CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A one-way ride of 1038 km, Lima to Arequipa - roughly 15 h 12 in the saddle. On the way it passes Paracas, Huacachina, Nazca and Camana. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 3,600 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Lima sits on the edge of one of the driest deserts on earth, and yet it is a city of more than seven million people, held together by a grey sky that locals call la garúa, a damp, low cloud that hangs over the coast for much of the year and rarely produces rain. The city's coastline rises in cliffs above the Pacific, where the districts of Miraflores and Barranco look out to the surf, and parks, cafes and paragliders occupy the clifftops.
Read the complete Lima write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lima is where the day begins. Next is Paracas.
The Paracas peninsula juts into the Pacific from the Peruvian coast, a dry, red-and-ochre tongue of sand and rock where no rain falls for years, and it is as strange and beautiful a place as any on the Panamericana. The Paracas National Reserve covers a huge area of this coast and sea, with dramatic cliffs, empty beaches, and a Red Beach whose sand takes its colour from volcanic rock.
Read the complete Paracas write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Paracas comes up about 252 km into the recorded legs. Next is Huacachina.
Huacachina is the kind of place that looks like a joke the Peruvian desert is playing on you. A small lagoon, ringed with palms and old-fashioned lamp posts, sits in a bowl of enormous sand dunes five kilometres from the city of Ica. Local legend says it formed when a princess, bathing, saw a hunter, dropped her mirror and fled; the mirror became the lake, and her robe the dunes. The truth is rather drier, a natural spring that has been dwindling for decades as water is pumped out for farms nearby.
Read the complete Huacachina write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 326 km into the recorded legs you reach Huacachina. Next is Nazca.
Nazca sits in the middle of one of the driest places on earth, a small desert town of about twenty-four thousand people on the Pan-American Highway, famous for lines drawn in the ground that nobody quite agrees on. The Nazca Lines, a collection of enormous figures and straight lines scratched into the stony plain, were made between about two thousand and fifteen hundred years ago by removing dark surface pebbles to expose the pale ground beneath. Birds, a monkey, a spider, a hummingbird: they were drawn on a scale that can only be appreciated from the air, and in 1994 they were listed as a World Heritage site.
Read the complete Nazca write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Nazca, about halfway. Next is Camana.
Camaná is a fishing and farming town at the mouth of a river that actually reaches the sea, which in this part of Peru is a minor miracle. South of Lima, the Pacific coast is one of the driest deserts in the world, a belt of sand and bare rock that goes on for a thousand kilometres, and only a handful of rivers carry enough water down from the Andes to make a green valley. The Camaná is one of them, and the ribbon of rice fields, orchards and reeds around the town is startling after hours of grey and yellow. The town has about sixteen thousand people, with beaches nearby, and it is a favourite summer holiday spot for families from Arequipa, who drive down the long road from the mountains.
Read the complete Camana write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Camaná sits at 1466 km, late in the day. Next is Arequipa.
Arequipa announces itself from a distance with a volcano. El Misti, a near-perfect cone of about 5,800 metres, stands behind the city, flanked by the broader mass of Chachani and the older, eroded Pichu Pichu, and on a clear morning the three seem to hang above the rooftops. Arequipa is Peru's second city, home to well over eight hundred thousand people, sitting in a dry valley at roughly 2,300 metres, so you arrive here after a long climb from the coast with your lungs and your engine both a little short of breath.
Read the complete Arequipa write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 1038 km.
Lima → Paracas is 252 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Paracas → Huacachina is 74 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Huacachina → Nazca is 145 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Nazca → Camana is 393 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Camaná → Arequipa is 175 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.