Hasta Luego Sud America!!

Rimaykullayki!

At least that’s one of the ways you say hello in Quechua, but there are many variations across Peru and Bolivia. Most of the mountains surrounding the small city of Huaraz still proudly bear their Quechua names. Alpamayo, considered the most beautiful mountain in the world, means “Dirty River” or “Earth River” according to our wonderful guide. Javier coaxed Jon and I along with 6 others through the beautiful Cordillera Blancas on the 4 day Santa Cruz trek. This was trekking in style! Over-friendly donkeys carried all our equipment and Javier and the donkey driver cooked us tasty dinners and breakfasts which we ate in a warm turquoise tepee seated on stools around an explosive gas lantern. We had contemplated going it alone and hauling our heavy packs along the trail, but the combination of the altitude and our recently unhappy stomachs convinced us to drop our tough hiker attitude and go with the luxury of a guiding company. We never once regretted it! Along the trail Javier would name the various icy peaks, describe the medicinal properties of the various local plants, pick wild fruit for us to try, ward off aggressive bulls and teach us a little about the local culture. In the cold evenings it was lovely sitting in our warm dinning tent eating popcorn, drinking coca tea and making new friends while waiting for our dinner.

Huaraz has been the highlight of the past 3 months. The town itself isn’t anything special; however it’s surrounded by the sheer peaks of the Cordillera Blanca, many of which are between 5000 and 6000m. The high reaches of these mountains are covered in beautiful ice sculptures, with huge crevassed glaciers, vertical ice cliffs with delicate fluting and bulbous mushrooms of snow perched precariously on top of rock steeples. It´s devastating to think that these tropical glaciers are rapidly retreating and many of them will have vanished in just 10 years time. What will these mountain communities do without their water supply? Narrow valleys with towering cliff walls sanded smooth from old glaciers reach out from the peaks and passes. Hiking up these impressive canyons dripping with colourful flowers and trees and buzzing with giant hummingbirds is the only way to reach the breathtaking mountain views.

Before our 4 day camping adventure on the Santa Cruz trek we spent a few nights at a lodge nestled in the mountains high above Huaraz from where you could hike straight from the front door into the mountains and be back in time to watch sunset from the hammock and enjoy a candle-lit dinner. We spent the peaceful evenings reading our books while curled up in front of the wood-burning stove until the last night when the young British owner arrived with her loud techno music!!

Tomorrow we catch our last bus, which we’re very excited about, to Lima. We’ve been counting down the bus journeys. The long-distance rides are often comfortable but last between10 to 28 hours and the short hops are terrifying since you’re squeezed into tiny, battered mini-vans with bald tires carrying double the number of passengers for which there are seats while driving along bumpy roads winding their way through the mountains. Just don’t look out the windows at the sheer drops below you or at the crumbling cliffs above and remember to breathe slowly. This is the true adrenaline adventure sport of the Andes.

We’re home on Saturday and can’t wait to get in touch with everyone. This is the last post from South America from us, though photos will be following soon. Thanks for reading my posts. I hope they were entertaining.

Huaraz and the Cordilleras Blancas

We arrived in Huaraz on Friday after spending a night in foggy Lima. The views of the mountains are stunning and we're eager to start exploring. Tomorrow we're moving hostels to The Way Inn perched above Huaraz where you can hike into the mountains from their front door. We’ll spend 3 nights at The Way Inn acclimatizing and stretching our legs on day hikes in preparation for the 4 day Santa Cruz trek which we hope to start on Friday 23rd from Vaqueria through to Cashapampa. We’ll be in touch when we’re back from the trek on Tuesday 27th May.

Fiestas and Incas

Buen Dia!

It’s been fiesta madness for the past two weeks. We arrived in Copacabana on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca to the discordant sounds of many bands playing at the same time and dancers thronging the streets in sparkling costumes. The bands started up at 5am and wound their way through the narrow streets followed by groups of dancing girls in twirling skirts and men with bells around their ankles until late at night, gradually getting drunker and drunker and more and more out of time and tune! This lasted about a week. Thankfully we escaped to tranquil Isla del Sol and hiked across the island visiting Inca ruins and camped on a beautiful beach with only some donkeys and cows for neighbours.

Here in rainy Cuzco they are celebrating The Cross with delightful dawn fireworks. In Aguas Calientes (the tourist town at the base of Machu Picchu) contemporary bands wearing silver outfits were loudly crooning in the main square and in Ollantaytambo (a beautiful Inca town between Cuzco and Aguas Calientes) we enjoyed a troop of dancers wearing grotesque masks with extremely long noses hip checking, bottom bumping and leg humping each other! Other acts included the ankle whipping dance and plenty of live music and loud fireworks rousing the town yet again at 5am. The hangovers must last a week!

Between fiestas we’ve visited plenty of Inca sites all of which are characterised by perfectly cut stones that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle making cement unnecessary. Machu Picchu was incredible, in cost as well as in location. After spending around $120 each to visit the ruins (train and entrance fee) we were astonished to discover that we also had to pay for the pleasure of using the seatless and soapless toilet! We spent a full day exploring the ruins by ourselves, enjoying the mountain views and eaves-dropping on tour guides who appeared to be inventing explanations about various important stones, buildings and temples. According to one guide a particular stone was placed in a certain position because it resembled the shape of the mountain behind the site while according to another guide the stone was a sort of compass …. one temple was described as the Temple of the Sun by one and the Temple of the Puma by another! Of course it is all speculation since no one knows the function of Machu Picchu. We contented ourselves with our own imaginative ideas and munched on our sandwiches that we had to smuggle into the site.

Now we’re killing time in Cuzco before travelling on to Huaraz and the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash. Cuzco is a beautiful city and we’re staying in the artist district of San Blas with it’s distinctive smell of cannabis and dog poop in a very hippy hostel complete with a cross-eyed cat, colourful rooms, a constantly stoned Dutch man who holds your hand for a little too long and tours to the mountains for private Shamanic ceremonies or to partake of the self-healing, self-finding, soul-cleansing, cancer-curing hallucinogenic local cacti, San Pedro. It does have a nice kitchen. Despite the picturesque narrow cobbled streets and jumble of terracotta roofs that are reminiscent of Florence we find ourselves constantly at war with the city with it’s overpriced attractions and hostels and the inescapable women in traditional dress with their eye-rolling llamas wanting their photos taken for a price, kids selling postcards or finger puppets, women offering discounted massages and aggressive restaurant and nightclub touts insisting that you eat, drink or dance in their business. We’re looking forward to spending a peaceful week camping in the mountains near Huaraz.

Copacabana

We arrived in Puno yesterday. It's a lively town on the shore of Lake Titicaca. We've decided not to venture to the reed islands (the exploited star attraction), but to spend the day exploring the town and shopping for a Peruvian alpaca sweater for Jon. Though the only alpaca I've seen around here is on the menu, which I'm avoiding along with the roast guinea pig! I'm sticking to simple food for a while. I'm feeling much better today and am rigidly sticking to the regimen of antibiotics the travel doctor in Seattle prescribed for us.

Tomorrow we leave for Cusco on the Inca Express bus, a luxury tour bus that stops at various Inca ruins on route. We're just excited to be travelling on a modern coach with comfortable seats, a clean bathroom and a responsible driver!! We'll probably spend a week in Cusco since there is so much to see (Machu Picchu and plenty of other fascinating sites, beautiful mountains, cathedrals constructed from stones taken from Inca temples, colonial villages, and ancient baths since the Incas were firm believers of bathing unlike the smelly Spanish conquistadors!!). From Cusco we'll hopefully fly to Lima and then take a bus to Huaraz where we'll spend some time trekking in the high Andes. But we'll be in touch again from Cusco!!

Falling off the Andes

Happy May Day! Bolivians are either on vacation today or demonstrating outside the government office so consequently our little area of La Paz feels deserted. A big vote is coming up in a few days and we plan to be out of town avoiding the fracas and hiking on Lake Titicaca’s fabled Isla del Sol. Bolivia has been such a surprising treat and it has been the highlight of our trip. The landscapes are incredible and the culture is fascinating.

We crossed into Bolivia from Chile’s Atacama Desert and spent 3 days squeezed into a 4x4 with 6 others driving across the high desert, the Altiplano, in the south-western corner of the country. It was an unforgettable experience!! The first morning the car refused to start and we spent a shivery hour anxiously waiting for the battery to warm up, coca leaves and tea were incessantly consumed to ward off altitude sickness, we unwillingly engaged in a high velocity bird hunt as our driver chased a grouse-like bird with our car (the poor thing travelled with us for an hour or so until we caught up with another tour and the driver’s wife, our cook, proudly showed the bird to the other tour operator before letting the traumatized bird loose, much to our relief since we were expecting it to appear in the pot that night!), we helped dig another stranded tour vehicle out of the mud and we had a small collision with another tour vehicle travelling in the opposite direction which resulted in much yelling between the two drivers (though luckily the incident didn’t lead to blows like it did for another group travelling the same day!). We bumped past green, red and white lagoons, steaming geysers, icy volcanoes and Dali-esque rocks. On the final day of the tour we awoke at 4am and drove blind in the dark to an island in the centre of the vast salt flat and watched the sun slowly rise over the distant mountains and the endless expanse of the Salar de Uyuni turn a blinding white.

From the salt flats we nervously took the bus to Potosi, the highest city in the world, declined the silver mine tour and instead dodged traffic on its winding, bustling and narrow streets during our city exploration. Potosi is a wonderful and colourful city, but built on so much suffering. Her sister city, Sucre, the old capitol of Bolivia, is full of lovely colonial buildings and shady green plazas. Those who prospered from Potosi’s silver lived here and built their fabulous houses since the climate and altitude was more welcoming. We took our time in Sucre, also enjoying the lower elevations and increased warmth. We decided not to risk the roads again and flew to La Paz.

Bolivians are awful drivers. They take their time with everything else, yet everyone seems to be in rush when they get in their cars. Common occurrences include buses passing trucks before blind bends in thick fog while going uphill …. 3 cars across a two lane road … sheer drops by the side of deeply rutted roads … dogs and children crossing without looking …. it’s been terrifying! Consequently we’ve been travelling in day light and selecting our buses carefully! As a result we avoided riding mountain bikes down the notorious “Road of Death” to Coroico (why anyone tackles this busy road down sheer cliffs on a bike is beyond me especially in consideration of the fact that 10 people died on that route last week yet hundreds of adrenaline loving travellers tackle this route every week). Instead we took the slow path and spent 3 days trekking to Coroico on a beautiful Inca trail that plunges over 3000m from an amazing high Andean pass at 4800m where we were encircled by gleaming black cliffs and snowy peaks, across high alpine grassy valleys with contented llamas, through cloud forest and eventually traversing steep and steaming jungle clad slopes high above rushing rivers. We passed isolated Aymara villages where people scratched out a living on small plots of land with their llamas, cows and crops and ancient Inca ruins. It was an incredible journey and there are plenty more wonderful treks in Bolivia. It’s definitely a place we’d like to return to. We feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of this amazing country, yet it has drawn us in so much deeper than any other place we’ve visited, despite the shocking driving and suspect food!