Tumbes and Machala

You may recall that in my previous blog post I mentioned that I'd been eating a lot of seafood in Huanchaco. Well it looks like I paid the price for that, because I was violently ill in the early hours of Tuesday morning while on the bus from Trujillo to Tumbes. I won't go into any details, but let's just say it was lucky that the bus had on-board toilets, because otherwise it would have been even more messy and unpleasant than it already was.

I'd already planned to split my journey from Trujillo to Cuenca into three parts, and that turned out to be a good plan, because it gave me a chance to recuperate. It also meant that I spent two nights in towns with tropical climates, and I actually got to put on a pair of shorts for the first time since I was in Salta in Argentina, about seven weeks ago.

I spent Tuesday night in Tumbes, which is a fairly large town about 30km from the Ecuadorian border. The main reason people stay in Tumbes is to explore the nearby National Mangroves Sanctuary, but I wasn't really in a fit state to do anything like that. Instead I just had a look around town, and I thought it was quite a pleasant place. Among other things it had a colourful Cathedral and a strange piece of artwork in the Plaza de Armas.

The border crossing to Ecuador at Aguas Verdes has the reputation of being the worst in South America, because the town is full of scammers and con artists who are all looking to take advantage of the fresh supply of naive tourists that turn up every day. Fortunately it's possible to avoid all of this by getting a direct international bus from Tumbes to Machala in Ecuador, which is what I did on Wednesday morning.

I spent Wednesday night in Machala. Pretty much the only interesting thing about the town is that it's surrounded by huge banana plantations, and it's sometimes referred to as the 'banana capital of the world'. However, I didn't see anything of interest in the town itself, so I don't really have anything else to report.

I've now arrived in Cuenca, which is a much nicer place, and where I'll be staying for the next week to study some more Spanish. I'll tell you more about it next time.

Trujillo

I arrived in Trujillo on Saturday, although I've actually been staying in Huanchaco, which is a bit like Trujillo-on-Sea - it's a town on the coast about 10km north-west of Trujillo. Huanchaco is famous for its surfing, although as its the low season at the moment, there aren't a massive number of surfers here. It's also known for it seafood, of which I've been eating a lot.

I've put a couple of photos of Huanchaco beach here and here - in the second one you can see the caballitos de totora stacked up along the shore. By the way, if it looks gloomy in the photos, that's because it was. I really had expected it to be hot and sunny here, but Trujillo seems to suffer from the same problem as Lima - it's sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, which causes almost constant cloud cover. However, the sunset wasn't too bad yesterday.

Yesterday morning I went to Chan Chan, which is quite an impressive archaeological site dating from around 1300AD. It was apparently once the largest adobe city in the world. I've uploaded some photos of the stone carvings here and here, as well as a photo of an excavated tomb.

This afternoon the weather improved a bit, and I went into the centre of Trujillo to have a look around. It's quite a pleasant city, and full of colonial buildings - these ones painted in pastel colours and with wrought-iron grills over the windows are quite typical. There wasn't a huge amount to see, except for the cathedral in the massive Plaza de Armas, below.

I'm now back at my hostel in Huanchaco, and I'm waiting for my inconveniently timed 11:45pm bus to Tumbes, which is near the Ecuadorian border. I'll probably cross into Ecuador on Wednesday, and I'm aiming to arrive in Cuenca on Thursday, in time to watch the opening games of the World Cup. I'll be staying in Cuenca for the whole of next week, as I've booked another week of Spanish lessons.

Huaraz

Huaraz is the adventure sports capital of Peru. There's not much of interest in the city itself, because most of the city was destroyed in an earthquake in 1970, so the main reason for visiting Huaraz is the landscape that surrounds it - the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash constitute the highest mountain range in the world outside the Himalayas. Most people that visit Huaraz go there for the mountaineering and trekking, and there are a lot of multi-day treks on offer, but since I'd only just recovered after getting ill on my last trek into Colca Canyon, I was happy just to go on a couple of day trips.

On Thursday I booked myself on a minibus tour that went to Lake Chinancocha via the town of Yungay. We first went to a viewpoint where there were good views of Huascarán (which at 6768m is Peru's highest mountain - see the photo below) and of other mountains in the Cordillera Blanca.
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We then went on to Yungay, which is most famous for having been completely buried by a landslide caused by the same 1970 earthquake that partially destroyed Huaraz. Only 92 people out of the population of 25,000 survived. We saw a memorial garden on the site of the old town (there are still apparently thousands of bodies buried underneath this), and Yungay's large cemetery. There was also an old bus that had been left in the position in which it was half-buried by the landslide. We then went on to Lake Chinancocha, which was quite pretty, and very turquoise. We also went on a slightly pointless 10-minute boat trip into the lake.

We had a late lunch in the town of Caraz, and it was there that I finally ate my first guinea pig, well half of one anyway. Here is a photo of me about to tuck into it, having put its cute fluffiness to the back of my mind. I ordered 'picante de cuy' (spicy guinea pig) rather than the more common 'cuy al horno' (roasted guinea pig), and I was actually a bit disappointed. The meat tasted OK, but it was a bit slimy and greasy, and not surprisingly for such a small animal there wasn't much of it, particularly as I only had a half. By the way, if you don't approve of eating guinea pigs, you should understand that they're not considered to be pets in Peru, and they're only bred to be eaten. Anyway, from now on I think I'll stick to the ceviche (raw seafood marinated in lime, chilli and onions), which is easily my favourite Peruvian food so far.

On Friday I went on a day hike to Lake 69, which is billed as the best way to get a taste of the scenery around Huaraz without actually going on a 4-day (or longer) hike. I found out that a couple of other people from my hostel (Harriet from the UK and Jeremy from Canada) also wanted to do the hike on the same day, so we decided to do it together. For 50 soles (£12) each, we could have booked a taxi to take us to the start of the hike at Cebollapampa, wait for us, and bring us back. That was my preferred option, but Harriet and Jeremy wanted to save money, so we ended up going by public transport, which cost about 30 soles each, and involved a nightmare 3½ hour trip each way.

We left the hostel at 6am, and after eating breakfast in Yungay we eventually reached the start of the hike at about 10am. It was an 8km walk up to the lake, which we were told should take about 3 hours. We started at the bottom of a valley at an altitude of about 3900m, and made our way up, passing through scenery like this and this. We passed by several waterfalls, for example here and here. We walked pretty quickly and actually made it to the lake in around two hours. Below is a photo of me at Lake 69 (altitude 4600m), and this is a picture of the three of us at the lake.

It started to snow just as we arrived, so we spent a pretty freezing 45 minutes resting and tucking into a lunch of Ritz crackers and coconut biscuits, which was about all we managed to buy in Yungay. We also heard and saw a couple of minor avalanches while we were at the lake, at the snow line way above us.

We made it back to Cebollapampa by 3pm, and we then had a long wait for a minibus to take us on the bone-shaking journey back to Yungay, from where we crammed ourselves into another minibus that took us back to Huaraz. I then had a mad rush to get something to eat and get ready to catch my overnight bus to Trujillo, which is where I am now, and will be for the next couple of days.

P.S. The map of my trip has now got so big that Google have split it onto two pages, which isn't what I wanted at all. I'm not sure at the moment how I'm going to deal with this.

Lima

I arrived in Lima on Saturday morning after a very luxurious 16-hour overnight bus journey from Arequipa. I travelled up here with Markus, who I met in the hostel in Arequipa, and we both decided to stay at Red Psycho Llama hostel in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima near the ocean. By the way, if you're wondering about the hostel's name, it's because the hostel has an eco-friendly theme, and the name is a very rough approximation of the word 'recycle'.

On Saturday I was feeling quite a lot better than I did on Friday, but I still wasn't fully recovered, so I decided to have a fairly lazy day and stay in Miraflores. In the morning I walked down to the beach (below), where there were a lot of surfers enjoying the waves.

We'd discovered when we arrived that the hostel was celebrating its second birthday that evening, and all of the guests were invited to a party at the owner's parents' house in a nearby Lima suburb. Markus and I decided to go along, but we didn't plan to stay very long because both of us were a bit ill. Anyway there were free pisco sours to drink, and for food there were anticuchos, which are a traditional Peruvian dish consisting of skewered meat served with boiled potato and sweetcorn. If I'd known at the time that the meat was actually cow's heart, I'm not sure if it would have stopped me eating it, but I might not have gone back for seconds.

We ended up staying at the party a bit longer than expected, and at around midnight some of the hostel employees told us that they were going to a disco back in Miraflores. Having had a few too many pisco sours by that point, we decided to go along to that as well, and we ended up not getting back to the hostel until after 2am. So much for getting an early night.

The following day I managed to drag myself out of bed at about 10am, and I felt well enough to make the journey into the centre of Lima. I'd read in Lonely Planet that a new bus system was about to be introduced, linking Miraflores with the rest of Lima, so I decided to go and see if it was up and running yet. I discovered that the southern part of the bus system had recently opened, which was enough to get me into the centre, and best of all it was still in a testing phase, which meant that all journeys were free of charge.

I went straight to the Museo de Arte de Lima, which had only recently reopened after a multi-million dollar revamp. There were three exhibitions there, including one of photographic portraits by Mario Testino, who I never knew was Peruvian, and born in Lima. I then walked to the Plaza de Armas, where I saw the Cathedral and the Palacio de Gobierno, the home of Peru's president. I also visited the Monasterio de San Francisco, whose catacombs contain thousands of human remains in some interesting arrangements.

On Monday I went to Huaca Pucllana, which is an adobe pyramid in Miraflores dating from around 400AD. They had a small farm there, as well as a few Peruvian hairless dogs running around. I then went back into the centre of Lima, where I visited the Museum of the Spanish Inquisition, and I also went to Chinatown, which was strangely devoid of Chinese people.

I'm now spending an unscheduled fourth day here in Lima, because it's a good place to relax (it has lots of Western comforts, including branches of Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and Dunkin' Donuts within three minutes' walk of the hostel, not that I would ever go to those, of course...). It's also nice not to be freezing cold at night, although Lima rarely gets very hot either, being almost constantly blanketed in cloud.

Tomorrow I'll be moving on to Huaraz, which is another town in the mountains. To be honest at this stage I'm just a little bit tired of mountains, but I'm told these are really good ones, so they're probably worth a couple of days of my time.

Arequipa and Colca Canyon

I arrived in Arequipa on Sunday evening after a 10-hour bus ride from Cuzco. I'm staying in Hostal Sol de Oro, which is a much smaller hostel than the huge place I stayed in in Cuzco, and I much prefer it. Arequipa itself is a pleasant city, perhaps not quite as attractive as Cuzco, but much less touristy.

On Monday I saw the sights of Arequipa, including the massive Cathedral in Arequipa's own Plaza de Armas (below).

I also went for a walk around the Santa Catalina monastery, which was founded in 1580 and is like a town within the city (there are some pictures here, here and here).

I then booked myself on a 3-day trek into Colca Canyon, which at 3191m is the second deepest canyon in the world (the deepest is the nearby Cotahuasi Canyon). I got an early night on Monday, because the following morning I was picked up by minibus at 3:30am for the start of the trip. There were two others from my hostel also on the trip - Margot from France, and Markus from Germany - as well as Chris and Joanne, a Liverpudlian fireman and his girlfriend, both on career breaks.

Our first stop was Cruz del Cóndor, which is the spot at which condors fly out of the canyon at about 9am every day (this was the reason for the early start). The condors did make an appearance as expected, but they didn't come particularly close to me, so this was about the best photo I got of them.

We then drove to Cabanaconde, a small town at the edge of the canyon, where we had lunch, and we also witnessed schoolchildren staging a strange protest. They all seemed to be protesting about different things, so I guess it was some kind of a school project.

After lunch we began the trek down to the bottom of the canyon. This is the view we got from the top, and a few hours later, this is the view we got from the bottom. We then continued walking along the bottom of the canyon until we reached our lodgings for the night in a village called San Juan de Chuccho. We stayed in very basic adobe huts with only candles for lighting, and not a lot of other amenities. They did have a good view though.

The following day involved just three hours of walking along fairly flat terrain, only passing through a few small villages, to our second hostel in Sangalle. Below is a view of Sangalle, and on the left of this photo you can also see the zigzag path out of the canyon that awaited us the following day.

If our rooms were basic the previous night, they were beyond basic this time - bamboo huts erected directly onto the ground, with no lighting at all. However, the hostel did have a swimming pool, and we were expecting to spend the afternoon relaxing here. However, due to the 15C temperatures and heavy rain, that didn't happen. After an hour or two of sitting around wondering if the weather was going to improve, some of the guides suggested a game of football, Peruvians vs Gringos, and we took them up on their offer. The rain got even heavier, and the pitch turned into a mudbath, but I'm pleased to report that the gringos won 5-4.

The following morning we woke at 5am to begin the climb out of the canyon back up to Cabanaconde. This was obviously the most difficult part of the trek, and the fact that we had to do it before breakfast seemed pretty crazy to all of us, but we didn't have a lot of choice. We completed the climb in about two hours, and were treated to a view of the mountains around the canyon with a fresh dusting of snow. This is a picture of the five of us with Verónica, our guide, at the top of the canyon.

It was at about this point that I started to feel ill, so I didn't enjoy the rest of the trip so much. After breakfast in Cabanaconde, we were driven to some hot springs near another town called Chivay, where most of us took a dip (although since I was feeling ill I didn't). After lunch we were taken back to Arequipa.

This evening I'm catching an overnight bus to Lima - it's a 16-hour journey, which I'm not really looking forward to, because I'm still not feeling particularly great. I'm taking it easy this afternoon, and hopefully I'll be OK by this evening.

Cuzco

I've spent all week in Cuzco since returning from Machu Picchu. I've been attending Spanish lessons every afternoon, which means that I haven't had much spare time, but I have managed to see the main sights of Cuzco, including the Cathedral (below) and the Iglesia de la Compañia de Jesus in the Plaza de Armas, as well as the Iglesia de Santa Domingo, which is built on top of the remains of the Inca temple Qorikancha.

I also found time to visit Sacsayhuamán, which is an Inca fort and the nearest archaeological ruin to Cuzco (just 2km up the hill). The Inca leader Pachacutec envisioned the city of Cuzco as being in the shape of a puma, and Sacsayhuamán's zigzag walls formed the teeth. It had some impressive examples of stonework, which I've also seen in other Inca constructions around the city. There were good views of Cuzco (below), including the Plaza de Armas.

I've now completed my twenty hours of 1-on-1 Spanish lessons at a language school called Proyecto Peru. My teacher was Carina - she was very friendly, but she did have a tendency to ask very personal questions in the interest of practising conversational Spanish. Some examples of the less personal conversations we had (in Spanish) are Peruvian politics, the UK general election, the Spanish civil war, the plot of the movie Avatar, abortion, witches, magic, and the differing merits of South American women (she had a particularly low opinion of Colombian women). To be honest I was surprised I was able to have conversations in Spanish on any of those subjects.

Carina has been encouraging me to try the local foods, so I've been ticking them off one by one. So far I've had chicarrón (fried pork belly), rocoto relleno (spicy pepper stuffed with ground beef and vegetables), ceviche (a spicy lime-marinated seafood dish served cold), and pollo a la brasa (charcoal-cooked chicken with french fries). I haven't yet tried cuy (guinea pig), but I may take the plunge this evening.

For my final lesson this afternoon we left the school and went to what Carina called a 'mercado negro' to see a bit more of Cuzco life. I always thought 'black market' was an expression rather than a physical place, but apparently this was an actual black market, where most of the goods on sale were stolen. My only purchase was La Fiesta Del Chivo, a novel by the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, which Carina suggested I buy (unsurprisingly the book was a facsimile rather than a genuine copy).

My Spanish has definitely improved a lot, but I've still got a long way to go, and I may do some more lessons later in my trip.

I'm off to Arequipa early tomorrow morning, so this is my last night in Cuzco.

Salkantay Trail to Machu Picchu

I arrived in Cuzco last night, and I've booked myself on a 5-day trek along the Salkantay Trail to Machu Picchu. The Salkantay Trail is a longer and more challenging alternative to the Inca Trail, which is always booked up weeks in advance.

I leave early tomorrow morning and return late on Monday night, so hopefully I'll tell you all about it on Tuesday. The cost of this trek is suspiciously low (about US$200 compared to the US$450 that the first trekking company quoted me), so I'm not really sure what to expect...

EDIT: OK, I've been back now for a couple of days now and have just about had time to recover. Firstly, to address the issue of the price, I needn't have worried because $200 is the going rate for treks booked in Cuzco (although it definitely didn't buy luxury). $450 is way over the odds, and I don't know what extra that would have bought me. Right, it's time to write about the trek.

It was a 4am start on day 1. I was picked up by bus from my hostel, and the bus took us to the start of the trek in a small town called Mollepata. It was there that I met the other members of my group (all 16 of them, a lot more than I was expecting). The group included people from many parts of the world (Australia, USA, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France and the UK), but the person that immediately stood out was Adrian, who I soon learnt was an Argentinian-born American living in Miami, where he drives a taxi for a living. Adrian turned up dressed in army fatigues (he served in the US army until 2005) and carrying his big backpack containing all of the belongings he'd brought on his trip, which turned out to be a big mistake (everyone else left most of their things in their hotel). Adrian was a very funny guy and kept us all laughing even when we were suffering (and when he was suffering even more).

Day 1 was a hard day, involving about 20km of walking and a vertical ascent of nearly 1km up to Soraypampa. The scenery was spectacular, particularly as we approached the snow-capped Mt Salkantay itself. It was a particularly hard day for me, because I'd caught a cold a couple of days before the start of the trek and wasn't feeling 100%. I completely lost my appetite, but forced myself to eat lunch anyway, and as a result I felt sick for the whole afternoon. In the end it was probably the hardest day of physical exercise I've ever had, and I only just managed to stagger up the last hundred metres to the campsite at the foot of the Umantay glacier. Needless to say, it was a freezing night and I didn't get much sleep.

Day 2 was billed as the hardest day, because it involved a 4-hour uphill climb to the highest point of the trek, the 4600m Salkantay pass. It was a tough morning, but as I was feeling a bit better it wasn't as bad for me as the first day. Here's a group photo taken in front of Mt Salkantay before the climb got serious, here's me at the highest point, and below is a photo of Mt Salkantay as I saw it from the pass.

It was five hours downhill from that point, which wasn't much easier on the legs. The scenery continued to look like something out of Lord of the Rings. We descended to our campsite at Challway, which at an altitude of 2920m was slightly warmer than the previous night's (at 3200m), but still I didn't get much sleep.

Day 3 was jungle day, as we descended into completely different scenery, including a large waterfall. There was only half a day of walking, so once we reached our lunch spot at Playa Sahuayaco, a minibus took us to our third campsite at Santa Teresa. It was an extremely uncomfortable ride - they managed to cram 22 people into a minibus with 15 seats (although strictly speaking three of those people were on the minibus rather than in the minibus). I would rather have walked. At least there were a few more facilities in Santa Teresa, so I was able to have my first shower of the trek.

Day 4 was the hot day, as we were at comparatively low altitudes. After about an hour's walking we had to cross Rio Urubamba in a cable car - unfortunately every other group following the same route had to do that too, and we were at the back of the queue, so we had a two-hour wait for our turn to cross. Shortly afterwards, we passed an amazing waterfall coming directly out of the cliff face - I'd never seen anything like that before - quickly followed by another even bigger one. At Hidro Electrica the route joined the railway to Aguas Calientes, but fortunately we only had to dodge one train. We also passed an unreal-looking group of boulders in the river (the photo doesn't really convey how weird it looked). We finally arrived in civilisation in the early evening, where we were thankful to be able to sleep in a proper bed for the first time in four days.

However, we didn't get much sleep because we were woken at 3:30am the following day to allow us to get to Machu Picchu when it opened at 6am. Most of the group chose to walk up, but I'd been advised to get the bus, and I think I made the right decision, because it's a horribly steep walk. I was in the queue for the bus before 4:30am, even though they don't start leaving until 5:30am. I got on the third bus to leave, and arrived at Machu Picchu just before 6am, where I met up with the others. Our guide, Reynaldo, then gave us a two-hour guided tour of the ruins. Here's a picture of some of the group during the tour. I then climbed up to the House of the Guardians to get the famous view of the city, below.

There are some other photos here and here, and of the Temple of the Condor here.

At 10am we began the climb up Wayna Picchu, which is the mountain in the background of the famous view of Machu Picchu. This gave us some amazing views, including this one looking back towards Machu Picchu. And below is a picture of Machu Picchu and me, taken near the top of Wayna Picchu.


I walked back down to Aguas Calientes at 2pm, after about eight hours at Machu Picchu. Our train to Ollantaytambo wasn't until 9:45pm, so we had a long wait. I met up with some of the others in Aguas Calientes, and we spent most of the afternoon eating and drinking until it was time to catch our train. I finally arrived back at my hostel in Cuzco at 2am. I was aching in my neck, back, legs, feet, and pretty much everywhere else, but it was worth it because I got to see Machu Picchu, and anyway the pain and discomfort are a distant memory now. Looking back on it now, it was a pretty great experience.

I'm going to be staying in Cuzco for the rest of the week (and maybe longer) while I take some Spanish lessons. I'll write some more about that in my next post.