Dec 2006

So far it`s rained every afternoon in Huaraz. There hasn`t been enough sunlight to take a good picture of the distant snow-capped mountains.

I checked out of my hostel this morning and am now just wasting time until my bus to Trujillo tonight. So with 8 hours of time to kill, I have:

- Devoured the book I was reading, Jostein Gaarder`s Maya. It is one of the most fascinating books I`ve read in a long time, complicated and layered. It`s about a group of people who randomly meet on an island in Fiji, but it tackles questions about the meaning of life, evolutionary biology, the world`s riddles and mysteries, love, magic, the self. I almost want to read it a second time to make sure I haven`t missed anything, as I undoubtedly have. It`s made me think a lot, and it`s become a bit of an inspiration to write more story ideas down.

- Uploaded some more pictures to this site! Check them out here: The Cat`s photos

I`ll start today with yesterday`s journal entry since I failed to log in to my blog:

¨Huaraz - 6.15pm - Sun. 17 December 2006

¨One thing about Perú I can definitely say I`m glad to have again is ´arroz a la cubana` (rice, fried egg and plantain), the most delicious meal I`ve had in South America. The buses are also much better than Bolivia`s (sorry Bolivia) and almost always have a bathroom.

¨I arrived in Huaraz at 6.30 this morning with absolutely no idea of where I was going to stay. I took the advice of the first pushy Peruvian who approached me, and his word that I could get a single room for S/10 ($3.41), and walked to Hostal Imperio. It`s a pretty nice Peruvian place with friendly staff and hot water, and I have a rooftop room with a big double bed all to myself for the promised price. Lovely. I napped until 11am before deciding to do anything.

¨Before showering I noticed they have 2 brown owls (great owls?) in a small cage on the roof. They look at me with their big yellow eyes; they`re so beautiful. I have to stop myself from pulling the cage door open and setting them free. I`m pretty sure it`s illegal to keep them there like that.

¨I finally had a look around the city at around 1pm. I took in a few sites: the ´Museo Arqueológico de Ancash` and `Parque Litico´, the Iglesia Señor de la Soledad, the Plaza de Armas, Plazuela Belen and the little church there, and the `sitio arqueológico Pumacayan´. The archeology museum was really interesting, perhaps because I haven`t been to one in a while and my interest has refuelled. It gave me a chance to glimpse at all the historic sites in the area that I don`t have time to go see in reality. I looked at a lot of artifacts, the likes of which I`ve seen before, but also a lot of lithic stone carvings from Chavin and other old towns nearby. I wish I could go see a place called `El Puente Colgante Inca de Pukayacu´ - it has this big suspension bridge I would love to walk across.

¨The Pumacayan site is actually just a bunch of old but still inhabited houses on top of a hill with a nice garden. It wasn`t much to see, but the man I spoke to briefly said something about it getting hit and ruined by earthquakes in the past.

...

¨I`m officially surrounded by Christmas, by the way, and have been for a while now. The decorations are the same, but tackier and more often over the top than in Canada. While I was waiting in Lima`s bus station yesterday I had to suffer through a hundred repetitions of cheap beep-tone Christmas songs because the bus people decided to decorate with blinking, singing lights. As if the blinking-only ones aren`t annoying enough. Some of it is very nice though, especially the trees, and it makes me long for a proper Christmas sometimes.¨

Today, Monday the 18th of December, I took a micro to a little town called Monterrey, just 15 minutes out of Huaraz. There they have `hot springs´ which turned out to be a concrete pool with brown (but yes, hot) water. There were a lot of locals there, horsing around and having a good time. I did a few laps but couldn`t take the heat for long. It was very nice though to have a dip, and after walking around town a bit I went back to Huaraz.

Nothing much doing today though except for this crazy drunk guy who wanted to buy me a drink. I`m having a good time just walking around and relaxing. Tomorrow night I take a bus to Trujillo on the coast, after which I`ll head to Máncora, the surfing town I mentioned before. If I like it I might actually spend Christmas there rather than have to rush to find a nice place in Ecuador. I`ll just have to see!

I got up at 8 this morning, looked out the window at the sunny patio, got my bathing suit on, and went for a short dip in the pool before most people were awake. A couple other early risers were sipping juice at the bar, the odd employee wandered around wiht a broom or a hose, cleaning up the place, but I was otherwise alone. What a life.

After a shower and a delicious breakfast - a thin pancake wrapped around a banana and drizzled in chocolate sauce, I packed my bags and sat reading in a sun chair while my towel dried.

I took a taxi into Ica by 11am and hopped on a bus to Lima by 12pm. The 5 hour bus ride was uneventful except that I watched Adam Sandler´s film Click in Spanish and the guy next to me kept looking over at me in a way I didn´t like. We drove quite near the coast most of the way; it was my first time seeing the Pacific ocean. When I arrived I went over to another bus terminal to buy a ticket for Huaraz, my next destination. It doesn´t leave till 10.30 tonight though so I´m filling the time in this ugly grey city with dinner, internet, perhaps some reading later on.

I look forward to seeing a bit of the north of Perú, an area I´m totally unfamiliar with at this point. I hear the beach in Mancora is beautiful and an excellent spot to take a surfing lesson.

I arrived in Ica early this morning and immediately took a taxi to Huacachina, a tiny little resort town 4km out of Ica. It`s a desert oasis complete with palm trees, a lagoon, and dozens of tourist-ready hostels and hotels. For just S/10 a night I`m sleeping in the dorm room of a hostel with a nice swimming pool, pool-side bar with restaurant service, dune buggy rides, and sand boarding.

I went dune buggy riding later this morning and it was so fun! There were 6 of us plus the driver in this buggy with bright red tumbler bars (I forget what the proper name for them is... spoilers?). We went for less than the promised 2 hours because one girl turned out not to like the wild ride, which I was a bit irked about. Why go on a dune buggy through the desert if you don`t like ride-type things? Other than that it was a great time though. We raced through the desert, reaching the top of a sand dune and plummetted down the other side. It was like a roller coaster at times!

We also stopped a few times for sand-boarding, which was pretty exhausting but also a lot of fun. We got on these boogie boards, same size as a snowboard, waxed with this weird kerosine-smelling orange liquid, and made our best attempts at going down the steep steep hills. Going down with feet strapped on was pretty difficult - it was hard to stay upright and hard to get an edge so we ended up falling over every 2 seconds.

The bigger thrill was actually to go down on my stomach, gripping the front foot straps. You go so fast down the dunes this way. I actually hurt my arm the first time cuz I let if off the board accidentally. I have a wicked sand burn and even after a shower and a swim in the pool I`ve got sand lodged into my skin. The last hill I went down I hit a nasty bump, banged my pelvic bone, and got the wind knocked out of me. For a few minutes I was completely debilitated, though laughing a bit at the same time, and was on my back in pain. Once I got my wind back it was all good though and we all had a lot fun racing up and down the dunes.

The swim in the pool this afternoon was nice - the first time I`ve been in a pool since I`ve been away. Once I was out reading a book on one of the reclining chairs though I got way too hot - I`m not much of a sitting-by-the-pool person.

I had a nap a little later on (didn`t sleep much on the night bus) and chilled at the pool-side bar with some people I`d met earlier in Arequipa. It`s nice to talk to them, but now that I`ve done the one exciting thing you can do here and have just the lagoon and the pool, I`ve come to the conclusion that I will move on tomorrow. When I was walking around early this morning I couldn`t help but noting that this is the kind of place you should share with someone: no one should be alone in a place so beautiful.

And so tomorrow I will head to Ica briefly once again, from there catch a bus to Lima, and onto Huaraz on the same day if possible.

Ok beautiful people, this is it: my catch up session.

When I was in La Paz, I:

1) Bought a new pair of glasses for the Canadian equivalent of $24. They`re not super amazing, but they`re still pretty nice, and even if they only last me until the end of the trip, big deal!

2) Rode a bike down the world`s most dangerous road. On the road itself only bits and pieces are super dangerous: it`s the sleepy drivers and many blind-spot-curves that give it it`s 100 deaths per year. And it`s much more safe to ride down on a bike than it is in a truck or on a bus. For this ride though I`ll copy from my journal:

¨The bike ride yesterday was the most fun ever. Such a thrill and so dangerous at times! I went with 3 guys from my hostel, Guy and Aaron from my room and Peter from downstairs. We all got on well (and still do), and it made for an excellent ride. Guy is a 23-year-old English guy from near Cambridge, very nice and outgoing. Aaron (24?) is from Sydney, Australia, and is studying medicine. Peter, 21, is Swedish and was the fastest and fittest of us all; he kind of reminds me of my brother Adam and is another one of those people I wish I could spend more time with. Such is the life of a traveller, to say goodbye to all your new friends. Christoff, our German guide, gave me an iffy first impression, like he was tired and not sociable, but once the ride started and we got chatting he was very nice. He`s been leading bike tours for 3 months and will keep doing it for 5 more weeks before returning home. What a great way to fulfill your civil service!

...

¨The bike trip starts in the Yungas, moutainous and cold, and ends up in the near tropics at the town of Coroico. You fly down the road from 4700m above sea level to 1200m in about 4 hours, including frequent stops either for snacks or just to make sure everyone is all right. As we went down we shed our layers and put them in the van that followed us down the hill - it got pretty warm by the end though it was windy at the beginning.

¨The first 20km is on smooth asphalt, dangerous mostly because you tend to go SO quickly dow that bit. The guide told us his hand signals for ´stop´, ´overtake a vehicle´, ´slow down´, and ´get to the left´, and told us never to overtake him. The downhill on this bit was so fun and so fast! It was a good road on which to get used to the bikes, especially mine with the hydrollic brakes - dangerous if you don`t use them properly. There was a nasty uphill bit that lasted for an exhausting 20 minutes. The altitude didn`t help, that`s for sure, and I walked my bike for a few minutes before struggling through the last stretch on the bike. I wasn`t the worst though out of a team of daredevil boys! Guy and especially Aaron stuggled quite a lot as well.

¨After this ´safe´ bit came the dangerous, gravel/big slippery stones road, wide enough for a truck to drive along it, but not much more. It was very rocky and slippery from the waterfalls that came from above. We rode through a few of them with Christoff in the front filming us with the camera. Peter and I still headed the team on this bit, but he got ahead of me eventually and Guy passed as well; I took the corners a little more easily. Some of that loose gravel would not have been a fun landing spot! There was one point where I was riding along an edge with a sheer drop (we had to ride on the cliff side - rule of the road) and my back tire slipped out a bit cuz I was busy looking at a condor. Scary! I think that`s how the accidents happen; if you always pay attention to the road and don`t go beyond yoru safety limit you`ll be fine.

¨The odd time a vehicle did pop around a corner was a bit of a rush as well - you have to make sure you`re close to the edge to prevent getting smucked. It`s a winding mountain road, full of surprises and hidden corners. One was called ´Devil`s Corner` because of all the deaths there...

¨The last third wasn`t as precarious - the road was still loose gravel but much wider and without the drop on the side. By the end though my arms and hands were hurting from the aggressive bump bump bump of the road.

¨We ended at a little town just near Coroico and had a victory beer, after which we drove the final uphill to Coroico and had a hot shower. So nice. After a buffet lunch we headed back up to La Paz in the van. I had a wicked headache from the rough ride so I couldn`t sleep on the way back, but it was nothing a little Aspirin couldn`t fix. It was such a great trip and my final reward was to pick up my free ¨Death Road¨ t-shirt and photo/video CD. Woo!¨

3) Partied hard with my biking buddies and others from the hostel that night.

4) Visited San Pedro prison in the hopes of getting an interview with one of the prisoners there. It`s an intersting prison, unique in South America because the quality of prisoners´ lives depends on their individual savvy. They all work within the walls of the prison for their survival: those who have money live 5-star hotel type rooms; those with no money live in horrible conditions. The prison is closed off to tourists, but if you have another purpose it`s possible to gain admission. I said I was a writer from Canada interested in interviewing the prisoners for a book. To make a long story short though, I didn`t get past the first security checkpoint because I didn`t have enough time to get written permission. I would have been able to with more time, but I needed to move on.

5) Partied all night yet again with the craziest people, not sleeping a wink and having a wonderful time. I guess it was to make up for 3 relatively partiless months.

So that was La Paz in a nutshell. Tonight I take a bus to Ica, at which I can go on a dune buggy and go sand-boarding in the desert!