So sorry for all the very long delays, but it has been an amazing and hectic month, that's for sure.
Huaraz was beautiful. A nice little city up in the mountains northeast of Lima, with tons of people in traditional clothing and lots of real Peruvian food. Actually reminded me a lot of Cusco, only minus all the people trying to sell tourists postcards and finger puppets every two seconds. We stayed at this really nice family place there, and all of them were so generous and hospitable, which was especially nice since we arrive don Christmas Eve morning (plus we loved it cause it only cost 10 soles a night including great breakfasts! which translates into about 3 dollars). I had a little trouble adjusting back to the altitude so I slept a lot of that first day and didn't even want to get up and answer the door to our room when some of the other people staying at the hostel were trying to be friendly and brought us some cake at 10am when the breakfast bar was closing. Seriously....... so lazy. Refusing cake is just not like me.
They had a really nice Christmas eve dinner, with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy and some delicious pasta salad, which I usually don't even like. But in order to make it to that, we all sat around the dinner table from about 7pm just drinking hot chocolate, telling travel stories, etc, which would have been a lot more fun if I wasn't feeling so tired and headachey. Some of the other people were pretty amusing though, including one czech guy who first refused to tell anyone his nationality, just saying that he was from "the dark side of the moon". But we waited around foodless until midnight, when everyone in the whole city ran outside and shot off fireworks, embers flying and falling everywhere, drank champagne and sang some ridiculous spanglish christmas carols, in which the line "vamos comer pavo" to the tune of "vamos a la playa" featured prominently. And then after dinner, the rest of us sat around and watched the family exchange gifts, which I thought would feel pretty strange if I were them, but I guess running and living in a hostel you must be pretty used to things like that. But just a very nice, homey Christmas overall, even if it did feel a bit like waiting for the ball to drop on new year's.
The next day (Christmas day), Irene and I hiked up a small mountain to this cross overlooking the city, which was really pretty and then we took a colectivo to a small town nearby to bathe in some hot springs that were a lot like Baños only the water looked even more disgusting. And then to this delicious chicken place for Christmas dinner (where we ended up going back to about 3 more times, partially because Irene knew her stomach could handle it and partially because the taste was just so tempting).
In the next couple of days, we arranged 2 day hikes, the first guided by a guy named Coqui from the hostel to Lago Churup. We had a colectivo (in which the man beside me had a live weaner pig in a burlap sack on his lap, and several sheep tied up on the roof rack, hilarious!) out to some town and then a 5 hour hike uphill, through some nice farmland and then almost straight up thi smountain, with the last half hour being rock climbing along the side of this rushing waterfall, which was absolutely my favourite part. I found it surprisingly easy, and have hypothesized that I must have been a mountain goat in a former life. But anyway, after the rock climb, you come to this small lake surrounded by mountains. The water was so blue, it was almost unbelievable, like a painting. Apparently depending on the type and angle of the sun or moonlight, the water changes into a multitude of colours, especially pure silver under a fool moon, which would have been really cool to see.
And then the next one we did was even more beautiful. Laguna 69 (not sure why it's called that)- in order to get there we had to arrange 2plus hours of changing colectivos on our own to find the departure point, and even then we were warned by the driver that if we didn't get back to that turn in the road before 4 or so, the last colectivo would be gone and we'd have no way of getting home. The first hour or so of the walk should have been pretty easy but I was dragging just from being so tired from the day before I think. And then there was a zigzag up a mountain-only had to stop briefly for a dead cow in the middle of the path that had apparently died in midst of giving birth, because both the cow and the emerging calf's legs had been gnawed on by animals. Or hungry hikers, I'm not sure. Then we came up to a small lake with a waterfall draining from it, which was pretty unremarkable except for that I was able to spot a little Andean fox hiding nearby, which was cool. Then we had to cross this big open marshy area, which resulted in Irene getting a soaker in a small creek, and then had to make another steep zigzag up, which was hard until you came around the corner of this ash gray mountain and caught a glimpse of a huge waterfall descending from snowcapped peaks all around, falling into a lake of the clearest blue water I have ever imagined. We sat there marvelling while eating lunch and I had a little half hour nap on a rock that manged to get me sunburned through my pants, but it was completely captivating nevertheless. Plus, we even made it back in time for our colectivo.
Pretty much took it easy then until the long (and so hot!) night bus to Lima, which was so sweltering that I had to strip down jus tto stop sweating. And then a piece of the bus got knocked off by going under a too low overpass on a detour, and then we got entangled in a bunch of low dipped powerlines, ensnaring the mangled mess of the air vents on the top of the bus. No one else except for the gringos seemed to be all that concerned though..........
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