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Haku’s Origins “The Best MTB Company in South America.”

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“These are the best tours in South America on Mountain Bikes that you can do do, I’ve done a couple of tours with them in Peru and now we’re in Ecuador!”    -Brett Tippie

Check out this interview Brett did to the founders and owners of Haku Expeditions.

See this podcast on:

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Haku means “let’s go” in the ancient language of Quechua, a well-chosen name for a mountain bike company in the Andes. Recently, in Ecuador, Brett rode 80,000 vertical ft. in an action-packed week with Haku Expeditions, focusing on downhill single-track – and a lot of it. While in Ecuador he interview Bill and Nic for his Brett Tippie Podcast. Here is part 1 of that podcast.

Brett Tippie and Nicole
Brett Tippie and Nicole in Ecuador.

“As talented bikers themselves, Bill and Nic have everything dialed in so bikers can completely surrender to the steep, swerving slopes of the Andes mountains. They have made a life for themselves chasing their dreams on two-wheels, and helping others live their own mountain bike adventures. Nowadays they run regular tours with world-renowned free-ride mountain bikers such as, Geoff Gulevich, Mark Matthews, Kilian Bron and KC Dean, Micala Gatto and Jordie Lunn (R.I.P!!),  taking them on tours descending huge vertical tracks.”           -Brett Tippie

Having just enjoyed 5,000ft of slippery descent, shuttled up and ripped down, Brett sat down in a rustic Ecuadorian farmhouse to interview the couple about their roots…

Brett Tippie (BT): So how do you do it? How did it come to be…

Nicole: We were Christian missionaries for seven years in Peru before we started doing tours. We are from Buffalo, New York, and we both lived away from Buffalo for a while and then happened to both be back living there when we met. I had gone home from college to visit my mum, having not lived at home since I was 17, and I met Bill! 

Bill: Drinking with my buddies in a sushi bar. We hit it off and went mountain biking for our first date, which was cool. I gave her my friend’s beater bike with no brakes. Testing her out!


Nicole: At the end of the ride I said “Wow, these brakes really don’t work very well” and he said “let me fix that for you,” five minutes before we finished! That’s typical Bill testing me! 

Bill: We were just outside of Buffalo in a place called Hunter’s Creek. It’s the only elevation gain or descent in the whole area, so we used to go there before work, ride a bunch and then go to work feeling pretty good! Then one thing led to another and Nicole asked me to marry her, for the first time in history… She forced me, and we had a huge party in Alleghany Park for a whole week. We went mountain biking, rented cabins, then two-weeks later left on our honeymoon, and we’re still on it 17 years later! Basically we loaded up my truck, an old Toyota, with all our gear; skiis, bikes and camping stuff. We put a bed in the back and drove all the way across the States into Vancouver. We were meant to make it to Alaska but the weather got a little bad in November. So we went down to Durango, Colorado and lived there for two years.

Nicole: When we were talking about getting married, we spoke about traveling and how great it would be to go and live in another country for a couple of years, and then move and be on this never ending traveling spree. Then Bill’s sister knew of this Catholic mission in Peru. We said it would be nice to try and help where we can, and she told me “there’s this place in the Andes, THE ANDES! And they help kids, you should check it out.” We were talking about it, going back and forth, and one day I just turned to Bill and said “you decide, I’m gonna follow you”, and he responded: “let’s do it.” So we sold everything except our bikes and snowboards, and came to Peru with our one-year-old!

Brett Tippie: Wow! And now you have five children! 

Bill and Nicole's family

Nicole: Yes, they are 5-15 years old… They all ride bikes and we go biking together as a family. 

Bill: So we did missionary work for seven years. It was supposed to be two years but we came down here and didn’t know any Spanish at all, so we basically bounced off eachother. One week I’d be like “this is crazy, let’s go,” and Nicole would want to stay. Then she’d do the same thing. We somehow got through the first year, and by that time we’d learned Spanish and developed relationships with the people there. So we stayed two years, then we ended up staying for another five! 

Nicole: So while we were there we were getting to know the trails, riding verticals…we were never shuttled, there were no drop-off points, and we peddled everywhere. We made fun of shuttlers! We would climb up to Radar – a huge upwards slope at 4,500 meters! All on little cross-country bikes. 

Bill: Everything was super rocky so Nicole couldn’t do much – she would get tired and then get to the technical stuff with her little bike and say – “I don’t know!” I would tell her “just ride it!!” A typical husband-and-wife mountain biking relationship. 

Nicole: Once we took the first few tourists riding they almost died from exhaustion – that’s when we decided to start shuttling. 4,000 ft of climbing at 11,000ft altitude is a lot of elevation. We would get a quarter of the way up Radar and they’d ask “are we almost there yet?” And then we decided to start shuttling. After that, my riding really changed… I got so much more mileage! More terrain under the tires…

Brett Tippie: So how did you decide to start taking bookings?

Nicole: When we left the mission we basically had nothing, because everything we had in Peru belonged to the mission. So when we left, we couldn’t open an agency because it required too much capital, and we had no idea what we were going to do, but we knew we wanted to leave. Then Bill saw a picture of his buddy in Pisac, and he left the town we were living in to go all the way over to meet him. Before he walked in, he thought: “this guy is gonna tell me something really important that’s going to help us out”. And that night, he told him about Airbnb, when it was just starting to boom, and nobody in Cusco knew about it. So we found a big city-center house, and started an Airbnb. Bill: We had over 3,000 people come there within 2 years. It was crazy, everyday cooking breakfast with four kids and fifteen travelers at the breakfast table, and they were always asking “what do we do today?” So we told them about different tours; mountain biking, zip-lining, Machu Picchu, giving them numbers for Salkantay horses or homesteads. 

We were buying tickets, organizing trips and taxis, and then we decided to do it formally. 

Nicole: So we created our first tour – A Day in the Life Tour, we called it. We were saying goodbye to one of our local friends in the mountains, sat in their adobe house, eating traditional food with guinea pigs running round the floor as is the custom in Peru, and we thought “travelers would love this, it’s the real deal!” So we created this day-tour, taking people through authentic experiences. Then, two people who did it told us about Alistair in Ecuador, and his mountain bike company. We called him up and asked him – what the deal is with running MTB tours?! He gave us some really great advice. Then, he called back three months later, and said “my guy who runs Gravity Peru, the biking company in Peru, is going back to the States – do you guys wanna take over?”

Up until that point we had never done any tour so complex as organizing the right size helmets and knee pads and bike and all that. And it’s so much money. So we debated, going back and forth for six months! But Alistair kept saying “if it doesn’t work out, you can just sell the stuff again…” So we bit the bullet and bought two bikes. We just started small, every month buying a new pair of knee pads and gloves, and that’s how it started! Mom and Pop shop! Gravity Peru has a name, so we were getting calls for Lares and Lamay… shuttling up and ripping down! We had been peddling for so many years, and now we had to learn the roads and the pickup spots in these huge mountains. It took a while to get it super dialed in. 

Brett Tippie: How did it progress from having two bikes to doing full-blown tours? How did you bring pro-riders on rather than just doing it yourself?

Best MTB company in South America

Nicole: So what happened is, right when we started the agency probably at the end of 2014, Ali Goulet came out with a group of riders to do the Inca Avalanche Trail Festival, which is riding the trails in the Valley for days and then racing the Inca Avalanche. He brought a group out, and while we know all the trails in the South Valley because that’s where we lived, this tour was going to be in the Sacred Valley, which we didn’t know. So I contacted him and asked if I could jump on the trip. 

One day one of the guys was talking about Mitch Chubey who was on the tour,  and how he’s a pro-mountain bike rider. I asked “what do you mean?” Because I’d never really heard of pro-riders before. He responded “haven’t you seen his hat? Only twenty people in the world have that hat!” It was a Red Bull Rampage hat. We had become really good friends on the trip, we stayed in contact and I kept inviting him back down. We had only just started our agency, but by the time he came back two years later, we had been running tours and had experience with the bikes, cars, guides – the whole shebang. 

So he came back and asked us to set something up for him, and I was thinking about Ausangate and all the trails I wanted to show him. Then he called and asked if his buddy Geoff can come, and I said “Sure!” Next thing I know he invites K.C, and then he turns up with Geoff Gulevich, K.C Dean and Margus Riga! They showed up and that’s how we became friends with all those guys. At the same time as the Inca Avalanche Trail Festival Kilian Bron asked us to do a crazy mission, so Bill went to Ausangate with him and rode scree fields. So it just kind of took off like that, by being friends with Mitch Chubey. Then we thought – maybe we should bring more pro-riders down, and have them go out with the group! 

When Kilian was here, our son Tim was 10 at the time, and stoked to go out and ride with a pro. We went on a ride to Yuncaypata, and we were 5 minutes in… We stopped, set up the drone, backed up, did it again, and again… Tim and I are looking at each other thinking – this isn’t fun. It was a shoot, not a ride. I was thinking about how cool it would be to bring pro-riders down and they could ride without worrying about cameras. Riding with different groups, traveling the world on two wheels, eating delicious food and having a really cool vacation where we just have fun. I spoke to Geoff about it, and he had the same idea, so we made the first trip happen in November!

So he posted about it on Instagram… 

Brett Tippie: Yeah I remember seeing it! 

Nicole: You know what, I didn’t even think of it as marketing. I just thought it would be so cool! Then I got some followers, and business! It was just this idea of riding bikes and having fun and doing these tours together. 

Brett Tippie: Who was the next pro you had to join your tours?

Nicole: We wanted someone really funny… and Gully told us “I think Tippie is the man for you”- and I didn’t even know who you were! I didn’t know who any pro riders were back then! These days we are in talks about different pros coming next year to Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. So stay tuned!

Taken from the Brett Tippie Podcast Part ½

Coming up, Brett Tippie’s Andean Adventures!

 

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Backcountry Mountain Road & Cross Country

Our Cross Country MTB tours take you from one spectacular destination to the next. On these, you’ll cycle literally across whichever country you’re visiting. For instance, check out our Andes to the Amazon tour, where you travel from Cusco to the Peruvian Amazon. 

Our current XC vacations are made up of long-distance rides on backcountry roads. If you are looking for XC singletrack, get in touch with us, and we’ll set up a one-of-a-kind MTB tour suited to your needs.

How we define XC: Anywhere from old logging or fire roads to rolling singletrack, Cross Country trails are generally long distances with both ascents and descents. While trails may be somewhat technical with rock gardens and tight switchbacks, they generally do not have intense steep rock gardens like those you might find in DH or Enduro racing.

An XC bike is often lighter with a slacker head tube angle for better climbing ability and tends to not have a dropper post although the trend is changing. Usually it will be a hardtail or a full suspension bike with a smaller amount of suspension — 100-130mm.  

Most XC riders do not wear pads such as elbow or knee pads and wear a half-shell helmet.

Expeditions

Our MTB expeditions are multi-day trips that involve camping, hiking and/or local home stays in the mountains with cooks and porters. At the moment Haku Expeditions offers one complete mountain expedition and also two packages that combine an MTB vacation with a smaller expedition nestled in it.

The front travel for DH bikes is usually somewhere around 200mm with the rear measuring slightly less. Because they generally aren’t pedalled uphill, these bikes are rugged and heavy and usually have less gears. DH riders wear full-face helmets, goggles, and body armor.

Downhill Riding

At the moment we do not offer a 100% DH trip. Contact us and we can make a custom trip for you! Below, you’ll find our Enduro MTB tours listed that are mostly all downhill and can be done either with a DH bike or an Enduro bike.

How we define DH: DH riding – or Downhill riding — is regarded as an intense, extreme kind of cycling, made for advanced riders who love to navigate roots and rocks and huge drops with furious downhill speed. It requires a stellar sense of balance and technique and a bike with slacker geometry. 

The front travel for DH bikes is usually somewhere around 200mm with the rear measuring slightly less. Because they generally aren’t pedalled uphill, these bikes are rugged and heavy and usually have less gears. DH riders wear full-face helmets, goggles, and body armor.

Enduro/All Mountain

Our Enduro/All-Mountain MTB tours are by far our most popular trips to date. While some of them focus more on descent like Ecuador and Peru, others include plenty of pedaling such as those in Colombia and Nepal.  

How we define Enduro/All Mountain: Enduro mountain biking, also known as All-Mountain biking, emphasizes technical ability. If you’re looking for a more adventurous ride, this is the kind of ride for you; usually, an Enduro/All-Mountain trail will involve adrenaline-pumping downhill mountain biking along with sustained climbs.

Enduro riders need bikes that can take burly drops and rugged technical obstacles efficiently while still being light enough to climb with; they almost always use full-suspension bikes with wide tires and longer rear and front suspension travel. Dropper post is a necessity and standard. The front suspension can be anywhere from 140mm to 170mm. Full-face enduro helmets and body amour are a must for Enduro racing.

Price Breakdown

How do you help?

1 – The Haku Christmas Drive, which includes yearly clothing giveaways, shoe drives, and a public hot chocolate panettone lunch.

2 – School supply giveaway for children of the High Andes.

3 – Bringing bread and fruit to kids living at elevations where none is available.

4 – Facilitating connections between local organic farmers and local restaurants.

5 – Affordable MTB classes for locals taught by professional coaches

6 – Sustained commitment to hiring out locals to work as drivers, office workers, etc., allowing a great amount of flexibility for family commitments, and paying them fair, livable wages.

7 – Donating 1% of all profits to help educate children in a technical field such as carpentry.

8 – Helping young adults begin a small business working in their technical field or purchasing products from them to help them get started after high school.

 

General Fitness Ratings

1 – Getting your heart rate up isn’t really your thing, and you rarely (if ever) exercise. Your idea of a perfect vacation is total relaxation: sitting on a beach, sipping a mojito, and just generally vegging out. 

2 – You don’t necessarily work out regularly but you aren’t averse to the idea of doing something active. Although you don’t exercise that often, you don’t necessarily consider yourself out of shape.

3 – You exercise one to two times a week but do not have a normal schedule that keeps you biking or doing other activities weekly. You don’t go to the gym or train for any specific sports but you lead a relatively active lifestyle by biking, hiking, skiing, or whatever it may be. For biking: climbs and long descents give you some trouble and you tend to get tired after about 2-3 hours on the bike.

4 – You exercise 3-4 times a week and enjoy physical activities such as biking, hiking, skiing. You are active. For biking: you enjoy climbs that are are moderately long and being on a bike for 3-5 hours in one day doesn’t get you too tired or fatigued. 

5You exercise at least 4 times a week and are an avid athlete that is consistently in good shape. You’re more or less game for any kind of adventure. For biking: you’re comfortable with being on your bike for 5-7 hours a day. 

6 – You live and die for exercise, sweat, and suffering. You only want to climb higher, go farther, and prove how much of an animal you are. Steep climbs, long descents and big days are something you are looking to do more of and you can’t wait for your next adventure. 

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Biking Skill Levels

Beginner:
You’ve been riding a mountain bike for a couple of years or less and you’re most comfortable on smooth single-track and wider, forgiving doubletrack. You like rides with scenic views; you like both ascending and descending on well-maintained, safe trails. You’re looking for an active but relaxing mountain bike vacation; you’re not into jumps, drops, super steep trails, rock gardens, roots or taking big risks on your bike.

Intermediate:
You’ve got two plus years of experience mountain biking on single-track trails under your belt; you’ve gotten pretty confident behind the handlebars and are beginning to expand your mountain bike abilities. You like riding most types of terrain, and you’re comfortable both climbing and descending on single-track trails with smaller technical features such as rocky sections, small drops, and small steep sections. You aren’t trying to walk on most of the trail and are looking to take small risks with things like speed, jumps, rock gardens, and stair sets to improve your skills as a mountain biker.

Intermediate Tech:
You’ve got three plus years of riding on singletrack trails of all sorts with features such as rock gardens, steep sections, rolls and drops, roots, and small jumps. You are confident on the bike in most situations. You’re constantly looking to improve your riding skills and enjoy riding for extended periods of time climbing and descending in terrain of all sorts. 

Advanced:
Ten plus years of experience riding single-track, freerides and biking of all sorts. You live for steeps,  jumps, rock gardens, techy trails, long descents, big ascents and discovering new terrain. Mountain biking is one of your passions and you are ready and confident to do what you love in a new and challenging place.
You can handle anything we throw at you — jumps, rock gardens, steps, technical descents, tough ascents, etc. Biking is a central part of your life. For you, the bigger the challenge, the more excited you get.

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