Cordillera Blanca

Our travels really are at an end now. Since leaving Arequipa we headed to the North coast by Trujillo for a week, and stayed in a really great place caled Huanchaco, where surfing allegedly originated 4000 years ago on reed float things (will provide a picture at a later date). It felt like a proper holiday with sea, sun and a bit of surf...although my patience for falling off a surfboard over and over deteriorated pretty quickly.

After a week of sunning ourselves and generally over-indulging in nice restaurants, we headed back into the Andes to Huaraz and the Cordillera Blanca mountain range, where FINALLY we paid for a proper guided 4 day treck (Santa Cruz)through some really stunning scenery. It actually wasnt as arduous as I expected as we had 3 donkeys and a donkey driver between our group of 4 to haul all our stuff over the mountains. Luxury. We also had all our food prepared for us by our guide which was brilliant, as I doubt we would have had any energy for cooking a decent meal after 8 hours of pretty hard trekking every day.

The other two people in our group were a super-nice Dutch couple, who luckily had a decent digital camera. I thought I would be able to upload the photos thay gave me now, but the computer in our hostel is a real dinosaur and can´t handle that sort of stress. Pah. As I already said though, the scenery was amazing- snowcapped mountains, the bluest lakes and deep green valleys. We actually did the trek in 3 days rather than 4, as we took a shorter route on the 3rd day due to one of our Dutch friends suffering really badly from the altitude at our 2nd campsite (4,200 m). I´m glad we have been at altitude on our recent trips to Puno and La Paz, otherwise I think we would have been sick as well.

At the moment I´m waiting for Steve to come back from a second treck he decided to set off on yesterday. I cant remember what the mountain is called, but it´s big and it has snow on it (that really doesnt narrow it down around here). He wanted to do a proper climb to the summit with crampons and all that shiz, so he hired our Santa cruz guide Benito to take him by himself for 2 days. When he gets back we are getting straight on a bus back to Lima and staying there for a night before flying to new york for the day and the flying home that night. We are going to be KNACKERED when we get back! Can´t wait for NY though!!