What a weekend.
Since we last posted we spent our last day in Lima wandering around the city taking in the sites and visiting the San Fernesto Convent. The convent contains a library with some of the oldest and most important books in South America, and they are all sitting on shelves and out for viewing, original prints and all. This isn´t like the rare book libraries you see back home all enclosed in glass. The convent also has many paintings and murals, some restored, but still open to the elements, and it is pretty humid in Lima.
The highlight of the convent was the catacombs. The catacombs house some 75,000 people all buried in mass graves and plots beneath the church. It was the buring place for people of the church, as well as the citizens of Lima. The catacombs were interesting inthemselves, if not a little errie, as the curators decided to rearrange the bones in circular and interesting patterns. Skulls and femurs dance together in a very odd display. (Having hard time uploading photos from other websites, plus we weren´t allowed to take photos inside, otherwise type into Google Images San Francisco, Lima and you will see pictures of skulls)
We then caught our bus to Casma, on Peru time (1 hour late to leave and 3 hours late to arrive). We arrived in the middle of the night and decided to splurge on a hotel a bit out of our price range 30CAD a night. We awoke to a beautiful flowered courtyard, pool, gymnasium, playground, restaurant and some monkeys in a cage. 30 dollars goes a long way here.
None'the'less, we are still cheap people and we took a mototaxi to another hotel (mototaxis are abundant in the small towns and they are a cross between a motorized bike with two seats behind the driver and covered with tarps. They are more prevalent than cars in Casma, and the locals take great pride in blinging out their ride with decals of Nike and Wolves, some even have neon lights).
We spent the first day wandering the town. The town of Casma is techically five hours north of Lima along the coast and is encased in dry desert like mountains. The mountains basically consist of dry sand'like rock. The downtown is quite small, yet insanely busy with people coming in from the surrounding communities to buy and hawk wares. If we felt like outsiders in Lima, it was definitely so in Casma, as in three days we did not see any other white people.
The first day we ate lunch in a restaurant and dined upon bowls of chicken foot and gizard soup (quite excellent) and chicken, rice, beans and lettuce, all washed down with purple corn juice for the equivalent of less than 2CAD. What a feast! And immediately after I asked exaclty what kind of juice we were drinking we were soon engaged in a two hour conversation with the locals. My spanish is growing exponentially by the hour, and everyone in Casma was so friendly. They all want to know where you are from and what Canada is like. They want to tell you about their country, and are happy you are at least trying to learn their language. We have given out our email to so many people because so many want to learn english and we have already gotten correspondence from some.
We were soon invited to a Comedy Festival at the Municipal Complex. It was to include local Peruvian acts, including two midget commedians and also one of the women we were talking to was singing at the festival. We agreed to go.
Of course the festival was on Peruvian time and thus three hours late to start. It was a children´s comedy festival, as I guess Peruvians, and maybe South Americans find midgets really funny, so most of the town was there. One of our friends was the DJ at the local radio station and for that night he was announcing to the crowd about his Canadian visitors, and of course as soon as the festival started they wanted to make fun of us as tourists, and to include us in the festival. Chris was the first act and had to get up on the stage (local football field) and lip-sing with glasses to a song. The comedy was intersting in that it was very physical and thus we could understand it.
The second day in Casma we took a mototaxi out to the ruins of Sechin. They are about five km from the city and there is also included a small museum. The ruins are mostly a wall and a city within. You aren´t allowed in the small city, but you can walk on the hill beside it to see in. The walls are fully covered in relief images of warriors and people, as well as water carvings, they are in amazing condition, and very beautiful. In the distance the wall of the Andes juts up into mountains, higher than any I have ever seen.
We decided to leave Casma yesterday, and it was somewhat with heavy hearts as we were getting to know people and it was small enough to get a lot of hellos and friendly smiles in the street.
We took a six hour bus ride through the Cordillera Negra to reach Huaraz. The road here is paved only in part through a desert and then hits a BUMPY dirt road. It wound and twisted all the way up from 90m above sea level to over 4000m, and went through some amazing scenic vistas, incredible dropoffs and some cute little houses and towns, all bearing in mind that what they consider two lane roads, is really more like one lane. The Cordillera Negra is a really dry mountain range filled with cacti and brush. It was really interesting to see how far up these mountains they farm. The local farmers really are scratching out an existence on whatever land they can claim and fields reached to the tops of the mountains. We saw tons of pigs, horses, mules, llamas and on. Way too much to describe, and of course many people dressed in authentic dress.
We dropped down into the town of Huaraz (3,090m) with views of the Cordillera Blanca in the distance. The views are filled with amazing glacier chocked mountains, there are over 50 peaks here at over 5700m high (North America alone only has three) and Peru´s highest mountain Huascaran at 6768m is found here. For people who have read-watched ¨Into the Void¨ this is where that went down. In any case we were quickly inundated with offers for lodging, as it is a much bigger city(pop. 100 000) and so as it got dark (630pm) we found a hostel and went and had dinner.
Altitude got the better of us and Justine went down with a splitting headache and we were both a little out of it *L*(might have been the sangria)...Today, we spent the day wandering the town and getting our bearings. This place makes Banff and Jasper look like a joke in terms of trekking and outdoor options. There are literally a plethora of options and the sky is the limit, horseback riding, mountaineering, trekking, canyoning, bungee, you name it you can do it. We want to do the Santa Cruz trek which will take us by Huascaran and also up onto a pass (Punat Union)around 4700m. We spent the day talking to guides and pricing it out and we will probably leave in a couple of days.
For now we have to acclimatize and tomorrow we will probably hike over to a local ruin. Following that we will take a bus-tour-hike up to a local glacier at 5000m to acclimatize to that. Life here in Huaraz is very busy with many students at school here and a lot of people catering to tourism. Tourism isn´t as big here as Cuzco but it is growing fast, and our books are already outdated. Still, as it is now slow season, there aren´t that many travellers and we have only seen a handfull of gringos thus far. I think in the busy season it would be really easy to find other trekkers etc.
Still there are many restaurants catering to all needs and we even found a great coffee joint with a huge library of books from fiction to biography and travel. It has board games and one of the best panaroma views of the mountians. We will probably hang out there and just get used to the rush. It feels like so much has happened and we have really only been here five days.
Hasta Luego.
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