Living in Peru : your everyday companion

Being a resident of Peru, how many times per year do you travel abroad?   1 2 3 4 or more?

In this article, LivinginPeru.com focuses on the multiple forms of transportation throughout Peru. The following article is a compilation of entries from the travel blog of cyclist David Kroodsma. David is currently working on publishing a book which details his adventure.
Through the Ride for Climate project, David bicycled from California to the tip of South America and then across the United States, covering 21,000 miles in almost two years of travel. Over the course of this journey, David appeared in more than seventy media outlets and gave over a hundred presentations on climate change at schools and community centers across sixteen countries. David also works as the outreach coordinator for Climate Ride, the first supported group bicycle tour to raise money and awareness to fight climate change. David lives in San Francisco and currently works for the 350.org campaign.

From the city of Manaus, I biked to the river port, where I found a boat headed upriver towards Peru. A space to put a hammock and food for six days of travel cost $100. I purchased a ticket, a hammock, and then made friends with a Colombian-Spanish couple who had a cabin on the boat and would guard my valuables while I slept in my hammock.

The river here is enormous – in Manaus, 1,000 miles upstream from the Amazon’s mouth, the river is already by far the world’s largest river (over 150,000 cubic meters of water per second), and over 300 feet deep. Manaus is a large city of 3 million people, yet the other side of the river is almost unpopulated.

My boat followed the largest of the Amazon tributaries (sometimes called the Solimoes, sometimes called the Amazon), upstream towards Peru. To maintain sanity while on the boat, I woke up every day at sunrise and ran laps on the deck. This was followed by a shower, reading until lunch, lunch, more reading, a nap until dinner, dinner, and then talking with other people on the boat until bedtime. It was a demanding schedule.

The boat did make a few stops in small towns along the way, unloading goods and picking up passengers. Most of the riverside, however, was unpopulated.

Arriving upstream, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil’s borders all meet, and in the course of a day, I visited all three before boarding another boat, this time a high speed cruiser to take a one day trip to Iquitos. Iquitos, with half a million inhabitants, is the world’s largest inland city with no roads to it – you can get there only by boat or plane. In the late 1800s, the town experienced a brief boom from rubber production, which produced a number of now-historic buildings in the town’s center.

I intended to go to the fire station to ask if I could stay there, but never made it, as two families offered me a place to stay first. Unable to choose between them, I resolved the problem by staying three days, giving me enough time to also visit two schools and appear in the local paper. I also received a tour of the town from three high school students, and also visited an AIDS clinic (perhaps one of the saddest parts of this trip) with a group working for the Catholic Church.

From Iquitos, I took a two and a half day trip upriver to Yurimaguas. The trip–food included–cost less than 30 dollars, and only after paying did I realize that I had paid for first class hammock space – second class, in the floor below, cost 15 dollars.

I arrived in Yurimaguas, a small city in the jungle, thus ending my two weeks of boat travel on the world’s largest river system. From here there were a series of small dirt roads that I will be able to follow southwest and into the Peruvian Andes.

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From Uchiza, on the east side of the Andes, I had planned to take a road which turned out to be only a horse trail. Eager to get in the mountains I did the only logical thing: I found a guide, disassembled my bicycle, rented a horse, and started walking.

This trail was not through the wilderness – along the sides were coffee plantations, and every few hours we would pass a small village, where we could buy food or camp for the night. The last town we stayed in, San Pedro, even had some electricity (but all transit was by horse). A woman with her 4 children fixed us dinner for $1 a piece.

I asked people along this trail if they had ever seen a gringo on the trail before. Most said no, a few cited Italian volunteers for the church who had passed through, and one older woman said "Why yes! Some tall foreign women passed through here 22 years ago!" and then she went on to describe the tall strange women.

The third day we met up with the road, I mounted the bike, crossed a 12,500 ft pass, and descended into the town of Huacrachuco. From Huacrachuco, I continued east on a one lane dirt road, passing only two cars a day. I dropped into a deep dry river canyon before climbing again into the next range of the Andes. At higher altitude, I encountered more small towns, finding that here the locals speak the native language of Quechua.

Passing through more towns and more climbs and descents on one lane dirt roads, I eventually climbed into the Cordillera Blanca, Peru’s highest mountain range, with peaks reaching over 22,000 ft. After camping two nights at 14,000 feet overlooking a huge glacier, I mounted my bike and crossed a 16,000 ft mountain pass, the highest in Peru.

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During my week in Lima, I crossed the city several times, logging 150 miles on my bicycle. With over 9 million people, Lima has no mass transit system, and only an inefficient system of busses. Few Limeños own cars, so most use the buses, which I found to be always slower than using my bicycle. So, do people bike in Lima? There are a few bike lanes (60 km), but they are of low quality. I got up early one morning to see if people used the bike lanes to commute, and I saw few cyclists. The city is flat, never rains, and has a cool comfortable climate – it is a perfect place for bicycle use, yet the infrastructure to do so is poor.

In the next few decades, cities like Lima have a choice – support individual car use, or support mass transit and non-motorized transit. If cities support car use, as the economy grows and more people can afford cars, their greenhouse gas emissions will grow rapidly, worsening global warming. If cities choose a less car intensive path, the city will not only produce less pollution, but also probably be more livable.

To develop sustainable transportation, a city needs not only good ideas and investment; it needs the people to support such projects. One problem, as I see it, is that many Latin Americans look to our cities in the U.S. as models for how to develop their spaces – the people are more likely to support projects that make their cities look like U.S. cities. And I will let you decide for yourself how to fix that problem.

tags : David Kroodsma Huacrachuco Quechua Uchiza Andes Yurimaguas Peru

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3 Comments

# CECILIA ZOLLNER says :
5 November, 2009 [ 06:12 ]

I WISH YOU LUCK IN YOUR TRIP AND THE BOOK.
 I HOPE IT COMES OUT SOON.

# Alberto C. Moreno says :
5 November, 2009 [ 08:20 ]

awesome

# Juan says :
5 November, 2009 [ 09:34 ]

I look forward to read your book. Nobody bikes in Lima out of fear of being stolen the bike. Public transport is a catastrophe, an eletric train system (i.e. Metro) is a top necessity but corrupt administrations usually have other interests. 

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