I'm here in a $.30/hr internet café, which is a few blocks from the center of town, stuffing my face with chocolate cake, which I bought only because I really had to pee and felt guilty not buying anything at the café across the street.
Last week, Wednesday (April 27th--a bit late on the updates here) to be precise, Kaeli and I returned from our first jaunt into the Peruvian backcountry. The hike is called the Santa Cruz Trek and it’s done, we´ve discovered, by everyone and their mothers, who hire guides, cooks, and donkeys to organize and carry everything, including large dining tents, which come complete with folding tables and chairs. Everything arrives donkey-/horseback and is setup each day before the group´s arrival in camp. They eat fancy food, salad, fresh fruit... And they bring full-size propane stoves--not the kind you bring car camping, but the kind you hook up and use on your back patio (!).
Not surprisingly, Kaeli and I observed the comfort and luxury of the guided groups in their giant, glowing, and catered messhall with a bit of jealously... and a hint of disdain--it seemed they hardly did anything for themselves! And here we were, poor us, across the way fetching our own water, pitching our own tent, cooking our own food--it felt like work. :P
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| Santa Cruz Trek - Peru (click to enlarge) |
Our trip started off at 6:30am with a white-knuckled collectivo ride about an hour and a half north to Caraz (lower left corner of map) along what's got to be the most-pot-holed road in the world.. It´s an exciting ride because you never know how the driver is going to react the swiftly approaching maze of craters: one moment the van is attempting top-speed on reltively unbroken road, the next moment you and 12 other passengers clutching the nearest oh-shit-handles, squashed against the doors/walls/seats after having been flung through the cabin from a near-axel-splitting catastrophie. Keep in mind, there are vans like this barelling both directions. At times it´s chicken, other times you pass oncoming traffic, which can be on the left or the right, depending on momentum. No one has seatbelts. People are sitting on 50lb sacks of potatoes. It´s madness. I don’t know how they drive back and forth all day long without accidents, blown tires, or worse. I’ve never been riding in a vehicle and been so certain it was going to break--not down, but in two. The collectivo had to have been at least 20 years old, almost everything inside and out that could be broken was. I don´t know, but somehow the poor thing managed, and we continued on to Caraz.
A quick side note on honking:
Only a few intersections in the center of town have traffic signals. The rest of the time, Peruvian drivers claim right of way either through constant honking or by simply holding down the horn while driving. The first one to to the horn apparently wins.
As far as collectivos go, the name of the game, as you can imagine, is to pick up as many passengers as you can, but in Huaraz (and Lima, so far) it´s special. I think there´s an assumption, ubiguitous amongst all taxi drivers, that anyone standing on the side of the road waiting for a ride is either narcoleptic (utterly not paying attention) or, perhaps, isn’t yet aware that they need one (?). I think they truly believe that if they honk enough, you¨ll jump right onboard and pay them to take you somewhere completely random, no matter if you´re standing on the opposite side of the road--maybe it´s me; maybe they´re just glowingly optimistic.
En route to Caraz our driver honked at anything that moved—and at things that didn’t. He honked to tell the cars around us that he was a mad-man barreling to town. He honked from the beginning of every roadside village to the end. He honked at little old ladies, at chickens and at trees. Most of the time, he honked for no apparent reason—maybe its aggression afterall? Needless to say, what remained of center of the steering wheel (where the horn honker normally should be) was a gaping hole of shredded pleather and broken plastic. The previous owner, too, had been overzealous. Honking here is an epidemic.
Sorry. So back to the hike. We made a trasfer in Caraz from the main road to a smaller, mountain road up to the village of Cashapampa (the bold arrow on the map). Accordingly, we transfered from our collectiveo van/mini-bus to a smaller collectivo. I had no idea it was possible to cram 10 people into a Toyota Camry stationwagon. A Toyota Camry is a car with a big trunk! Ten people: 3 in the front 3 more in the back seat with Kaeli and I (one little old Quechuan lady lay at my feet, curled in a ball) and two kids in the back with all our backpacks and someone´s (as usual) potatoes. The road climbed some 2,500 feet or so up the mountains side. At first, the road caught my attention. It definitely seemed rugged and quite exposed, like we were driving up a trail: one misplaced wheel could have sent us barreling down the cliffs back to Caraz (remember, how the first guy dodged potholes? Same story here). However, after surviving the collectivo ride back from Vaqueria, my fear of plummeting to death has--well--evolved, you could say, to a new state of awareness, but it hasn´t yet diminished. We were the last stop. The trailhead was about 1.5 hours from Caraz (3 hours from Huaraz).
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Cashapampa
That morning, around 11am, we started our hike uphill through the gorge in the afternoon heat. Kaeli wore capris and I wore a short-sleeve shirt. Along the way, we noticed little black flies nipping at our skin. For awhile they seemed innocent, but somehow we were failing to notice the chunks of skin and blood being carried away from my elbows and her shins. Around 4pm we arrived at Llamacorral, a place along the river with a small collection of abandon stone structures, lots of donkeys, cows, and an out-house. We made lentils and quinoa amongst the animals, who lurked around, kindly, to carry off any uneaten morsels. Unfortunately for them, we were starving.  |
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| Lake Jatuncocha |
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| Dinnertime! Lentils and Quinoa with carrots and onions and lots o BUTTER |
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| Taulliraju (5830m) |
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| Artesonraju (6025m) |
The highest point of the trek came on the third day at Punta Union 4760m (15,600ft). Even with our heavy packs, we blazed past the donkey-assisted guided groups. Snow had fallen the night before, which made the trail a bit slick. We had lunch at the top around 11:30. It was cold and breezy. Unfortunately, the mountains became socked-in, so we didn´t get to enjoy the mountains from the pass, just views of both valleys down below. Actually, it was pretty incredible to be able to see all the way back down the Santa Cruz Valley that we had spent the last two days walking up, including our two previous camps and the large lakes.
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15,600 feet |
We dropped down the east side of the pass after lunch and trucked along for another 3 or 4 hours until we arrived at Huaripampa about 4pm in the afteroon. We met a lot of people, also carrying their own packs, heading the other direction late in the day and wondered if they knew how high 4760 meters really was. It looked like they might barely make it before nightfall, definintely not before rainfall. This time of the year (´till about mid-May) is Peru´s rainy season, and anytime between about 2pm and 5pm insanely heavy rain pours down over the mountains. In can last all night, keeping you tent-bound even when you have to pee. You can buy a slice of chocolate cake but it wont stop the rain. So anyway, we made friends with a German couple from Berlin just before it started pouring. We both got our tents up quickly and took shelter and waited.
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| SE (far side) of Punta Union |
The hike to Vaqueria was supposed to be quick and easy, but there was a secret, hidden, steep hill at the very end that nearly killed us. We caught up with the guided party that we´d been leap-frogging. They were waiting in town, at the top of a hill, for a collectivo to bring them to Laguna 69, the 5th day of their paid-adventure. If you look at the map above, this is just beyond the pass (4767m) through which we eventually drove.
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| Peruvian construction in Vaqueria |
Luckily, we got to share the ride with other tourists, also english speakers, who could appreciate the insanity of the road. This collectivo was insanely packed (theres a photo somewhere). I think we got 20 people inside. Better yet, we drove for 4 hours back to the main road on the west side of the range swerving, like always, from one side of the road to the other. This time the road was unimaginably steep. Stairs. We drove down stairs. It was a one-lane road with dozens and dozens and dozens of 180+ degree hairpin turns. Looking down, the road appeared to be stacked on top of itself, like a stack of ribbon, or easy cheese. It was a pile of road. You could see 3,500 feet down, but you couldn´t see the road we were on. It was too narrow. Remember the potholes? I swear, at times half the tires were hanging halfway off the roadside. Kaeli couldn´t even bear to look out the window. It felt a lot like a roller-coaster, but with no track, just trust in this willey pot-hole-evading collectivo driver, who I observed, at least once, eating an apple, another time washing his hands, playing with the radio. Señor!! Watch the road, watch the road, please! Maybe you can wait till we get to the bottom of this cliff!
Ok, so we made it down and safe and alive and so on and so forth, but for me (and for Kaeli to) the road was so, shall we say, memorable, that it became one of the highlights of the trek/trip. But on par with the mountains? Oh yeaaaa. It wasn´t trekking, sure, but it burned within me a dizzing sense of vertigo. When I´m climbing, I get to make the calls, but having some random Peruvian driver sitting behind the wheel as we rumble within inches of death, for some reason, doesn´t instill much comfort. If I had been driving, fine. But a potentially-maniacal Peruvian collectivo driver?!
-Andre
More photos: http://www.andret.com/peru/santa-cruz/
