The wind-scoured notch, higher than Mont Blanc, where Peru's Central Highway tops out four hours above Lima — black rock, mine lakes and half the air you woke up in.
Ticlio — the Abra de Anticona — is the highest point of Peru's Central Highway, 4,818 metres up at kilometre 120 of the road out of Lima. That is higher than Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps, and trucks and buses grind over it every day of the year. Two kilometres away the Ferrocarril Central Andino, begun in 1870, slips through the Galera tunnel at 4,783 metres. Most people stop at the summit sign, take the photograph, and discover within four minutes that the air holds half the oxygen it did at breakfast.
The railway came first. In 1868 an American contractor called Henry Meiggs offered to lay track from Lima into the Andes: he would put rails, he said, where the llamas walk. Work began in January 1870 under Ernest Malinowski, a Polish engineer who had fled his partitioned homeland and had proposed exactly such a line back in 1851. Then a fever nobody understood swept the construction camps in the Rímac gorge. Thousands of Chinese and Chilean labourers died of it, and the men said every sleeper had cost a life; only in 1885 did a Peruvian medical student, Daniel Carrión, identify the disease — by injecting himself with it and dying. Trains reached La Oroya, beyond the pass, in 1893.
Malinowski's answer to the mountain was to make the train climb the way a walker takes a steep path: in zig-zags. Six times the line runs out onto a dead-end ledge, stops, and reverses up the next leg. Around the switchbacks are 69 tunnels and 58 bridges, among them the Infiernillo, "little hell", a red steel span hung between two tunnel mouths in a gorge with nowhere else to put it. Galera station, at the top, stands at 4,781 metres and was the highest railway station on earth for 113 years, until China opened the Qinghai–Tibet line in 2006. Freight still runs daily; the tourist train from Lima to Huancayo goes only a handful of times a year.
Up here the country is copper and silver: mine camps beside cold green lakes, and Morococha, a few kilometres past the summit, which was picked up and rebuilt ten kilometres away in the 2010s so that a vast open pit could be dug where the town had stood. What a visitor remembers, though, is the body. You had breakfast at sea level in Lima; by lunchtime you are standing in half the air, with a band tightening round your head and legs that will not hurry. Four minutes at the sign is usually plenty.
The making of Ticlio Pass
The top of the Central Highway
Kilometre 120 out of Lima and 4,818 metres up: a sign, a monument and a gravel lay-by where every lorry between the coast and the jungle pulls over to breathe.
The Galera tunnel and station
The railway's own summit, 35 metres below the road: a 1,177-metre bore at 4,783 m, with Galera station beside it at 4,781 m — the highest in the world for 113 years, until 2006.
Ernest Malinowski
The Polish exile who surveyed the impossible line and saw it built; a granite and bronze monument to him has stood at the summit since 1999, a century after his death.
The zig-zags
Six switchbacks where the train runs onto a dead-end ledge, stops and reverses up the next leg — how Malinowski climbed from the sea to 4,783 m in 172 km of track.
The Infiernillo viaduct
"Little hell": a red steel bridge slung between two tunnel mouths in a gorge above the highway, at kilometre 129 of the line.
Soroche
Altitude sickness — the reason bottled oxygen and coca tea ride the trains. At the pass the air presses about half as hard as it does on the coast.
Morococha and the mines
Copper country just over the summit, and a town that was rebuilt ten kilometres away in the 2010s so an open pit could be dug where it had stood.
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