Thursday, December 14, 2006
6-7 December 2006 Exploring mountain country.
Ok, cause I´ve been slack these two days seem to get muddled in my mind but...I took 2 day tours, which seems to be the best way to explore the Cordillera Blanca surrounding Huaraz.
First day I caught a bus with about 8 tourists and 24 high school kids from Lima. I was the only one who spoke no Spanish and the guide was Spanish speaking. It was a fun day. The school group´s supervising teacher was their English teacher and yet she spoke VERY little English. The kids constantly wanted to take photos with me and we had lots of laughs all trying to make each other understood. They were really nice kids. Well behaved, well spoken and respectful. An achievement to get 24 kids to do this on a school trip (this was like their schoolies week but is held the week before school finishes and is arranged through school fundraising. They had been saving for 2 years for the trip and so really wanted to get a lot out of it. It is probably the only trip away from Lima most of them have ever had). The kids all had film cameras, and no-one had walkmans or P2Ps or designer clothes. Their teacher explained although all the kids wanted to go on to university only 4-5 of the group would actually get a place. And these were the lucky ones to have stayed at school to senior.
There were 2 Isrealie girls on the bus, 3 South Americans, 2 Germans and me. Each of the foreiners spoke a little Spanish and if I looked completely lost would give me a quick summery of the important points. But mostly it was about looking out the window at the view so all was fine.
First stop was the town of Carhuaz, traditional mountain town. What I remember most was that the Plasa de Armas was filled with flowering rose bushes, there was a funeral procession through town with a brass band playing Latino music, and a pedestrian got hit by a taxi because she insisted on walking down the middle of the street in the traffic. Got a great photo of two friends sitting on a park bench talking. Young women - one dressed western, one dressed mountain traditional - totally unaware of their differences, and comfortable with their differences.
Then we stopped at old Yungay, where the worst natural disaster of the Andres occured in 1970. The 18,000 people of the town were buried alive in a huge avalanche and mud slide. It was incredibly hot here and as we walked through the park like bushland and visited the memorial we could have been in the south of France (or Spain, I suppose). I felt it was rather a depressing place to include on the itinerary and we seemed to be here for ages. Without understanding the detail of the commentary it is hard to understand if this is like a pilgrimage site for the Peruvians.
Incredibly, the heavy cloud that had hung on the high mountains all morning (and stopped me seeing their snow covered 6000m peaks) decended and turned a stifling hot day into a freezing cold one. As we climbed the mountain pass to Lagunas Llanganuco (pronounced Yanganuco), the weather closed in and the high pass was slippery , gravel and narrow. Bromilliads clung to the rock faces bounding the road - what are tropical epiphites doing here?...The girls in the back seat screamed as we rounded each switch back curve and the back of the bus hung out over the cliff. Luckily we met very little traffic and our bus could use the whole of the one lane road.
The Lake itself is beautiful and heads up toward a glacier and snow capped mountains. Unfortunately the cloud and incecent rain took away a lot of the scenery but it wasn't hard to imagine on a clear day the brilliant clear green/blue lake contrasting with white glittering snow. I took a short walk along the shore to absorb what atmosphere I could and bought a hot cob of corn to warm me as I waited in the drizzle for the bus to return.
We didn´t get back to Huaraz til nearly 8pm (lunch at 4pm - so Peruvian). But I did get to meet and talk to the Isrealies and one of the Peruvians over lunch. We were supposed to meet for a drink that evening in Huaraz but the agreed meeting point seemed very dodgy when I got there in a cab so I just told him to take me back to my warm hostel and had a quite night getting to know two canadian girls volunteering in Peru for three months.
Ok, cause I´ve been slack these two days seem to get muddled in my mind but...I took 2 day tours, which seems to be the best way to explore the Cordillera Blanca surrounding Huaraz.
First day I caught a bus with about 8 tourists and 24 high school kids from Lima. I was the only one who spoke no Spanish and the guide was Spanish speaking. It was a fun day. The school group´s supervising teacher was their English teacher and yet she spoke VERY little English. The kids constantly wanted to take photos with me and we had lots of laughs all trying to make each other understood. They were really nice kids. Well behaved, well spoken and respectful. An achievement to get 24 kids to do this on a school trip (this was like their schoolies week but is held the week before school finishes and is arranged through school fundraising. They had been saving for 2 years for the trip and so really wanted to get a lot out of it. It is probably the only trip away from Lima most of them have ever had). The kids all had film cameras, and no-one had walkmans or P2Ps or designer clothes. Their teacher explained although all the kids wanted to go on to university only 4-5 of the group would actually get a place. And these were the lucky ones to have stayed at school to senior.
There were 2 Isrealie girls on the bus, 3 South Americans, 2 Germans and me. Each of the foreiners spoke a little Spanish and if I looked completely lost would give me a quick summery of the important points. But mostly it was about looking out the window at the view so all was fine.
First stop was the town of Carhuaz, traditional mountain town. What I remember most was that the Plasa de Armas was filled with flowering rose bushes, there was a funeral procession through town with a brass band playing Latino music, and a pedestrian got hit by a taxi because she insisted on walking down the middle of the street in the traffic. Got a great photo of two friends sitting on a park bench talking. Young women - one dressed western, one dressed mountain traditional - totally unaware of their differences, and comfortable with their differences.
Then we stopped at old Yungay, where the worst natural disaster of the Andres occured in 1970. The 18,000 people of the town were buried alive in a huge avalanche and mud slide. It was incredibly hot here and as we walked through the park like bushland and visited the memorial we could have been in the south of France (or Spain, I suppose). I felt it was rather a depressing place to include on the itinerary and we seemed to be here for ages. Without understanding the detail of the commentary it is hard to understand if this is like a pilgrimage site for the Peruvians.
Incredibly, the heavy cloud that had hung on the high mountains all morning (and stopped me seeing their snow covered 6000m peaks) decended and turned a stifling hot day into a freezing cold one. As we climbed the mountain pass to Lagunas Llanganuco (pronounced Yanganuco), the weather closed in and the high pass was slippery , gravel and narrow. Bromilliads clung to the rock faces bounding the road - what are tropical epiphites doing here?...The girls in the back seat screamed as we rounded each switch back curve and the back of the bus hung out over the cliff. Luckily we met very little traffic and our bus could use the whole of the one lane road.
The Lake itself is beautiful and heads up toward a glacier and snow capped mountains. Unfortunately the cloud and incecent rain took away a lot of the scenery but it wasn't hard to imagine on a clear day the brilliant clear green/blue lake contrasting with white glittering snow. I took a short walk along the shore to absorb what atmosphere I could and bought a hot cob of corn to warm me as I waited in the drizzle for the bus to return.
We didn´t get back to Huaraz til nearly 8pm (lunch at 4pm - so Peruvian). But I did get to meet and talk to the Isrealies and one of the Peruvians over lunch. We were supposed to meet for a drink that evening in Huaraz but the agreed meeting point seemed very dodgy when I got there in a cab so I just told him to take me back to my warm hostel and had a quite night getting to know two canadian girls volunteering in Peru for three months.
# posted by The Essence of Good Taste @ 12:46 PM 
