Santa Cruz Trek

Preparation began in Huaraz, buying supplies, improving Hannah´s backpack (which is really not intended for hiking (to be fair mine´s pretty rubbish, it weighs 3kg empty)) by sewing on some foam, and going for a short hike to some ruins which we diddn´t pay to go in as we´re all ruined out. Oh, and have found a $1.25 set menu, soup, main, and juice drink dessert.

Day 1 starts with a 1hr collectivo (vw camper van packed with 20 people and numerous items on the roof) followed by a 1hr taxi journey (with the driver picking up all his mates and apparently his uncle along the way) dropping us at the trail head.
The views are stunning everywhere in the area so to us the trail begins as a steep climb up a valley along side a crystal clear river.

Apparently this is one of the most popular treks in SA (South America), after the Inca trail and Torres del Paine in southern Patagonia, so we weren´t surprised to have counted 20 gringos in the first hour alone. But most of them having never walked further than a hundred yards from their cars had a guide to stop them getting lost, and donkeys to carry their stuff.

As we were carrying everyting we breaked/snacked for 15mins every hour and took an hour lunch and this assisted in reducing the weight of:
1 kilo of chocolate
0.5kg raisins
Brazil nuts and dried apricots
Porridge
Bananas
Honey
Bread
Crackers
0.5kg Cheese
6 hard boiled eggs
2 tins of sardines (one had a spicy sauce)
3 packs of biscuits
4 packs of soup (MSG is not an optional extra in SA)
0.5kg of Angel Hair spaghetti (uberthin and therefore quick cooking)
2 packs of noodles
Carrots and spring onions to liven up the packet soup
Tea
Iodine (to purify the gringo poisoned water)

Campsite 1 was a nice spot with snow covered peaks far off down the valley giving us an indication of what was to come.

Day 2 and the sun rises just in time to lift the chill and dry our tent. Whilst we are packing our stuff the other gringos have set off after having breakfast in their dining tents, having a wee in their toilet tent and leaving the packing to the horsemen.

Pretty easy days walk with more and more snow capped peaks coming into view along the way, our lunch break includes dipping feet into ice cold water and a crazily big bug landing on my leg. N.B: The insect that bit my ankle on Day 1 caused a big swollen welt making it uncomfortable to walk.
Even more stunning campsite , with us making a precarious water crossing to be away from the groups and viewing of Condors.

Being so close to the snow made it bloody freezing and waking up at 2am with ice in the tent we decided to head out for a piss and go a quick jog to warm up. My sleeping bag has a comfort rating of about 7 degrees C and Hannah´s is only marginally better, so after a failed attempt of both of sleeping in one sleeping bag with the other sleeping bag over the top, we resorted to joining them together and not sleeping much more.
Nice starry sky and full moon though.

Day 3 and having survived the night I added more honey and even some banana to the porridge in celebration. Once packed we found that the precarious river crossing had become even more precarious thanks to the stepping rocks being covered in ice, but having thrown her backpack to me Indihannah made the jump from bank to bank with an inch to spare.
Then we were off and up to Punta Union and having enjoyed the view back to where we had come.

We continued onwards and in to the next valley below with a new and equally stunning backdrop.

Today we were expecting a long day and maybe even an arrival after dark, but were pleasantly surprised to find that we had made the campsite in 4.5 hours of walking, and set camp after once again crossing a river to escape the crowd.

Day 4 we headed off early to ensure we could catch the one collectivo which would pass the end of the trek. And after passing through some small communities, witnessing rural life, and fending off the local kids, we made the last final climb to the dirt road out. We luckily made it in time to catch the collectivo, only to find out that he was going the wrong way to find more people and stop for lunch (nice little town though) . An hour and a half later we end up back at the end of the trek and have just enough space to pick up some more gringos one of whom was unfortunate enough to get the worst seat on the bus. 3 more bumpy hairpin corned hours followed, then a change of vehicle and another hour but on a proper road.

Recovery was assisted by eating the hottest Thai food in my life, getting smashed on caphriñas and waking up with a bumpy but warm head.

Today we are sorting out the Galapagos and booking our bus tickets to the beach, see you there...

Tx

Ariquipa to Huaraz

Now the high season (July/August) is fully in swing, all the hostels, buses and tours get booked up fast, and is also pushing the prices up. As a consequence we had to hang around in Nazca for longer than we would have liked, but we had a very comfortable hostel, which had Cable TV and so we spent much of our time watch straight to video films and changing rooms.

The wait was worth it though, bouncing around in the light aircraft over the Nazca lines was an amazing experience. These Nazca´s fellows were a busy bunch, we had been to a number of museums and a planetarium covering all kinds of theories and explaining their sizes etc, but until you actually get an eye full its hard to appreciate had much effort went into them. In my view the reasoning behind the lines is a mixture of all the theories...with more emphasis on hallucinogenic filled spiritual ceremonies.

Sadly the pics didn´t come out amazingly but here is a selection (if you click on them they will expand and you may have a better chance of actually seeing anything).

Whale

Spaceman

Monkey

Spider, the black smuge is the plane´s shadow

Hummingbird

The right hand shot shows a plane at a lower altitude than us, their are usually three planes in the air at the same time at three different altitudes, we were in the middle.

Following Nazca we spent the day in Lima and our first view of the Pacific, arriving at 6am and leaving at 10pm. Which bring us to Huaraz where we are now acclimatising at 3100m in preparation for a 5 day hike, surrounded by snow capped peaks .

Cuzco to Arequipa

Hannah finds potential wedding (or bridesmaid?) dress!

Inti Rami, the festival we were in Cuzco for, was entertaining and very colourful. Various historic scenes were re-enacted, as it was all in Quechua we could only enjoy the music and atmosphere, which was enough for us.

That evening we headed back to Ollantaytambo to take command of our Hostel, Chaska Wasi (House of Stars in Quechua), for the next few days. Bloody hell, what a shock, working that is...if you´re ever thinking of running a hostel, hotel or whatever, don´t your life will end. When we offered our services, the hostel only had us and 2 others in it so we thought it would be a breeze, and had a massive smack in the face when finding out that the coming days would be uberbusy with night 2 being a full house of 40 beds! In the desperation to find space for guests I was even moving beds from room to room (thanks Phillipe). Hannah was mainly on bed making duty, luckily the sheets were so thin they dried in half an hour as there weren´t spares laying around, and I was on toilet cleaning duties, nice. As we were close to the train station for Machupichu we would have to let people out at 5am for the first train departure and stay awake till the 11pm last train arrival. On top of that we had Trevor the dog (see pic of him licking his balls behind H´s back) who I taught to sing, Chaska the cat (who was subjected to wearing a bright orange and green jacket) who would make a right racket when she was hungry and 5 Guinea pigs one of which lived under the kitchen cupboards (apparently they were too old to eat). We did do a good juice for breakfast though, the best being orange, papaya and banana, and even offered brown bread.
I´m now looking forward to another 9 months off work.

As you can image we were very pleased when Katty the hostel owner returned home (with a copy of the Telegraph and a tin of quality street), and were able to enjoy Ollanta Rami, another festival much like the one in Cuzco, but had to run home half way though to watch Spain win the Eurocopa. That evening we had a BBQ and played frogger, which the Ozzies´ won having been the only ones to actually get the golden coins in the frog´s gob.

Back in Cuzco, we visited the Inca museum which had displays of the tools used to create the massive structures we´ve been visiting.

And a selection of weapons, which were atached to sticks, seems they were the orignal creators of the french tickler.

In the evening we met up for a meal with the Australians who'd been staying at the hostel. Thinking about it all the guests we had were sound. Then we headed for our bus to Arequipa, I´ve included a pic here so you can get an idea of the standard of buses if you look carefully you we see the leg rests which fold out and later we were given blankets and they popped a movie on with English subtitles, having just eaten I had to eat Hannah's spaghetti dish as well as my own, not bad for $12.

After a day in Arequipa getting our camping supplies together we made our way to the Colca Canyon, apparently twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and whilst the views were great I doubt it´s quite as impressive. After a night in Cabanaconde we headed off on a 3 day hike.

Day 1 walk down 1200m to the Canyon floor, get blisters everywhere and fall over on slippy dusty marbles, alot. (the lines in the middle pic are from the pre inca terracing)

Day 2 wake up to find that we were sharing our tent with a posionous scorpion , and head down the canyon to the Oasis to cool down in the ice cool pools, note sharing of camping ground with not so friendly Alpaca.

Day 3 hike back up before the sun gets too hot, this pics doesn´t really do justice to how hard it was , and to add injury to insult a peruvian guy comes the other way carrying a matress on his head. My shoes are now even offensive to myself, I still haven´t washed my hair though.

Back Arequipa, and a set lunch for $6 consisting of soup, alpaca steak cooked on hot rock, and fruit salad. This isn´t the cheapest we´ve had yet, Cuzco takes that title at $2.

See you in Nazca, where Indihannah and I will be mostly grave digging.