Lost Kingdoms Guided Motorcycle Tour
OVERVIEW
The Lost Kingdoms is a journey into one of the last truly undiscovered corners of South America — a land of lost civilizations, remote mountain roads, cloudforest, and ancient mysteries hidden far beyond the routes traveled by most visitors to Peru and Ecuador. While travelers flock to Cusco and Machu Picchu, the forgotten kingdoms of Northern Peru remain largely unexplored: the Moche, the Chachapoya, and other civilizations that built vast adobe cities, cliffside tombs, and mountaintop fortresses long before the rise of the Inca. Many of their secrets remain unknown, their ruins still emerging from the jungle and desert only in recent decades.
This expedition follows the old pathways between these vanished worlds, crossing deserts, Pacific coastline, high Andean passes, cloudforest, and the edge of the Amazon basin on some of the most spectacular motorcycle roads anywhere in South America. From the sweeping curves around Chimborazo to the remote paved mountain roads linking Cajamarca, Leymebamba, and Chachapoyas, the riding is endlessly varied and breathtaking — long days, high elevations, and road after road of curves for experienced riders who love spending time in the saddle.
What makes this region so compelling is not only the riding, but the feeling of discovery. Northern Peru and the eastern Andes of Ecuador still feel raw and authentic, where ancient traditions survive in isolated mountain towns and where many of the archaeological sites receive only a fraction of the visitors seen farther south. Here, enormous pyramids rise from the desert, mysterious mummies rest high in the cloudforest, and forgotten stone citadels emerge from the mist above the jungle canopy.
The Lost Kingdoms Guided Motorcycle Tour is designed for riders drawn to the unknown — for travelers who want to experience the Andes not as tourists, but as explorers following the traces of civilizations that history nearly forgot.
Where You'll Ride
DETAILED ITINERARY
Day 1
Quito – Ambato – Chimborazo – Riobamba
The Lost Kingdoms tour begins in Quito, Ecuador, high in the Andes where the air is thin, the mornings are cool, and the old city still carries the sound of church bells, diesel buses, and footsteps on worn stone. Sitting at 9,350 feet on the Andean plateau, Quito is one of the highest capital cities in the world. In 1978, it became one of the first cities on the planet to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognized for having one of the best-preserved historic centers in Latin America.
You’ll want to arrive a day or two early, not only to handle the paperwork, pre-ride briefing, and welcome dinner, but to let your body settle into the altitude. Quito rewards a little extra time. The historic center is all carved balconies, gold-leaf altars, steep streets, and the smell of fresh bread drifting from small bakeries in the morning. Ecuador Freedom’s shop is located in one of the city’s most modern and comfortable neighborhoods, close to good hotels, restaurants, cafés, and the last easy errands before the road begins pulling you south toward Peru.
On the morning of departure, you’ll be matched with your motorcycle and walked through a thorough orientation with your Ecuador Freedom guide. This is where the practical side of the journey begins: local road customs, riding signals, fuel stops, group procedures, Ecuadorian and Peruvian driving habits, and the small courtesies that make travel here smoother and safer. It is the kind of information that comes from years spent riding these roads, not from a map. You will feel the value of that guidance almost immediately, once the city traffic fades and the Andes begin to open in front of you.
Then Quito drops away behind you, and the ride opens onto one of South America’s great mountain corridors: the Avenue of Volcanoes. Two Andean cordilleras squeeze the highlands into a long valley, with volcanic peaks standing like weather-makers on both sides. On a clear morning, the views are enormous. On a cloudy one, the mountains appear in pieces: a snow shoulder here, a black lava ridge there, a summit breaking through mist before disappearing again. The road runs at altitude, where the light is sharp, the wind is cool, and every stop reminds you that you are riding through the spine of the continent.
The valley is also home to some of the finest rose farms in the world. We’ll stop at a working rose plantation to see how Ecuador produces the enormous, perfectly straight, long-stemmed roses that are exported around the globe. The secret is Ecuador’s position on the Equator. Here the sun remains high in the sky throughout the year rather than moving through the extreme seasonal angles experienced farther north and south, encouraging the stems to grow straight upward. Combined with the cool temperatures and intense sunlight of the high-altitude Andes, the conditions produce exceptionally large flowers, vivid colors, and remarkably long stems.
Inside the greenhouses, we’ll see how the roses are grown, cut, graded, bundled, and prepared for their journey to markets thousands of miles away. It is a surprisingly precise operation, and a chance to see an Ecuadorian industry that most travelers know only from the finished flowers they encounter back home.
From the rose plantation we continue to Hacienda La Ciénega, where we stop for lunch surrounded by more than four centuries of Andean history. La Ciénega has been receiving travelers since the colonial era, including some of the great scientific explorers of South America. The French geodesic expedition led by Charles Marie de La Condamine used the hacienda while carrying out its historic measurements near the Equator in the 18th century, and Alexander von Humboldt stayed here during his explorations of Ecuador at the beginning of the 19th century.
Those expeditions helped change the world’s understanding of the Andes, the Equator, volcanoes, and the shape of the Earth. Plans were discussed, observations compared, and the next stages of journeys into largely unknown country took shape around places like La Ciénega. There is something fitting about beginning the Lost Kingdoms expedition over lunch here. More than two centuries after Humboldt and La Condamine traveled through these mountains, we’re sitting within the same old walls, studying the country ahead and then setting off on our own long journey through the Andes toward Peru.
After lunch, the route slips through Ambato and bends toward the Ecoruta, one of those roads that reminds you why motorcycles belong in the Andes. The pavement begins to carve through canyon country, tracing the whitewater roar of the Río Ambato as the landscape tightens around you. Cornfields, eucalyptus, rock walls, and sharp switchbacks pull you deeper into the mountains. Your guide keeps the pace measured as the road gets more serious, reading the weather, the surface, and the group while still leaving enough room for the ride to feel alive.
The climb toward Chimborazo is steady and dramatic, rising to more than 14,500 feet, where the temperature drops, the engine note changes, and the horizon starts to feel almost lunar. This is one of those places that cannot be fully explained before you are there. You can read the altitude, study the map, and look at photos, but none of that captures the strange feeling of standing beside your motorcycle in the thin air, with the wind cutting across the páramo and Chimborazo sitting above everything in silence.
You’ll stop at a local hot spring near the base of Chimborazo, not a polished tourist complex, but the kind of place where people from nearby communities come to soak after working the fields. Steam rises into the cold mountain air, and the volcano sits above it all — massive, snow-capped, and quiet. Chimborazo is Ecuador’s tallest mountain and, because of the bulge of the Earth at the Equator, its summit is the closest point on Earth to the sun. Nearby, you may also see vicuñas, the delicate, high-altitude relatives of llamas and camels, grazing in the thin air with the calm of animals perfectly built for this harsh country.
The final stretch of the day continues along twisty backroads toward Riobamba, with Chimborazo still dominating the skyline when the weather allows. The day ends at Hostería Andaluza, a historic highland property that feels like part of the ride rather than just a place to sleep. Established in 1555, the estate is one of Ecuador’s most beautiful historic haciendas, with old walls, quiet gardens, warm interiors, and the kind of mountain silence that settles in after a long day in the saddle. Dinner in the elegant dining room brings the first day’s dust, altitude, and cold air into focus over good food, warm light, and the realization that the road to Peru has truly begun.
Chimborazo’s summit is farther from the center of the Earth than the summit of Mount Everest. Everest is higher above sea level, but because Chimborazo stands near the equatorial bulge of the planet, its peak reaches farther into space than any other point on Earth.
Day 2
Riobamba – Cajabamba – Cumandá – Machala
The day begins quietly at Hostería Andaluza, with breakfast in the cool highland air and Chimborazo still holding the horizon. From here, your Ecuador Freedom guide leads the group onto the backroads around Riobamba, skirting the city through fields, small settlements, and open views where the King of the Andes rises behind rooftops and farmland. Chimborazo has a presence that feels different from other mountains. It does not simply sit in the landscape — it rules it.
Some mountains have better stories than others, and Chimborazo has one of the best. Because it stands near the equatorial bulge of the Earth, its summit reaches farther from the planet’s center than any other point on Earth. Mount Everest is higher above sea level, but Chimborazo reaches farther into space. On a clear morning, with cold air in your jacket and the road curling away through the highlands, that fact does not feel like trivia. It feels visible.
You’ll continue toward Cajabamba, the original site of Riobamba before the devastating earthquake of 1797 destroyed the old city and forced its relocation. Here stands the Balbanera Chapel, considered the oldest church in Ecuador and one of the first structures built by the Spanish after their arrival in 1534. You’ll step inside walls more than three feet thick, into a small, heavy silence that has survived conquest, earthquakes, weather, and centuries of mountain life. Your guide helps connect the place to the road you are riding — not as a quick photo stop, but as part of the long Andean story beneath your wheels.
The route then rolls south toward Laguna Colta, a cold, dark lake where totora reeds grow thick along the water’s edge. Local families still use these reeds to make baskets, mats, and small canoes, keeping alive a practical craft shaped by the lake itself. Along the roadside, Indigenous vendors serve hot snacks from steaming pots and griddles — the kind of simple, warming food that makes sense before climbing and descending again through the highlands.
This is one of those places that is hard to explain from a brochure: the lake wind, the cooking smoke, the wet reeds, the bright clothing, and the motorcycles cooling at the roadside all belong to the same moment.
From the highlands, the road begins to change. The air softens first. Then the temperature rises. Layers come off, vents open, and the mountains loosen their grip as you descend toward Cumandá. The cold Andean edge gives way to warmth and humidity, and the ride starts to smell different — damp earth, vegetation, fruit, diesel, and roadside cooking.
Your guide keeps the pace smooth through the changing road conditions, reading traffic, weather, and the group while the route drops toward the coastal lowlands.
Cumandá makes a natural stop, with local restaurants and the chance to cool down with ice cream made from chocolate grown in the region. It is a small but satisfying shift in the day: from cold mountain roads and colonial history to tropical warmth, cacao country, and the first real sense that the tour is moving toward the coast.
These are the kinds of pauses that an experienced guide knows how to build into the ride — not just for comfort, but because they help you feel the country changing in real time.
Continuing south, the ride moves toward Ecuador’s coastal lowlands and one of the country’s largest mangrove estuaries. At Reserva Ecológica Manglares Churute, you’ll step off the motorcycle and into a different world of tidal forest, mud, roots, bird calls, and heavy tropical air.
The trails here wind through protected mangrove habitat where, with some luck, you may see howler monkeys moving in the canopy, Chilean flamingos feeding in the wetlands, or bottlenose dolphins working the channels near the estuary. After hours of mountain riding, the sudden closeness of mangroves and humid air makes Ecuador feel almost impossible in its variety.
The final stretch carries you into Ecuador’s banana-growing heartland. This is a working landscape of plantations, packing houses, irrigation canals, trucks, and roadside fruit stands piled high with green and yellow bunches.
Ecuador is one of the world’s great banana producers, and bananas remain one of the country’s most important agricultural exports. The Cavendish is the variety most people know from supermarket shelves, but here you’ll have the chance to taste other kinds — sweeter, starchier, smaller, denser, and far more interesting than the one-note fruit most travelers know from home.
The day ends in Machala, often called the banana capital of the world. After a long ride from volcanic highlands to humid coastal plains, you’ll check into the area’s best luxury hotel, the 4-star Oro Verde. The hotel gives the group a polished, comfortable landing after a day of serious climate change, with space to cool down, clean up, and reset before dinner.
Later, the evening moves toward the waterfront at Puerto Bolívar, where the air smells of salt, mangroves, boat fuel, and seafood coming off hot pans. This is the place to taste the coast properly — shrimp, fish, plantains, lime, and cold drinks after a day that has carried you from the shadow of Chimborazo to the edge of the Pacific lowlands.
Ecuador grows many different types of bananas and plantains, but only a small number are familiar to international consumers. Many local varieties are eaten close to where they are grown and may be fried, boiled, roasted, baked, or served with cheese and coastal sauces.
Today’s ride also shows just how compressed Ecuador’s geography can be. We begin in the cold highlands beneath Chimborazo and finish among tropical banana plantations and mangrove estuaries near sea level — experiencing an enormous change in climate and landscape in a single day.
Day 3
Machala – Tumbes – Máncora
You’ll leave Machala after breakfast and ride south through Ecuador’s coastal lowlands toward the Peruvian border. The road begins in banana country, warm and flat, with trucks, farms, irrigation canals, fruit stands, and the humid smell of the coast still hanging in the morning air. After the volcanic highlands and the descent through mangroves, this stretch feels like the edge of a new chapter. Your Ecuador Freedom guide keeps the group moving smoothly toward the border, where the day shifts from riding to the practical rituals of overland travel.
Border crossings have their own rhythm: passports, vehicle documents, stamps, copies, insurance, waiting, and the occasional mystery window where something important seems to happen just out of sight. This day is intentionally designed with fewer miles so there is room for the crossing without pressure. The Ecuador Freedom team handles the process as efficiently as possible, making sure the motorcycles are properly cleared into Peru and covered by the required Peruvian SOAT insurance.
It is not the glamorous part of the journey, but it is one of the details that makes a guided tour valuable. Years of experience with these crossings help keep the day moving, and once the final stamp lands, the road begins to feel different almost immediately.
After entering Peru, you’ll ride toward the Tumbes coast, where the first proper taste of the country should come from the sea. This is northern Peru at water level: mangroves, wooden boats, seabirds, tidal mud, and the sharp smell of salt and fish in the warm air.
Lunch brings your first Peruvian ceviche, bright with lime, onion, chile, and the briny freshness that makes the dish feel alive on the plate. You may also hear about leche de tigre — the citrusy, spicy marinade left behind, prized almost as much as the fish itself.
The border region is a different kind of threshold, where Ecuador’s humid coastal lowlands begin to give way to the drier edge of northern Peru. It is one of those transitions that does not fully translate in photos. You have to feel the heat, smell the mangroves and salt air, hear the birds and traffic, and then watch the landscape start to dry out mile by mile to understand that you have crossed into a new country.
Back on the motorcycles, the scenery begins to change. The mangrove country gives way to coastal desert, and the road straightens enough to let the bikes breathe again. After the stop-and-go patience of the border, this stretch feels good: open throttle, warm wind, long sightlines, and the Pacific pulling the horizon wide.
Your guide keeps the pace relaxed and steady, helping the group settle into Peruvian roads, traffic habits, fuel stops, and the different feel of the country under the tires.
You’ll continue along one of Peru’s most beautiful northern coastal corridors, passing fishing villages, roadside seafood stands, dry hills, resort towns, and long strips of sand where the desert seems to run straight into the ocean. The light is different here than in Ecuador — harsher, wider, more exposed. Salt hangs in the air. Fishing boats sit pulled up on the beach. The road has the stripped-down feel of a place shaped by wind, sun, and sea.
Máncora is the day’s destination, a lively beach town known as one of Peru’s surf capitals. After the formality of the border and the dry coastal miles, it is the right kind of place to land. The pace drops, the boots come off, and the evening belongs to the beach, the smell of grilled seafood, and the sound of music drifting out from town after dark.
You’ll check into the chic and very comfortable Arennas Máncora, one of the special treats of the tour. Set on the sunny Máncora coast, it feels like a peaceful oceanfront refuge rather than a standard hotel, with open spaces, natural materials, thoughtful service, and an atmosphere designed for rest.
After the border crossing and the dry coastal miles into Peru, Arennas gives the group a beautiful place to slow down properly — sea breeze, good food, warm air, and time to recover before continuing south along the coast. Dinner is a chance to lean into what Máncora does best: fresh fish, shrimp, ceviche, cold drinks, and the easy energy of a surf town that knows how to stay up late.
Northern Peru’s coast is influenced by both warmer tropical waters from the north and the colder Humboldt Current farther south. That meeting of currents helps create a rich marine environment, which is one reason seafood is such an important part of the food culture here — and why ceviche tastes especially right when eaten this close to the boats that brought in the catch.
Day 4
Rest Day in Máncora
Máncora is the right place to let the road noise fade out of your head. After the altitude of Ecuador, the border crossing, the first dry miles of northern Peru, and the steady push down the coast, this rest day gives you time to slow down and feel where you are. The motorcycles stay parked, the boots come off, and the day opens into warm Pacific air, dry hills, fishing boats, surfboards, mototaxis, and music drifting through town after dark.
This is a rest day, but it is not a throwaway day. Your Ecuador Freedom guide will help you understand the options and make the most of Máncora without turning the day into a schedule. You can swim, walk the beach, stretch out in the sun, take a surf lesson, wander into town, visit local shops and cafés, or simply disappear into a hammock with salt still on your skin and the sound of waves working the shoreline. Some places only make sense when you stop moving long enough to feel them, and Máncora is one of them.
The beach is the easy center of the day. Máncora has long been one of Peru’s favorite coastal towns, not because it tries too hard, but because it has the right ingredients: warm water, pale sand, fresh seafood, good surf, and a slightly rough-around-the-edges beach-town energy that feels honest. It is polished in places and scruffy in others, which is part of its charm. You feel the fishing village beneath the resort town, the working coast beneath the vacation mood.
The sea is not just scenery here. Depending on conditions and local availability, you may have the chance to swim with giant sea turtles, one of the most memorable wildlife encounters on Peru’s northern coast. The experience is simple and direct: warm water, dark shapes moving beneath the surface, the flash of a shell, a turtle rising slowly through the blue. It is quiet in a way motorcycle travel rarely is, and that contrast is part of what makes the day stay with you.
You may also visit the local fish market, where Máncora’s relationship with the ocean becomes more practical. Boats come in, fish are unloaded, knives move fast, pelicans wait for scraps, and the air smells of salt, scales, diesel, and the morning’s catch. It is not polished or staged. It is the working coast, and it gives more meaning to the ceviche, grilled fish, and seafood stews that show up later at the table.
Máncora also has a small creative side worth exploring. Between the beach, cafés, surf shops, and restaurants, you’ll find local art, handmade objects, and relaxed spaces where travelers and residents mix without much ceremony. This is where having a guide nearby helps without getting in the way. You can get pointed toward the good places, the better food, the easier walks, and the experiences that fit the day, while still keeping the freedom that a rest day should have.
For riders who want to stay active, Máncora is one of Peru’s classic surf spots, with lessons and board rentals available locally. For everyone else, the day can be as simple as reading in the shade, getting a massage, walking the beach, lingering over lunch, or doing absolutely nothing for a few hours. That is the point. A good motorcycle journey needs days like this — not empty days, but days that let the miles settle into memory.
The stay at Arennas Máncora makes the rest day feel intentional. This is one of the special treats of the tour: a peaceful, highly personal boutique hotel on the Máncora coast, created as a small oceanfront refuge for rest, yoga, good food, music, meditation, and connection with nature. The open spaces, natural materials, wild gardens, native plants, and thoughtful service make it feel intimate and handcrafted rather than hotel-chain predictable. After the first days of riding, border logistics, heat, and coastal miles, Arennas gives you time to recover properly in a place that feels beautiful without trying too hard.
As evening comes in, the heat drops, the beach bars begin to glow, and the town loosens up. Dinner is best kept close to the sea: ceviche, shrimp, grilled fish, plantains, lime, and cold drinks after a day spent barefoot instead of in riding boots. There are some places you understand by looking at them, and others you understand by staying long enough for the rhythm to get under your skin. Máncora is the second kind.
Máncora sits in one of the warmest coastal zones in Peru. While much of the Peruvian coast is cooled by the Humboldt Current, the far north receives warmer tropical influence, which helps give Máncora its beach-town climate, strong marine life, and year-round appeal for surfers, fishermen, and travelers following the northern coast.
Day 5
Máncora – Piura – Túcume
You’ll leave Máncora with salt still in the air and the relaxed rhythm of the coast behind you. The ride turns south along the Pacific, following a warm, open route through fishing villages, dry hills, roadside seafood stands, and long stretches where the desert seems to run straight into the sea. Your Ecuador Freedom guide keeps the group flowing through the coastal towns and open highway, helping you settle into the pace of northern Peru. This is a different world from the misty mountains waiting farther inland — brighter, drier, more exposed, with wide skies and a hard coastal light that makes every color feel shaped by sun and wind.
Life along this part of the Peruvian coast moves at a slower, sunnier pace. Boats rest on the sand, mototaxis buzz through small towns, and the smell of grilled fish, diesel, salt, and dust drifts across the roadside. The riding is not technical in the same way as the Andes, but it has its own pleasure: long sightlines, warm air, and the feeling of covering ground through a landscape that keeps stripping itself down to sand, sea, and sky.
The farther south we ride, the emptier the landscape becomes, and the road settles into long, fast stretches where the desert, ocean, and horizon seem to merge. You can look at a map and see the line south, but you have to ride it to understand how the desert, the ocean, and the villages create their own rhythm.
As the road pushes deeper into the coastal desert, you’ll pass through country where carob trees manage to thrive in the dry heat. From these hardy trees, locals produce algarrobina, a dark, rich syrup made from carob pods. It is used in drinks, desserts, and traditional preparations throughout northern Peru, valued for its flavor and energy.
You’ll stop to taste it where it belongs — close to the desert landscape that produces it. These are the small encounters that make a guided ride different: not just stopping where there is fuel, but where the place has something to say.
The route continues toward Piura, one of Peru’s oldest cities and an important center of life in the north. Piura has a restless mix of old and new: colonial mansions, shaded plazas, carved balconies, modern commerce, and the everyday movement of a city that has long connected the coast, desert, and northern Andes.
Depending on timing and traffic, your guide will help thread the group through the city and make space to see its historic streets and colonial homes, where worn façades and quiet courtyards hint at the region’s long role as a crossroads between different landscapes, cultures, and trade routes.
From Piura, the ride continues south toward Túcume, where the landscape begins to carry the weight of older civilizations. The destination is not just a town, but a vast archaeological complex built more than 1,000 years ago. Spread across the desert are 26 major pyramids, walled citadels, residential compounds, ceremonial spaces, and traces of a city that once stood at the center of powerful coastal cultures.
As the afternoon light drops across the adobe, the place starts to feel less like ruins and more like a buried memory rising out of the sand.
The site was first developed by the Sicán people, later controlled by the Chimú, and eventually absorbed into the expanding Inca world. Each civilization left something behind — new structures, altered spaces, different styles, and layers of meaning pressed into sun-baked adobe.
One of the pyramids, Huaca Larga, is considered the world’s largest adobe structure. Standing near it, the scale is difficult to grasp with your eyes alone. You feel it in the heat, the silence, the dry air, and the strange realization that entire worlds were built here from earth, water, labor, ritual, and time.
The night is spent among these ancient ruins at the comfortable Horcones de Túcume Lodge. The lodge fits the setting beautifully, built with local materials and a rustic character that belongs to the desert rather than competing with it.
After a day of coastal miles and ancient history, staying here keeps you connected to the place — the dry air, the adobe mounds, the quiet around the ruins, and the feeling of sleeping near a city more than a thousand years old. Staying beside the site also means we wake up already inside the landscape we came here to understand, ready to explore Túcume with a local guide before the road continues.
Dinner comes with the sense that the tour has moved out of the beach towns and into a much older Peru. From here onward, the civilizations that gave the Lost Kingdoms tour its name begin to take center stage.
The pyramids of Túcume were built from adobe, a mixture of earth, water, and organic material shaped into bricks and dried by the sun. In Peru’s dry northern desert, adobe could endure for centuries, allowing entire ceremonial cities to rise from the same earth around them.
The next morning, a local guide will help bring these structures to life with the stories, beliefs, and mysteries that still cling to the Valley of the Pyramids.
Day 6
Túcume – Lambayeque – Trujillo
The morning begins among the ancient pyramids of Túcume, before the desert heat has had time to rise off the adobe and sand. A local, experienced guide leads you through the Valley of the Pyramids, not just pointing out ruins, but telling the stories that still seem to cling to this dry northern Peruvian valley of 26 adobe huacas.
The visit begins at the site museum, where ceramics, models, ritual objects, and archaeological exhibits help explain the Sicán, Chimú, Inca, and colonial layers of the site. Having the guide here makes all the difference: without the stories, these enormous adobe forms can look like silent hills; with the right voice, they begin to feel like a vanished city rising out of the desert.
From the museum, you’ll walk out among the great earthen pyramids themselves. These are not stone monuments like Machu Picchu. They are desert architecture — massive platforms of sun-dried adobe, softened by centuries of wind, rain, and time. Their power is quieter and stranger.
From the valley floor they look almost natural, but as you move closer, the scale becomes clear: ceremonial platforms, walls, ramps, and traces of a city that once held power, trade, ritual, and political life in this part of Peru. If conditions and timing allow, the visit continues toward the Cerro Purgatorio viewpoint, where the whole site opens below you and the size of the ancient city finally comes into focus.
After Túcume, the ride is short but meaningful, carrying you into nearby Lambayeque for a visit to the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán. The building itself rises from the ground like a modern interpretation of a Moche pyramid, dark red and deliberate, designed to prepare you for what waits inside.
This is one of the great archaeological museums of South America, built to house the extraordinary treasures discovered in the royal tombs of Sipán. Inside, the story unfolds slowly: the excavation, the tomb chambers, the royal burials, and the ceremonial objects that revealed the wealth and sophistication of the ancient Moche world.
Gold, silver, copper, turquoise, shell, elaborate jewelry, weapons, headdresses, and funerary pieces were buried with rulers, priests, warriors, and attendants. The exhibits explaining how the tombs were discovered and excavated are nearly as compelling as the artifacts themselves. The low light, the gold, the silence, and the careful reconstruction make this one of those places where the ancient world suddenly feels very close.
The route then turns south again, leaving Lambayeque and Chiclayo behind and settling into the long, sun-exposed rhythm of northern Peru’s coastal road. Your Ecuador Freedom guide keeps the group moving through traffic, fuel stops, and the practical realities of Peru’s Pan-American Highway, where trucks, towns, heat, and open desert all shape the pace.
This is not a day of high mountain switchbacks. It is a day of distance, desert light, warm wind, irrigation canals, sugarcane fields, roadside towns, and watching Peru keep changing its face as the miles roll beneath the motorcycles.
Lunch is planned at Los Patos near Chepén, a local country-style restaurant known for northern Peruvian cooking, especially rich duck dishes served with green rice. After a morning of ruins and museum halls, it is the right kind of stop: shaded tables, cold drinks, savory food, and time to get out of the gear before the afternoon ride to Trujillo.
A meal like this is part of the route, not a break from it. The flavors, heat, relaxed service, and regional cooking connect the archaeological past we have been exploring with the living culture of northern Peru.
From Chepén, the road continues south toward Huanchaco, one of Peru’s most distinctive fishing and surfing towns. Huanchaco is famous for its narrow, pointed reed fishing boats known as caballitos de totora, made from bundled totora reeds and used along this coast for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years.
Fishermen still take these ancient craft through the surf and ride them back toward shore with the day’s catch. After spending the morning learning about civilizations that flourished along this same coast, seeing a traditional reed boat still being used in the Pacific creates a remarkable link between ancient Peru and the living coast around us.
It is one of those traditions that feels both fragile and alive — not preserved behind museum glass, but still working in saltwater, foam, and morning labor.
Arriving in Trujillo, you enter one of Peru’s most elegant colonial cities, known for its broad plazas, colorful mansions, carved balconies, ironwork, churches, and one of the most beautiful historic centers in the country. The city has an old coastal confidence to it — part colonial capital, part desert trading hub, part gateway to some of the most important archaeological sites in Peru.
With your guide handling the flow of the day, the arrival feels less like navigating another city and more like entering the next chapter of the story.
Just outside Trujillo lies Chan Chan, the enormous adobe capital of the Chimú kingdom and one of the most remarkable pre-Inca sites in the Americas. At its height, this desert city may have held tens of thousands of inhabitants and controlled a vast stretch of Peru’s northern coast.
We’ll save the real exploration of Chan Chan for tomorrow, when a local guide can lead us through its ceremonial courtyards, walled compounds, corridors, and extraordinary carved reliefs. For now, its presence on the outskirts of Trujillo is another reminder of just how much ancient history is concentrated along this coast.
By nightfall, the ride has carried you through two great chapters of northern Peru — Sicán Túcume and Moche Sipán — with the great Chimú capital of Chan Chan waiting just outside Trujillo for tomorrow’s exploration.
The day ends at the comfortable Costa del Sol, where you’ll settle into poolside rooms after a full day of archaeology, desert riding, coastal towns, and pre-Inca history.
The hotel gives the group a reliable and restful base in Trujillo, with the comfort, food, pool, and space that matter after a long day on the road. A swim helps wash off the heat and highway dust before dinner and an easy evening together.
By nightfall, the ride has carried you through three great chapters of northern Peru — Sicán Túcume, Moche Sipán, and Chimú Chan Chan — each one built from earth, power, ritual, and the hard coastal light of the desert.
The caballitos de totora of Huanchaco are part of one of the oldest surviving fishing traditions on the Peruvian coast. Fishermen ride these reed boats through the waves much like a surfboard, but their purpose has always been practical: reaching fishing grounds and bringing the catch safely back through the breakers.
Representations of similar reed boats appear in ancient coastal Peruvian art, creating another link between the civilizations we are exploring and traditions that remain alive along the Pacific today.
Day 7
Rest Day in Trujillo
After the ride down from Túcume, this rest day in Trujillo gives the group time to slow the pace without stepping away from the adventure. The motorcycles stay parked, the riding gear gets a chance to dry and air out, and the day opens into one of the richest archaeological landscapes on the Peruvian coast.
Trujillo is more than a graceful colonial city with bright mansions, old balconies, wide plazas, and polished stone streets. It is also the gateway to ancient desert kingdoms that rose here long before the Inca ever arrived.
The included local guided tours are optional, so the day can move at your own rhythm. You can head out with the guides to explore the archaeological sites, relax by the pool, wander Trujillo’s historic center on your own, or make your way to the beach at Huanchaco for seafood, surf, and a slower coastal afternoon.
Your Ecuador Freedom guide helps make the day easy — connecting you with the right local guides, explaining the options, and giving the day structure without taking away the freedom that a rest day should have.
With local guides leading the way, you can visit Chan Chan, the great adobe capital of the Chimú civilization and one of the most important pre-Inca sites in the Americas. This was once a powerful city of walls, courtyards, corridors, storerooms, ceremonial spaces, and royal compounds built from the same desert earth beneath your boots.
At its height, Chan Chan was home to tens of thousands of people and controlled a vast stretch of Peru’s northern coast. You can read those facts anywhere, but you begin to understand the place differently when you walk through its corridors in the coastal heat, with adobe walls rising around you and the desert stretching beyond them.
Walking through Chan Chan feels very different from visiting stone ruins in the high Andes. This is a city of mud brick, salt air, ocean symbols, and desert silence. The walls are decorated with repeating patterns of fish, seabirds, waves, nets, and geometric designs — reminders that the Chimú world was tied deeply to the Pacific, irrigation, fishing, trade, and the careful control of water in one of the driest coastal regions on Earth.
The place feels both fragile and immense, softened by centuries of wind and weather but still powerful enough to make the imagination work.
The guided visit may also include Huaca del Dragón, also known as Huaca Arco Iris, the Rainbow Temple. Located near Trujillo and the Chan Chan archaeological zone, this Chimú adobe ceremonial site is known for its remarkable high-relief friezes.
Rainbow-like forms, serpents, human figures, and other symbols rise from the adobe walls, reflecting ideas connected with water, fertility, weather, and ritual power. It is much smaller than Chan Chan, which gives the site a more intimate scale and allows you to stand close enough to appreciate the detail in the old reliefs.
In a landscape where survival has always depended on water, these designs begin to make much more sense.
You may also visit the great pyramids and ceremonial sites near Trujillo, where the older Moche culture left behind some of the most dramatic adobe monuments in Peru. These pyramids were living ceremonial centers — places of ritual, political power, sacrifice, painted walls, processions, and offerings.
The Moche were master artists and engineers, famous for their ceramics, metalwork, irrigation systems, and vivid murals that reveal a civilization capable of extraordinary beauty as well as extraordinarily powerful ritual traditions.
Depending on the day’s timing and local conditions, the visit may include the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna, the Temples of the Sun and Moon. Rising from the desert at the foot of Cerro Blanco, these massive adobe pyramids reveal a different chapter of northern Peru’s history.
The Huaca de la Luna is especially striking, with painted reliefs, ceremonial platforms, and images of the fierce Moche deity often known as Ai Apaec. The surviving colors and monumental scale make it easier to imagine this valley as one of the great centers of ancient coastal Peru rather than simply another collection of ruins.
This is a rest day, but not an empty one. It is a day for walking instead of riding, for listening to stories instead of engine noise, and for letting the scale of these ancient kingdoms settle in.
Local guides help bring the sites to life — not as dead monuments, but as places once filled with priests, warriors, artisans, farmers, fishermen, rulers, and ordinary people living between the desert and the sea. The best moments are often the quiet ones: a carved fish pattern in an adobe wall, wind moving through an empty courtyard, or the realization that the roads we have been riding cross landscapes shaped by civilizations far older than the highway.
For those who prefer a lighter day, Trujillo itself rewards wandering. The historic center has colorful colonial façades, carved wooden balconies, ironwork, churches, cafés, galleries, and plazas where the city’s elegant coastal character comes through at walking speed.
Huanchaco is also nearby, with its beach, surf culture, seafood restaurants, and traditional caballitos de totora reed boats still tied to the working life of the coast. Whether you spend the day exploring ancient kingdoms, walking city streets, relaxing by the pool, or heading to the beach, the point is the same: rest, look around, and let northern Peru come into focus beyond the motorcycle seat.
By evening, the group comes back together for a relaxed night in Trujillo. After the archaeological sites, colonial streets, pool, or beach, there will be time for a good meal, cold drinks, and an easy evening before the journey turns serious again.
The next couple of days carry us away from the coast and back into the Andes, where the roads begin to twist, climb, and tighten into the kind of mountain riding this route was built around. Tonight is for resting well, enjoying the company, and getting ready for the switchbacks ahead.
The Huaca del Sol was one of the largest adobe structures ever built in the Americas. It is believed to have required millions of adobe bricks, many marked with symbols associated with the communities that produced them.
Those marks give archaeologists an unusual glimpse into the organization of labor behind the Moche world — evidence of the enormous human effort required to build monumental cities from the desert itself.
Day 8
Trujillo – Huamachuco – Cajabamba – Cajamarca
The day begins by leaving Trujillo’s coastal light behind and pointing the motorcycles inland, away from the Pacific and back toward the Andes. Your Ecuador Freedom guide leads the group out of the city and into the dry edge of the coastal desert, where the road begins low, warm, and open before starting its long climb into the interior.
The air changes first. The sea humidity fades, the heat sharpens, and the landscape opens into bare hills, river valleys, and long exposed sweepers that pull us steadily upward.
This is a day of transition, and motorcyclists will feel every layer of it. The road from Trujillo toward Huamachuco climbs from the desert floor into highland country, trading straight coastal stretches for tighter curves, broken ridgelines, small farming settlements, and wide views back across the valleys below.
It is a road that asks you to pay attention: trucks working slowly uphill, patches of rough pavement, blind corners, animals near the roadside, and then, suddenly, a perfect set of curves that makes the climb feel effortless. Your guide’s experience matters here, keeping the pace safe and fluid while letting the road do what it does best — carry you from one world into another.
Huamachuco sits high in the northern Andes, surrounded by cold air, rugged hills, and some of the most important pre-Inca history in this part of Peru. This region was once the heartland of the Huamachuco culture, whose influence reached across the northern highlands long before the Inca arrived.
Nearby Marcahuamachuco was one of the great ceremonial and political centers of the Andes, a massive highland complex of stone walls, compounds, towers, and sacred spaces built on a mesa above the surrounding valleys. Riding through this country drives home one of the central themes of the Lost Kingdoms journey: the ancient world here extended far beyond the famous Inca sites farther south. These mountains had their own centers of power, trade, religion, and culture centuries before the Inca Empire reached them.
In Huamachuco, you’ll visit the local archaeological museum, a small but important stop that helps connect the ride with the deep history of the region. The exhibits provide context for the cultures that lived here, with artifacts, ceramics, tools, and displays tied to Marcahuamachuco and the surrounding highland sites.
It is a very different experience from the great archaeological museums we visited on the coast. This one feels local and direct, with objects that remain closely connected to the mountains, fields, and communities they came from. The museum helps explain why this area mattered: it was a powerful highland crossroads of ritual, trade, agriculture, and political influence.
From Huamachuco, the ride continues toward Cajabamba, following paved mountain roads through one of the most distinctive regions of the northern Andes.
This is country of high pastures, cold ridges, adobe villages, women in tall Cajamarca hats, donkeys, roadside shrines, eucalyptus groves, and fields planted into steep slopes. The landscape feels lived in rather than staged. You pass people carrying firewood, farmers walking behind animals, children in school uniforms, market trucks loaded with sacks, and small towns where life still turns around the plaza, the church, the fields, and the road.
Soon the valley narrows and the surroundings change again. Grasslands mix with cactus as the route works deeper into the Andes, sometimes along slopes that seem barely wide enough to hold a road.
The riding becomes increasingly engaging: rising corners, tight bends, switchbacks, rough edges, sudden views, and the constant sense that the mountains are folding and unfolding around you. There is no off-road riding expertise required here, but these are roads for experienced motorcyclists who are comfortable spending a day working through curve after curve in the mountains.
You have to feel the temperature change through your jacket, smell the eucalyptus in the turns, and watch the valleys fall away below the road to understand why this part of Peru stays with riders.
Continuing through the highlands, you’ll pass small towns and roadside settlements where local families offer jars of honey, homemade wines, fruit liqueurs, herbal spirits, and moonshines in flavors you may not have expected to find in the Andes.
These stops are part of what makes this region special. It is a working highland corridor where old travel routes, local agriculture, mountain trade, and family craft still meet the modern road. Your guide knows how to make these pauses feel natural, giving the group room to taste, ask questions, and connect with the people who live along the route.
As the day pushes on, you’ll ride over the Gavilán Pass and into a series of serpentine switchbacks through pine and eucalyptus forests. The temperature drops again, and the smell of the road changes with it — damp needles, eucalyptus, woodsmoke, cold soil, and the occasional burst of cooking fires from houses hidden behind walls and trees.
By the time you reach the village of Choropunta, the culture of the Cajamarca highlands is all around you: tall hats, wool layers, livestock along the roadside, cultivated hillsides, and the quieter rhythm of mountain communities.
In Cajamarca, the day ends with the motorcycles parked and a full day of mountain riding settling into your hands and shoulders. We stay at Hotel Laguna Seca in Baños del Inca, a place intimately connected with the thermal waters that have drawn people here for centuries.
After riding from the warm Pacific coast into the high Andes, the hot springs could hardly arrive at a better time. Laguna Seca offers gardens, comfortable rooms, and naturally heated mineral water where you can soak away the miles before dinner.
It is a fitting ending to one of the great riding days of the Lost Kingdoms journey: this morning we woke near the Pacific, and tonight we are back high in the Andes, surrounded by mountains, history, and roads that have been carrying people through this country for centuries.
The highlands between Huamachuco, Cajabamba, and Cajamarca formed an important cultural corridor long before modern roads existed. Ancient societies moved goods, ideas, rituals, and political influence through these valleys and passes, connecting the Pacific coast with the northern Andes and routes leading toward the Marañón basin.
Today we follow that same broad corridor on motorcycles, climbing from the coastal desert into a landscape that connected some of northern Peru’s most important ancient cultures.
Day 9
Cajamarca – Baños del Inca – Celendín
The morning begins slowly at Hotel Laguna Seca, and that is exactly the point. After the previous day’s climb back into the Andes, there is time to enjoy the thermal waters of Baños del Inca before the motorcycles are loaded again. Steam rises from the hot spring pools into the cool Cajamarca air, and the body gets a chance to loosen up before another day in the mountains begins.
These springs have drawn people for centuries. The Inca elite used them, and Atahualpa is closely associated with Baños del Inca, where he was staying when the Spanish advance toward Cajamarca changed the course of Andean history. That connection gives the morning more weight than a simple soak: we are starting the day in a place tied directly to one of the most consequential encounters in South American history.
Your Ecuador Freedom guide keeps the morning relaxed but well paced, giving you time to enjoy the thermal waters without losing the rhythm of the day. This is one of the advantages of breaking the old long route into two days: instead of rushing out of Cajamarca, you get time to feel where you are.
From Baños del Inca, the ride moves through Cajamarca, one of northern Peru’s most historic cities. The streets carry a mix of colonial architecture, highland markets, church towers, tiled roofs, and the daily movement of people from the surrounding countryside.
Cajamarca is also where Atahualpa was captured by Francisco Pizarro and the Spanish in 1532, a turning point that helped bring down the Inca Empire. Passing through the city with a guide helps connect the plazas, churches, old walls, and mountain setting with the events that unfolded here nearly five centuries ago.
Once out of the city, the road begins climbing and bending toward Celendín. This is a shorter riding day, but it is rich in the kind of Andean detail that rewards a slower pace: eucalyptus groves, adobe houses, green valleys, grazing animals, highland fields, roadside shrines, and women in the distinctive tall hats of the Cajamarca region.
The route follows paved mountain roads through a landscape that feels thoroughly lived in. Farm trucks share the road with donkeys, schoolchildren, livestock, and people carrying goods between villages. The curves come steadily, views open and close, and small settlements appear along ridges and valley floors.
Today is less about mileage and more about giving the northern Andes room to unfold around us.
Celendín is known throughout the Cajamarca region for its traditional hatmakers. Artisans here still weave paja toquilla hats by hand, using techniques learned through families and refined over years of practice.
These are not costume pieces. The hats remain part of everyday highland dress, shaped by local identity, climate, pride, and the practical needs of people who spend much of their lives outdoors beneath the Andean sun.
We’ll visit local hatmakers and see how the process begins with fine natural fibers and slowly becomes something elegant, durable, and unmistakably regional. The work is quiet and exacting: selecting the fiber, weaving, tightening, shaping, trimming, and finishing each piece by hand.
It is difficult to appreciate the patience involved until you are standing close enough to watch the movement of the fingers and see how slowly the pattern grows. A finished hat may look simple from a distance, but watching one being made changes the way you see it.
This artisan visit is one of the reasons the overnight in Celendín adds so much to the route. Instead of passing through on the way to somewhere else, we have time to meet people whose craft still belongs to daily life in the northern Andes.
The motorcycles brought us here, but the hands of the hatmakers are what make the stop memorable.
The evening in Celendín is quieter than the larger cities and more closely tied to the surrounding countryside. After checking in, there is time to walk the plaza, feel the cooler mountain air, and settle into the pace of a town that still revolves around farming, local trade, family businesses, and the communities spread across the surrounding hills.
This overnight also puts us in exactly the right place for tomorrow. The next ride leads toward the Marañón canyon and Leymebamba, one of the most dramatic stretches of the entire Lost Kingdoms journey.
Tonight gives the route room to breathe before the mountains become much bigger.
Celendín is closely associated with the traditional handwoven hats of the Cajamarca highlands. The craft requires patience, repetition, and a trained eye, with each hat taking shape slowly from fine natural fibers worked entirely by hand.
Once you watch the weaving up close, the hat stops being simply something people wear and becomes a small piece of highland identity — practical, personal, and shaped by generations of local knowledge.
Day 10
Celendín – Marañón Canyon – Leymebamba
The day begins in Celendín, high in the Cajamarca region, with cool morning air still sitting in the streets and the mountains waiting just beyond town. After yesterday’s shorter ride and time with the local hatmakers, the group is ready for one of the great road days of the entire tour.
Your Ecuador Freedom guide will set the pace carefully today, because this is not a route to rush. It is a road to respect, to read, and to remember.
From Celendín, the pavement begins dropping away from the highlands toward the immense canyon of the Río Marañón, one of Peru’s great rivers and one of the major headwaters of the Amazon system.
The road quickly settles into a long sequence of switchbacks and mountain curves. Green highland slopes begin giving way to cactus, exposed rock, dry scrub, and increasingly warm air. You can feel the temperature changing through your jacket as the road falls toward the river, one curve at a time.
This is the kind of riding that is difficult to understand from a photograph or a line on a map. The turns stack below you like a staircase carved into the mountainside, with the Marañón far beneath and the opposite wall of the canyon waiting in the distance.
Your guide’s experience matters here — reading the surface, watching for local traffic, setting a safe rhythm, and giving everyone enough room to enjoy one of the most spectacular paved mountain descents in South America.
At the bottom, near Balsas, the route crosses the Marañón. It is a hard, dry, powerful place — sun, rock, river, and heat, with the canyon walls rising sharply on both sides.
The temperature at the river can feel almost impossible when you remember the cool air of Celendín only a few hours earlier. This is vertical geography at full strength: in the course of a morning ride, we have descended from green Andean farmland into a hot, dry canyon that feels like an entirely different region of Peru.
And then we start climbing again.
The second half of the day takes us from the Marañón toward Chachapoya country on a paved mountain road built into the slopes above the canyon. The climb is full of switchbacks, tight corners, changing views, and long stretches where the road seems to trace every fold in the mountains.
This is engaging riding that rewards concentration and a smooth rhythm. There is no off-road experience required, but it is a day for experienced riders who are comfortable with mountain roads, sustained curves, elevation changes, and plenty of time in the saddle.
As we gain altitude, the landscape begins transforming again. The dry canyon gradually softens. Scrub gives way to greener slopes, scattered farms, cooler air, and cloud-shadowed ridges that hint at the high jungle ahead.
Near Chacanto, another change arrives through your helmet before you necessarily see it: the smell of lemon trees.
It is one of those details no elevation profile can capture — the sudden scent of citrus in warm mountain air, the engine ticking beneath you, the road still climbing, and the enormous Marañón canyon dropping away behind us. Small moments like this become unexpectedly vivid after the trip is over.
From Chacanto toward Leymebamba, the road becomes one of the most memorable stretches of the entire Lost Kingdoms tour. It is intimate, twisting, and completely absorbed into the mountains. Curves keep arriving, valleys open and close, and the scenery continues its transformation from dry canyon country into the greener, mistier highlands associated with the Chachapoya world.
At one bend the mountains crowd close around the road; at the next, an entire valley suddenly opens below. The pavement seems to follow the natural contours of the slopes, giving the motorcycle a rhythm that is difficult to reproduce anywhere else.
This is the reason riders come this far.
Your guide keeps the group focused and flowing through this extraordinary section, balancing the joy of the road with the realities of remote mountain travel. Local traffic, weather, loose material on the pavement, blind corners, and changing light all deserve attention. Ridden patiently and smoothly, the route becomes one of the defining experiences of the journey.
By the time we arrive in Leymebamba, the day feels much larger than the mileage suggests. This small mountain town sits in a green valley surrounded by steep slopes, cool air, and the quiet presence of the Chachapoya world.
Think about the geography we have crossed in a single day. We began in the cool agricultural highlands around Celendín, dropped thousands of feet into the hot, dry Marañón canyon, crossed one of the great headwaters of the Amazon, and then climbed all the way back into cool, green Chachapoya country.
After the heat, the canyon, the lemon trees, and mile after mile of mountain curves, Leymebamba feels like a refuge — slower, greener, and tucked into a landscape that seems to hold its stories close.
Tonight we stay at one of our favorite places on the entire tour: Kenti Tambo Hummingbird Inn, set on a hillside overlooking the Museo Leymebamba. The property consists of just three bungalows surrounded by lush gardens and cloudforest, with hummingbirds constantly moving through the flowers and trees.
What makes Kenti Tambo especially remarkable is the forest itself. In fewer than twenty years, the owners transformed what had been a barren hillside into a thriving landscape of native trees and plants. Today the property is alive with hummingbirds and other wildlife. After a day spent crossing the Marañón and climbing through the mountains, arriving here feels like finding a small sanctuary hidden in the cloudforest.
The food is another reason we love staying here. Meals are genuinely home-cooked, combining Peruvian and international dishes made from fresh, mostly locally sourced ingredients. They make their own bread, yogurt, farmer’s cheese, and jams, while much of the produce comes from their own rain-watered garden, grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
The garden produces everything from lettuce, arugula, carrots, and beets to rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries, and fresh herbs, and the property even raises its own pigs. Breakfast continues the theme with homemade bread and cheese, ham, fresh fruit, yogurt, granola, and eggs, pancakes, or French toast made to order.
At the bottom of the property, the Kentikafé serves locally grown coffee, tea, brownies, cakes, and sandwiches. The meals here are the kind that stay with us long after the tour — fresh ingredients, home cooking, and the feeling that someone genuinely cared about what was put on the table.
The motorcycles cool down in the cloudforest while hummingbirds work the gardens around us. Celendín gave us the highland morning, the Marañón gave us scale, Chacanto gave us lemon trees in the canyon air, and Kenti Tambo gives us exactly the kind of ending this day deserves: good food, cool mountain air, hummingbirds, and a quiet place above Leymebamba.
The Río Marañón is one of the most important river systems in South America. It begins high in the Andes and eventually joins the Ucayali to form the Amazon River.
Crossing it here gives you an extraordinary sense of the continent’s geography: water running through this hot, dry Andean canyon will eventually become part of the enormous river system flowing through the world’s greatest tropical rainforest and onward to the Atlantic Ocean.
Day 11
Leymebamba – Kuelap – Gocta
The day begins in Leymebamba, and we do not have far to go for our first stop. Just below Kenti Tambo is one of the most fascinating museums in northern Peru, the Museo Leymebamba, built to house and protect the extraordinary collection recovered from the cliffside mausoleums near Laguna de los Cóndores.
Inside are mummies, ceramics, textiles, carved wooden objects, quipus, and burial offerings associated with the Chachapoya and the later Inca presence in the region. Together they provide a remarkable window into the beliefs, craftsmanship, funerary traditions, and daily lives of people who inhabited these remote cloudforest mountains centuries ago.
The museum gives shape and meaning to everything we will see later at Kuelap. The Chachapoya stop being simply the mysterious Warriors of the Clouds and become real people: skilled builders and artisans connected by mountain trade networks, communities, rituals, and a complex relationship with the cliffs, caves, forests, and mountains surrounding them.
The mummies are haunting, the textiles remarkably delicate, and the setting itself seems inseparable from the collection. Outside are green mountains, hummingbirds, cool air, and cloudforest. Inside are the people who lived and died in that landscape centuries ago.
Some of the greatest mysteries involve the way the Chachapoya treated their dead. Across this region they placed human remains in cliffside mausoleums and distinctive anthropomorphic sarcophagi, sometimes in locations high above the valleys that remain extraordinarily difficult to reach, even with modern machinery and and helicopters.
The stylized human forms seem to watch from the cliffs, positioned between the valleys below and the mountains and clouds above. Their faces are strange and remarkably expressive, and seeing them alongside the mummies, textiles, ceramics, and other artifacts in Leymebamba inevitably raises questions about who these people were and where they came from.
One of the more fascinating theories concerns possible ancient European ancestry or contact. Early Spanish chroniclers described some Chachapoya as unusually fair-skinned, and over the years those accounts, together with interpretations of certain mummies, sarcophagi, and artistic representations, have fueled speculation that their story may be more complicated than we currently understand.
There is no definitive answer, which is part of what makes the question so interesting. When you look at some of the faces represented in Chachapoya artifacts and sarcophagi, it is easy to understand why the theory has persisted. You may find yourself staring at them and wondering the same thing.
Maybe future discoveries will give us a clearer answer. Maybe they will raise entirely new questions. That uncertainty is part of the fascination of the Lost Kingdoms. Human history is filled with migrations, encounters, civilizations, and connections we are still trying to understand, and northern Peru is a wonderful place to be reminded of how much of the story remains unfinished.
We will leave you to look at the evidence, hear the different ideas, and draw your own conclusions. In a place like this, wondering is half the fun.
After the museum, we leave Leymebamba and ride north through the green folds of the Chachapoya highlands. The Andes here have changed again. Bare mountains and dry canyon country have given way to cloudforest, steep green valleys, wet vegetation, and ridgelines that appear and disappear behind moving mist.
The paved roads wind through small villages and mountain country that sees a fraction of the international tourism found around Cusco and Machu Picchu. This is one of the qualities that makes the Lost Kingdoms route so special. We are riding through one of Peru’s great archaeological regions, yet much of it still feels wonderfully removed from the country's better-known tourist circuit.
The great destination today is Kuelap, the massive mountaintop citadel built by the Chachapoya culture centuries before the Inca took control of the region.
Long before the Inca pushed into these mountains, the Chachapoya built fortified settlements, circular stone houses, ceremonial structures, cliff tombs, and communities throughout the cloudforest. Kuelap is their most famous surviving monument — an enormous stone complex sitting high above the surrounding valleys.
Its massive walls rise from the ridge like the sides of a ship stranded in the clouds. Within them are the remains of hundreds of circular structures, ceremonial spaces, narrow passageways, and distinctive entrances that constrict as they lead into the complex.
Moss grows between the stones. Bromeliads and other plants cling to the walls. Mist moves across the mountains, opening and closing views across valleys that seem to fall away forever.
We will take our time here, exploring the archaeological complex according to the access arrangements in place at the time of our visit. Your guides help connect what we saw that morning in the Leymebamba Museum with what now surrounds us in stone: the same people whose dead were placed in remote cliffs also built one of the most extraordinary mountain settlements in South America.
From Kuelap, the Chachapoya world begins to make more sense. These mountains were their home, and their architecture belongs to the terrain. Circular buildings occupy ridges and slopes, enormous walls follow the contours of the mountain, and the surrounding cloudforest seems to be part of the site rather than simply scenery around it.
Standing high above the valleys with damp mountain air on your face, it becomes much easier to understand why the Chachapoya became known as the Warriors of the Clouds.
After Kuelap, we return to the motorcycles and continue toward Gocta. The road drops and bends through increasingly lush country as we move into another deep green valley. Warm air, wet leaves, birdsong, and the smell of vegetation replace the cooler air around the high ridges.
Then, through breaks in the mountains, we begin to see the enormous cliffs surrounding Gocta.
Our destination is Gocta Andes Lodge, one of the most memorable places we stay on the entire Lost Kingdoms tour. The lodge occupies a spectacular position facing the valley, with Gocta Falls dropping from the cliffs directly across from the property.
It is difficult to imagine a better arrival after a day spent exploring the Chachapoya world. The motorcycles are parked, the riding gear comes off, and there in front of us is a waterfall dropping hundreds of meters through a wall of green mountains.
The lodge is designed around that view, with gardens, comfortable rooms, terraces, and a pool overlooking the valley. Clouds move across the cliffs, birds work the vegetation around the property, and Gocta Falls appears and disappears as the weather changes.
After Leymebamba’s mummies, the unanswered questions, the mountain roads, and the stone walls of Kuelap, the evening becomes wonderfully simple: a good meal, a cold drink, boots off, and one of the great views of the entire journey stretching out in front of us.
The Chachapoya placed many of their dead in extraordinarily difficult-to-reach locations, including cliffside mausoleums and anthropomorphic sarcophagi positioned high above the valleys.
Their origins, beliefs, burial practices, and relationships with neighboring Andean peoples continue to generate questions. Archaeology has answered many of them, but certainly not all — one of the reasons exploring Chachapoya country still carries such a powerful sense of discovery.
Day 12
Rest Day at Gocta Lodge
This morning there is nowhere we need to ride. The motorcycles stay parked, the boots can stay off, and Gocta Andes Lodge gives us a very good reason to remain exactly where we are. From the lodge, Gocta Falls drops from the enormous green cliffs across the valley, appearing and disappearing as clouds move through the mountains.
After the extraordinary roads, archaeological sites, and long days that brought us into Chachapoya country, this is a chance to slow everything down. Coffee tastes better when you can drink it while staring across a valley at one of Peru’s great waterfalls.
For those ready to trade motorcycle boots for hiking shoes, the main adventure of the day is the hike to Gocta Falls. Accompanied by a local guide — and sometimes a local dog or two that decides to come along — we follow the trail through cloudforest, small farms, and rural communities toward the base of the falls.
The trail can be muddy and humid, with sections of climbing and descending as it follows the contours of the valley. Birds call from the forest, insects buzz in the vegetation, horses and mules occasionally pass on the trail, and water seems to be moving everywhere.
As we get closer, Gocta begins to take over the landscape. You hear it before you fully see it. The distant waterfall that looked almost delicate from the lodge becomes a deep roar coming through the forest, and glimpses through the trees reveal just how enormous the cliffs really are.
Gocta is part of the living landscape of the Chachapoyas region, surrounded by old stories, local beliefs, farms, trails, and communities that existed here long before the waterfall became internationally famous. Walking instead of riding gives us time to notice the smaller details: orchids, bromeliads, butterflies, birds, cultivated fields, and the transition between farmland and cloudforest.
Of course, this is a rest day. Nobody is required to hike anywhere.
Gocta Andes Lodge is a destination in its own right, and spending the day here is an equally good decision. The pool looks directly across the valley toward the waterfall, gardens surround the property, and there are plenty of places to read, have another coffee, take a nap, or simply watch the weather move across the cliffs.
Gocta changes constantly. One moment the entire waterfall is visible against the green mountainside; later, clouds roll through and erase half of it. Sunlight breaks through, mist rises from the valley, birds move through the gardens, and then the waterfall appears again.
After days measured in miles, switchbacks, archaeological sites, and mountain passes, there is something deeply satisfying about spending a few hours measuring absolutely nothing.
If you still feel like exploring, your motorcycle is available and Chachapoyas is close enough for an easy ride into town.
Chachapoyas has a completely different character from the coastal cities and highland towns we have already visited. Whitewashed colonial buildings, wooden balconies, tiled roofs, narrow streets, cafés, shops, and a handsome central plaza give it the relaxed atmosphere of a mountain town that remains closely connected to the countryside surrounding it.
It is worth parking the motorcycle and wandering.
Small galleries and artisan shops offer textiles and regional crafts, while cafés provide an opportunity to try locally grown coffee from the surrounding mountains. Restaurants draw from both Andean and Amazonian traditions, with potatoes, corn, trout, herbs, tropical fruits, local cheeses, and other ingredients reflecting Chachapoyas' position between the high Andes and the Amazon Basin.
There is no particular mission here. Walk the plaza. Find a good coffee. Browse a shop. Have a long lunch. Watch people go about their afternoon. After so many days spent following a route, sometimes the best way to understand a place is to stop following one.
By late afternoon, everyone gradually finds their way back to Gocta Andes Lodge. Some will return muddy and tired from the waterfall trail. Others may have spent the day wandering Chachapoyas. A few may have accomplished little more than moving between breakfast, the pool, lunch, and a comfortable chair overlooking the valley.
All are perfectly acceptable ways to spend Day 12.
As evening settles over the valley, the waterfall fades into the cliffs and the sounds of the forest become more noticeable. We come back together for dinner, cold drinks, and an easy evening with nowhere else to be.
Tomorrow the motorcycles point north again and the long journey back toward Ecuador begins. Tonight, we are still deep in Chachapoya country, with Gocta Falls across the valley and one more evening to enjoy being here.
The Chachapoyas region is often associated with the Cloud People, a fitting name for a civilization whose settlements, fortresses, tombs, and sacred places were scattered across mist-covered mountains, cliffs, and cloudforest.
Their world was never centered on a single great city. It stretched across an enormous mountain landscape connected by trails, villages, ceremonial sites, cliff tombs, and fortified settlements — many of which are still being studied today.
Day 13
Chachapoyas – Huancabamba – Canchaque
After our rest day at Gocta, it is time to ride again — and Day 13 gives us plenty of road. We leave the green world of Chachapoyas behind and begin the long journey west across the Andes toward the Pacific side of Peru. This is one of those days when the motorcycle is exactly where you want to be: paved mountain roads, enormous canyons, major elevation changes, and curve after curve through a part of northern Peru that sees remarkably little international tourism.
The scenery changes constantly. We begin among the wetter eastern mountains, climb through cooler high country, cross open ridges, descend into river valleys, and work our way toward the drier western side of the Andes. The temperature changes with the elevation, and so do the smells coming through your helmet: damp vegetation, eucalyptus, grass, woodsmoke, warm earth, and eventually dust.
These are paved roads built around the shape of the mountains rather than through them. They follow canyon walls, wrap around ridges, drop toward rivers, and climb the other side in long strings of bends. There is very little time for the motorcycle to remain upright for long. Find the rhythm and the miles seem to disappear beneath you.
This is experienced-rider country, and your Ecuador Freedom guide sets a smooth pace that gives everyone room to enjoy it. Local traffic, animals, blind corners, weather, and occasional changes in the pavement are simply part of riding in the Andes. The reward is an entire day of the kind of roads we came to northern Peru to find.
Somewhere along the way, we stop for a hearty Andean lunch. Up here, lunch tends to be straightforward and filling: local ingredients, generous portions, something hot, and enough time out of the riding gear to be ready for another afternoon of curves.
Then we continue toward Huancabamba, a remote mountain town with a reputation unlike anywhere else on this journey.
For generations, Peruvians have traveled here seeking the help of curanderos and brujos — traditional healers whose practices draw on medicinal plants, ritual cleansing, sacred lakes, mountain spirits, Indigenous traditions, and beliefs that reach back long before the Spanish arrived.
Huancabamba's reputation extends far beyond these mountains. People come here looking for healing, guidance, good fortune, protection, answers to personal problems, or sometimes simply because conventional solutions have failed them. Some of the ceremonies are associated with the remote sacred lakes of Las Huaringas, high in the mountains above the region.
Whether you arrive as a believer, a skeptic, or simply curious, the tradition is fascinating. These practices remain part of life here rather than something reconstructed for visitors. Catholic imagery can exist beside older Indigenous beliefs, medicinal plants beside spiritual rituals, and modern life beside ideas about the power of mountains and water that have survived for centuries.
We don't need to decide what is possible. We are here to see another side of Peru, ask questions, and meet people in a place where the boundaries between medicine, faith, tradition, and the supernatural are drawn differently than they may be at home.
Leaving Huancabamba, we return to the curves. The road works its way across another succession of ridges and canyons as we continue toward the western slopes of the Andes.
Along the way we pass through Palambla, where wood-fired ovens give us another good reason to stop.
You smell the bread before you see where it is coming from. Smoke and warm flour drift through the mountain air from ovens that have been baking bread for local families and travelers for generations. There is nothing complicated about the stop: fresh bread, a roadside town, motorcycles parked outside, and a few minutes talking with the people who made it.
These are often the moments that survive longest after a trip. You may forget the name of a particular mountain pass. You probably won't forget standing beside your motorcycle in a tiny Peruvian village tearing into bread that came out of a wood-fired oven minutes earlier.
As we descend toward Canchaque, the landscape changes once more. Green returns to the slopes, waterfalls appear in the folds of the mountains, and we begin riding into coffee country.
Small farms occupy the steep hillsides, where altitude, shade, rainfall, and mild temperatures create excellent conditions for coffee. This is agriculture on a human scale. Families grow, pick, wash, dry, roast, and sell coffee produced on mountainsides that would make mechanized farming nearly impossible.
When the season is right, red coffee cherries appear on the plants and beans can be seen drying in the sun. Coffee is part of the landscape here — something growing beside the road and being worked by the people living in the houses we pass.
Canchaque sits among these green western slopes, surrounded by coffee farms, forested mountains, waterfalls, and cooler air. After hours of crossing the Andes, the arrival is a dramatic contrast to the country we rode through earlier in the day.
We spend the night at the comfortable and friendly El Cafetal Hotel. It is an appropriate place to finish a day that ends in coffee country: a relaxed mountain hotel where we can park the motorcycles, get out of the gear, eat well, and settle into the cooler evening.
By dinner, Gocta seems much farther away than the day's mileage suggests. We have crossed climate zones, canyons and high ridges, visited a town famous for healers and sacred traditions, eaten bread from a wood-fired oven, and finished among the coffee-covered mountains of Peru's western Andes.
And most of the distance between them came with the motorcycle leaned into a curve.
Huancabamba is famous throughout Peru for its traditional healers and the sacred lakes of Las Huaringas. For generations, people have traveled into these remote northern mountains seeking cleansing, healing, protection, and guidance through traditions that combine Indigenous beliefs, medicinal plants, ritual practices, and later Catholic influences.
Some mysteries are archaeological. Others are still very much alive.
Day 14
Canchaque – Chulucanas – Macará
The day begins in the coffee-growing hills of Canchaque, where the morning air is cool, green, and heavy with the smell of damp earth, woodsmoke, and coffee plants. Your Ecuador Freedom guide leads the group down the western slopes of the Andes, following a road that winds through forested hills, small farms, river valleys, and villages clinging to the mountainsides.
The transition comes quickly. As we lose elevation, the air grows warmer, the mountains begin to open, and the greener highland landscape gives way to drier country. Curves through the hills gradually mix with faster open sections and village streets, where mototaxis, farm traffic, dogs, and roadside activity keep the ride connected to everyday life in northern Peru.
By the time we reach the lower country, the Andes already feel different behind us. The landscape is warmer, broader, and more exposed, and the road is carrying us toward one of the most distinctive artisan towns in northern Peru.
Chulucanas is famous for its ceramics, a tradition rooted in the ancient Vicús and Tallán cultures of the Piura region. Here, local potters continue to shape clay using techniques that have been passed down and adapted over generations.
The finished pieces are immediately recognizable: rounded forms, deep black finishes, warm earth tones, polished surfaces, and designs that range from simple geometric patterns to animals, human figures, and forms that echo older pre-Hispanic traditions.
The process is slow and physical. Clay is shaped and burnished by hand, decorated with natural slips, then carefully fired and smoked with organic material to create the distinctive contrasts for which Chulucanas pottery is known. Some traditional techniques use materials such as mango leaves during the smoking process to deepen the black finish and create negative designs.
Seeing the artisans at work gives the stop its meaning. These are not anonymous factory pieces. Each object comes from local clay, heat, smoke, inherited technique, and the practiced hands of someone who has spent years learning the craft.
You have to stand close enough to smell the clay, watch the smoke-blackening process, and see the concentration in the maker’s hands to understand how much work lives inside a single finished piece. After days spent exploring ancient cultures through ruins and museums, Chulucanas gives us a living connection to that past — art still coming from the earth, still made by hand, and still tied to place.
After Chulucanas, the motorcycles turn north toward Ecuador. The country opens into dry forest, scrubland, irrigated fields, riverbeds, tropical fruit stands, and long stretches of warm lowland road.
This is very different from the cloudforest around Gocta or the cooler highlands of Cajamarca. Thorn trees, dust, goats, ceibo trees, and heat shimmering above the pavement create a borderland landscape with its own character.
The farther north we ride, the closer Ecuador feels.
After crossing the border, we continue toward Macará and one of the most unusual overnight stops on the tour: Jorupe Reserve, a biological reserve protecting one of the rarest and most threatened ecosystems in the region.
Jorupe protects Tumbesian dry forest, a landscape that stretches through parts of southwestern Ecuador and northwestern Peru. Giant ceibo trees, thorny vegetation, seasonal streams, deciduous forest, and a remarkable concentration of endemic wildlife define the reserve.
At first glance, dry forest can seem sparse compared with cloudforest or rainforest, but it is an extraordinarily specialized ecosystem. Plants and animals here have adapted to long dry seasons, intense heat, irregular rainfall, and sudden bursts of green when the rains arrive.
Jorupe is especially important because so much Tumbesian dry forest has disappeared over time. The reserve provides habitat for numerous endemic and threatened species, particularly birds found only in this small corner of Ecuador and Peru.
Staying here also means our visit directly supports the conservation work being done to protect this landscape.
The night at Jorupe Reserve is simple, comfortable, and immersive. This is a working biological reserve rather than a resort, and that is part of what makes the stay memorable.
Expect dark skies, dry leaves underfoot, forest sounds, ceibo branches silhouetted against the evening light, and the feeling of being close to the landscape again after days of cities, museums, mountain lodges, and long roads.
As the temperature drops after sunset, birds call from the trees and insects take over the night chorus. Dinner is simple, the surroundings are quiet, and the pace slows naturally.
After the artisan workshops of Chulucanas and the long warm ride back into Ecuador, Jorupe gives us a very different kind of finish to the day — remote, peaceful, and rooted in conservation.
It is also a reminder that this journey is not only about riding through remarkable landscapes. Sometimes where we choose to stop helps protect them.
Chulucanas ceramics are especially known for their polished black-and-cream contrast. Traditional techniques use smoke from burning organic material, including mango leaves, to darken selected areas of the clay and create the distinctive negative designs associated with the region.
Jorupe Reserve protects Tumbesian dry forest, one of the most threatened ecosystems in South America and home to numerous plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth.
Day 15
Macará – Loja – Saraguro – Cuenca
The day begins in the dry forest near Macará, at the Jocotoco Foundation’s reserve, where the morning comes alive before the engines start. Birds call from thorn trees, insects move in the brush, and the first light filters through pale trunks and dry leaves in one of Ecuador’s most fragile ecosystems.
Leaving the reserve, we begin climbing back into the Andes. The warm, dry air of Ecuador’s southern borderlands gradually gives way to cooler mountain wind as the road rises through scrub forest, folded hills, small farms, and quiet settlements. This is one of the great pleasures of riding in Ecuador: within a few hours, the country changes around you completely.
The colors shift from dusty browns and thorny greens to richer mountain slopes, and the smells change too — dry leaves and sunbaked earth giving way to eucalyptus, damp soil, roadside cooking, and the cool breath of higher elevations.
The road toward Loja is a beautiful southern Ecuador ride, with long climbs, exposed corners, high valleys, and pavement that seems to follow the natural folds of the mountains. Your Ecuador Freedom guide keeps the pace smooth through the changing terrain, knowing where slow trucks tend to gather, where animals wander near the shoulder, and where it is worth stopping to take in the view.
Loja is one of Ecuador’s most graceful southern cities, known for its music, education, old churches, plazas, cafés, and strong regional identity. The city has a calmness that feels different from the larger highland centers farther north.
Depending on timing, Loja gives us a natural pause in the ride — a place to stretch, drink coffee, take in the historic center, and feel the transition from the dry south into the more cultivated highlands of southern Ecuador.
From Loja, the route continues north toward Saraguro, home to one of Ecuador’s most culturally distinctive Indigenous communities.
The Saraguro are known for their strong identity, traditional black clothing, wide-brimmed hats, silver jewelry, beadwork, weaving, music, agriculture, and deep connection to the land. Many Saraguro traditions hold that their ancestors were relocated into this region by the Inca as part of the mitmaqkuna system, in which communities were moved throughout the empire to strengthen political control, agriculture, and trade.
Over centuries, the Saraguro developed a powerful local identity that remains visible in everyday life, dress, farming, ceremonies, markets, and community organization.
One commonly repeated local explanation says the traditional black clothing represents mourning for the death of Atahualpa, although the history and meaning of Saraguro dress are broader and have developed over centuries of adaptation, resistance, and community pride.
One of the most striking parts of Saraguro culture is the jewelry. Saraguro women are known for wearing layered necklaces made from rows of colorful beads arranged across the chest in bold, intricate patterns. Along with silver pins, woven belts, embroidered blouses, black wool skirts, and distinctive hats, these pieces form part of a living cultural language — a way of carrying identity, history, beauty, and belonging into modern Ecuador.
The ride through Saraguro country is one of the day’s highlights. The road moves through cool high valleys, patchwork fields, grazing animals, eucalyptus groves, pine stands, market towns, and ridgelines that open and close with every curve.
Your guide helps connect what we are seeing from the motorcycles with the culture around us — the clothing, crops, markets, architecture, and the way this highland landscape is worked and lived in.
From Saraguro, the road continues toward Cuenca, one of Ecuador’s most beautiful colonial cities. The approach brings cooler temperatures, sweeping curves, highland towns, red-tiled roofs, church domes, rivers, stone bridges, and the feeling of arriving somewhere both refined and deeply rooted.
After the dry forest, southern borderlands, long mountain roads, and the cultural richness of Saraguro, Cuenca feels like a reward at the end of the day.
We settle in for two nights at Hotel Victoria, a historic boutique hotel overlooking the Río Tomebamba in the heart of Cuenca. Its location puts us within easy walking distance of the historic center, cafés, galleries, museums, restaurants, river walks, and the old stone streets that make Cuenca such an enjoyable city to explore on foot.
The hotel itself fits the city beautifully, with polished wood, traditional details, quiet interior spaces, and terraces overlooking the river. After the dry forest and long ride north, two nights here give us time to unpack a little, rest properly, and enjoy Cuenca at a slower pace.
In the evening, we’ll walk through Cuenca with the guide and experience the city at street level. Its historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, known for colonial architecture, flower markets, the blue-domed cathedral, river walks, old homes with carved balconies, and a refined but unmistakably Ecuadorian street life.
Cuenca is best felt slowly: church bells, footsteps on stone, the smell of bread and coffee, rain on old pavement, families in the plazas, and warm light spilling from cafés and restaurants.
By the end of the day, we have crossed another remarkable slice of Ecuador — from the dry forest near Macará, through Loja’s southern highland culture, into the living Indigenous world of Saraguro, and finally to the colonial beauty of Cuenca.
Cuenca’s historic center was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its well-preserved colonial architecture and the way Spanish urban planning blended with local Andean traditions.
The city is also one of Ecuador’s great craft centers, known for ceramics, jewelry, textiles, and the famous woven hats often called Panama hats — which actually originated in Ecuador.
Day 16
Rest Day in Cuenca
Today is about slowing down and enjoying Cuenca at your own pace. Based in the heart of this UNESCO-listed city, you can spend the morning wandering cobblestone streets, exploring plazas and churches, stopping for coffee, or following the river through the historic center.
Cuenca is one of those cities that rewards walking. Flower-filled courtyards, old balconies, blue-domed cathedrals, bakeries, cafés, and small shops are packed into a compact center that is easy to explore without a plan.
Culture is everywhere around you. Visit historic churches and small museums, browse artisan workshops, or wander through the famous flower market near Parque Calderón. Cuenca is also one of Ecuador’s great craft centers, with ceramics, jewelry, textiles, leatherwork, and traditional hatmaking all represented in workshops and shops throughout the city.
Lunch can be as simple or as leisurely as you want it to be. The city has everything from traditional Ecuadorian kitchens serving soups, trout, and highland dishes to contemporary restaurants built around local ingredients. Your guides are nearby if you want recommendations for places they know and enjoy.
If your body is asking for a quieter day, Cuenca has hot-spring spas, massages, and day-spa options that work well after two weeks on the motorcycles. Or simply find a café, walk the river, browse the markets, and let the day take care of itself.
If you still feel like riding, the motorcycle is yours for the day. Cajas National Park lies just west of the city, and your guides can point you toward the route for a run through high-altitude páramo, glacial lakes, and sweeping mountain roads. It is an easy way to add a few more curves to the day without turning the rest day into another scheduled group ride.
Or keep the motorcycles parked and continue exploring Cuenca on foot. That flexibility is the point.
As evening settles in, the city becomes even better on foot. Church domes light up, restaurants fill, and the streets around the historic center take on a quieter rhythm. With another night at Hotel Victoria, there is no need to rush anywhere.
Whether the day was spent walking, shopping, soaking, eating, riding out toward Cajas, or doing very little at all, this is time to recharge before the final stage of the journey begins.
Cuenca’s full name is Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca, a reference to the four rivers — Tomebamba, Yanuncay, Tarqui, and Machángara — that run through the city.
Just west of town, Cajas National Park contains more than two hundred glacial lakes along with rare Polylepis forests. Its high wetlands help supply Cuenca’s drinking water and feed rivers that eventually reach the Pacific.
Day 17
Cuenca – Chordeleg – Paute – Macas
After a relaxed breakfast in the historic center of Cuenca, we load the motorcycles and turn east. Church domes, tiled roofs, flower markets, and the cool elegance of the city quickly give way to green valleys, farms, orchards, and the artisan towns scattered through the hills beyond.
The road begins gently, with generous paved curves through sculpted rock outcrops, fruit orchards, flower plantations, and small communities. This is the kind of morning that lets you settle back into the motorcycle after a rest day while the landscape begins changing around you.
It is also one of Ecuador’s great artisan corridors, a region where handwork still matters and skills continue to pass from one generation to the next.
Near San Bartolomé, family luthiers still build guitars by hand in small workshops. Step inside and the air is filled with sawdust, varnish, cut wood, and glue. Woods are selected for tone, grain, and weight; necks are shaped by hand; bodies are bent and joined; and every surface is sanded, adjusted, and finished slowly.
The value of the stop is seeing the process rather than simply the finished instrument. These are working traditions, carried on by families who have spent years learning how small changes in wood and shape affect the voice of a guitar.
Nearby Chordeleg is known for fine filigree jewelry, where threads of silver and gold are twisted, curled, soldered, and polished into earrings, pendants, rings, and traditional designs that can look almost like metal lace.
In Gualaceo, the artisan tradition shifts again to leatherwork, footwear, textiles, and handwoven macanas made with ikat techniques and natural dyes. Boots are cut and stitched by hand, textiles are tied and dyed before weaving, and the work still depends on patience, repetition, and apprenticeship.
These towns give the morning a human scale. We are not simply riding through beautiful valleys; we are moving through communities where people still make things slowly, carefully, and by hand.
Following the Río Cutilcay, the road brings us into Paute, where the air is warmer and the valley is filled with fruit, flowers, small restaurants, and produce stands. It is a natural place to stop, stretch, and pick up something local — perhaps a jar of jam for the panniers — before the route begins climbing and turning once again.
Then the character of the day changes completely.
The road leaves the gentler agricultural valleys and begins crossing the eastern Andes toward the Amazon Basin. Mountains crowd closer to the pavement, waterfalls begin appearing beside the road, and tunnels cut directly through the rock where there was simply nowhere else for the highway to go.
Mist gathers in the trees. Streams cross beneath bridges and spill down green cliffs. The air cools as we climb, then begins warming again as the road works its way toward the eastern side of the range.
This is one of the great ecological transitions of the tour. Highland farms give way to cloudforest, and then the cloudforest begins opening toward the warmer, wetter Amazon foothills. You can watch the vegetation change from the motorcycle: larger leaves, denser forest, hanging vines, wetter rock faces, and water everywhere.
The road itself is superb. Curves stack through steep green mountains, tunnels break up the ridgelines, and waterfalls appear around bends without warning. This is paved riding through some of the most dramatic terrain in Ecuador, with the landscape constantly changing as we descend east.
As we move toward Sucúa, we enter an area closely associated with the Shuar people. “Shuar” simply means “people” in their language, and this part of the journey gives us another chance to encounter a living Indigenous culture rather than something preserved for visitors.
The Shuar have a long history of independence, resistance, and deep knowledge of the forest. Their communities have depended on rivers, medicinal plants, hunting, agriculture, family networks, ceremony, and a detailed understanding of the Amazon environment for generations.
Colonial attempts to control this region met fierce resistance, particularly when Spanish expeditions pushed into the Amazon searching for gold and territory. The Shuar became known throughout South America as formidable warriors, and that history remains an important part of their cultural memory.
Older practices such as the creation of tsantsa, or shrunken heads, ended generations ago, but they remain one of the aspects of Shuar history most outsiders recognize. Their meaning was far more complex than the curiosity-shop image later created around them, tied to warfare, ritual, spiritual beliefs, and ideas about power.
Today Shuar culture continues to evolve. Younger generations may use smartphones, attend universities, ride motorcycles, wear modern clothes, and participate fully in contemporary Ecuador while still maintaining language, ceremonies, forest knowledge, family traditions, and a strong sense of identity.
By afternoon, waterfalls seem to appear on all sides as we ride through the Amazon foothills toward Macas. The air becomes warmer and heavier, the vegetation hangs closer to the road, and the pavement may still be wet from rain even when the sky above us is clear.
The riding here has a completely different feel from the high Andes we left that morning: broad green views, wet rock, jungle vegetation, tunnels, warm air, and the constant sound of moving water.
Macas is a friendly gateway town to Ecuador’s southeastern Amazon, closely connected with the rivers, forests, and communities surrounding it.
Tonight we settle into a luxurious private cabin at Hostería Arrayán y Piedra. The cabins offer privacy and comfort while keeping us surrounded by the vegetation, humidity, and sounds of the Amazon foothills.
After a day that began among Cuenca’s churches and artisan valleys and ended among waterfalls and rainforest, a hot shower, a quiet porch, a good dinner, and the warm evening air feel like exactly the right reward.
Today’s route crosses one of Ecuador’s most dramatic ecological transitions. Rivers such as the Paute and Upano carry water east from the Andes toward the Amazon Basin, while the road takes us from highland valleys through cloudforest and into the warm tropical foothills in a single riding day.
We also pass near Sangay National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that protects an extraordinary range of environments — high páramo, cloudforest, rainforest, rivers, and active volcanoes — within one of Ecuador’s most biodiverse mountain corridors.
Day 18
Macas – Hola Vida Waterfall – Mirador Indichuris – Puyo – Puerto Misahuallí
The day begins in Macas, with the motorcycles pointed north through one of Ecuador’s great riding landscapes: the Amazon foothills running beneath the immense eastern wall of the Andes.
To the west, the mountains rise in a long green barrier, often wrapped in cloud. To the east, the land opens toward the Amazon Basin, warm, wet, and crossed by rivers flowing away from the Andes. The paved road rolls through jungle valleys, over bridges, past small settlements and fruit stands, with long sweepers and curves that make this a wonderful day to be on a motorcycle.
Water shapes everything here. Rivers appear constantly below the road, sometimes brown and swollen after rain, sometimes green or white with current. Warm air moves through your jacket, vegetation crowds close to the pavement, and the smell of wet leaves, fruit, smoke, and earth follows us north.
One of the great highlights of the day begins away from the motorcycles. Near Hola Vida Waterfall, we park the bikes, loosen the riding gear, and follow a short trail into the forest.
The temperature changes beneath the canopy and the sounds of the road disappear behind birds, insects, leaves, and moving water. The waterfall announces itself before we see it: first the low roar, then cooler air, and finally the white rush of water dropping through green forest into a natural pool below.
This is exactly the kind of stop that belongs in the middle of an Amazon riding day. After hours in warm riding gear, we can swim, cool off beneath the falls, sit on the rocks, or simply enjoy being off the motorcycles for a while with the jungle around us.
Then it is back into the gear and onto the road.
From Hola Vida, we continue toward Mirador Indichuris, one of the great viewpoints over Ecuador’s Amazon Basin.
The final approach climbs through warm tropical vegetation before the trees suddenly fall away and the landscape opens beneath us. From the mirador, layer after layer of forest stretches toward the horizon, broken by rivers, mist, distant ridges, and the enormous green expanse of the Amazon.
After spending the morning riding through valleys and forest, this is where we finally get to look down on the world we have been traveling through. The scale becomes much easier to understand from up here.
The viewpoint also brings us closer to the communities and landscapes that define this part of Ecuador — Indigenous territories, farms, rivers, forest, and small settlements spread across a region where roads are still only one part of how people move through the country.
From Indichuris, the motorcycles turn north toward Puyo, one of Ecuador’s principal Amazon gateway cities. After the quieter jungle roads, Puyo brings a sudden burst of activity: traffic, markets, cafés, restaurants, shops, motorcycles, buses, and people arriving from communities throughout the surrounding region.
Depending on timing, we may stop for coffee, fresh juice, or something to eat before continuing. Then we leave the city behind and return to greener roads as the route carries us farther into the Napo region.
The final stretch takes us toward Puerto Misahuallí, an old river town where road travel meets the waterways of the Amazon Basin. The nearby Napo River is one of the great tributaries of the Amazon system, and boats remain an important part of life here.
Misahuallí has its own unmistakable character: river traffic, small restaurants, motorcycles moving through town, tropical heat, jungle vegetation, and the resident monkeys that have become famous for wandering around the central plaza and malecón with complete confidence.
They are entertaining to watch, but they have also become extremely skilled at identifying unattended food and belongings.
We end the day at the El Jardín Misahuallí Lodge, set in lush tropical surroundings near the Napo River.
The private cabins are a highlight in themselves. After a warm day in riding gear, having your own plunge pool, quiet patio, and tropical gardens around you is an excellent way to recover.
The lodge keeps us connected to the Amazon rather than separating us from it. Warm evening air, river sounds, insects, frogs, birds, and dense vegetation surround the property as daylight fades.
By dinner, the day has given us flowing Amazon roads, powerful rivers, a jungle waterfall, one of the great views over the basin, the bustle of Puyo, and finally the river world of Misahuallí.
Now the motorcycles can cool down while we do the same.
The Napo River begins in Ecuador and flows east into Peru, eventually joining the Amazon River system. For centuries, rivers like the Napo have served as highways through a landscape where dense forest made overland travel difficult.
This part of Ecuador also sits where the eastern Andes descend into the Amazon Basin, creating an extraordinary biodiversity corridor of mountain forests, tropical lowlands, rivers, and Indigenous territories.
Day 18
Macas – Hola Vida Waterfall – Mirador Indichuris – Puyo – Puerto Misahuallí
The day begins in Macas, with the motorcycles pointed north through one of Ecuador’s great riding landscapes: the Amazon foothills running beneath the immense eastern wall of the Andes.
To the west, the mountains rise in a long green barrier, often wrapped in cloud. To the east, the land opens toward the Amazon Basin, warm, wet, and crossed by rivers flowing away from the Andes. The paved road rolls through jungle valleys, over bridges, past small settlements and fruit stands, with long sweepers and curves that make this a wonderful day to be on a motorcycle.
Water shapes everything here. Rivers appear constantly below the road, sometimes brown and swollen after rain, sometimes green or white with current. Warm air moves through your jacket, vegetation crowds close to the pavement, and the smell of wet leaves, fruit, smoke, and earth follows us north.
One of the great highlights of the day begins away from the motorcycles. Near Hola Vida Waterfall, we park the bikes, loosen the riding gear, and follow a short trail into the forest.
The temperature changes beneath the canopy and the sounds of the road disappear behind birds, insects, leaves, and moving water. The waterfall announces itself before we see it: first the low roar, then cooler air, and finally the white rush of water dropping through green forest into a natural pool below.
This is exactly the kind of stop that belongs in the middle of an Amazon riding day. After hours in warm riding gear, we can swim, cool off beneath the falls, sit on the rocks, or simply enjoy being off the motorcycles for a while with the jungle around us.
Then it is back into the gear and onto the road.
From Hola Vida, we continue toward Mirador Indichuris, one of the great viewpoints over Ecuador’s Amazon Basin.
The final approach climbs through warm tropical vegetation before the trees suddenly fall away and the landscape opens beneath us. From the mirador, layer after layer of forest stretches toward the horizon, broken by rivers, mist, distant ridges, and the enormous green expanse of the Amazon.
After spending the morning riding through valleys and forest, this is where we finally get to look down on the world we have been traveling through. The scale becomes much easier to understand from up here.
The viewpoint also brings us closer to the communities and landscapes that define this part of Ecuador — Indigenous territories, farms, rivers, forest, and small settlements spread across a region where roads are still only one part of how people move through the country.
From Indichuris, the motorcycles turn north toward Puyo, one of Ecuador’s principal Amazon gateway cities. After the quieter jungle roads, Puyo brings a sudden burst of activity: traffic, markets, cafés, restaurants, shops, motorcycles, buses, and people arriving from communities throughout the surrounding region.
Depending on timing, we may stop for coffee, fresh juice, or something to eat before continuing. Then we leave the city behind and return to greener roads as the route carries us farther into the Napo region.
The final stretch takes us toward Puerto Misahuallí, an old river town where road travel meets the waterways of the Amazon Basin. The nearby Napo River is one of the great tributaries of the Amazon system, and boats remain an important part of life here.
Misahuallí has its own unmistakable character: river traffic, small restaurants, motorcycles moving through town, tropical heat, jungle vegetation, and the resident monkeys that have become famous for wandering around the central plaza and malecón with complete confidence.
They are entertaining to watch, but they have also become extremely skilled at identifying unattended food and belongings.
We end the day at the El Jardín Misahuallí Lodge, set in lush tropical surroundings near the Napo River.
The private cabins are a highlight in themselves. After a warm day in riding gear, having your own plunge pool, quiet patio, and tropical gardens around you is an excellent way to recover.
The lodge keeps us connected to the Amazon rather than separating us from it. Warm evening air, river sounds, insects, frogs, birds, and dense vegetation surround the property as daylight fades.
By dinner, the day has given us flowing Amazon roads, powerful rivers, a jungle waterfall, one of the great views over the basin, the bustle of Puyo, and finally the river world of Misahuallí.
Now the motorcycles can cool down while we do the same.
The Napo River begins in Ecuador and flows east into Peru, eventually joining the Amazon River system. For centuries, rivers like the Napo have served as highways through a landscape where dense forest made overland travel difficult.
This part of Ecuador also sits where the eastern Andes descend into the Amazon Basin, creating an extraordinary biodiversity corridor of mountain forests, tropical lowlands, rivers, and Indigenous territories.
Day 19
Puerto Misahuallí – Paccari Chocolate Experience – Baeza – Quito
Our final day begins with one last Amazon adventure. After breakfast we'll meet our longtime friend Marco, a native Kichwa guide who has introduced our guests to the Ecuadorian Amazon for many years. Rubber boots on, life jackets buckled, we board a long motorized canoe and head upriver into the rainforest.
Marco has an uncanny ability to make the jungle understandable. What first looks like an endless wall of green quickly becomes a living community where every vine, palm, insect, and towering tree has a purpose. Plants become medicines, baskets, fishing tools, food, and shelter. Animals you would normally walk straight past suddenly become impossible to miss.
The exact morning depends on the interests of the group, the weather, and river conditions. We may walk rainforest trails, visit a local community, learn about medicinal plants and traditional forest uses, look for wildlife, swim near a waterfall, or explore another part of the river world around Misahuallí. Marco reads the conditions and helps us make the most of whatever the Amazon gives us that morning.
By the time we return, the jungle feels much less like an impenetrable wall of green and much more like someone's backyard.
Back in Puerto Misahuallí, one of the westernmost navigable ports in the Amazon Basin, the resident monkeys patrol the malecón with complete confidence, helping themselves to unattended snacks whenever visitors underestimate just how organized they really are. They're fantastic for photographs, but sunglasses, wallets, and sandwiches should stay close.
Before we begin the long climb back into the Andes, we have one of the most memorable food experiences of the tour: the Paccari Chocolate Experience.
Ecuador is one of the great cacao-growing countries of the world, and here in the Amazon we get to see where that story actually begins. We visit a local Indigenous community where cacao is part of everyday agricultural life and learn how the pods are grown and harvested and how the beans are fermented and dried before becoming chocolate.
Then we get involved ourselves. We'll roast cacao beans, work through the traditional preparation process, and discover just how far a raw cacao bean has to travel before it becomes something we'd recognize as chocolate.
Paccari has built an international reputation for Ecuadorian chocolate while working directly with local cacao producers. Experiencing cacao here, surrounded by the climate and communities where it grows, gives an entirely different appreciation for the finished chocolate.
We'll also share a traditional lunch prepared with local Amazonian ingredients. After nearly three weeks of eating our way through Ecuador and Peru, it's fitting that one of our final meals on the road connects the food directly to the people who grow it.
The road now turns west through the lush forests of Sumaco National Park. Before leaving the Amazon behind, we'll stop at a mushroom farm we never seem to drive past without pulling into.
Oyster mushrooms and shiitake grow in carefully controlled rooms, while the little shop sells Amazonian teas, medicinal herbs, spices, chocolates, and other products from the surrounding rainforest. It's a fascinating little stop and one more look at the extraordinary variety of things grown and produced in this part of Ecuador before the road begins climbing toward the Andes.
By the time we reach Baeza, it's time for one last essential stop at our friend Gina's.
Gina seems to know absolutely everyone. She served as Governor of Napo Province, and spending ten minutes in her café is enough to convince you that half the people walking through the door are old friends. The other half soon will be.
We always stop here because in the next hour we'll climb more than 8,000 feet (2,450 m) back into the Andes. Strong coffee is mandatory. So is Gina's famous chocolate cake — thick, rich, unapologetically chocolatey, and made with locally grown Amazonian cacao. Somehow the combination of caffeine and chocolate arrives in your bloodstream at exactly the right moment, just as the oxygen begins quietly negotiating for a little more attention.
Gina's café is also a gathering place for hardcore whitewater kayakers who travel from around the world to paddle the legendary rivers nearby. We always seem to end up talking with them because they're our kind of people. They wear helmets, disappear into remote places, spend unreasonable amounts of money on specialized equipment, and constantly hear that their hobby is going to get them killed. Adventure motorcyclists recognize their own immediately.
Leaving Baeza, the road begins one final climb into the Andes. Waterfalls tumble beside the highway, the air cools with every switchback, and within an hour we rise from the Amazon foothills to more than 13,300 feet / 4,050 meters. The thick green forest gradually gives way to open páramo as the road crosses the Continental Divide.
It's an extraordinary final ride. In a remarkably short distance we climb from the warm, humid Amazon through cloudforest and into the cold, open high Andes. The vegetation changes almost by the minute, waterfalls appear along the mountainsides, and the curves keep coming as we gain thousands of feet of elevation.
From the high pass, the highway descends toward Quito through mountain valleys, high lakes, and sweeping bends. The temperature begins to rise again, traffic gradually returns, and the capital appears ahead as the final miles bring us back to where the journey began.
The final approach to Quito always feels a little different.
Nearly three weeks ago, the motorcycles were unfamiliar, the road to Peru was still ahead of us, and many of the faces around the table belonged to people we had only just met.
Since then, we've ridden the Avenue of Volcanoes, climbed beneath Chimborazo, reached the Pacific, crossed into Peru, followed the northern desert through Túcume and Sipán, explored Trujillo and the great pre-Inca kingdoms of the coast, climbed back into the Andes through Cajamarca, crossed the Marañón Canyon, entered Chachapoya country, explored Kuelap and Gocta, crossed back into Ecuador, ridden through Saraguro and Cuenca, descended into the Amazon, and followed its rivers and jungle roads east of the Andes.
Somewhere along the way, the motorcycles became second nature, the roads began to make sense, and strangers became riding partners.
We roll back into Ecuador Freedom's La Carolina headquarters with dusty motorcycles, memory cards full of photographs, and a much better understanding of just how much history, geography, culture, and extraordinary riding can be packed into this corner of South America.
Our job has never really been renting motorcycles. It is introducing people to friends, places, roads, and experiences they probably never would have found on their own.
We hope you'll come back. There are still plenty of roads we haven't shown you yet.
Ecuador is one of the world's great sources of fine-flavor cacao. The country's native Nacional cacao is particularly prized for its complex floral and fruit characteristics, and cacao has been cultivated and consumed in this part of South America for thousands of years.
Today's ride also gives us one final demonstration of Ecuador's extraordinary geography. We leave the tropical Amazon Basin, climb through rainforest and cloudforest, cross the Continental Divide above 13,000 feet, and return to Quito — all in a single day.
ACCOMMODATIONS
Hacienda Andaluz
Set near Riobamba in the shadow of Chimborazo, Hostería Andaluza is a historic highland retreat with thick walls, quiet courtyards, warm interiors, and a strong sense of place. After a day of high-altitude riding and volcanic scenery, it offers a comfortable and memorable first night that feels connected to Ecuador’s history.
Oro Verde
Oro Verde Machala offers a comfortable landing after the long descent from the high Andes into Ecuador’s warm banana-growing lowlands. Spacious rooms and full-service amenities give riders time to cool down and recharge, while nearby Puerto Bolívar brings fresh seafood, salt air, and the atmosphere of Ecuador’s working coast.
Arrenas Mancora
Arennas Máncora gives the tour a well-earned two-night pause on the quieter Las Pocitas coast. Beachfront rooms, ocean views, a beautiful pool, excellent seafood, and the sound of the Pacific create the perfect place to swim, eat well, sleep deeply, and recharge before the journey continues south.
Las Horcones de Túcume
Los Horcones de Túcume sits beside the ancient adobe pyramids of Túcume, with a rustic design and local materials that fit naturally into the desert landscape. Comfortable and full of character, it keeps riders close to the archaeology and perfectly positioned for the next morning’s guided exploration of the Valley of the Pyramids.
Costa del Sol Trujillo
Costa del Sol Trujillo gives riders a comfortable base near the city’s historic center, with spacious rooms, secure parking, a pool, good food, and room to properly recharge. Its location also makes it convenient for exploring Trujillo, Chan Chan, Huanchaco, and the great archaeological sites of Peru’s northern coast.
Hotel Laguna Seca
Hotel Laguna Seca in Baños del Inca turns the Cajamarca overnight into part of the experience. Set beside thermal waters used since Inca times, it gives riders hot springs, gardens, comfortable rooms, and a calm place to recover after a day in the highlands.
Kenti Tambo Hummingbirde Inn
Kentitambo Inn in Leymebamba is surrounded by lush gardens, native trees, cloudforest, and hummingbirds. Its warm hospitality and fantastic home-cooked meals made with fresh local ingredients make this one of the most memorable stays of the tour — a quiet, welcoming retreat after an extraordinary day of mountain riding.
Gocta Lodge
Gocta Andes Lodge is one of the standout stays of the tour, set in a lush valley with direct views of Gocta Falls. Two nights here give riders time to hike, explore Chachapoyas, relax by the pool, or simply enjoy the cloudforest, birds, mist, and mountain air with the waterfall always in sight.
El Cafetal
El Cafetal in Canchaque is a comfortable mountain retreat surrounded by coffee country, green hills, and the quieter rhythm of Peru’s western Andes. After a full day of curves and changing climates, it gives riders a friendly place to eat well, cool down, and rest in a setting connected to the region’s coffee-growing culture.
Urraca Lodge
Urraca Lodge sits inside Jorupe Reserve near Macará, surrounded by Tumbesian dry forest, giant ceibo trees, reserve trails, and rare birdlife. Rustic but comfortable, it offers a memorable night in a working conservation landscape, with the added satisfaction that your stay supports the Jocotoco Foundation’s efforts to protect one of Ecuador’s most threatened ecosystems.
Hotel Victoria, Cuenca
Hotel Victoria overlooks the Tomebamba River in the heart of Cuenca, combining old-world elegance with warm hospitality. Polished wood, antiques, and flower-filled terraces reflect the city’s colonial character, while the comfortable rooms put you just steps from Cuenca’s plazas, cathedrals, restaurants, and cobblestone streets.
Arrayan y Piedra Lodge
Arrayán y Piedra near Macas features private stone cabins arranged around a large swimming pool in the lush Amazon foothills. The welcoming bar area and fantastic restaurant overlooking the Upano River make it an especially enjoyable place to spend the evening, and the cheerful staff go out of their way to make sure everyone has a good time. Comfortable, relaxed, and full of personality, it is a great reward after a day on the motorcycles.
El Jardin Misahualli Lodge
El Jardín Misahuallí Lodge sits on the banks of the Napo River, surrounded by beautiful gardens and the soothing sounds of the jungle. Private cabins with verandas, plunge pools, and hammocks blend comfort with nature, while gourmet meals made from Amazonian ingredients make it the perfect place to relax after a day’s adventure.
WHAT TO EXPECT
This guided 19-day / 18-night motorcycle adventure tour starts and ends at the Ecuador Freedom office in Quito. Because the motorcycles will enter Peru, the required cross-border documentation is prepared in advance. We still recommend arriving early enough to settle in, organize your gear, and give your body a little time to adjust to Quito’s altitude before Day 1 begins.
On the morning of departure, you’ll receive a detailed pre-ride briefing covering Ecuadorian and Peruvian rules of the road, local customs and courtesies, border-crossing procedures, riding signals, fuel stops, and group riding protocols. You’ll be assigned the adventure motorcycle of your choice, equipped with a waterproof luggage system and a tank bag if requested. The goal is to start the tour calmly and confidently, with everyone clear on how the group will ride, communicate, and handle the changing conditions ahead.
This is a fully guided motorcycle tour led by an experienced Ecuador Freedom guide who knows these roads, border crossings, hotels, towns, restaurants, and cultural stops from firsthand experience. The guide’s role goes far beyond navigation: keeping the ride flowing safely, reading road and weather conditions, managing the timing of the day, and helping you connect with the people and places along the route. Years of relationships also open doors to local guides, artisans, restaurants, communities, workshops, and experiences that would be difficult to reproduce by simply following the same line on a map.
Ecuador Freedom also operates a Ride for a Purpose program, which reflects our commitment to making motorcycle tourism useful to the communities and places we travel through. Throughout the tour, we support local guides, family-run businesses, artisans, conservation projects, and communities whenever possible, helping ensure that the journey contributes directly to the people and landscapes that make it special.
Itinerary Flexibility
The itinerary shown on this page is a general outline of the planned tour rather than a fixed schedule. Motorcycle travel through Ecuador and Peru requires flexibility, and the route, timing, stops, activities, and accommodations may be adjusted according to weather, road conditions, closures, border circumstances, rider abilities, group dynamics, local conditions, or other factors that affect safety and the quality of the experience.
Your guide will make these adjustments when necessary, always with the goal of giving the group the best possible journey under the conditions encountered. Some days may move faster or slower than described, stops may change, and activities may be adapted to the interests and abilities of the group.
The route itself has been built from years of riding experience in Ecuador and northern Peru. It includes some of the finest motorcycling roads in South America: high Andean passes, canyon roads, Pacific highways, cloudforest routes, Amazon foothills, and remote paved mountain roads that seem made for motorcycles. The tour is approximately 97% paved and 3% dirt, though riders should be prepared for construction zones, gravel patches, road repairs, hotel driveways, weather-related debris, and temporary surface changes. These are real roads in real mountain country, and conditions can change quickly.
When more than five motorcycles are booked on the tour, a support truck is included to provide additional assistance and carry luggage. When the support truck is in use, personal luggage is limited to one carry-on-sized item per person. If there are five or fewer motorcycles, the bikes are supplied with adequate panniers or luggage systems for personal belongings.
Once the motorcycles roll out of Quito, the goal is to let you focus on the road and the experience rather than constantly thinking about what the next stop will cost. Breakfast is included every day, and all lunches and dinners are included on riding days. Lunch and dinner on rest days are not included, giving you the freedom to choose where and when you would like to eat. Fuel, tolls, required road costs, admissions, scheduled archaeological visits, cultural experiences, and planned activities are also included as described in the itinerary and What’s Included section.
Weather and Temperatures
This route crosses an enormous range of climates and elevations, from sea level on the Pacific coast to high Andean passes above 4,450 meters / 14,599 feet. You may ride through hot coastal desert, humid Amazon lowlands, cool cloudforest, high-elevation páramo, and cold mountain passes — sometimes within the same day.
At the highest elevations, riders should be prepared for cold, wind, fog, and temperatures that can approach freezing when weather moves through. At lower elevations, conditions can be hot and humid. Passing showers are possible in the highlands at almost any time of year, though full days of rain are less common. Dressing in layers is essential, and riders should be ready for sun, wind, rain, fog, cold, heat, and rapid changes in weather throughout the journey. For more detail, see our Weather in Ecuador guide.
Accommodations
Accommodations are an important part of the Lost Kingdoms experience. You’ll stay in carefully selected hotels, lodges, haciendas, inns, and biological reserves chosen for their comfort, setting, character, and connection to the route. The journey includes historic highland properties, archaeological lodges, hot-spring hotels, cloudforest inns, colonial city hotels, Amazon lodges, and conservation reserves.
Some nights are genuinely luxurious; others are intentionally rustic because the location and experience are worth far more than another conventional hotel. Places such as Kenti Tambo Hummingbird Inn, Gocta Andes Lodge, Hotel Laguna Seca, Hotel Victoria, Hostería Arrayán y Piedra, and El Jardín Misahuallí Lodge are part of the story of the tour, not simply places to sleep between riding days.
Single occupancy is included as standard at no extra charge, giving every rider privacy and space to rest properly at the end of the day. In remote regions, accommodations are selected for the best available combination of location, authenticity, and comfort. Ecuador Freedom may substitute accommodations when necessary because of availability, weather, road conditions, operational needs, or other circumstances, and will communicate significant changes whenever possible.
Riding Style and Difficulty
This tour is designed for experienced riders who enjoy real-world adventure travel, long days in the saddle, mountain roads, changing conditions, and remote routes. You do not need to be an expert off-road rider, but you should be comfortable handling a motorcycle on tight curves, steep climbs and descents, occasional rough pavement, traffic, gravel patches, construction zones, and changing weather.
The greatest challenge for many riders is endurance rather than off-road difficulty. This is a 19-day international motorcycle expedition with substantial days in the saddle, major elevation changes, border crossings, heat, cold, mountain curves, and repeated changes in climate and road character. Some days are relaxed and scenic; others require sustained concentration.
Your guide will set a safe pace and adjust the ride according to the group’s abilities, dynamics, weather, and road conditions. Riders should arrive comfortable on their motorcycle, prepared for long days, and ready to adapt as conditions change.
Packing List and Preparation
Ecuador Freedom will provide detailed preparation information before departure, including luggage, documents, insurance, and border requirements. We strongly recommend reviewing our Packing Guide before you travel so you arrive with the right riding gear and clothing for the wide range of climates encountered on this tour.
No knowledge of Spanish is required. Your guide speaks English and Spanish and will assist with communication throughout the tour. Riders who arrive with some familiarity with the cultures and archaeological sites along the route — including the Moche, Sicán, Chimú, Chachapoya, and Inca worlds — will find that the ruins, museums, artisan traditions, and landscapes become even more meaningful as the journey unfolds.
After the Tour
When the tour returns to Quito, Ecuador Freedom staff will help with motorcycle return and luggage and can answer questions about onward travel, airport transportation, hotels, or your next destination. You’ll also have time to use the Freedom Riders’ Lounge, clean up, relax, and celebrate with the people you have just spent nearly three weeks riding with.
By then, Quito will no longer feel like simply the place where the tour started. You will have crossed Pacific desert, high Andean passes, the Marañón Canyon, Chachapoya cloudforest, Ecuador’s southern highlands, and the Amazon Basin while following the traces of the Moche, Sicán, Chimú, Chachapoya, Inca, and the living cultures that continue to shape Ecuador and Peru today.
That combination of extraordinary roads, ancient civilizations, artisans, Indigenous communities, food, landscapes, and people is what defines the Lost Kingdoms Guided Motorcycle Tour.
PRICING
Ecuador Freedom · Guided Tour
Lost Kingdoms
Motorcycle tour price list
Single occupancy — one rider, one room. The ride-away price. Add a non-riding passenger sharing your room — a flat $4,500. Bikes marked * ride solo only. Two riders, two bikes, one room — each takes 10% off.
Hero XPulse 200*200cc
$13,140single occupancy · per rider$13,140solo only · no passenger$13,140$11,8262 vehicles · 10% off
Honda XRE 300*300cc
$13,520single occupancy · per rider$13,520solo only · no passenger$13,520$12,1682 vehicles · 10% off
Honda XR650L650cc
$14,090single occupancy · per rider$18,590rider + passenger · shared room$14,090$12,6812 vehicles · 10% off
Suzuki DR650*650cc
$13,900single occupancy · per rider$13,900solo only · no passenger$13,900$12,5102 vehicles · 10% off
Suzuki DR650 LOW*650cc
$13,900single occupancy · per rider$13,900solo only · no passenger$13,900$12,5102 vehicles · 10% off
SWM RS650R*650cc
$13,900single occupancy · per rider$13,900solo only · no passenger$13,900$12,5102 vehicles · 10% off
Aprilia Tuareg 660660cc
$15,040single occupancy · per rider$19,540rider + passenger · shared room$15,040$13,5362 vehicles · 10% off
Yamaha Ténéré 700700cc
$14,850single occupancy · per rider$19,350rider + passenger · shared room$14,850$13,3652 vehicles · 10% off
Suzuki V-Strom 800 DE800cc
$14,850single occupancy · per rider$19,350rider + passenger · shared room$14,850$13,3652 vehicles · 10% off
BMW F800 GS800cc
$14,850single occupancy · per rider$19,350rider + passenger · shared room$14,850$13,3652 vehicles · 10% off
Triumph Tiger 850 Sport850cc
$14,850single occupancy · per rider$19,350rider + passenger · shared room$14,850$13,3652 vehicles · 10% off
BMW F850 GS850cc
$15,230single occupancy · per rider$19,730rider + passenger · shared room$15,230$13,7072 vehicles · 10% off
Moto Guzzi V85 TT850cc
$15,230single occupancy · per rider$19,730rider + passenger · shared room$15,230$13,7072 vehicles · 10% off
Triumph Tiger 900 Rally900cc
$15,230single occupancy · per rider$19,730rider + passenger · shared room$15,230$13,7072 vehicles · 10% off
BMW F900 GS900cc
$15,230single occupancy · per rider$19,730rider + passenger · shared room$15,230$13,7072 vehicles · 10% off
Suzuki V-Strom 10001000cc
$15,040single occupancy · per rider$19,540rider + passenger · shared room$15,040$13,5362 vehicles · 10% off
Honda Africa Twin DCT 11001100cc
$15,610single occupancy · per rider$20,110rider + passenger · shared room$15,610$14,0492 vehicles · 10% off
- Tour pricing varies depending on the vehicle selected.
- 2-up (passenger sharing room) refers to two people sharing riding in or on one vehicle and sharing the same room. A passenger fee applies.
- Two riders on separate vehicles sharing a room receive a 10% discount on each rider's tour price.
- Final pricing is calculated automatically during the booking process.
- If more than one passenger will ride in a 4x4, please contact us for custom pricing and a payment link.
* Bikes marked with an asterisk are not configured to carry a passenger.
All prices are in United States Dollars (USD) — the official currency of the Republic of Ecuador.
WHAT'S INCLUDED
What's Included
Motorcycle & Riding Support
- Unlimited-mileage motorcycle rental for the full tour route
- Saddlebags or hard luggage system included
- Tank bag included upon request
- Detailed pre-ride briefing covering safety, group riding, border procedures, local customs, and rules of the road
- Experienced bilingual Ecuador Freedom guide throughout the tour
- Support truck included when more than five motorcycles are booked on the tour
- Fuel, tolls, motorcycle insurance, and required road costs included
- Ecuador–Peru border-crossing assistance, including temporary motorcycle import procedures and required Peruvian SOAT insurance
- Pre-tour preparation materials, packing lists, route information, and recommended videos
Accommodations & Meals
- High-end accommodations at the hotels, lodges, haciendas, and inns listed on this page
- Single-occupancy rooms included as standard at no extra charge
- Daily breakfasts included
- All lunches and dinners on riding days included
- Freedom to choose your own meals on rest days — lunch and dinner on rest days are not included
Experiences, Guides & Admissions
- Entrance fees to included museums, archaeological sites, reserves, and cultural attractions
- Guided visits to major archaeological highlights, including Túcume, Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán, Chan Chan, Leymebamba Museum, and Kuelap
- Cultural and artisan experiences along the route, including traditional hatmaking, ceramics, jewelry, weaving, and other regional crafts described in the itinerary
- Paccari Chocolate Experience included
- Amazon jungle excursion by canoe with a native Kichwa guide included
- Local guided activities where specified in the itinerary, with rest days also providing time to relax or explore independently
Tour Extras
- Luggage storage and locker usage while riding
- Souvenir Ecuador Freedom T-shirt
- Souvenir tour decal
- VIP access to the Freedom Riders' Lounge™ with hot shower, jacuzzi, and honor bar
- 20% discount on high-quality KLIM riding gear
What's Not Included
- Airfare – flights to and from Quito (UIO)
- Airport transfers – taxis or shuttles between the airport and your hotel
- Hotel accommodations in Quito before and after the tour
- Personal travel and evacuation coverage – strongly recommended for medical emergencies, evacuation, trip cancellation, interruption, and other unexpected travel problems. If you don't already have appropriate coverage, you can arrange it through our trusted partner: Global Rescue
- Lunch and dinner on rest days – breakfast is included every day, and all meals are included on riding days
- Optional activities – experiences and activities not specifically described as included in the itinerary
- Personal expenses – souvenirs, snacks, laundry, and other items of a personal nature
- Alcoholic beverages – drinks at meals or during evenings
- Tips and gratuities – for guides, hotel staff, local guides, or other service providers, always at your discretion
- 100% refundable motorcycle security deposit – required for the motorcycle rental and payable by credit card at check-in to cover damage to the rental motorcycle
TOUR DATES & BOOKING
Click on a tour date above to begin the booking process.
Book your tour online in just a few steps.
To reserve your place, simply click the tour date you would like to ride. Our reservation system will guide you through the booking process, including your rider information, motorcycle selection, optional extras, and deposit payment.
Our booking system operates under Ecuadorian banking regulations, which require an identification number when making a reservation. You may enter your passport number, driver’s license number, national ID number, or another government-issued identification number. If you are uncomfortable entering that information online, you may enter any number in that field and we will collect your identification securely before finalizing your reservation.
If you prefer to pay by PayPal, you can request a PayPal invoice at checkout by clicking the “Request PayPal Invoice” button.
If you have any questions or need help with your reservation, please email us at
If you would like to request a tour date that is not yet listed on our calendar, please let us know by clicking the button below.
Booking and Cancellation Policies
Before booking a tour or rental with us, please carefully read our Motorcycle Tour Terms and Conditions.
Our reservation system is automated and available through the “Book Now” or “Reserve Online” buttons. The system will guide you through the steps to reserve your tour, rental, and any desired extensions. Payments are processed securely through Kushki, an Ecuadorian third-party payment platform that meets international security and compliance standards. You may pay using any major credit card.
Due to Ecuadorian banking regulations, we are required to collect a government-issued identification number when you book. You may use your passport number, driver’s license number, or another government-issued ID number.
You may also request to pay through PayPal by clicking the PayPal logo at checkout. If you prefer to pay by wire transfer, please contact us using the “Ask a Question” button or the “Contact” menu item, and we will provide our banking details.
Cancellation Policy
Deposits are refundable only when the reservation is cancelled at least 90 days before the tour departure date or rental pickup date. In that case, the refund will be the deposit paid, minus 10% of the total tour or rental price.
Reservations cancelled less than 90 days before the departure or pickup date are not refundable for any reason. This includes, but is not limited to, illness, injury, family emergencies, flight delays or cancellations, civil unrest, border closures, pandemics, acts of God, natural disasters, bad weather, road closures, or any other event outside your control or ours.
Cancellations are very costly to us because they affect our planning, hotel reservations, vehicle scheduling, staffing, and our ability to sell that tour or rental to another customer. For that reason, deposits on reservations cancelled less than 90 days before the start date may not be refunded, transferred, credited, or applied to a future rental or tour.
We strongly recommend that you purchase travel insurance that covers cancellation losses due to medical issues, family emergencies, travel disruptions, civil unrest, acts of God, weather events, flight problems, and other unexpected circumstances. Protecting yourself from the loss of your deposit is your responsibility.
Global Rescue offers travel insurance designed for adventure travelers and outdoor activities. IMG Signature Travel Insurance can be added to a Global Rescue membership and may provide useful protection for this type of trip.
For more information, please visit our Global Rescue partner page:
https://partner.globalrescue.com/freedombikerental
The remaining balance, usually the second 50% of the rental or tour price, is due when you pick up the motorcycle or 4x4 at our office in Quito. The final balance may be paid in cash using United States Dollars, through PayPal, or by credit card. We accept Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Diners Club, and Discover Card.
Please note that we do accept cash payments, but additional forms and paperwork will be required for any cash payment over $500.
If you would like to pay your final balance before arrival, you may request to pay in advance by PayPal or by telephone credit card payment.
A separate, fully refundable security deposit is also required for the rental motorcycle or 4x4. This security deposit is not part of the tour or rental payment. Security deposits range from $500 to $2,500, depending on the vehicle selected.