The Spanish had a word for what they did to the Andean countryside in the 1570s: reduccion. Under the viceroy Francisco de Toledo, scattered hamlets were gathered into planned towns around a plaza and a church, so that the people could be counted, taxed, taught the catechism and put to work, and a settlement named for Santiago, the apostle the conquistadors invoked in battle, was one of hundreds of such foundations.
What the reducciones could not erase was memory. Not long after, around 1608, a priest named Francisco de Avila had a collection of local religious traditions written down in Quechua in the province of Huarochiri, east of Lima, and the Huarochiri Manuscript survives as the best account of Andean belief from before the conquest, with its mountain gods, its stories of a flood and its tale of the god Pariacaca. The Inca road that this ride follows, the Qhapaq Nan, ran through these same valleys, and the old stone paths still climb out of the Rimac valley above the sprawl of the capital.
Lima does not make it easy to leave. The city of nearly eight million people spreads along the desert coast, hemmed between the Pacific and the foothills, and the traffic is a sport of its own: buses that stop wherever a passenger waves, vans with a conductor leaning out of the door shouting destinations, and drivers who read the horn as a language. Start on a Sunday morning or before dawn if you can, and use the main avenues and the expressway along the cliffs, the Costa Verde, rather than the grid of the old centre, where one-way streets and market stalls turn every junction into a negotiation.
Everything a rider needs is within reach here: fuel stations on every corner, workshops that can fix almost anything, cheap lunch menus with soup, rice and a main dish. In winter, from about June to October, a low grey cloud called the garua smothers the coast, the damp gets into everything, and the sun is a rumour, while the mountains above are often bright and dry. Fill up and eat before heading up the Rimac valley, because services thin out quickly past the last suburbs. Carry some small notes for tolls and for the people who will offer to watch your bike. The ride to Molle and Huarangal follows the old way inland, and the climb into clean air is a pleasure after the city.