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Onwards and upwards (quite literally where Huaraz is concerned), I first had to make a pitstop in Lima to change buses, get a haircut and invest in a funky new laptop. I have finally got my own electronic wheels!
The overnight bus from Lima took me high into The Andes and the mountain town of Huaraz, the main point for organising adventures into the Cordillera Blanca, the white mountains with a brimful of peaks breaching the magical 6000m mark, including Cerro Huascaran, Peru's highest.
This was actually my second visit to Huaraz, the first was cut short due to the bad weather at the tail end of the rainy season. But not before I visited The Way Inn lodge, a mountain retreat located another 700m above Huaraz. This place was realised by an English couple who have created a little piece of Dartmoor in The Andes, a fantastic lodge that could be called The Slaughtered Lamb or similar...stick to the path and not the moor! I had three days there, taking day hikes and playing chess with Brad and Jaime (American couple who were running the place) in the evening. Now Paul from Brighton, with whom I was travelling with Simon, is running the lodge for the next 3 months!
Anyway, this was the second time round and I was here for some adventure, so I stayed at the lovely Churup Hostel in the centre of town. Here I hooked up with Peter, a 20 something from New Jersey who had just returned from a 10 day trek and was eager for more. So we teamed up and organised a trek into The Cordillera's Parque Nacional Huascaran, the well known Santa Cruz route, regularly voted as one of the worlds best hikes.
With a difficulty level graded at medium, this was to be no stroll in the park. We arranged the trek with a local agency which included a guide, porter, mule, and fellow trekkers Diego from Switzerland and two French chicks. We set off in flamboyant mood, only to be hit with a deluge of hail stones, freezing rain and high winds, only an hour short of the first camp. Add the high altitude into the mix and we had a wet, freezing first night and began thinking the worse, ie more of the same over the next three days. Luckily, this adverse weather was to be a one off.
We awoke in the morning to find ice on our tents and clothes that had been left outside frozen solid! Still, I had some dry clothes (the same could not be said of the others) and a belly full of porridge so we set off for the hardest day of hiking, a climb to the Punta Union pass, which rises to 4760m. This was a tough climb, illustrated by the recently dead mule we passed en route and Diego's bout of altitude sickness. He was OK, just dizziness and headaches as he had come direct from the coast with no time for acclimatisation.
Day three was all down hill... that's to say casual strolling down gentle inclines and into lush Andean meadowns, but still with the razor toothed mountains providing the spectacular backdrop. We spent the final night camping by a waterfall before the morning hike out to our transport and the afternoon bus ride back to Huaraz. I spent the next two days in Huaraz, getting fully rested up and enjoying the views from the hostel lounge / terrace over to the mighty Huascaran.
I'd liked to have stuck around for longer to tackle the 10 day Huayhuash trek that Peter had already trampled and given big props to, but alas I only have three days left on my 90 day Peru Visa so I had better head north and onward to Ecuador.
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