This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 142
For most, the Peru Great Divide is nothing more than a series of obscure mining paths, many of them in disuse, connecting sporadic settlements. But for adventure cyclists, it is Mecca – a thrilling expedition that cuts through the earth’s longest mountain range where snow-capped peaks, endless high-altitude plateaus, and plunging valleys reveal dramatic landscapes of raw beauty.
It is also a challenge. Riding here wears you down. Many cyclists get sick. I’ve met people who planned to cycle the entire continent, but cut their trip short on or right after the Great Divide. My partner and I set out to ride our variation with something else in mind, too. The ruins of pre-Hispanic civilisations scattered throughout the Peruvian Andes.
“That’s Peru for you,” Peruvian archaeologist Luis Condori tells me. “You lift a stone, and right beneath it – there lie archaeological remains.” Many date back to the Inca empire and the civilisations that predated them, each gone now – behemoths buried in an unforgiving mountain cemetery.
By the time I begin this trip, my partner Douwe and I have spent six months cycling through the mountains and jungles of Colombia, Ecuador, and northern Peru. I know what I am getting into. And I don’t.
Crossing the Peruvian Andes by bicycle, dates and days of the week lose their significance. Away from the rest of society, the scaffolding these markers give our life falls away. Instead, each waking moment is ruled by the hours of sunlight left. Who cares if it is Tuesday or Friday? What matters is whether you can make it past the mountain pass and down to a reasonable camping altitude before the sun slides behind the neighbouring peak and the temperature plummets to freezing.
Setting Off
We begin in Huaraz, a high altitude city where adrenaline junkies – mountaineers, climbers, trekkers, and cyclists – gather in search of the edge of the world. Coffee is strong, food portions are big, and exotic top-of-the line outdoor gear is on display.
The city’s traditional market spills onto the streets, filling them with colour. Freshly slaughtered chickens and pig heads are sold side-by-side with alpaca wool sweaters and indigenous handicrafts. I spend hours under its hangar-type roof, wandering through a maze of narrow hallways, bartering the price of dehydrated fruits, powdered potatoes, desiccated shrimp, and dried whey protein cubes – all things lightweight and calorie-full.
The night before we leave, I carefully measure these out into pre-planned meals with which to fill our panniers. The effect is intoxicating: we have supplies, we have a route, we have a plan.
The Recuay
In the outskirts of Huaraz, up towards the snow-capped peaks that surround the city lie the ruins of Huilcahuayín, ‘the sacred house’, that the Recuay civilisation first built for their dead, centuries ago.
The Recuay were fierce warriors who thrived between 200BC and 700AD. They were the first to build fortified towns in what is now Peru and, in their clashes with neighbouring civilisations, some archeologists believe Recuay warriors collected their enemies’ heads as trophies.
Yet their most lasting contribution to Peruvian culture was not the design of their weapons or citadels, but their burial sites. Much like the ancient Egyptians, the Recuay believed that death was not the end of existence, but a doorway into another life.
They interred their elite in elaborate multi-room structures, burying them with fine ceramics, metal ornaments, food, expensive textiles and, occasionally, their life companions. Villagers and elites would gather in the Huilcahuayín for ritual feasts, bringing food, offerings, and chicha – a thick, slightly fermented maize beer – to toast the souls of the deceased.
Today, only a wall separates the archeological ruin from a modern-day cemetery. That’s not a coincidence, Nelson Yauri, a local who acts as the Ministry of Culture’s custodian for the site, tells me. The contemporary cemetery was built here “to unite the modern and the ancient cultures”.
Each year on November 1, Peruvian families gather in the modern cemetery to visit with the souls of their deceased loved ones. They bring flowers and traditional foods like hearty, savoury pumpkin mazamorra (porridge), and toast chicha in an echo of their Recuay ancestors.
The tradition may live on, but not the Recuay. As recently as two decades ago, archeologists attributed this place to the Wari, a later civilisation. In fact, the signs at the site still credit the ruins to the Wari. Yauri tells me that archeologists now know better, but there is no money to update the outdated signs.
KM 0
The ride out of Huaraz begins with a 30-kilometre paved downhill north, during which my mind keeps wandering back to the Recuay. Time has been uncompromising with these once-great warriors – their fortresses worn away to dust, their burial sites credited to someone else.
Then we turn off the main road into the mountains, and I forget the Recuay.
As we begin our trip in earnest, the paved descent becomes a graded-earth climb. During the wet season, this road would be awash with torrents of rain, slick with mud, and narrowed or even closed by rock slides. Now, during the dry season it resembles baked concrete – though it still winds tortuously upwards, kilometre after never-ending kilometre. The provisions in my panniers seem to actively drag me back downhill. Douwe fares even worse. One day into the trip and he is already sick. Our best-laid plans are crumbling.
The next morning, two truckers hauling a trailer loaded with a bulldozer catch us staring glassily into our morning coffee and offer us a ride up. We’ve been cycling South America’s rugged terrain long enough not to hesitate – such offers are too rare to overthink.
As the giant truck winds back and forth up the mountain, I contemplate the immensity of what’s ahead from the bulldozer’s cabin. The ride suddenly seems insurmountable. We take the final switchback and stop at a clearing where vans and motorcycles are parked and groups of tourists are taking photos at over 4,700 metres above sea level. This is Punta Olímpica, our first pass.
Our goodbyes with the truck drivers are brief, but warm. Then, the best part – the first real descent of the trip. In Colombia and Ecuador, routes through the mountains are often steep, rocky, and unmanageable. Climbing them is backbreaking work, but descending can be just as hard – you have to concentrate and screw up your courage to avoid leaning on the brakes.
But Peru is a different animal. The mining roads that criss-cross the Andes were built for heavy machinery and trucks weighed down with ore and, with my 2.4 inch tyres, I gradually gain speed on the gentle downhill, slowing naturally as the road evens out. I feel like I could glide down to Chavín de Huantar even without brake pads.
It’s moments like this that make you forget the daunting nature of the Great Divide.
The Chavín
Among Peru’s many pre-Hispanic civilisations, one of the least discussed and most fascinating is the Chavín.
At their peak, around 700 BC, the Chavín drew power not from a large military or economy, but from a cult built around their oldest monolith, the Lanzón: approximately 32 tons of granite, carved into a standing humanoid deity with fangs and claws of a jaguar (or possibly caiman), serpentine feet, and hands holding sceptres.
“Some people would call it an oracle. Some people would call it a god. Some people would call it a transformed priest. Some people would call it an idea,” John Rick, archeologist and retired Stanford professor who has dedicated over 30 years to studying the Chavín, tells me.
Chavín de Huantar is an active archeological site and we speak to Rick as he works, leading a group of archeologists digging up a new gallery – just one in the maze that surrounds the Lanzon.
“[Originally] it stood on top of a building... and then they built a room around it. Then the complex grew up around that room, and eventually the room became a sunken area with the Lanzón in its centre,” Rick explains. “From a modern perspective, there is no real logic to this massive construction.”
But for the Chavín, it all made sense. The complex temple allowed them to manipulate the senses of visiting regional elites. Ducts within the maze were a form of sensory engineering, allowing the Chavín to manipulate light and sound, Rick explains.
“Strombus trumpet played in the Lanzon chamber can be heard [outside] inexplicably clearly. They were playing around with sound... channelling it, making it appear where it shouldn't be,” he tells me. “This would have been a very uncomfortable experience.”
This discomfort had a purpose. Much like modern-day cults, the Chavín understood that disorienting outsiders made them vulnerable and more likely to buy into their dogma. Thanks to their cult, the Chavín became one of the Americas’ most influential cultures, lasting nearly 500 years longer than the Inca Empire.
Yet, few people know of the Chavín today. They’ve fallen into obscurity compared to the Incas and the Machu Picchu ruins they left behind. Where over 1.5 million people visit Machu Picchu every year, a mere fraction of that come to Chavín de Huantar.
KM 225
Of course, the Inca dominated these slopes more recently and it occurs to me as we cycle away from Chavín de Huantar that, in time, their legacy may also disappear.
Our first night out is idyllic. We cross a shallow river to an island of rock surrounded by waterfalls and trees, and fall asleep to the sound of cascading water. The next day, we climb out of the low altitudes and into heights above 4,000 metres that bring a different, peculiar kind of beauty.
“The mountains in Peru are severe. They look like giant molars, black in some places, breaking through green mossy gums,” one of my journal entries reads.
From here, our days are defined by a series of high mountain passes – 4,960 metres one day, 4,850 on another. Finding food becomes a challenge as the stretches without towns get longer. Some stand empty – their entire population out working the fields. The few stores are devoid of anything but the bare essentials.
All day, every day, the immense, dramatic majesty of the landscape surrounds us. It’s impressive, awe-inspiring. But over time, it becomes overwhelming and oppressive. It’s unforgiving. And by the time I claw my way to the top of yet another peak, I have no energy left to appreciate it. My body is begging for oxygen, and I rush to go downhill.
“On today’s climb, I couldn’t breathe and had to walk the last kilometre up. Then we raced down nearly 2,000 metres. Tomorrow we will have to do it all again,” I write in one journal entry. “What a slog. What a beautiful, privileged, slog.”
As we draw closer to the town of Laraos, the approximate halfway mark of the Great Divide, it becomes hard to imagine life as anything but a series of climbs and descents. I am Sisyphus on a bike.
The Incas
The largest, and without a doubt the most famous, empire in pre-Spanish America is that of the Incas. At its peak, around 1500 AD, the Incas ruled a territory stretching from modern-day Ecuador to Chile. Without the invention of wheels, steel, or writing, they constructed one of the greatest empires in human history.
More than any other pre-Hispanic civilisation, the Inca are still visible in Peru’s culture today from popular soda, Inca Cola, to cuy, the roasted guinea pig savoured at festivals and family feasts.
High in the Andes, some of the clearest reminders of this mighty empire are the agricultural terraces carved into the mountainsides. Thousands of these line the climb into Laraos – each a few metres deep, with steps connecting to higher and lower terraces a metre up or down. There are so many that even the government has lost count. Laraos has one of the biggest collections of these historic terraces and it is one of the few where farmers still cultivate them.
These ingenious subterraneous irrigation systems may have preceded the Incas and allowed their predecessors to cultivate food in otherwise arid landscapes. They worked so well in Laraos that, scholars believe, the Incas imported them to Cusco, their capital.
“I once went to Machu Picchu,” a local farmer named Carlos Rodriguez tells me, “but the terraces there don’t compare to what we have here.”
Around the time the Spanish landed in the Americas, the terraces fed over 10 million subjects of the Inca empire. The Spanish destroyed much of the Inca infrastructure, but 500 years later, farmers in Laraos still cultivate a part of their crop on the terraces. Yet, their time seems to be running out.
“When I was little, everyone worked on the land. We would grow corn to make chicha, but that is lost now,” Rodriguez tells me. The younger generation no longer wants to work in the fields, he explains. The Inca legacy, too, is being worn away. “It is still beautiful though,” Rodriguez adds, looking at the hundreds of terraces slowly being overtaken by nature.
KM 860
Cycling out of Laraos, the Great Divide becomes even more desolate.
Aside from a bit of wind, most of the time we ride through a total absence of sound. A stillness that, coupled with the bare, rocky landscape, gives me a strong suspicion that I’m no longer on earth. The only thing I hear is the sound of gravel crunching below my wheel and that of my own laboured breathing.
“Apart from Douwe, I haven’t seen a living thing in days,” I write in my journal “Nothing moves. Nothing changes.”
The lack of oxygen doesn’t help. Maybe, maybe there are mountaineers out there who can acclimatise to this altitude in a meaningful way but, in my experience, mere mortals like myself shouldn’t count on it. Feeling good has no permanence. Rather, it’s a temporary state that can change from hour to hour without rhyme or reason.
The climbs are never steep but just keep going: a never-ending winding road that repeats day after day. After a while, the sun burns the coiling path into my retinas so even when I close my eyes, I see its black outline. After a while, I begin to climb it in my dreams.
At the same time, something strange begins to happen. As I let go of the idea of cycling the Great Divide, the impossibility of it loses weight. It doesn’t disappear, exactly, but becomes irrelevant. It’s no longer about whether I can make the next 30 kilometres and 1500 metres climbing – that would drive me insane – it’s about whether I can make the next five, ten, fifteen minutes. The time until lunch. And that, I can do.
It’s a different way to think about persistence. Not a ‘grit your teeth and push through' approach, but one that forces you into a friendship with time and allows it to break down an insurmountable challenge into bite-sized pieces.
It's the inverse, I realise, of what I’ve seen happen to the civilisations that ruled these passes – or thought they did. Once unflinching titans, seemingly unshakable and permanent, they have been broken down by time. They are nothing but echoes now.
As we approach the colonial city of Huancavelica, I write: “I often feel ill. Not something concrete and curable, but a general tightness around the temples, a hard pit in my bloated stomach, difficulty eating and breathing. Is it altitude sickness, a stomach bug, my stressed out body betraying me?”
It turns out to be typhoid, which puts both Douwe and I flat on our backs for weeks and cuts our trip short. In the end, we cycle 1,000 kilometres – only two thirds of the traditional route.
It is not the clean black-and-white victory I’d imagined and I struggle to define what we’ve done. We have, after all, cycled the highest and ‘hardest’ part of the Great Divide – a route that itself has continuously changed since first being published by Neil and Harriet Pike.
In the end, I decide that rigidness does not serve me. I’ve learned that nothing is durable – not cycling achievements, not great civilisations, not even the Andes themselves. The journey, the experience, really does matter more than the legacy. And in that, there is freedom.
