Never ridden a quad bike? What the Rainbow Mountain day is really like

Somewhere between half and two-thirds of the people who ride with us have never been on a quad bike before. This is not a specialist activity dressed up for tourists — it is a mountain road, a machine with an automatic gearbox, and a guide riding in front of you at a pace set for the slowest person in the group.

That said, you are operating a vehicle at 5,030 metres, and it is worth knowing exactly what that involves before you book it.

The short answer

If you can ride a bicycle, you can do this. There are no gears to change, no clutch, and no balancing — a quad stands up by itself. Throttle with the right thumb, brake with the right hand or the foot, steer with the handlebars.

No licence is required for the tour. What is required is the briefing, which everybody does, and staying behind the guide, which everybody is told about three times.

What the briefing covers

It runs about 20 minutes, in Cusipata, on flat ground, before anybody goes anywhere.

1. The controls, demonstrated and then repeated back.
2. Braking — the single most important thing, and the one beginners get wrong by being too gentle.
3. How to take a loose gravel corner: slow before it, not in it.
4. Group rules: single file, keep the machine in front in sight, never overtake the guide.
5. Hand signals, because at speed in a helmet nobody hears anything.
6. A practice loop, which you ride until the guide is happy — not until the clock says so.

What the track is actually like

It is not an off-road course. The route follows mountain tracks and rural roads used by the communities who live up there: compacted earth and gravel, wide enough for a vehicle, with some loose sections and some genuinely rough patches.

There are no jumps, no technical obstacles and nothing requiring a particular skill. What there is: altitude, cold, long straights, and a few corners where the surface changes under you. Slowing down solves all of them.

How fast you will go

Slower than you are imagining. The group moves at the pace of its least confident rider, which on most departures is somewhere between 20 and 35 km/h. On the long flat sections it feels quick, mostly because of the wind and the fact that there is nothing beside the track to measure yourself against.

The machines will go considerably faster than that. You will not, because the guide is in front of you and overtaking the guide is the one rule that ends somebody’s day.

The two moments beginners find hard

The first five minutes of real track

The practice loop is flat and smooth. The first proper gravel always feels worse than it is, and almost everybody tenses up and grips too hard. It passes in about five minutes, and the guide knows to go slowly through it.

Cold hands at the top

Above about 4,800 m, with wind chill at speed, bare or thin-gloved hands stop working properly. That is not a riding problem — it is a packing problem, and it is the single most common thing people get wrong on this day. Proper gloves.

If you decide you would rather not

Then say so at the practice loop, and ride the day as a passenger behind your partner, your friend or the guide. We refund the difference between the two-rider and single-rider rate on the spot, and nobody makes a thing of it.

We would far rather have that conversation in Cusipata than halfway up a mountain.

Questions travelers ask us

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