When Che Guevara journeyed here by motorcycle and thumb in 1952, Peru made him see the world in a new way. A half century and many revolutions later—and from a mountain bike this time—it does no less for Joe Kane

After being shut down for nearly two decades by the bloodiest revolution in modern-day South America, Peru has rebounded spectacularly. It has always boasted one of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet—within the space of a few hundred miles lie the world's biggest river, deepest gorge, driest desert, and richest rain forest. Comfortable lodges and efficient transportation have now opened up the cloud forest and the Amazon basin, once accessible only to the machete-wielding few. Cuzco, long known for its Incan ruins and thin air, has grown into a sun-splashed metropolis with hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs to match its superb mountain setting. Machu Picchu is the most popular destination on the continent. You need reservations to get on the Inca Trail.

What I needed was a new way to see an old place—the Peru, as young Ernesto "Che" Guevara wrote during his formative journey up the Andean spine by motorcycle and thumb, "where time had stopped several centuries ago." I hired a driver, a guide, and a cook, drove to fourteen thousand feet, and climbed on a mountain bike. Then I pointed it toward the Amazon and let go of the brakes.

Cycling the Andes can be far less daunting than it sounds. My handlers—Simon Leishman, English driver; Clark Kotula, American guide; Anacleto Succli, toque-clad Quechuan cook—picked me up at my hotel in the Sacred Valley, near Cuzco, on one of those impossibly blue Andean mornings when the weather's so perfect it feels like there's no weather at all. We would spend a day acclimatizing and practicing—I had mountain biked only twice in my life. We drove up into the arid Peruvian highlands known as the Pampa de Anta, to an altitude of twelve thousand feet, where Simon assembled two Raleigh mountain bikes. Clark and I then stripped to T-shirts and shorts and strapped on helmets. "Chew?" Clark asked, offering a coca-leaf quid to thwart the debilitating effects of the high altitude. I tucked it into my cheek. Then we mounted our silver steeds and set off along a broad dirt track that undulated as gently as the Yellow Brick Road.

Pumping easily, we zoomed past fields of wheat, barley, corn, and potatoes. The bicycle felt of a piece with the landscape: more efficient than walking, more intimate than a car. To the northeast, across the Urubamba Valley (known as the Sacred Valley of the Inca), the Cordillera Vilcanota dominated the skyline. I counted five glaciers hanging on the flanks of the Chicon massif. To the northwest rose the gleaming, snowcapped cone of Mount Veronica, at 19,100 feet nearly a mile taller than any mountain in the continental United States but here just one in a string of majestic peaks. In Peru, the spectacular is quotidian.

Over the next two hours, barely sweating, we rode fifteen miles and dropped two thousand feet, breaking for lunch at an Incan ruin called Moray. Here, as at so many Incan sites, the stonework, accomplished without metal tools, is complex and ingenious. From high on one side, we looked down on ring upon ring of intricate stone terraces, one within another, that descended for hundreds of feet. The Inca had no written language and left no records. But as Clark explained, Moray was probably built for agricultural experiments. The meteorological quirks of its location give each terrace a unique microclimate. In this concentrated space, the Inca were able to replicate conditions found throughout their empire.