55.9 mi / 12.2 mph / 2191 ft. climbing
Home: Carlos’s AirBNB

Our descent into Tarata a couple days ago had started at an utterly-barren pass at nearly 16,000 ft., and the landscape remained dry and arid the whole way down, until we hit a section of green irrigated terraces that started just a few miles above Tarata. I had assumed that this anomalous patch was the result of some 100-year-old water-rights claim that a bit of political corruption had granted to just this one spot in the desert, and with just one final wall of mountains to climb over before exiting the Andes and descending to the true coastal desert, I figured the previous (higher) walls would have already wrung out every last drop of water in the air passing over them.

So it was a delightful surprise to discover on our exit from Tarata that, no, there is one more valley hidden in these mountains that somehow gets enough natural (non-irrigated) water to support hillsides full of trees! Rett and I were laughing in amazement at Peru, giving us stunningly-beautiful (and unique!) landscapes right up to our final ride fully within this incredible country.

The climb, starting from the “low” oxygen-rich elevation of 9800 ft., was easy enough, though the last mile tipped up to an average grade of 6%, with sections at 8%. Eventually we climbed high enough again that the trees disappeared and the green turned to grays and browns, but up until a mile or so from the top, there was a steady stream of good clear water running down the roadside channels, and in places even weeping down the cliff faces which had been created when the road was cut into the mountainside. I don’t think we’ve seen so much free-running water (outside of a river) since before Cusco!

The unexpected craft brewer whose beer we’d bought in Tarata proved his localness by naming his brewery “Apacheta”, after the viewpoint at the top of the 11,500 ft. pass here. The label on the bottle even includes a photo of the little yellow chapel at the viewpoint. But while that proves the brand is local, it says nothing about its freshness. Because the little yellow chapel is no longer there, replaced by a white building that forms the core of the fanciest viewpoint complex we’ve seen in all of Peru! It includes a parking lot, lights, and even a modern bathroom building! With a water tank on top! (Of course the doors to it were locked, which seems “normal” for public toilets in Peru). I have no idea why someone invested all this money to upgrade this viewpoint along a highway where one car passes every five minutes, but it was a nice place for us to enjoy our last, highest view of Peru.

Apacheta was the divide between two worlds, with the Andes that we have erroneously identified as “Peru” on one side, and the coastal desert on the other. The latter is also “Peru”, but it might as well be an entirely different planet, both because of the contrast with what we have come to know, and because it literally made us think more of alien planets (Tattooine, Arrakis) than Planet Earth.

It also brought us to the most-epic descent we will likely ever do, a downhill 41 miles long, dropping us nearly 10,000 feet. We climbed well over 100,000 feet during our time in Peru, but our initial lift from sea-level to 10,000 feet came via an airplane to Huaraz, so much of this descent would be “unearned” by our legs and lungs, the result of finally trading in what we bought with that flight 5+ months ago. But we were still glad to take it!

Tacna might as well have been another planet too, because it is so different visually, and culturally, than any other city we’ve been in in Peru. Rett kept saying that it felt like Los Angeles, and certainly the lines of palm trees and “oasis in the desert” feel had a lot to do with that, but we also saw more stylish people than we’ve seen anywhere else. In other Peruvian cities, when we saw someone whose style stood out substantially from the traditional baseline, it often felt like they had visited New York City once, and were mimicking someone they saw there. But in Tacna, the style-culture felt homegrown and organic, a place where there is enough wealth and surplus for the city to develop its own idea of “cool”.

We spent four nights in the city, preparing for our crossing into Chile, and recovering from our remote and final crossing of the Andes. It had been a risk to leave Lake Titicaca and cut a path across Peru relatively-unknown to cyclists, and in some ways it was even more-challenging than I’d expected. But it was also more-rewarding than I expected, and was one of the highlights of our highlight-filled travel through Peru. There probably aren’t a lot of people who want to head to the coast at the border with Chile (because continuing south for 1000 miles across the Atacama desert is the main option from there), but for those who do, I fully endorse our route as the way to do it, especially if they eventually get that road to Mazocruz paved!