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Published: December 28th 2006
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Rock Climbing 1
Ross at the bottom of our wall before we started. the guy in the weird hat is Nadav, who was far too good a climber for us to like him much....
these photos of us climbing suck, as do those of Huaraz and photos of Lima are non-existent. until nasca everyone will have to make do with the crap we had left after we lost Ross' camera (see Pisco and Nasca post) Ross:
Ok so we haven’t posted in nearly 3 weeks and our last post about Lima was pretty crap as it had no photos. So it’s time to set things right and let you know we haven’t been kidnapped and dismembered (yet).
It’s the 23rd of December and as a wee Christmas treat we thought should really get some posts up to satiate your appetites.
Lima & Huaraz
I can’t really say a great deal about Lima as we never really saw that much of the city other than Miraflores which is a world apart from the rest of Lima as we discovered on the bus journey to Huaraz. This was also our first contact with the excellent Cruz Del Sur bus company, traveling by bus in Peru is something to look forward too as for 70 sol (about £10) you get to travel in luxury: Massive comfy seats, plenty of leg room, hostesses, meals included and bus bingo. Bus travel is promoted and looked upon very much like jet travel of the 50’s and 60’s, your not crammed in like cattle as you would back home, on every journey your pilot and cabin crew are introduced and
The Rock...
it looked easy... they always do... bend over backwards to make sure you have a pleasant journey.
We took the day bus to Huaraz up the spectacular Pacific coast road. The road is sandwiched between the Andes and the desert on one side and a hundred or so foot drop too the Pacific on the other (got some really good photos of the trip up the coast but we lost them, more on this later). After a few hours the route turns inland and a very steep and rapid ascent into the Andes begins. Claire was pretty glad she didn’t have the window seat; she was a bit freaked out at the drop on the coast road when we hit the mountains the valleys plunged away almost vertically hundreds of feet to the jaggey rocks at the bottom. Finally arriving in Huaraz we took it easy trying to get used to the altitude, as a trip to the shops had us gasping and wheezing like asmatics. After a few days spent relaxing in our excellent hostel (called churup, only bad thing was it being located at the top of a hill) and eating too much tasty food from the local chifa, this is what a chinese
The Stream
this stream at the bottom of the rock made our painful borrowed climbing shoes all muddy and slippy. damn nature! is called in Peru, we got round to some climbing.
Greeted with a wonderfull morning we eventually set off after much messing around trying to get shoes that fit Claire and some that had some grip for me. Arriving a few klicks outside of town we had a little trek to reach our wall. At fist sight it looked pretty good plenty of cracks and ledges to use but what we hadn’t seen on the approach was the fast flowing stream and muddy bank at the foot of the rock face which proved a bit of a nightmare for climbing (as your shoes were either wet or slick with mud. Not ideal for grip) not to mention actually getting on or off to the wall in the first place. Still it was a lot of fun and apart from being crippled by a cronically small pair of rock shoes and being shown up by Nidav (an Israeli we meet at the hostel who was mad for climbing) fun was had by all, well mabey’s not Claire so much.
We planned to do a short walk the next day up to a mountain lake that was supposed to be really cool
Ross in action
there are no photos of me in action.... the few Ross took were all on his camera. grrr. but we couldn’t be bothered and jumped the night bus back to Lima. Surprisingly this wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be going down all those twisty roads in the dark. Arriving in Lima again with Claire in a particularly foul mood it was up to me and my none existent Spanish to sort out tickets to Pisco. This went very well considering even when I know what to say or try mispronouncing out of the phrase book most people can’t understand my Spanish let alone my English.
Claire:
Well... I'm sorry but we suck at blogging in Peru. Right now its Christmas time, I'm ill (and Ross is recovering from being ill) and we have a lot of blogging to catch up on. before I begin, and in anticipation of the rest of Ross' blog entries, I would just like to say in my defence that while the buses are comfy, sleeping overnight on them is still not as good as having a bed and does leave me a little frazzled and grumpy when we arrive places. Also, when I decide it should be Ross' turn to organise stuff for a change and decide to
The Descent
notice how i'm making these photos sound hugely exciting by capitalising all the names... go sit down somewhere and have nothing to do with it, he defines this as me being in a bad mood. So when he says im grumpy in Peru I'm usually off sitting somewhere warm while he tries to communicate with random annoying touts and taxi drivers. I like being grumpy in Peru, it's very enjoyable.
Anyhoo...
Starting in Lima, we spent a couple of days in the department shops in miraflores, stocking up on jeans and things for the colder weather. Even Ross enjoyed the shopping cos it was so cheap and the shops were great.
Then we headed up noth for 8 hours of so to Huaraz. Huaraz is a little town with not much exciting going on but its location is amazing. It's sandwiched between two mountain ranges and has some world class trekking, etc. We wanted to head up here so we could try and do some outdoor rock-climbing and were told Huaraz had the most developed and reliable set-up routes in peru. What we didn’t realize is how long it would take us to get used to the altitude (about 3100m above sea level) and so we spent a few days doing nothing,
Relaxing in Cafe Andino
good coffee, a huge library and an even bigger fire made this the best place to spent the cold bits of the day in Huaraz then attempted some clibing (which went badly, I didn’t enjoy it at all… maybe I was out of shape or maybe it was the altitude but it was a let down anyway). All the good treks in the region are 3 or 4 nights long and we figured we didn’t have the time (and I didn’t have the inclination) to do this and still make it to cusco by Christmas. So we left Huaraz and high-tailed it on down to Lima and straight through to Pisco.
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