Southern Exposure

Saturday, February 7

We stirred in the middle of the night to the sound of heavy rain, but by the time we woke up, it had stopped raining, which pleased us greatly. We had planned on doing another excursion on the Cordillera Blanca to the pass of Punta Olympica, which has great vistas and dirt roads over 15,000 ft. The clouds in the morning were low and omnipresent, so combined with the sure to be muddy roads from the rain, we decided we’d pass on that ride and continue our journey south.

The ride down the valley, with the huge mountains looming to our left, was punctuated by frequent villages. In the larger pueblo of Huaraz, I had a tough time finding my way out of town as seemingly every road south was under construction or a dead end. It’s very common, even in small towns, for the highway that goes through town to be a different road on one end of town than the other. Signs are non existent, the Spanish must have destroyed them all because they had native names. It’s often tricky to find the road leading out of town even though you’d think it would be the same road you came in on.

Once we were past Huaraz, the road climbed out of the valley onto a high plain dotted with rolling hills. We were at over 13,000 ft and vegetation was sparse, which left stunning, wide open vistas. The only thing giving the area any sense of scale were the jagged, snow capped peaks across the plains to our left. If we were at 13,500 ft with no snow, the snowy peaks must be well over 15,000 ft. Traffic was almost non existent, so it was a serene ride across the landscape.

All good things must come to an end, and as the highway began to descend, we found our familiar Peruvian companion of cloud banks awaiting us. Fortunately they didn’t last for too many miles, and we were soon below them. The road however, had deteriorated into crap. The suspension on the poor KLRs got a workout traversing an infinite maze of potholes. The majority of the surface area of the road was definitely a hole instead of pavement. It was tedious, slow work grinding down the mountain. I’m not sure a dirt road wouldn’t have been preferable.

After descending and descending even further past a large section of road construction, we were rewarded for our hard work. The road crew had done their job, and the last 20 miles to the Panamerican were super smooth, brand new asphalt. The gift of smooth tarmac was balanced by a return to the relatively boring Peruvian desert.

As we came to the intersection with the Panamerican, we saw a guy on a BMW 1200 sitting in the shade of a road sign. We stopped to chat with him. He was from Quito and had been down south for the inaugural South American version of the Dakar. He had high praise for the event and I was a little bummed there had been no way to fit it into our schedule. He was waiting for a friend before heading into the mountains we had just left. We’d seen his friend on a KTM 20 minutes previous. I guess the friend was impatient.

The next 175 miles was relatively straight line cruising the Peruvian coastal desert. It’s a strange juxtaposition of scenery to see barren mountains and sand dunes bordering the Pacific Ocean. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. The only interesting point I remember is that we passed the crashed bus we had seen a few days previously being towed back to Lima. Strange coincidence of timing to see it twice.

We reached Lima late in the day, and after spending so much time in Quito, we decided we were going to bypass the city and keep going south. Riding around in large cities hasn’t been much fin, and with a population of 9 million people, we weren’t enthused about more city time. The traffic riding through was slow at first, but picked up and we were through sooner than expected. I don’t think we saw downtown Lima proper as I don’t recall seeing many tall buildings.

Night fell as we reached a beach on the southern outskirts of the Lima suburbs called Playa Hermosa. It was Saturday night, so it was lively. Every hotel except one had a built in discoteca, so we chose that one in hopes of getting some sleep. Naturally it had a discoteca/sushi bar next door to compensate. We ate an overpriced dinner and went back to our overpriced hotel, which at least had secure parking. The music went till dawn but with earplugs we slept through it. We never even saw the beach of Playa Hermosa.