Three and a half thousand metres up, on the cold grass plateau of the Peruvian Andes, the Incas built a city that was never meant to be a home. Huánuco Pampa was an administrative centre, a stop on the great road between Cusco and Quito, with a vast central plaza, an ushnu platform from which officials presided over ceremonies, rows of long halls for visitors and hundreds of storehouses lined up on the hillsides. The people who staffed it were moved in from elsewhere, and the labour they owed was paid in cloth, maize and llama wool that fed the road and the army.
The road itself is the Qhapaq Ñan, the Inca network of roughly thirty thousand kilometres linking the empire's provinces, of which UNESCO listed a selection in 2014. This segment runs from the ruins towards Huaricashash, and in places you can still follow the paved surface, the stone drains, and the retaining walls that held it against the mountain. The engineering is the lesson: steps where the slope was steep, causeways across boggy ground, bridges woven from grass across the gorges. Nothing was built for wheels, because the Incas had none, and the road was walked and used by llama trains.
For a rider, the access is the adventure. The nearest town on our list is La Unión, a small highland place in the Dos de Mayo province, and from there the way to the ruins is on unpaved mountain tracks that are rough, narrow and sometimes washed out. The altitude means thin air, cold nights and sudden weather, and from December to March the rains make the tracks slick and dangerous. The dry season, from May to September, is much better, with intense sun by day and frost at night. Carry warm layers, because the plateau is exposed, and take it slowly.
Bring food and water as well, because services near the ruins are minimal, and a local guide from the nearby villages is well worth finding. Altitude sickness is real up here, so give yourself a day to acclimatise, and drink coca tea if it is offered.