“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.
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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.

“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!
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?
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!