From countryside to city chaos

Although our campsite lay situated quite pretty, it lacked one pretty important thing: access to clean water. Therefore, after we all got up at 6:30 AM and had finished breakfast, I cycled 2 km uphill back to the village to ask for some water. In the meantime the men were packing up the tent and tending to our bikes.

My Spanish isn’t the best (or not ‘the yellow from the egg’ as Germans would say) so I was quite proud I managed to converse with the locals to explain my problem. I was less enthused when the woman answered I would have to cycle another 8 km uphill to the next village because they had a public tap for potable water. Cycling that long and far wasn’t an option so after I had kindly explained my situation she told me to follow her, so I obediently trotted behind her and the donkey she was leading. It turned out she brought me to her sister-in-law who had a tap and allowed me to fill my water there. Both women were incredibly kind, impressed by our travels and wished us all the best. One of them even gifted me two handmade little loaves for us on our way. For people who barely own anything I found this quite the gesture. Alas I had nothing to give her except for the picture together that she asked for.

With our water bottles stored, bags packed and bikes ready we headed off to the next town. One of the men from the previous evening had told us that there was a bakery in said town and that a little further back in the direction we had come from there were ruins from an Inca village. Their local Macchu Picchu, he called it. So we headed to town hoping to have a coffee (or tea in my case) and a pastry from the local bakery. We were sorely disappointed when we arrived at the village and found out that the man was wrong about the bakery. He had been right about the Inca village though, but because Göran and I were lazy and didn’t feel like cycling uphill again, we waited in the town square. We guarded dad’s luggage and wrote in our diaries while dad headed to the Inca village (which, as expected, turned out to be a very far cry from Macchu Picchu).

The remaining day we cycled and cycled until we reached Chupaca, a town close to the city of Huancayo. Huancayo has repeatedly been reported to us as not being safe for cyclists. Therefore we chose to stay in Chupaca although Huancayo would have had far better supermarkets to refill our stocks. Being in the loud and bustling streets of Chupaca was quite the contrast to the serenity of the countryside we had gotten used to the past few weeks. None of the other towns we had been to since Lima were as large as Chupaca. While it was nice to have the experience for a day, we were glad that we would continue cycling on the day after.

We arrived in Chupaca in the afternoon. After pizza for dinner (the second pizza in Peru and no sauce to be found on it yet again…) we searched for a hostel. Finding one that was acceptable and fit us and our bikes wasn’t that easy to find. After about an hour of cycling through town and looking at hostels, we ended up at one that was quite luxurious for our standards. We had a proper bedroom and a shower with hot water <3 I haven’t been able to properly wash my hair in such a long time. This felt amazing.
After all of us had showered we left to do groceries. Unfortunately the supermarket was so far away that by the time we were done we only had some watermelon for dinner and went to bed.

distance cycled: 45 km
Actual altitude: 3715 m
time cycled: 3 h min