You Take My Breath Away....

OK fine, it´s a lame title, but seriously, Huaraz literally takes your breath away at a neat 3,090 meters above sea level. You´ve occasionally witnessed the little ear popping phenomenon on a flight and you´ve climbed a few little mountains. You´ve read about altitude sickness in travel books and scoffed at all the apparent exaggeration. Then, just to be on the safe side, you´ve dished out the money for the little pills, all the while thinking you probably won´t need them since you´re pretty invincible. It´s time to come down to earth when you suddenly land somewhere so high and even going up 15 steps to your hostel room leaves you panting.

It took us about 2 days to overcome the nausea, headache and zombie feeling after arriving at Huaraz. This is a little city in the north of Peru which sits at the bottom of a gorgeous part of the Andes. The snow capped mountain range on one side of the valley is called the Cordillera Blanca and the range on the other side Cordillera Negra, ie the black mountain range, named thus due to the lack of snow on the mountain peaks. Huaraz itself isn´t particularly charming, but the multitude of treks and trips around it more than make up for this.

Deciding to play it safe on the first day, we pick a ¨cultural¨ trip, namely a visit to the archeological ruins of Chavin. It starts off with a visit to one of the many beautiful lagoons in this mountainous area, called Querococha. It`s literally right by the highway, as can be seen in the picture. Tourists beware-authentic Peruvian women clad in traditional clothes are ready to have their pictures taken with you for a fee, the little lamb in their arms making this opportunity all the more irresistible!

Seriously, does anybody ever buy this ridiculously obvious ploy?? And what a boring job that must be-stand on the side of the road and pounce on unsuspecting tourists the minute they step out of the bus. This is only the first of many other depressing jobs we will encounter during our trip. One cute moment of the visit to the lagoon was the following attempt to join our group right before we left:

I promise, no one staged that one!

The ruins at Chavin are apparently remnants of a temple from Pre Inka times. I found it difficult to understand the guide and she had appalling English so I didn´t retain too much information from the trip. Apparenly it was a very important place for its time and dignitaries from all over came annually to offer offerings and participate at other religious ceremonies. One interesting mystery proved to be not too mysterious after all-there were ridiculously high stairs leading to some underground tunnels and sleeping quarters, but the doors leading to them were so short that even I had to kneel to get in. I was beginning to imagine some very weirdly proportioned ancient people when the guide pointed out that the doors were made only recently, for visitors to the site.

I was a lot more interested in the little village by the ruins-the nearest we`ve come to seeing authentic Peru so far:

Seeing as it was right before Shabbat and we were still a little dizzy, we decided to leave all hiking related activities to the following week. After a brief few hours of resistance I gave in to ¨peer¨ pressure and signed up for a wall climbing trip on Friday. Here is a picture of me looking all cool:

It does not reflect my feelings for the whole experience!! It was a breeze going down the wall, but I had a really rough time climbing it back up. Granted it was not particularly high and the guide was standing at the bottom holding the security rope, but that didn´t mean that I suddenly grew an extra few inches, which is all I needed. You see, there ARE places among the rocks where you are supposed to place your hands and feet, but what about short people who cannot reach these little nooks without completely overexerting themselves??? My arms were killing me by the time I made it halfway up and at some point it even felt like I couldn´t finish the climb cause I just couldn´t reach the next nook and kept falling back to the previous one when I tried. Way to go on a vacation to take a break from hard work!

Thinking I had no other choice (since we have to go back to Huaraz from the top of the wall where we came from, right? right???) I somehow made it to the top, when the guide at the bottom of the wall declared ¨OK, I´m pulling you down¨! What???? Turns out we were supposed to climb up and down the wall until we get bored and get back to Huaraz from the BOTTOM of the wall. So, really, there was no need to finish the climb... The day wasn´t completely wihout its merits though. I managed to have a whole conversation in Spanish with our guide Luis while Rikki (the tall and experienced, grrr) had her turn. He told me about his jealous Swiss girlfriend who left him to go back home and about how difficult it is for a guide to find love. He waxed poetic about the power of the heart and complained bitterly about tourists not keeping up on their promise to write to him. Oh I was happy to listen to him, anything to pass the time so my arms could rest... Needless to say, my 2nd attempt to climb was much less enthusiastic. :)

One last picture before I end this post-not sure which trip this is from, but it`s cool-the image formed by the mountains is like the map of Peru, or so the Peruvians like to believe...