How far will your Soles take you?

So we decided to change hostels in Huaraz. Not really for any reason, just because we had some time to kill and found a nicer place to stay.


We are now staying at Olaza''s B and B. It is a little more pricy, but there are hot showers (never will I take them for granted again), breakfast included, an upstairs roof patio with 360 panorama of the mountains, a TV, music, DVD's (english ones), free internet and a library. So we thought we would hang out here for a while.

www.andeanexplorer.com

We have booked an excursion with some Brit's that we met via a bulletin board for a four day trek of the Santa Cruz trail. We will be going with Andean Kingdom. There are a lot of options here for trekking, all ranging in price, and many offering a lot and not coming through. Seems like my kind of hiking..(or at least I am sure Marty and Andrew will think it is) donkies carry everything.. you just carry a day pack with your camera. We''ll post how it actually ends up next week. Sounds like it is a very busy trail because you can book the day before and there are a lot of companies going, so I am beginning to wonder how remote the trail will be...

Today we took a tour up to the Pastoruri Glacier. There really are no english speaking gudes so we went with a spanish group. Of course the guide starts into a big long half hour serious talk about acclimatizing and what to do and what not to do and things like that. I got bits and pieces, enough to know it was serious, about coca leaves and chocolate and not sleeping.....

Map: http://www.andix.com/huaraz_maps/huaraz3.html

Website with photos: http://www.geocities.com/smailbd76/Huaraz.htm

We stopped to sip tea made of coca leaves which is supposed to help with altitude. Then we continuted onwards and upwards visiting some llamas dressedup for pictures with colourful blankets, earings with pompoms and sunglasses. We decided not to pay to have our pictures taken with them, but got some of other people. We also stopped by these giant Puya Raymondi flowering, I think they are from the cacti family. In any case they have the worlds tallest flower, taking up to 100 years to grow a flower 10m high.

http://www.pbase.com/jorginho/image/32076481

The glacier was nice, but neither of us came off it feeling overly excited about the visit up there (might have been the splitting headache from the 5200m of altitude). More interestingly was to watch a few overweight and rich tourists from somewhere come all decked out in snowpants, mitts, hats and watch them get packed up the hill on the backs of farmers. Like I said a few soles go a long way, you can get packed up a mountain. On the glacier, they let you go anywhere you want, I guess I shouldn't say let you, because there is no one there to stop you. At that altitude a few km walk to the face of it takes almost 45min, and since you only have two hours, you can't go far. But there were school children running all over the beast, sliding down on tarps and having a gay old time.

Coming down we watched a girl on a horse filming a music video. Peruvian/South American music videos are funny, we have watched some on the bus, and they basically include one or two sites and some low-budget filming. It was funny to watch her singing/miming to the ghetto blaster and riding off with the fat tourists who just got packed up the hill a few moments before.

Other than that we are now back in Huaraz, nursing headaches and looking up places in Trujillo. The plan is to head out on the trek at 6am Sat. morning. We will return Tuesday, and either catch a night bus to Trujillo that day, or leave the next. We plan to be in Trujillo for a few days, and then quickly on to Chiclayo. In both cities there are Incan and pre-Incan sites we want to visit. Then it will be on to Ecuador, in a week and a half to two weeks.