Let’s get this out of the way: Former Peruvian Presidents and coup enthusiasts Alberto Fujimori and Pedro Castillo are being held in the same prison.
Fujimori the Elder, which is how I will refer to him in this post to distinguish him from his more currently relevant daughter Keiko, is a Japanese-Peruvian South American dictator archetype, responsible for some 300k forced sterilizations of native Peruvians during his time as leader of the country in the 90’s. In 1992, when the national congress wouldn’t follow his wishes, he rolled the tanks to the steps of the capitol, told them to get out, and installed his own loyalists, resulting in things like, well, forced sterilizations. He has been in and out of some combination of prison/exile/on trial for going on 25 years.
Pedro Castillo was a schoolteacher from a small town outside Cajamarca, and rode a career in educational labor unions to the highest office in the land by 2021, defeating Fujimori the Elder’s daughter Keiko by a fifth of a percentage point. His trademark straw hat, seen painted these days on the walls of pretty much every house in the countryside surrounding Cajamarca, is a mark of his grassroots connections to the community from which he emerged. Is did he aspire to govern as a leftist? Hard to say, he wasn’t in power long enough (consider replacing with ‘skilled enough as an autocrat’) to develop a substantive legacy, but he definitely supports wealth transfers to the rural poor, and the personal story would seem to fit that mould. He did have that following, and a powerful message. Straightforward slogans. Socially conservative, by all modern standards.
Keiko Fujimori on the other hand, has lost three straight presidential elections by a combined 2 percentage points, the final one to Castillo. I suppose after that record I may also find myself crying ‘fake news’ about election results, if that phrase didn’t carry such Trumpian connotations. But is she a right-winger? I mean, the playbook is similar, but as with everyone, she seems to be primarily in it for herself and the Fujimori legacy. Her party’s logo is a circle K, and she represents the institutional class.
So let’s be real, everyone’s at least somewhat marginally corrupt in this story. There were 15 other candidates in the most recent election, from sterile by-the-numbers economists to a famous goalkeeper, and most were in it for their own personal legacy, wealth, or business interests. Another President previously got impeached for getting paid to pardon Fujimori the Elder and get him out of prison. Castillo himself was chummy with Bolsonaro in Brazil and, despite being from the rural countryside, he’s no environmental crusader. One massive molybdenium mine, either as just a conceptual bargaining chip or fully operational, can transform a rural town. Nobody wants to be associated with the Marxist Shining Path rebel group, but it’s very often more complicated than that.
Congress is still full of Fujimori loyalists, by belief or by outright purchase, who can basically impeach the President at will. So despite Keiko’s pretty dismal record of attaining the big chair, her party wields an enormous amount of power over the whole system. All in all, Peru has had five presidents in six years. The latest to be impeached was the Cajamarqueñan schoolteacher Castillo, who after two impeachment votes and a third on the way, tried to pull a Fujimori the Elder and dissolve congress. He failed rather dramatically in December 2022 and found himself arrested in a matter of hours. Lima erupted in protests, people were killed and the airport was shuttered for a time.
Castillo, well, like I said, he ended up being thrown in the same prison as Alberto Fujimori. Must be an awkward dinner table.
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I returned to Peru a few weeks ago for a singlespeed bike trip. It became apparent as I made my way through this route, that bikes would be taking a secondary role in the eventual post, giving priority to reflecting on the bewildering political situation in Peru at this moment. I was in and around the the area surrounding Cajamarca, home of Pedro Castillo. Singlespeeding the Andes mountains was every bit the large challenge I personally wanted. But Cajamarca in this moment… watching their favorite son reach his highest high, defeating a hated Fujimori, and then getting thrown in prison. Better story, for sure. To have attained, and to have so suddenly lost. This is not a violent region, there are those in Peru, further in the south. Traditional, sure, exploited, also sure. But it’s complicated. There were very few jubilant greetings for me on this trip, a staple of bike touring pretty much anywhere the world round. No other tourists. Sunday morning services in the town square were more pointed. The news talked of more riots in Lima being planned over encrypted apps. Fresh mining protests over water rights. My last night in Cajamarca, a police brass band showed up in town. The performance was followed by all the kids in the audience being brought together to sing “La policia son nuestros amigos!”
Even these short paragraphs are a dramaic oversimplification of the situation. For a variety of reasons Peru is unlikely to elect (and maybe more importantly keep in power) a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, and more extreme party leaders are documented to have came together in around 2020 to promote Castillo as an acceptable alternative to their own perceived extremism. Or were they themselves afraid of getting dragged to prison by the Fujimori undertow? For that matter, why is Fujimorism still so popular in the first place?
It has been a wet year in Peru, and the streams were gushing. Culverts being built save high mountain roads from runoff, water tanks full. We are seeing the effects of a dramatic El Niño year across the planet, and the manifestation of this weather pattern in Peru was tons of rain last season. Clear skies for me, but it was clear just how much the rain had shaped the landscape and the growing season. Many terrace farms had sprinklers running, and the many full water tanks diminished my own need to carry large amounts of water. I was filtering, but even the smallest streams running across roads at the highest elevations were crystal clear. Only when I got down into the canyons, after that water had crossed at least three or four layers of society, was it cloudy or muddy.
That stratification of society, on elevation layers, and how the water flows through them, shaped this trip. I climbed a lot of elevation here, almost 50,000ft over two weeks, so I often got to see, in a day, the full picture of the use of one watershed. First, at the top, 14,000ft up, a mine, and a spring. The mine, sometimes an entire mountaintop removed, built after years of political dealmaking between political and industrial leaders (sometimes one and the same) upon the water source for thousands of small farms. Next up, an entire hillside, thousands of feet of elevation, of carefully terraced farms and livestock, making due with the water available to them. Then the next level, maybe a small town, shiny and newly-painted as a result of the payoff from the mining activities, also has to live with the runoff and heavy metals from the top. Finally, the canyon, and a rushing river with a road that washes out regularly from flash floods. All rely on a complex web of irrigation canals and pipes carrying one source of water down the hill. It was a big year for water, all tanks are full, but what about next year?
Bike travel brings you closer, and to more locations, than really any other mode of travel, that is what has always drawn me back. To bike trips and to intricate, complicated places. That level of intimacy with the setting is so cool, and exposes you to so much. There are no cheap miles, no eight hour naps while the world rushes by your window. If you can’t get over that hill today (or in the case if Peru maybe an 8% 10 mile pass topping out at 14k ft), you’ve gotta adjust, be flexible. You are always on someone else’s turf, always to some degree out of place. In the developing world in particular — and I terminate this sentence early to note that I use the phrase ‘developing world’ in a very literal way. Not to denigrate or diminish these places and label them as ‘lesser than developed countries’. It is that I am referring to regions which share a roughly common set of infrastructure and development related challenges which set them apart. Poorly defined property rights and building codes, rumbling diesel trucks, webs of tangled power lines. The difference being a massive Home Depot vs a a sprawling marketplace in which which many vendors sell specific things from doors and faucets to flooring from small stalls. In that ‘developing world’ in particular, you are right there in the thick of it, immersed in building activity, the ever present sounds and sights of a country being built. That imposes no ideological constraints on the setting, left or right, people need safe water to drink, a source of protein, and a secure place to sleep. I am a person who enjoys absorbing and soaking in new information, a data sponge, and I am addicted to the richness of that data stream that comes with that world. Everything, every day, at all moments, is new, all is fluid.
Singlespeed doubles that feeling. It makes the bike into a bit of a hinderance, but turns the whole adventure into a more meditative journey. Daily distances become shorter, tougher, walking becomes more common. But the bike is durable. No wimpy derailleur clicking, flat miles become the chore, not the climbs. This is my second singlespeed trip, and I’m pretty sure the next few will be this way as well. It just suits my mindset better, and draws the world tighter around me.
I left Cajamarca on the 23rd of June and returned on the 7th of July. The “Third Take of Lima” is being planned in disparate encrypted group messages for the 19th, but I’m not sure how much of that is the media playing on rumors. (It was past the 19th when I got around to posting this. Almost 30,000 people showed up to protest.) We shall see. Dina Boluarte, Castillo’s VP is the current president, and after going back on her word saying she would resign if Castillo were impeached, she wields a frosty 15% approval rating, second only to the National Congress’s… 6%. Nevertheless, she is where the current anger is directed.
From Cajamarca, there was a big pass to get over, and then a back way along a river to the next sizeable town of Huamachuco. Still getting my bearings at that point (the average elevation of this route was around 11-12,000ft), I was gasping pretty hard going up the first time for this trip at 13,000ft. It is after Huamachuco that things get interesting, scenery-wise, a slow ascent from 10,000 to over 14,000ft in the mountains. This road, the 115, is one of the prettiest I have been on, hilly, and all between 14 and 15,000ft.
The first encounter with a mountaintop mine is on 115, with a few others on roads adjacent to this one. There are three possible routes from the pass in El Condor (well, 4 but the fourth I did later on) down to Mollepata/Mollebamba. The first splits at a big four-way intersection and it is not advised. Armed guards block access unless you beg your way through. This is the road suggested by Bikepacking.com on their Cajamarca to Caraz route, but the route is old, and it is no longer recommended. The second option is Route 118, which has recently been abandoned due to landslides. Despite being on Google/Gaia, iOverlander has many comments from people who got stuck for days portaging over landslides. The third road is not on any mapping applications except for Google sattelite view. It is about 1 mile past the 118 turnoff, and you cannot miss it. It is a beautiful road, descending all the way from 14,000ft to 6,000ft over about 25 miles, going through Mollepata/bamba, and eventually Tablachaca.
Immediately after that descent, a big switchbacked climb to Pallasca, and a turn on the 101. The 101 may have been paved at one point, that point being when it appeared on Google streetview, but it is not any more. And what a road it is, it runs, cut into the cliffside, thousands of feet above the valley floor. Panoramic views, all the way to the delightful town of Conchucos, buried high up in a valley, far away from anything, next to a rushing river and… a future mine.
From Conchucos, to Pampas. From Pampas, back up to the mountain, and almost 15,000ft. A fantastic road, but it is far out there, and the towns to pass through gave me a bit of the willies. Aggressive dogs, some towns I didn’t want to spend much time in, but the top of the pass is wonderful, and very scenic.
From there, a grind back to Huamachuco, definitely the biggest town in the middle of the route, but still reflective of the mix of mining culture and people that dominate this area. You can feel a Chinese presence here as well, a supermarket run by Chinese owners, and some Chinese restaurants. Everyone has their economic interests in the second largest copper exporting region in the world. Running short on mental stamina, a fact that I am able to admit now in a way that I may have had more difficulty admitting previously, I joined the 3N for two easy days back to Cajamarca. It was a vacation after all.
This trip was a good one, sometimes the personal goals of a trip like this take time to materialize. For me personally, I left Cajamarca with a particular article ringing in my ears which had put strict limits on what the author of the article considered “Bikepacking” vs “Bike Touring”. It implied that bikepacking is performance-oriented, focused on long distance ultra races to stretch your physical stamina. The term bikepacking didn’t really exist when I first went what I called bike touring, I don’t know what the big deal is, the other hard line that was drawn was that bike touring is when you take time to take a dip in lakes, cook at night, and generally just wander. I’m not going to gripe and pick and claw at the author’s reasoning because my objectives for these trips take all of those sorts of things for granted. What I get out of bike trips runs somewhat orthogonal to, not with or against the definitions set forth in article. I liked some of the conclusions about the commercialization of the word “bikepacking”, but disagreed with some implications made about the lackadasical nature of “bike touring”, but I’m also sure I misinterpreted the author’s words somewhere along the line.
This trip was a physical challenge, it was singlespeeding in some of the largest mountains on Earth. I also cooked some nights and stayed some nights in hotels. My goals, my reason for going forth, have more to do how to bring humility and respect to the new places the bike enables me to go. Try and get past the me-me-me part of the travel journal, and try and focus outward. Reflect the uniqueness of the experience, and what unique views of different places that traveling on the bike enables. Going singlespeed requires you to be connected to your surroundings in a really unique way, to be truly comfortable on someone else’s turf, and very often just straight up walking up a steep hill with no way to speed away. That’s what makes these trips and singlespeeding fun to me these days, not the distance I make each day or the amount of climbing, or how ‘performance-oriented’ the trip is. I haven’t called this either a bikepacking or bike touring trip, I was just exploring an intricate area very up close at a particularly interesting moment in time, and the bike is just a great way to do that. It was a fun bike trip, and a great route. Carriage Return. Do you want to add another text block to this post? Nope, that’s all.
Thanks for reading. 
