Cusco to Tarapoto by bike, part 1

Cusco to Tarapoto by bike PART 1: a boy’s own adventure up the Eastern flanks of the Andes

Apparently “Rainbow Mountain Cusco Peru” is the most Google-searched phrase for Peru?

(My marketing manager told me to put as many SEO-friendly words into this blog as possible, see if you can spot any more from now on!)

I wonder if anyone has ever Google-searched any of the following? Kiteni, Pichari, San Martin de Pangoa, Satipo, Oxapampa, Pozuzo, Sungaro, Tingo Maria, Tocache or Tarapoto?  All places in Peru too!

So to the blog…

Day 1 – 6 Over the Andes and out of the tourist bubble we call home

A few years ago, my good friend, Hugo Mariscal and I “bike-packed” 500 km from Cusco to Puerto Maldonado in 4 days, staying in dodgy hostels along the way, thoroughly enjoying ourselves and vowed to do it again but “something longer”.

Then along came Covid and then the 2022-3 protests in Peru, and several years of hard-grind recovery was needed as our tourist industry started from zero again.

So we rather forgot all about it until May this year, when on an early morning bike ride, Hugo mused about cycling to see his brother in Quito and I said “I’m in”, thinking it would be in a few years’ time which might coincide with about time for me to retire.

A few days later, he suggested a 3-week trip departing the 28th of July, which happens to be the Peruvian Independence Day and absolute peak tourist season here. It could not have been more inconvenient if he’d tried! And there were 101 reasons to “just say no” but I said “If not now, when?” and signed up on the dot, genuinely expecting one of us to drop out at some stage.

I’ve recently been diagnosed with a dodgy thyroid which is a bit like having a ticking time bomb attached to your body. At some time, it will “go off” and whilst it will eventually be controlled by pills, the waiting part is not much fun.

My doctor had suggested I avoid too much stress and partook in some “light” exercise which I took as a sign to avoid the aforementioned “peak tourist season” and by ignoring the word “light”, this trip suddenly seemed to be at the perfect timing indeed.

We both agreed Quito was a bit too far and settled, for no real reason at all, on the northern Peruvian jungle town of Tarapoto, roughly 1,882km away and in theory “doable” in 3 weeks.

If you Google-map Cusco to Tarapoto, 3 routes come up:

1: Down to the coast, up the Pan American highway, through the desert and then back over the Andes.

2: Up and down and right along the spine of the Andes.

or

3: the route no one has heard of –  over the Andes into the Amazon and along the Eastern flanks of the Andes through all those towns I previously mentioned.

Did Route 3 really exist? We were about to find out!

I was also attracted to this route, as if you work in tourism, you are never ever quite “on holiday”, as you are always checking out a hotel, a transport provider, an excursion etc. for “commercial viability” and this route was the definition of “non-commercial”. On Day 3, we were scheduled to head straight into the heart of the VRAEM, a region all foreign offices advise against “all but essential travel to” and, if I actually had any, would have invalidated my travel insurance on the spot.

The names above were places on the map of Peru I had dreamed of visiting ever since I arrived here in 1989, but usually, they came with a large red ring around as “totally off bounds” to travellers. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were the hotbeds of the Shining Path terrorist movement and then later on and, in theory, to the present day, as centres for the Peruvian drug trade.

 A sad fact we are not particularly proud of is, that Peru now actually produces more cocaine than Colombia but they’ve not made a Netflix film about us yet, so no one knows that.

And so on the 29th of July, only 1 day late (hey it’s Peruvian time we work on here!)  and with some trepidation, we set off, 2 mates on their bikes, a change of clothes, a GPS, and a few spare parts attached.

Day 1: 29th July leaving  the Amazonas Explorer office for an “Adventure of a lifetime”

 

 

A quick photo stop at the Plaza de Armas in Cusco en route to Ollantaytambo

Funnily enough, the route we started on coincided with a route I had cycled back in 1990 to Ollantaytambo and up over the Abra Malaga to Quillabamba and onto Kiteni, which in those days was the end of the road.

Back in those days, we literally did not have a clue where we were going, we’d catch a truck to the top of the pass, and then enjoy the downhills, no helmets or fancy stuff like suspension or disc brakes. We literally made it up as we went along.

Back then, before we worked in tourism, to give ourselves some “credibility”, we created a fictitious company called “F$%kwitt Tours”, from a character in the adult comic “Viz”. We were specialist designers of “totally doomed adventures” and our slogan was taken from a friend who’d travelled with us the year before – “I will never travel with this company again” which seemed suitably fitting.

And so, in 2024, F$%witt Tours was riding again, and this was definitely going to be a “doomed adventure” if ever there was one.

As a species, man clearly hasn’t evolved much recently, as this time, 35 years on, we were going to ride the uphills too. Why, you may ask?

Carol, my lifetime adventure partner and mother of our 3 children, clearly has evolved significantly, as she joined us for the first two days on her “state-of-the-art” E-bike, an electric assist full suspension bike and duly ran rings around us, before heading home in a taxi. Will us boys ever learn?

So, 2 days into the trip and I’m sitting, staring up at a 43 km uphill from 2800m to 4350m, and really having doubts my body will make it. Would my thyroid give up and I’d collapse in a ditch? Would my legs give out ½ way up?

½ way up Abra Malaga and still climbing.

But no, as the Kms ticked away, aided and abetted with the odd coca tea stop, before I knew it (well actually some 4 ½ hours later) we were there, at Abra Malaga, sipping the best hot chocolate ever and toasting my frozen feet (another joy of an overactive thyroid) by a wood fire.

.

The Best Hot chocolate in Peru – 4350m at Abra Malaga

We wrapped up warm and set off for a 75km “downhill of a lifetime” dropping Carol off in Huyro to catch a taxi home, and we cruised into Quillabamba, late in the afternoon, and ate the biggest pizza of our lives ever. We are now over the Andes and heading into the middle of nowhere.

My front gear shifter gave up the ghost on Day 3, so we stopped at the only bike shop in town which was closed and I was about to say, “sod, let’s just go” when the smiley face of Octavio appeared and after wrestling with it for a few minutes, went into his shop and appeared with the exact spare part I needed and it was fitted and sorted and we were on our way.  Call it “luck” or whatever you like, but down here, we call it “magical realism” where things just happen just like this and that’s how “normality” works.

I don’t know if it’s just Peru, but every time I go through Lima airport, I bump into someone I know. That has never ever happened at Heathrow, Amsterdam or Madrid. So, in similar style, the next day, we bump into “Beto”, our Cusco-based early morning bike partner in the same hotel, and then a few KMs down the road, one of Hugo’s school friends appears, offering bottles of ice cold water and later on, we are joined by Vicky, a local cyclist who accompanies us for the whole day, sharing mandarins and bananas and local stories. More “magical realism” at play?!

We don’t make our planned destination today, but are kindly found beds in a local native Indian community called Koribeni, where a lovely lady agrees to cook us some food in her grass-roofed hut. It’s wild down here but so good!

 Breakfast courtesy of the Koribeni Indigenous community

We are truly on our way now. We stop to clean our chains with help from a friendly car mechanic and begin the next of our epic climbs, out of the Urubamba watershed and into the Apurimac and the notorious VRAEM.

I learn a lesson today, always go for the 1st hotel you can find, as in Kepashiato, we roam round and round the rather steep town till returning to the 1st place and a rather grumpy receptionist who begrudgingly gives us a room and, with my tourism work head back on, I vow to give him a 1-star review on Google, if we ever get reception again!

This evening, Hugo introduces me to “Cremoladas”, a drink of iced fruit juice with a dash (or quite a lot I’m guessing), of sweetened milk and probably a tablespoon of sugar for good measure in each glass. They are “SO GOOD!” so surely must be seriously bad for me.  But, if you’re burning through 5 – 6000 calories a day largely on chicken, fried bananas, yucca and rice, surely a Cremolada a day is OK?

The second big climb is a statistically insane 64km up to 2230m through gorgeous cloud forest and past native indigenous huts, where we are met with blank, incomprehensible but largely smiley faces staring out at us. A truck driver shouts out his window “Oye Gringo” which is slightly offensive, but I laugh as I am almost certainly the only white face he’ll see this week, month or even year. There are NO tourists here at all, and I’m loving it!

Early morning cloud lifts off the Urubamba on the road up to the Apurimac

A giant “Paco” fish on the way up to Cielo Punko. A possible tourist attraction?

We enter the notorious VRAEM region, dire warnings of lawless drug barons and rogue terrorist operatives ringing in my head from my friend, Barry Walker, the British consul in Cusco, and dreading the “I told you so” lecture I’d be getting if I got into trouble. I’m genuinely nervous but 100% committed now.

Entering VRAEM  where “only essential travel” is recommended by all foreign offices

Travelling by bike, at 15 km an hour, instead of in an air-conditioned car or bus, you are instantly accessible and comprehensible and we encounter nothing but friendly and curious locals, farmers, shopkeepers, restaurant owners, road-side mechanics and drinks sellers. Conversations flow over iced coconut water straight from the nut and they can’t believe where we’ve come from or where we are going.

Today, we even cycle an extra 17km to get to a hotel with a swimming pool but then realise neither of us has packed swimming gear, so settle for ice-cold beers instead. Not so nervous now eh?

The next day, rain stops play as the road disintegrates into deep mud and we make a measly few KM’s to Pichari, when Hugo’s brakes give out totally but the only bike shop in town comes to our rescue. My biking gloves have worn through the leather palm so I buy their whole stock – both pairs, which serve me admirably for the rest of the trip. In true style, we bump into a friend of Hugo’s on the street. Does this guy know everyone in Peru?!

Rain stops play en route to Pichari – our tyres can’t grip anything so we give up.

The local bike shop in Pichari (with natural bike cleaning facilities) saved our day again

To be continued……