Huaraz

Hey there folks, it´s time for Jill´s latest update.

I am in Huaraz, Perú. It is located in the mountains about midway up in the country. The town is the center for trekking, as there are a lot of things to do in the surrounding countryside. The national park here is about 100 miles long and covers a lot of mountains, which for people like me, means a lot of play. Unfortunately, I have been recovering from a cold so was not able to do a trek.

I did do a counple of outtings though. The first was a trip to Pastoruri, a glacier, located more than 5000m (16,000ft) up on a mountain. The pictures are really cool. In one I look like I am in Antartica. One day I will do an activity where it is warm. Being next to a glacier guarantees it is going to be cold.

THe next day I went to a lake really high up in the mountains. The lake is the product of snow melting from neighboring mountains, again with really great pics. Now, there is kind of a tragic story about one of the mountains. Exactly 40 years ago today, a major earthquake hit off the coast of Peru and the traditional adobe buiildings were not up to the tremor. But, one really unlucky town was located below a giant glacier, one that had fractured from the mountain. The earthquake loosened it and 63,000,000 cubic meters of material went flying down the mountain and covered the town. Literally 20-30ft of rock plus another 20-30ft of ice and snow sat over the town. Over 25,000 people died.

Next I am going to another mountain town, but due to mountain roads, there is no easy way to get there. I hope to visit some Peace Corps Peru volunteers in the area and see what their service is like.

I´ll put up picks when I can.

Jill

Huacachina

This desert oasis is surprisingly simple to get to.
I wont lie, there isn´t a whole lot to the ¨town,¨see pictures of how small the place is on the previous post, and I almost dismissed this trip as a waste. then I did the sand buggy tour.

My friends had talked this up quite a bit, so I was expecting a lot, and it delivered. Being in the buggy feels like being is a rollercoaster. You are just like, there is no way we are going up there, and then you do, then you can´t see the other side and have no idea if you are going straight down, or what! It is so much fun.

Then you get to try sand sledding on the board and then actualy boarding if you can stand up on the board. I was in a group of three people, the other two were girls from Denmark, and we got to stop several times to sled. It is so much fun, and I posted a video. You get really sandy. The sand is like fine beach sand which makes trying to walk up the dunes very interesting.

My attempts at standing on the sandboard was pitiful. My first time down I had a record of ten feet before falling, and the second time I made it a little further but then had a serious wipeout.

A couple of times on the trip I had to empty my shoes of sand because they were a few sizes too small due to how much space the sand was taking up. Then showering after was fun because there wasn´t enough water pressure to actually get the sand off.

In all, the town isn´t that great, but sand buggying is totally worth it!

Next step: back to the mountains. My goal is another trek (we´ll see) and rock climbing!

Pictures in chronological order

Sand dunes
here I go! (five feet before falling) The girls from Denmark and I agreed it was a cool factor just to have tried, no need to actually be able to stand up on the board!
Sunset.

Sandsledding. The internet is too slow to add the video of sandbuggy-ing. Make I can add it later.

Pictures- in reverse order as always

Stairs going down Waynapicchu. I was not joking about the steepness, these were at least wide steps.
The average postcard pic of Machu Picchu. When I get home I need to photoshop out the people.
Baby Llama!
Random walls in the urban sector.
HousesMe! This is the view out from MP
View from random spot.
This was the boy´s learning center.
Agricultural terraces
Fresh from the hike up and taken before people arrived.
On the trek, this is one bridge that we crossed.
Town that we slept in.
Pretty mountains. Cold mountains.
First view of mountains. Day one when everyone was fresh.
Group resting on day one.
Cusco, one of many churches
These ladies go around saying ´take a picture´and then ´monies.´ I snapped this one without them looking.
Big church on the Plaza de Armas Cusco.
Typical market selling souvenirs
church bells
incan walls and churches
shopping street in lima.
blue church in lima.
one of many historic buildings in the historic district
main plaza
the girls who I met on my first night, they were also Honduras peace corps volunteers and were on their last night of travelling.

Salkantay and Machu Picchu

The hike went really well.

I got picked up at 5:30am on the first day, and we drove the about two hours to Mollepata. It is a small town that is the traditional starting point for this trek. After an expensive and unsatisfying breakfast in town, we started hiking. The whole day was a steady uphill at high elevation. This is why I got to Cusco a few days early, you have to learn to breath at that elevation. The town is over 10,000 ft above sea level, in comparison, Denver is a mile high at just above 5,000ft. There is a lot less oxygen and your body feels it.

The hike was pretty, we had some great photo ops of mountains. We followed the road all day. At lunch we realized we would be getting great food on the trek. Soup followed by traditional plates. No room for complaint. By the end of the day it was cold, I mean really cold. We camped at 12,500ft and it was COLD. We were all huddled around waiting for dinner wondering if waiting for dinner was necessary, knowing that sleeping bags were in tents. No one slept well, I can´t even explain the cold.

The next morning was sheer will and determination that got everyone up. We had to take off clothes to get ready for hiking, and most people paced and ate breakfast at the same time to keep the body moving to not cool down too much. Before noon we reached the saddle of Salkantay and Umkatay mountains. The saddle is at 4650m or 15,255 ft. That is high people. Our guide led us through a traditional Incan thanks giving ceremony to pachamama, or mother earth. Then we went down.

My knee lasted most of the way down, then I tried to wrap it, but had no idea how to wrap a knee. We went down almost 6000ft in that afternoon. The good news was that it was so much warmer down there! Everyone was out and talking and having fun. We were taught a peruvian card game called ¨Chancho va!¨or ¨Pig go!¨ It is really fun and I shall teach it to people when I get back to the states.

The next day was almost all downhill. We hiked all day and it became more jungle-y vs the highlands we had been seeing. By the end of the day it was almost exactly like Honduras, even to the point that they had coffee plants.

Then we learned the Russian knife game. Now, the first time we heard the rules we all thought that it was like playing russian roulette whether anyone was going to throw a knife and get it stuck in your foot, but it turns out it is a safe and fun game to play with knives. Later when the ground was too hard but we all wanted to play, we found a away to play with rocks, which makes it available to younger people as well.

The next day we hiked until Aguas Caliente, which is the starting point for Machu Picchu. The town kind of looks cute at first, but there is nothing all that great about it. It was made to house all the people going to MP. I also highly recommend skipping the hot springs, they are NOT WORTH IT.

So, last day of the trek was the Machu Picchu day. Now, there is a peak behind MP called Waynapicchu and they only let 400 people climb it a day, so only the first 400 in the place get it. How do you get to be one of the first in there? You wake up at 3:30am and start walking to the start gate for the hike (400m or 1,300ft) up the mountain. Now when I say up, I mean up. There is very little horizontal distance covered, it is almost like a constant spiral staircase up. It was funny, people who later when up on the bus were saying how crazy that road was and all the hikers laughed because the road did major S turns and the trail did not.

Machu Picchu is amazing. We got the guided tour for the first few hours and managed to get some pictures before thousands of people entered the ruins. They are really big so can hold that many people. I have limited time so cannot go into the history of machu picchu right now, but it was amazing.

Yeah, then I came back to town. I started a conversation with other travelers on the bus and we chatted for a while. I came back and had a nice discussion over dinner with two canadian girls. Life is going well. Tomorrow I head to Lima and then down to Ica.

Jill

The adventure continues

Well, if anyone still reads this, I thought I would write up a little bit on what I have been up to.

I finished my Peace Corps experience on May 13th. It was also the day the trainees swore in and became real volunteers. There is something poetic about that. The last week was in Tegucigalpa finishing reports and medical tests. There is just something degrading about having to poo in a cup.

Before that I had a bunch of good-byes. Two weekends before, the volunteers in the department of El Paraiso threw me a good bye weekend. We went to two small towns that I had never visited. We had a barbeque at hot springs in one town followed by fresh strawberries at a freezing cold pool at the second town.

My host family threw me a pupusa and margarita party my last night in site. My whole host family was there and it was a really calm night just talking to everyone.

My last night was actually at the lake, where I met a close volunteer friend. We spent one night at a hotel, then the next day went to a giant waterfall.

THe next night, I didn´t stay in the hotel in teguc, but with friends. It was good to spend a calm night with them and talk.

So, after doing the paperwork and tests, I left! THere are both happy and sad feelings about that, but I don´t have time to express all of them.

The first night I had a 13 hour lay-over in San Jose, Costa Rica, where I met my friend Ryan. He had left two weeks before me and was on the last night of his travels, while I was on the first night of my travels. We went to a chinese place for dinner and just chilled, I got in too late to see much of the city. I will say though, that it is very different from Tegucigalpa, it is developed and has highways, and green in the city.

Finally, on Saturday morning, after an hour layover in Panama, I flew to Lima. This is when the giant panic happened. Apparently, my bank limited how much money I could get out, and I didn´t know this, so I flipped because i couldn´t get money out, i was in a foreign country and couldn´t get in touch with the guy I was couchsurfing with. I had friends who were on their last night of travelling in Colombia and Peru, and I had an idea where they were staying with, so I charged the overpriced airport taxi to my credit card and went to their hostel.

I had a good conversation with the taxi driver (yeah for speaking spanish) and because the hostel was on the other side of the city, I got to see a bunch of the city. I get there, start rehearsing how I am going to talk my way through the door and immediately see one of my friends. She was online trying to get a message to me, so seeing me was weird. At that point, we dropped my stuff off in their room, I used to internet to try and get in touch with couchsurfing guy, then we went out. We went to find an atm, my card still didn´t work, tried another one- no luck, and then went to email couchsurfing guy again, because the number he gave me didn´t work. We went to eat, at one point I called couchsurfing guy and that finally resolved itself.

At night, CS guy met me at the hostel and we all had a beer in the restaurant there, then I went to his sister´s house. We stayed there a little bit then went out for a walking tour of the historic district of Lima. It was really nice, so safe and so different than Teguc.

The next morning we did the walking tour during the day and got to see more and I was able to take photos. Then, I tried my debit card and decided to take a giant wad of money out so that I would never get stuck without money, well at least for a few weeks.

Lima is really nice, but it was so good to have a local guide. I can imagine that alone it wouldn´t be as nice. It is also pretty cheap, not as cheap as Honduras, but that is the price of development. Speaking of development, my friend told me that ten years ago the center was a bad place and that the government and investors spent a lot of money on it, and in my opinion it paid off.

I had dinner with his whole family, and then went to bed early because I literally could not keep my eyes open.

I then went to Cusco. I again had to pay a lot for the airport taxi only to get dropped off below the hill from my hostel. Not cool. I had my giant bag, and then there is not too much oxygen up here. We are around 3300m, or over 10,000 ft. I thought my heart was going to pound hard enough to explode. I got my room, dropped my stuff off and then went exploring.

I like exploring Cusco alone. I can go anywhere, spend as much time as I want people watching and having fun. I found the market, which turns out to be the cheapest place to eat lunch. I am going to need to control myself on how much I buy here though. I can´t help it, there are just that many things for sale that I really like. The one thing stopping me is that my bag is already full and heavy, so i don´t want more weight.

Oh, and my first night here, I lost the key to my lock! I had to make due with what I had in my purse for the night, then headed out early to buy a twin to my lock to be able to change and shower.

I leave early tomorrow for my hike, so it will be six days before I can post again.

Jill
PS photos will have to wait, i don´t want to load them now