The Lure of the Unpaved Roads

By Jessie, guest contributor

Read more from Jessie and her husband Robert's blog, www.knkexplore.wordpress.com

Back when my parents used to say it, the “scenic route” meant the long way. I didn't want to sit in the car for an extra 40 minutes on our drive home from church, and I didn't understand why we had to go all the way out in the opposite direction just to see what was there. I knew what was there: corn fields and orchards. Same as we would see on the normal route home.

Eventually, though, I began to catch on that taking “the scenic route” was just a small way that my parents could experience a world different from the one they knew every day, a way to briefly recapture that magic of travel that I've come to know and love as an adult. I began to realize that these back roads might be unpaved, they might be indirect, but they were never a waste of time.

Today I'm ever fascinated by those unpaved roads. On my Peru map they're represented by simple red lines that draw my curiosity. My guide book already told me what I can expect to find on the main road; I want to know what I can find on the back roads.

On a recent solo road trip from Seattle, Washington, to Tucson, Arizona, I sought out the roads that ran parallel to the highway. On my Utah map they would sometimes be marked with a row of dots if they were thought to be “scenic,” a word which does all too little to describe Utah's majestic wilderness.
The most understated of them all was the horrifyingly beautiful Hogsback Ridge (Utah's Highway 12).
After many miles of pleasant forest switchbacks the road suddenly crests. The land beside the road drops away to leave you and your car stranded on a thin ribbon of two-lane highway floating thousands of feet above a sea of windswept stone in pink and orange and cream and vermilion. Fortunately at that moment they provide a turnoff so that you can pull over in a panic and collect your wits, staring out over the Escalante badlands and commiserating with other drivers as you collectively think: “Oh, shit! I have to drive down that?”

In Peru it was the unpaved, 12-hour bus ride on a single lane dirt road from Cajamaca to Chachapoyas. It was hard to know what

View from the road from Cajamarca to Chachapoyas

was more disconcerting: watching the road while the driver sped around hairpin corners with barely a courtesy honk of the horn, or staring out over the increasingly-gorgeous scenery that was spread out so incredibly far below you.

On the road from Cajamarca to Chachapoyas

During that trip we stopped in the town of Celendín, which is overlooked by most guide books. Looking for something to do, we took a taxi up to a village to search out a waterfall we had been repeatedly told did not exist. We were warned by the taxi driver not to leave the main road, but as soon as he was out of sight we looked at each other and set out on a footpath that cut through a potato field.

Campesina woman

What would we have found if we stayed on the road? Who knows! But by taking the footpath we met an old Andean campesina and her two horses, who led us on a tour of the beautiful countryside and showed us off to her neighbors.

Campesina woman

There is merit in the well-traveled routes; after all, they would not be popular if there was nothing worthwhile to see. But I also find profound joy in looking at my state atlas and saying: “What a bizarre name for a town. Maybe I'll go there today.” It's the love of the scenic route which takes you to the out of the way places where you're on your journey alone, on roads that no one has bothered to pave. You'll always find something if you're searching for it.