Cusco to Tarapoto by bike PART 2

Cusco to Tarapoto by bike PART 2: a boy’s own adventure up the Eastern flanks of the Andes

-Haven’t read Part 1? Click Here!–

Day 7 – 11  Deeper into narco-terrorism central….

We start to get into a groove. Something like 5 am wake up in the pitch black and “enjoy” a cold shower, creep out of the hotel and pack the bikes and as dawn appears, around 6 am, ride for an hour in the cool morning air before finding a roadside breakfast shack and wolfing down an enormous plate of rice, fried bananas and a couple of fried eggs or a random bit of meat and chips, usually washed down by a dubious cup of warm brown liquid claiming to be coffee.

My plan to go plastic-free dissolves as the only cold drinks you can find around here are served in plastic bottles. To keep us hydrated, we settle on a combination of 3:1 Sporade (Peruvian Gatorade) and water which is just about palatable and not too sugar-infested, along with random but delicious locally made cebada (barley) or maracuyá (passion fruit) refrescos (squash) and the occasional fresh juices that get increasingly exotic as we travel further. My favourite quickly becomes “Camu-camu”, a jungle fruit that I still have no idea what it looks like but, boy does it taste good in fresh juice or, even better, a homemade ice lolly. We even get to try the local “Masato” – an emulsion-white chicha-like beer made from fermented yucca (and it’s surprisingly good!).

Stuck at roadworks for 40 minutes would normally drive me mad, but instead, we get to try “Masato” a local beer made from Yucca- and it’s actually quite good!

A few more hours of cycling and a set “menu” for lunch at a roadside shack, often chicken foot soup (yuck), more rice, bananas and if we are lucky, freshly caught Paco or Doncella, delicious but bony river fish.

I put my music on and head down as only “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” and we plough on in the scorching heat, past fields and fields of Cacao. The initial smell of chocolate wears a bit thin as it is actually more like “gone off” chocolate, and it gets quite nauseating. 

Around 4 pm, we roll into a random jungle town for the night. I’ve taken to asking the 1st taxi driver we see “Where’s the most expensive hotel in town?” and we head there and splash out on a room each, sometimes with a fan, sometimes with windows too. And rarely break S/100 ($25) a night and often way less than ½ that. It’s cheap down here.

Cake shops – we just can’t get enough calories down us but boy do we try!

At the reception, you are given the key, the TV control, some sort of towel, a minuscule bar of soap and a toilet roll. We accept that in several hotels we stay in, we were the only one’s actually “sleeping” the night and there certainly are some loud noises coming from nearby rooms but they serve what we need, a place to rest and get a shower and, as a bonus, we get no bedbugs on the whole trip.

Unpack, take a cold shower with my current biking clothes still on for a token wash and hang them up in the hope they might dry. My bungee cord becomes my favourite bit of kit as an emergency washing line, hung from the TV to the curtains, it works just fine. Find the plug and charge everything. GPS first, then earbuds, lights, power bank and phone. Amazingly (and a little depressingly) all but 1 of the hotels we stay in have some sort of WIFI or phone connection so we update our progress on Strava and Facebook, as apparently someone is interested in what we are doing.

Will my clothes ever dry?

6 pm, meet for dinner (yup you can probably guess what!), the compulsory walk around the plaza and then we go in search of cake and cremoladas like two sugar addicts craving more calories. Bed. With my alarm telling me I have a glorious 10 hours to go and boy do I need it, as, at just after midnight, the roosters start up and there is inevitably one, just above my room who feels it necessary to crow every few minutes. In between the dog barking and next door’s copulating couple, it makes for an interesting night’s sleep…

And repeat….

 I just love the simplicity, the routine, and even the monotony of daily life on the road. I have all I need, I have a place to sleep, food and drink aplenty, my bike works, my legs go up and down, the Kms on the daily GPS route go down, and the voice in my head starts to clear. It is the total antithesis of the crazy luxury tourism we offer and a proper reality check indeed. In Cusco, the Sacred Valley and at Machu Picchu we live in a bubble, with companies vying to show tourists the “real” Peru. I am in the “real” Peru right now, and it doesn’t look like the sanitised packaged version is on sale at all….

I can’t believe it’s not until Day 7 we actually leave the Cusco region and head straight into Junin. I send my friends a google pin announcing I am now officially in the middle of  “Bum F$@K Nowhere Peru” and I’m pretty close.

Charming family-run boutique hotel….  No toilet or shower, but it had wifi!!

It rains all night and we set off in thick mud and soon are struggling to even stay on our bikes, as under the mud is smooth round river pebbles so you can’t even stand up if you try. We manage a frustrating 27.5km in 4 brutal hours and whilst stopped for a drink, an empty 4×4 passes and offers us a lift and we guiltily accept and thankfully we did, as we would never have made it to the next town in the light. A friendly Venezuelan pressure washes our bikes for $1 and we find pizzas for the night. Life is good.

I’ve never loved tarmac so much and we progress well, meeting up with some super friendly local riders who invite us to a great coffee shop in Satipo which is up there on the FCO list of “do not go to” but the only signs of the “narcos” is a decommissioned light aircraft, prettying up a boring roundabout.

Meeting local riders Elvis and Rebecca from Satipo who show us the best coffee shop in town

The only “narco” evidence we can find in Satipo – A decommissioned light-aircraft brightening up the roundabout

The next big climb is a spectacular 1000m altitude gain over 64km to Oxapampa. I tell Hugo “I’m on fire” and then promptly get a puncture and lose the plot trying to fix it in the steaming heat. I fall off into a ditch whilst not concentrating and it’s just not my day today as I fall behind into a “dark place” but plod on as I have no option. The climb into the cloud forest is tough and energy sapping but then this “Lord of the Rings” like plateau appears and we roll into Oxapampa and we are soon supping most excellent craft beer and laughing about it all.

Lord of the Rings-like entrance into Oxapampa

Oxapampa is interesting. It was founded by Austrian-German colonists in the 1830’s and there are cuckoo clock Bavarian-style chalets and a wooden church and lovely wide boulevards. “It’s all so organised” Hugo comments. Welcome to Europe, I reply!

As expected from a Bavarian colony, the craft beer is most excellent

We are forced to have a day off here as the 4-hour laundry is actually 12 hours. Just as well, as I’m run down and I start getting eggy burps, the classic symptoms of giardia so, without consulting a doctor, I down a full course of Tinidazole in one go, and the next day I’m good to go. We also get Hugo’s gears sorted by a local mechanic who is clearly high as a kite on something, but seems a nice bloke!

Oxapampa Main Square –“It’s all so organised”!

Oxapampa Church – made of wood in a Bavarian style

Oxapampa: Waiting for the bike shop to open and our clothes to come back from the laundry

To be continued….

-Haven’t read Part 1? Click Here!–