illi News - Ecuador Freedom Launches First Scheduled Motorcycle Tour of Northern Peru's Lost Kingdoms

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Five years in the making, the new tour links the Pacific coast, the desert
pyramids, the high Andes, and the remote cloud-forest fortresses of the
Chachapoya "Warriors of the Clouds" — opening one of the Andes' least-explored regions to adventure riders for the first time.

QUITO, Ecuador - illiNews -- Ecuador Freedom today announced the first scheduled adventure motorcycle tour to traverse the full sweep of northern Peru — from the Pacific surf town of Máncora and the ancient pyramids around Chiclayo and Trujillo, up through the Andean city of Cajamarca, and on into the remote cloud-forest fortresses of the Chachapoyas, heartland of a civilization that flourished centuries before the Inca and that remains, to this day, largely unexcavated. The Lost Kingdoms Guided Motorcycle Tour, a 19-day, 18-night journey through Northern Peru and southern Ecuador, makes one of the Andes' great archaeological frontiers accessible to travelers on two wheels.

At the heart of the route is Kuelap, the mountaintop fortress city built by the Chachapoya, known as the "Warriors of the Clouds," which predates Machu Picchu by roughly 500 years. Yet while millions visit Machu Picchu in the south, the Chachapoyas region in the north has remained one of the least-studied corners of the ancient Andes. In the BBC documentary series Lost Kingdoms of South America, the late Adriana von Hagen — a co-founder of the Leymebamba Museum and a leading authority on the Chachapoya — noted that only about five percent of the region's archaeological heritage has been studied. Many of its most remarkable discoveries, including the Chachapoya mummies now housed at the Leymebamba Museum, emerged only in the 1990s.

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The expedition has been five years in the making. Ecuador Freedom scouted the region thoroughly between 2018 and 2020, with plans to open a second office in Cajamarca to serve it. Those plans were shelved during the pandemic. The company has now drawn on that original groundwork to bring the route to market — opening a region long overlooked by mass tourism, and until now unserved by any scheduled adventure motorcycle tour, despite terrain widely regarded as some of the best riding in South America.

Departing from and returning to Ecuador Freedom's Quito headquarters, the route covers roughly 3,962 kilometers (2,462 miles) — about 97% paved — across an unusually diverse span of landscape: Pacific coastline and coastal desert, high Andean passes reaching nearly 14,600 feet, cloud forest, and the edge of the Amazon basin. Riders explore the Pyramids of Túcume, the Moche royal tombs of Sipán near Chiclayo, the vast adobe city of Chan Chan at Trujillo (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), the Andean hot-spring city of Cajamarca, the Leymebamba Museum, and Kuelap itself.

True to Ecuador Freedom's signature approach, the journey is built around full immersion rather than passive sightseeing. Riders meet the people who live along the route — farmers, traditional craftspeople, and others — to understand the places they pass through rather than simply view them. The riding itself is relentlessly varied, stringing together dozens of exceptional roads over 19 days: high Andean passes, sweeping desert and coastal highways, and tight cloud-forest switchbacks. The standout is the legendary stretch between Celendín and Leymebamba, which plunges into the Marañón Canyon, a headwater of the Amazon, before climbing into the cloud forests of Chachapoyas country.

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"It's the kind of riding you remember for the rest of your life," said Sylvain Galléa, Founder of Ecuador Freedom. "We scouted this region years ago and always believed it held some of the best roads in South America, yet no one was running a scheduled tour here. We're proud to be the first — opening up a civilization older than Machu Picchu that most travelers have never heard of."

The tour is fully inclusive — covering all meals (excluding lunch and dinner on rest days), fuel, tolls, motorcycle insurance, and all museum, archaeological site, and guided activity entrances. Accommodations are predominantly high-end — historic haciendas, boutique coastal hotels, thermal-spring resorts, and cloud-forest lodges — alongside one memorable rustic night at a private bird-conservation reserve near the Ecuador border, with single occupancy included at no extra charge. The tour accommodates groups of 1 to 12 motorcycles as a guaranteed departure and starts from $13,140 USD.

Full itinerary, pricing, and departure dates are available at: https://freedombikerental.com/en/articles/62-guided-tours/160-lost-kingdoms-guided-motorcycle-tour