Peru: Choque, Lima, Huaraz, Huanchaco, Iquitos

Hello all,

Just back from Manu a few hours, our (highly persuasive) friend JP talked us into trekking Choquekirao, Inca ruins that havent yet become the Machu Picchu circus.

There are no trains or buses to Choque. It´s just you and your donkeys.

Chicklet & Number 2:

The scenery is much the same as Machu; dramatic canyon, massive river cutting through the bottom & snowy peaks where we camped with the local kids & taught our arreiro how to play the cardgame, shithead. He didn´t lose a single time. . .

On day 2 we were already exploring the upper ruins, a terrace covered in white stone llamas.

We saw maybe 5 other people there in the afternoon. Even the official attendant had disappeared while we were still playing on the ruins & drinking wine watching the sunset.

The day before returning to Cachao, 27km that felt mostly uphill, the site was entirely ours again.

What do you do when you come back to Cusco from an exhausting trek? Shop for hats and hand puppets at the market of course.

Lima kind of sucks all the happy juice out of your soul. It´s sprawling, reliably gray in climate & building materials and has way too many US products for sale to feel like you´re somewhere exotic.

Huaraz to the northeast sits in the middle of the highest mountains in Peru. We spent a couple weeks there doing progressively longer treks.

One overnight trek rained on us with a freezing sleet until just after we had set up the tent, but the morning was clear and then we realised we were surrounded by glaciars, green lakes and high peaks.

The Alpamayo base camp trek took us 6 days and crossed 6 passes between 4400 & 4900m. Although its in the Huscaran "National Park" it is covered in cows, pigs, horses & donkeys, therefore the ground is covered in shit, which means our water supply was really dodgy.

From the Quechua villages of Cashapampa to Pomabamba we were armed with a frighteningly basic map, a truckload of diamox & ibuprofin, Darryls 2 kg copy of Shantaram and maybe enough iodine tablets kill all the giardia in Peru.

The trek went well. We didnt acquire diarrhea, altitude sickness or get trampled by livestock in the night. To celebrate these small victories in Pomabamba we drank a lot of beer, ate the ubiquitous pollo con papas fritas & took showers with the locals in the town hot springs.

Our last day Huaraz we spent ice climbing up a 13 meter wall with the lovely Gwen and Nicolas who we met on Alpamayo.

It was vertical until you reached a few meters from the top.

One overnight bus later and we were eating ceviche & surfing in Huanchaco, a small town next to Trujillo. We spent a couple days there, procrastinating before going to Chacapoyas, the start of our potentially arduous journey to Iquitos by river.

Chachapoyas is near the overgrown, pre-Inca Kuelap ruins, which, in cynical moments we refer to as the round not rectangular ruins.

Yurimaguas is a jungly 2 hours from Terapoto, and from there we caught a chicken boat to Lagunas, slinging up hammocks and spending 10 hours answering questions from the inquisitive & charming 11 year old, Juliana.

From Lagunas we journeyed in to the Pacaya Samiria reserve for three days in a dugout canoe.

Our guide Lucio caught the fish we would have for breakfast with his pointy trident during our nighttime caiman spotting trips.

Unfortunately, we heard gunshots while in the reserve and noticed they still use gil nets to fish, but nevertheless there was still a fair bit of wildlife around.

Back on the boat, Iquitos still two days away, there was little else do but read and wonder when the next meal would be ready.

We saw pink river dolphins and tiny villages on stilts whose only communication with the world comes and goes by river boat.

Around Iquitos you can wander the Belen markets where there´s a thriving trade in illegal jungle animals, bananas, liquid versions of love, luck and everything else. Darryl bought a bottle of siete raices-an alcohol made from the bark of seven trees, which has yet to bring us anything but hangovers.

Upriver the Pilpintihuasi butterfly farm/animal sanctuary rescues casualties from the illegal trade. The monkeys & sloths are free to come and go & forage in the hair of whomever they please.

The jaguar, tapir, boas and anteater are kept in spacious enclosures-presumably more for their safety than the safety of others.

The Amazon river, where the Peruvians say it begins.

Little red poison dart frog that only lives in the white sand dune forests of the Allpahuayo reserve.

Iquitos is only accesible by air or river but is 370,000 inhabitants rich nonetheless. We took the air option back to Lima spending 2 slightly less soul sucking days at the national museum-which had really good exhibitions on traditional masks, Shining Path & the potato.

This is us 20 hours of bus time post Lima, 30 minutes post getting ripped off 4 soles, crumpled & sleepy but deliriously happy to be through the horror that is the Tumbes-Ecuador border crossing.

Love, j&d

Peru: Arequipa, Colca, Misti, Cusco, Machu & Manu

Hello All,
From Copacabana it was on to southern Peru, to Arequipa. The buildings in its city center are made out of huge blocks of sillar volcanic stone. In fact, the whole region is volcanic. The city sits at the heels of El Misti, which is due for an eruption any day now.

Our friend Cody convinced us to hike for a couple days into nearby Colca Canyon, one of the deepest in the world (which is next to the Ampato volcano where the famous Inca ice maiden Juanita was found. you can visit her now in her little temperature and light controlled box, and have the guide squwak at you that she´s not a mummy because she still has internal organs. Darryl just calls her the frozen popcicle).

We took a bus to Cabanaconde, a village on the edge of the canyon and spent the night there so we could get an early start.

Those smiles are fake. The sun´s barely up, it´s too damn early for hiking.

Colca Canyon, as Darryl contemplates, is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.

We found an oasis at the bottom, tended by Steve the alpaca (proficient in both upkeep of lawns & spitting on tourists).

The following morning was a dark 4:30 start using head torches to arrive at the rim by 8:30 & catch the bus back to Arequipa. Once there we alternately rested (watching the olympics) and ate & loitered with our friends Cody, Rob & Saskia, Nick & Sheryl and Louise & Louie. Darryl also did some construction work at the school where Rob & Saskia teach local kids.

Our next trek was up El Misti. Its summit sits at 5800m or 19,000ft. And up until about 4000m, it was covered in wildflowers.

It took one day to trudge up to base camp. We set up, ate dinner, watched the sun set and jumped into our sleeping bags as the temperature plummeted.

Our guide woke us up at 1:00am to have some coca tea and start the climb up a rocky ridge to the summit. Arequipa´s electricity and a partial moon lit the way until the sun came up and cast Misti´s shadow far below us.

Misti is actually a straightforward climb, just steep. The altitude makes it difficult. Darryl is a phenomenon and could have made it to the top in record time, but generously hung back with the pale & blue-lipped slow poke who kept wanting to lie down and pass out.

There´s a sulfurous smoking crater at the top, where we took a nap for an hour before making the descent.

This is the best part of the trek, because after a 12 hour ascent it only takes 3 hours to run down the scree to the bottom.

The next stop for us was Cusco, us and every other backpacker in S America. Suddenly we became uncharacteristically efficient in an effort to get in and out as fast as possible.

Cuzco is a beautiful city built on solid Inca foundations. The Spanish stonework is appalingly inferior to the Incas and locals like to tell the joke that the Incas were 'capaz'(means capable) and the Spanish were 'inca-paz'(means retarded).

A good place to see the difference is Qorikancha, the sun temple, religious center of the Inca empire.

Machu Picchu became a mission to see how quickly we could experience it. Bus, train and leg power got us in and out in under 48 hours. It lived up to both our ideas about it, spectacular even though it´s a circus.

We thought we were clever to get up at 5 & catch the first bus from Aguas Calientes. But at the bus stop 200 people were already lined up, it´s all organised and efficient though with at least 20 buses arriving on time to whisk the masses away at 6.
Once at the top we rushed to wait in the next line to climb Huayna Picchu. We were 196 in the 1st group of 200. Only 400 are allowed to climb it each day.

The Temple of the Moon sits on the other side of Huayna Picchu, consisting of overgrown ruins set around several caves.

Next day we were off to the Manu Biosphere Reserve in the Amazon lowlands for a week. We boated up the Madre de Dios river to different jungle lodges, lakes and licks.

The macaw clay lick was on the first day. There were hundreds of red & green macaws, blue headed parrots & mealy parrots squawking as the sun came up.

We saw a tapir munch its way through the mammal lick the following night. They´re the biggest mammals in the rainforest and interested mostly in eating leaves. Tapirs are gentle herbivores but continue to be hunted for their meat.

The next day we saw giant otters (a large family with 2 babies), endangered, but starting to recover there again in the oxbow lakes of Manu.

We also saw a ton of beautiful plants & insects during night & day walks.

And got a chance to swing on vines, punt on lakes, eat wild cacao & watch toucans from a 40 meter platform in a Kapok tree.

Every day there was something new to see, and our guide (Juan de la Selva) spotted a 3 toed sloth with a baby clasping her back on the next.

Also 8 species of monkeys including Red Howlers, the rare Monk Saki, Brown Capuchins, Black Spiders, Squirrel Monkeys, Wooly Monkeys, the Dusky Titi and the Saddleback. Some sat still and watched us from the treetops.

Howlers

Monk Sakis

One of the last nights we spent on a leaky catamaran in the dark looking for black caiman. Our guide caught (carefully) two babies so we could have a closer look.

It was difficult to leave the jungle but there´s always the next trek to do. . .

Love, d&j