Huaraz :: Peru
Living life without oxygen.
Places: Huaraz, Chavin de Huantar, the Cordillera Blanca & Vaqueria.
Coolest thing I did: The bus ride up to Vaqueria rises up to a mountain pass at 4900 metres and the view was so good you basically stuck your camera out the window, pressed the button at random times and got postcards.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The term "National Park" in Peru seems to mean "comes with cows".
Huaraz is a nice little town nestled in between the very impressive Cordillera Blanca and the slightly less impressive Cordillera Negra mountain ranges (translation: The White Mountains and The Black Mountains. About Australian levels of originality in naming things in Peru then...)
After a stupidly early 5am start, a taxi and two collectivos (minibuses) we found ourselves with all the day trippers standing in a cloud covered valley full of cows. For some reason the term National Park seems to not preclude people's livestock roaming free all over the place. This means after a few days you stop noticing you're walking in cow poo, setting up your tent in cow poo, sitting in cow poo etc. If you've ever been camping and thought "this whole thing could be made a heap better if there was only shit everywhere" then Peruvian national parks are for you! Despite this we set off carrying our full packs on a hike that included a climb from 3600 metres to a truly beautiful alpine lake at 4400 metres.
Having done Torres del Paine with James we knew I tended to charge off ahead so by the time we dumped our packs 3 hours later at a height of 4200 metres I'd probably been a good 45 mins ahead of him. I'd felt my heart beating well above normal pace for that level of effort and being honest I'd never really tried this kind of hiking at altitude before. The last 200 metres to the lake absolutely killed me and by the time we got to the lake I felt like I was having my worst ever hangover x10, with a massive headache and queasiness. I attempted to plough through lunch at the lake but was really feeling terrible. It seems like a lot of people who do a fair bit of endurance exercise I'm pretty susceptible to altitude sickness - which amongst the mountaineering fraternity is a bit like admitting you're a premature ejaculator. I'm not sure if it's just we've got too much ego and get sick by going out too hard too early, or whether exercising a lot at sea level makes changes to your body that don't work very well at altitude. All I do know is it was very annoying to see chain smokers having an easier time of it than I was.
We cooked pasta up for lunch and spent a lot of time trying to fight off the two cows that were constantly bugging us for food and during that time all the day tripping groups came and went with the ridges behind the lake totally covered in thick cloud. It was only when we were packing up the clouds cleared for half an hour to show two massive snow caps behind the lake, making it postcard perfect. Chalk up one to James for wanting to not do a day trip - that lake was possibly one of the most impressive I saw in all of South America.
We camped back down near the road at 3600 metres in pouring rain but luckily the next morning I felt good again when we hooked up with our collectivo to take us up the road to the next town, Vaqueria. This involved an hour and a half drive through a pass at 4900 metres (the highest I've ever been in my life) and we were blessed with a perfectly clear morning. The winding switchback road up the side of the mountain gave us incredible views of Huascaran, the highest mountain in Peru and simply sticking your camera out the window and pressing the button at random gave you some of the best pictures I took on the whole trip. This was lucky as on the way back the road was covered in fog and we would have missed everything.
The Santa Cruz trek used to be a 4 day trek through the Santa Cruz valley up to the Punta Union pass at 4760 and then back down to the village of Vaqueria, taking you through two of the most spectacular valleys in the national park. However about the middle of March this year there was a massive mudslide that covered the first two days of the trek in waist deep mud and it's since been impossible to do the original trek. So instead you start off in Vaqueria and spend two days getting over Punta Union, camp down the bottom and then do the whole thing in reverse, which still takes in both valleys but obviously misses out most of the first one. Unfortunately too is the fact Punta Union is much harder to climb to from the side you currently do under the current trek than under the old one.
Generally speaking we were walking unaware of the mountain ranges around us, as cloud or fog was covering them most of the time, but that made it a bit more special when the cloud did clear to show us the jagged white caps of the biggest mountains of the range. I've seen pictures of what it looks like in June, but you have to work with the conditions you're given and I think we were pretty lucky to see what we did during this time of year.
The second day is a 900 metre climb from the first night's camp site to Punta Union and that 5 and a half hours, even though I was doing it slowly to avoid a repeat of feeling as bad as a I did a couple of days before is probably the hardest thing I've ever done. You simply aren't prepared for how hard it is to climb that high carrying (at that point) 12kg on your back with what feels like air so thin you're getting nothing from busting your lungs breathing. I was literally stopping every 4 or 5 steps for the last 200 metres or so and was in bits by the time I reached the tiny notch between the mountains at the top. Still, if you're travelling this long and you aren't occasionally saying "this is the hardest thing I've ever done" then you aren't doing it properly. For that matter, you could apply that to your life in general.
We had lunch at the pass and once again we were lucky to have clear views over both valleys during the hour or so we spent up there. We could see just how much of the other valley was covered in mud and with the weather closing in by the time we came to leave we made a call to drop back down the side we'd just come from and cut a day out of the trip. Neither of us could really see the point of going down the other side to camp for a night and then kill ourselves coming back up the same pass the next morning. We went down to a flat area near a lake at 4400 metres and slept there, under what turned out to be a light dusting of snow. It turns out it's actually very hard to sleep at that kind of altitude, you can feel your heart racing even when you're lying still in your sleeping bag. At least I was free of major symptoms of altitude sickness, but my appetite wasn't great. We'd been chewing coca leaves all day, which do act as an appetite suppressant so perhaps that was part of it.
Despite it's unpopularity with the DEA, the indios of the Andes have been growing and chewing coca leaves since time immemorial. There's statues of the gods chewing coca going back as old as pottery in the Andes and it was it's ubiquity and obvious positive effects on people operating at high altitude that caused Western chemists to first extract the active ingredient, the cocaine alkaloid in the late 19th century. Due to the fact you need about a kilo of leaves to make a gram of cocaine hydrochloride (the stuff you'd confiscate of Paris Hilton) you can pretty much buy the leaves here in the petrol station if you want if it's in the kind of quantity you can carry around with you all day. You masticate it your cheek between the teeth and the gum and add a little bit of lime (because it's an alkaline) and you soon feel a slight numbing sensation and find walking and climbing a little bit easier. Those of you that work in investment banks won't have to worry either - it's such a small dosage that you could chew it at your desk all day and your wee would still be clean at bonus time.
So having seen some awesome views in patches we pushed back to Vaqueria by mid afternoon in the hope of snagging a ride back to the Real World that afternoon. By 6pm it was obvious that wasn't going to happen, as we saw one car and two trucks pass in 3 hours and they were all full. So the woman who owned the only restaurant in town (which was basically a room with a table she served from her own kitchen upstairs) let us sleep in a couple of beds they have in the store room behind the shop. Which didn't have any doors. Still, after 3 solid nights of sleeping on the ground beds were a welcome sight and she fed us dinner and breakfast for about $8 all up. Vaqueria had about 8 houses so our predicament caused a bit of amusement, with the locals sitting around watching us sit around waiting for buses that were never going to come. Still, they were all very nice. I also got up fairly early to a clear morning and managed to get some nice photos of the craggy snow caps behind the town. It was also possible to dry my shoes for the first time since we started, which meant they stank slightly less when we got our collectivo at midday.
On the return to Huaraz we decided to celebrate by going and having a curry at the most westernised restaurant in town (Chilli Heaven - owned by possibly the most sour Scottish bastard in the world), and being foolish enough to have the Vindaloo my guts are an absolute mess today. We also decided to get a taxi out to the 9 month old local microbrewery, Sierra Andina and try our hand at high altitude drinking. Owned by two Yanks from Colorado (which has a fairly hectic microbrewery scene of it's own) with visa issues that are currently keeping them out of the country, Sierra Andina beer has pretty much infiltrated every place you can eat and drink in Huaraz, pushing out the local mass produced drops. It turns out they make a passable stout and very nice pale and amber ales, but due to some of Peru's laws about beer it's really hard to say how strong they are. You can't sell beer with an ABV of 6% in Peru, so three of the four beers on the menu were suspiciously 5.9%. I admit to being fairly unsteady when we wandered out at midnight, two hours after the official closing time.
So after 5 days in the rain I wake up this morning to find absolutely glorious sunshine and the hostel window giving out onto the best view of the Cordillera Blanca I've seen during the week or so I've spent here. Put that in the dictionary under Murphey's Law.
My only other trip out of town while I was trying to get the trekking organised was to one of Peru's most important archelogical sites, Chavin de Huantar. The Chavin culture existed at about the same time as the Greeks were at their peak in the Classical period, thus being as far from the Inca Empire and the Spanish conquistadors as we are from the Vikings. They were credited as the people who brought the various strands of Andean culture together for the first time, combining a lot of the agricultural and religious motifs that wouldn't have been too unfamiliar to the Incas. Their religious and cultural centre was at Chavin de Huantar, and what remains these days is the base of a pyramid looking out over multiple levels of plaza and some underground tunnels where the priests prepared the various ceremonies.
Most of the artefacts excavated from Chavin had been sitting in the museum in Lima until the local government got their act together and build a museum near the ruins, opening it in 2008. The building has taken a fair bit of inspiration from Chavin de Huantar itself, but also looks like it could have come from the pen of Frank Lloyd Wright, with big flat stone slabs blending seamlessly into the hillside behind. If I'm honest I think I was more impressed with the building that I was with what was in it. It is the current location of the Tello Obelisk, considered one of the best artefacts that still survived the Chavin people. It's such an intricately carved pattern of jaguars, felines and so forth I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before the young, hipper Peruvian kids of Lima start sporting tattoos based on it (if they aren't already).
So despite a false start I too would now highly recommend Huaraz and surrounds to anyone making their way through Peru. Despite being fairly famous it seems to have escaped the most common of the Facebook generation's Gringo Trail, so most of the people wearing North Face clothing you see in town tend to be my age or older. Most of the kids I'd spoken to in Lima had no idea what I was talking about when I said I wanted to come here and that gives the place a very laid back pace of life. Tomorrow I make my way back through Lima to Huacachina, a town in the desert known primarily for sandboarding, so I suspect the party atmosphere will be in full swing when I get there.