud ceremony celebrating the anniversary of the province was happening there, so we were glad to find an alternate. We got friendly-greetings from passers-by, including a teenage girl and her boyfriend who passed by sneaking glances, and then summoned the courage to circle back and sweetly ask for a photo with us.

“The Chapel” is a special place looking out onto a vast circular marshy grassland, run by a Czech-Canadian expat (Michaela) and her Peruvian partner (Jaime). We were warmly welcomed (explicitly, with tea!), met family and animals, and got to enjoy a really nice conversation about being an expat in Peru (and especially in a relatively-small town like Ayaviri).

The ability to have a meaningful conversation with Michaela is a gift to us in this country where we speak the local language very poorly, but today we would be showered with even more riches when Roberta and Nicolo, the bike tourers we had met two mornings ago, turned up a couple hours after us. We had known they would be staying here (crazy coincidence #4!), but since we hadn’t run into them at all in Santa Rosa, wondered if climbing the pass yesterday had done them in (since they started in Cusco, it was their first big climb, on bought-in-Cusco bikes). It turns out they had decided to camp at the hot springs before the pass (as we had considered), and had a good (if loud) night before completing the longer-but-easier segment of the 2-day journey today. Honestly, stopping at Aguas Calientes is a much more balanced way to split the journey from Sicuani to Ayaviri, but given my stomach issues, I’m glad we pushed on when I could yesterday to a relatively-comfortable hotel and then had a nearly-zero-effort day today.

The four of us headed out to see a bit of the town together and find dinner. Seeing the town was good (we had several fun interactions with kids around the plaza), but for the dinner part, even being able to leverage the Italians’ far-better-than-our Spanish skills (they claimed it’s due to the similarity with their native language, but it must be more than that!), we still had difficulty. But that mostly seemed to be due to the ongoing anniversary celebrations in town: the place Michaela had recommended to them (which Rett and I had decided on earlier, coincidence #5!) had an audible party going on behind its tightly-closed doors (even the inebriated man in a nice suit had trouble getting anyone to let him in), and other places just seemed closed because there owners were off celebrating elsewhere. In this one evening, I feel like I saw as much public drunkenness as I’ve seen in the rest of Peru, though even with that, if “the worst” is an overly-friendly fully-outfitted cowboy, that means it’s still all just fun.

Although none of us were excited about it, we ended up at a polleria, with an unusually-helpful host who brought us an actual menu, explained what on it was available and what was not, and even broke down the total for us at the end. Coincidence #6, each couple shared a big Cusquena beer (though theirs was Trigo, ours was Negra), and then we also ended up mirroring orders of a fried and a grilled 1/4 chicken to be shared within our couples. I’d been feeling pretty decent after breakfast and lunch, but I definitely was now feeling the effects of stuffing too much chicken and fries into my upset stomach, even though I didn’t finish my half (Rett made sure a dog got more enjoyment out of the chicken than I did).