Round the World with Ann and Katie

Going blind in Riobamba

kt_m_white — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:48:59 +0000

After an overnight bus to Riobamba we had a lazy day looking round the town, organising stuff for the next few days and catching up with things like doing the laundry. The following day we went to Banos a small toursity town about an hour away. It was a nice place to go for the day but that was long enough. It is in a valley by a river surrounded by waterfalls and overlooked by an active volcano which last erupted about 2 years ago. We went for a bit of a walk up to some viewpoints but unfortunately it was cloudy so we couldn´t actually see the volcano. The following day we set off on a 2 day trip to climb a 5000m volcano near Riobamba. Unfortunately the weather still hadn´t improved and when we set off it was still overcast and we were yet to see what we were going to climb. The first day was just a walk to acclimatise, as we spent most of the day walking in the clouds, rain and sleet, it wasn´t great and by the time we reached the refugio where we were to spend the night we were all cold and soaked through to our underwear. We got up at 4am the following day and as it was only snowing a bit we decided to try and do the climb. But yet again the weather deteriorated and we spent all day in the clouds and snow. The climb itself wasn´t too difficult, mostly walking, with the top section being a bit steeper, and in the conditions we had it got quite difficult so we were relieved when we finally reached the top. Coming down the top section was as difficult as going up but once we had done that it was relatively easy going back to the refugio. Although the weather did improve slightly for the last hour of the walk, the volcano remained in the clouds so we never actually saw what we had climbed. We had a relaxing evening in Riobamba with a nice dinner and bottle of wine followed by an early night, or so we thought. When I closed my eyes to sleep they started hurting a lot and this just got worse and worse. After about an hour I realised that I couldn´t even open my eyes anymore as they had swollen up so much. So I woke up Cathy who then realised her eyes were hurting, she went to speak to the guy who owned the hostel and he took us to hospital. Although I couldn´t see anything and didn´t have much of an idea what was going on, the hospital seemed well organised and we were soon diagnosed with snow blindness and given a prescription for eyedrops and much needed painkillers. After visiting many pharmacies we were able to go back to bed and actually got a bit of sleep. In the morning I could half open one eye and had a bit of limited blured vision. Luckily Cathy wasn´t quite so bad and could still see relatively well, so we were able to go and get breakfast etc. I then spent most of the day blindfolded and by the evening I was a lot better, I could open both eyes and see enough to get by without too many problems. A couple of days later everything is about back to normal again and we have continued with our travels having learnt an important lesson about wearing sunglassses even when its not sunny.

On to Ecuador

kt_m_white — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:22:11 +0000

We got a bus early in the morning from Mancora to Aguas Verde, the border town. At the previous stop, a women had got on and said that she was coming with us to help us cross the border and that this was part of the service included in the price of the bus tickets. As we didn´t have to pay any extra we agreed although we didn´t think it was necessary having managed to cross a lot of borders previously with no problems. Anyway, we got our Peruvian exit stamps then were put in a mototaxi for a few kms. Then we had to walk for about 10 minutes through the town until we finally crossed a bridge and ended up in Ecuador. Here we were forced to go to the tourist information where we were given a lot of useless information and told to wait for something, but we didn´t understand what. Next we were put in a taxi with a policeman and taken out of town to a place quite a distance from the actual border, where we finally got our Ecuadorian entrance stamps. We weren´t able to work out whether we needed the police escort for our safety or because they thought we were going to try and escape into Ecuador without getting our passports stamped. Then the policemen escorted us back into town and came with us to a bus station where we were met again by the women from the 1st bus who gave us the tickets for the next bus. That has to be the strangest border crossing I have done and afterwards we understood why they thought we needed help with it.

We arrived in Cuenca later that evening. The city seemed a really nice place, a lot wealthier than places in Peru, modern cars, clean well maintained streets and parks and the average houses looked a lot nicer. But despite all this for some reason no where in the city seemed to have water between 8am and 8pm. To start this didn´t seem to be much of a problem until in the middle of the day we tried to find a toilet. They were all just closed because of the lack of the water. Luckily we found that our hostel still let you use the toilet and `provided buckets of water for flushing. We spent our first day exploring the city, went to a nice art museum and doing various organizational jobs that we had to get done. The next day we went out to the Cajas National Park for a days walking. The scenery and probably more importantly the weather, really reminded us of home and all the hiking we have done in Scotland. Despite the low cloud and drizzle we had a really good. In the evening we caught the bus a bit further north to Riobamaba.

North Peru

kt_m_white — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:21:24 +0000

I spent my last few days in Peru visiting a few places in the far north. I spent 2 days in Chiclayo, a big city but it doesn´t have much for tourists. I went on a tour which visited an archaeological site and a couple of museums about pre-Incan tombs found in the area. There aren´t many foreign tourists in this part of Peru, and I was the only non-Peruvian on the tour. For everyone else the highlight of the tour seemed to be when we drove past the house where Miss World 1988 grew up, but I found the museums more interesting. The following day I went a couple of hours further north to Piura, mainly just because I had a spare day before meeting up with Cathy, my friend from home. There wasn´t much to do in the city so I went to a nearby village which apparently has the biggest craft market in Northern Peru. And yes it was big, but practically everyone was selling the same things and most of them were wooden spoons, so I wasn´t too impressed by that.

My next stop was Mancora, a very nice little town on the beach a few hours from the border with Ecuador. Here I met up with Cathy and we spent the following day catching up on the beach, before spending the next day travelling to Ecuador.

Trekking to Kuelap

kt_m_white — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:38:26 +0000

After a day and a night on buses I arrived at Chachapoyas at about 5am so spent the rest of the day enjoying doing not a lot. Chachapoyas is only a small town and there isn´t really much to do in the actual town itself, but there a lot of pre-Incan ruins to see in the surrounding cloud forest. So I arranged a 4 day trip starting the next day. THe first day we mainly spent in a taxi. We did have a stop off at a burial site where the bodies were buried in a cliff to void flooding and they placed wooden figures at the entrances to the caves containing the bodies. From there the road was just a muddy track, I think the taxi driver was soon regretting agreeing to the job as after getting stuck a few times his car was covered in mud both inside and out. When we left the taxi (with doubts that he would ever make it back up the road without anyone to push) we had a short walk to our 1st nights accommodation in the Valle de Belen. We were staying in a house in the middle of the valley 3hours walk from the closest village. It was an amazing place, so quiet and relaxing with just us and a lot of cows. In the evening we had a fire outside and sat looking at the stars and finding out more about the area from the guy from the village who was staying to look after the cows.

The 2nd day was the main day of trekking. Initially we had to cross the river in the valley and then we followed a pre-Incan path up the other side of the valley to the top. Then we started descending into the next valley and the scenery just completely changed as we entered the cloud forest, which was also surprisingly cloudy after the clear skies on the other side of the hill. After stopping for lunch we reached an area of ruins where a pre-Incan village of more than 3000 round houses made of stone.  The government is spending a lot of money excavating at Kuelap, a similar site nearby, so no work has been done at this place, so it was really interesting to see the place in its wild state where the forest has just taken over. Anywhere where you just walked a short way from the main path into the forest you could find more buildings. The area the site covers is huge and in the dense forest difficult to access, so there must still be a lot there which remains undiscovered. The rest of the afternoon was sent walking down through the forest to the village of Congon. As we got closer to the village we saw areas of the forest being burnt and cleared, according to our guide this is illegal, and done because they want more space for coffee plantations.

We stayed in a really nice house in the village and had a nice evening there. We had a good dinner and finally found some half decent coffee in South America. But then we were sat on the balcony watching the owners sort, process and dry coffee beans, so it shouldn´t have been so surprising. In the evening we went to the village shop which also just seemed to be a general meeting place for everyone and had the only TV in the village. Here we tried the local alcohol, some kind of sugar cane rum, as with all the locally made alcoholic drinks I have tried on this tip, it was disgusting but you have to drink it anyway. We also spent a long time playing a game that is popular here that involves throwing metal discs at a board with various different holes in it, worth different values, obviously without much success on my part.

The following day was a long day of horse riding. We set off at 7am, riding up the valley through spectacular scenery. My horse took a bit of getting used to, but after fighting off all the other horses it made it to the front of the group and then calmed down. It was a really steep climb out of the valley on a muddy track that must have been very difficult for the horses. We arrived at the top and went for a walk through the forest to another area of unexcavated houses and a viewpoint looking back over the valley. We had lunch here, at the only house for miles around. Then we had another few hours of difficult horse riding before reaching the top of the pass. Here we left the horses and had a nice 3 hour walk down to the village of Choctamal where we stayed the night.
The following day we went to see the pre-Incan fortress at Kuelap. In a way it has been likened to Macchu Pichu as it is situated at the top of a hill overlooking al the surrounding valleys and is a large complex of houses, temples and other buildings. In some ways I found it more impressive than Macchu Pichu We spent a long time being shown around the site. It was nice to have seen similar unexcavated sites in the previous few days to see what a difference the archaeologists make.  Even though only a small part of the site has been restored, the rest of it looked very different from what we had seen before. It was also interesting to see how the site and buildings had been modified first when the Incas took over the area and then later when the Spanish arrived. We ended spending nearly 5 hours there before driving back to Chachapoyas late in the afternoon.

Unfortunatly when we arrived back at the hotel we found that our luggage and things that had apparently been left in the safe had been gone through and some things had been taken, although most of it was of little value. Its a long story and I have written too much already but by about 2am, most of our missing belongings had been returned and a temporary member of staff had been taken to the police, so things turned out OK in the end.

Cajamarca

kt_m_white — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:20:45 +0000

From Huaraz i had to back track a bit and spend a day in Trujillo, to get back my camera that I somehow managed to leave there when I was there before. From there I got the bus to Cajamarca. There isn´t really much to do in Cajamrca, it has a few small archaelogical sites, but nothing as impressive as in other parts of Peru. My main reason for going there was to meet up with Cathy, my friend from Glasgow who is doing a work placement there for a month. So we had a very enjoyable couple of days catching up on all the news from home and everything that we´ve been up to over the last year or so. For a while I have been thinking of finally booking flights home, it is going to have to happen sooner rather than later, while I still have money left to pay for them. I almost booked them, but haven´t quite managed it yet.

Trekking in Huaraz

kt_m_white — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:19:47 +0000

finally made it to Huaraz after the strikes ended. Its a relatively small town in the best area for climbing and trekking in Peru. I spent the day finding out about trekking in the area and eventually decided to go for an 8 day trek on the Huayhuash circuit, apparently the 2nd best trek in the world, after the Annapurna Circuit. And the trek itself didn’t disappoint. I loved all 8 days of the walking, each day we hiked over high passes through spectacular scenery of high snow covered mountains, glaciers, lakes and past small villages where you would think it was impossible to live. Each day we had at least one high pass to climb of between 4500-5000m but luckily I felt unaffected by the altitude so could enjoy the walk without too much of a struggle. And everyday we started out quite early in the morning to reach the campsite by mid afternoon as for a few hours in the afternoon the weather always seemed to be bad, we experienced high winds, heavy rain, hail and snow storms, but the majority of the time we had clear sunny weather. The 4th day of the trek was the shortest day and we were camping near some hot springs, where we spent the afternoon having a very welcome wash, the only opportunity on the trek. Although the trek itself was amazing, our guide and the service we received on the trek was appalling. We had been promised an English speaking professional guide and a cook, we only had one guy with us who only seemed to know one word of English (lunch) and seemed to spend the whole time trying to avoid us, so although I can speak relatively good Spanish it was still very difficult to get even the most basic information from him. The tents we had were not suitable for camping in the mountains, none of the zips worked and after a few days mine had a huge hole in the roof, not good for camping in a snow storm. Due to our ‘guide’ being so bad, I decided he must just be a cook normally, but he wasn’t much better at that. Food included a piece of stale bread for breakfast and sugar sandwiches for lunch. The evening meal was basically the same every night except for the final night where we paid extra to have something different and try the local speciality of Pachamanca, lamb and potatoes cooked underground by hot rocks. This meant a bit of late night shopping for me. After dinner the night before, the only Spanish speaker in the group I was sent up the hill from the camp to visit the farmer and choose us a sheep. It was a bit different from shopping at Tesco.
So the trek itself was amazing and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys trekking but I definitely wouldn’t recommend booking with either Quecha Explorers or Monttrek.

Trujillo

kt_m_white — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:19:00 +0000

I arrived in Trujillo early in the morning and tried to get a taxi to take me to a hostel. As seems to be common in Peru, the taxi drivers don´t like to take you where you want to go as they all seem to get commission from other places. So I was taken to a much more expensive hotel where i had no intention of staying but I left my bag until check in time and went for a walk around the city centre. Having got myself organised, booked a tour for the day and found a much better place to stay I went back to the hotel and told them I had changed my mind and thanked them for the free bag storage.
I spent the day on a tour of some archaeological sites in the surrounding area. In the morning we visited the temples of the sun and moon, in part of a city built by the pre-Incan Moche culture. The temple of the moon had been excavated so we were able to go in parts of it. It was a really interesting building. The area is very dry but occasionally there are big floods caused by El Nino. When the temples flooded they would just fill them in with clay bricks and build another temple on top of it, so it forms a pyramid shape. In total there were 5 temples on top of each other, all with the same basic design. The most impressive thing about the buildings was the brightly coloured wall paintings that had survived with in some cases very little damage. You could see that in each temple the design of the patterns had been modified slightly as the culture changed over time.

After lunch we visited Chan Chan, a huge archaeological site of 9 palaces, built by the Chuimu culture, which followed after the Moches. We spent hours just looking round 1 of the temples. Was really interesting to see how the culture and architecture had changes in a few hundred years as the culture developed and how they adapted to cope better with the rainy seasons. Was also really interesting to see how within just a few hundred years the beliefs of the society had completely changed, from worshiping mountains to the moon. So thanks to having a really good duide for a change, the day was really interesting.

I had wanted to leave that night to get to Huaraz, but the strikes meant there were still no buses, so instead I spent the following day in Huanachaco, a small town a little bit further up the coast, where I made the best of the good weather and enjoyed a relaxing day on the beach.

Lima

kt_m_white — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:55:30 +0000

I had heard a lot of bad things about Lima before I arrived there so I wasn´t expecting too much from it, but it turned ot to be not as bad as everyone said. After the overnight bus from Arequipa I spent the morning in Miraflores, one of the richer areas of the city. Here I felt safe walking around alone, despite the warnings and had a nice morning seeing a small part of the city by the coast. In the afternoon I decided to go to the national museum, unfortunately most of it was closed so I saw an extensive exhibition about potatoes and an interesting photographic gallery about the recent history and terrorism in Peru. This was actually really interesting as it was something I knew little about. My second day in Lima I decided to brave the city centre, apparently one of the least safe places in South America. I went with a German girl form the hostel for a bit of support. We saw the changing of the guards at the government palace, a very long ceremony that the ministry of silly walks would be very proud of. We went to the San Francisco monastery- One of the most interesting parts of the tour was the catacombs where there was a strange collection of bones. Apparently the archaeologists had organised the bodies by bone type so we saw a room of femurs, etc. In one area they had made an interesting mosaic pattern out of skulls and bones that was a bit disturbing. Other than that it was an interesting tour with some impressive architecture with a lot of influence from Southern Spain. After unexpectedly surviving the city centre we headed back to Miraflores on the buses, a bit of a challenge but we made it in the end. In the evening I tried to get the bus to Huaraz in the mountains, but due to strikes and road blocks there were no buses running that way, so rather than spend an extra few days in Lima I got on the only available bus and went further up the coast to Trujillo.

Nazca

kt_m_white — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:50:05 +0000

After an overnight bus ride I arrived in Nazca at about 5am, not in the mood to avoid the touts so I let someone show me to a hotel. For only 2.50pounds a night I thought it was quite good for my own room, private bathroom and TV. Unfortunately though after arriving at the hostel she spent ages trying to sell me various tours and flights for the next day, at prices well over twice as much as they should be. I eventually managed to get rid of her and go to bed only for her to come knocking on my door at 7.30am wanting to know if I had decided what I wanted to do. Because it was overcast the chance of getting a flight that day were very unlikely so I decided to do a tour of some of the archaeological sites in the area and go to the viewpoint where you can see a couple of the figures in the lines. Eventually she dropped the price by 50% and although I thought it was still over priced I gave in and agreed to it, just to get rid of her. After that, the day did improve the tour was actually better than expected, I had my own private guide for the day and he was very knowledgeable about the area, so I probably learnt a lot more about Nazca and the lines than I would have done doing a flight. In the morning we visited several sights including the aqueducts built more than 2000 years ago, that are still in use now and have survived numerous large earthquakes in the area because of the way they were designed. we also visited a Nazca cemetery which was a bit of a strange sight. The Nazca culture mummified all bodies and buried them in family graves. Despite being attacked by grave robbers, some of the mummies were still in very good condition and had been arranged on displays in the open graves.

In the afternoon we went to see the lines from a watch tower overlooking a couple of the figures, the view form here was better than I expected but obviously nothing like flying over them. And by this time some flights had started running as the morning fog had cleared, but they were all booked out by tour groups. The figures were impressive to see, along with the perfect straight lines that continued for kilometres across the desert. What was most impressive to me was that the lines and figures were apparently still perfect after hundreds of years with apparently no reconstruction. How have they survived weathering and earthquakes for that long? And although there are some theories, there are no really convincing ideas about why they built them.

Having seen everything there was to see around Nazca I decided not to stay and see if I could get a flight the next day and so I took an overnight bus to Lima.

Arequipa

kt_m_white — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:29:50 +0000

I spent a few days in and around Arequipa, a very nice colonial city in Southern Peru. Within the city itself there are a lot of religious sites, including many churches, the cathedral and the Santa Catalina monastery. One of the main sites is the monastery and I spent a couple of hours visiting it. It is huge, like a separate village walled off within the town centre. It was really interesting to find out about the way of life for the hundreds of nuns that used to live there and the few that still remain today and there was a lot of impressive colonial architecture. I also visited the university run museum which displays the body of the child mummy Juanita found on one of the mountains overlooking the town. As the Incas believed the mountains were Gods there have been numerous child sacrifices found in the mountains across the Inca territory. Strange to think that it was thought of as an honour and privilege to be sacrificed, but only the best children were chosen. Because of the burial conditions the mummy was still in very good condition so they have done a lot of studies on the body and you could even see the facial expression of the child.

I also spent 3 days trekking in Colca Canyon, which has apparently just been reclassified as the deepest canyon in the world. It is a few hours drive from the city to the canyon, which was not the most comfortable ride on an overcrowded local bus that required a break for some repairs on the way. From the village of Cabanaconde we started trekking, down into the base of the canyon where we crossed over the river and climbed the otherside to a small village where we stayed the night. On the second day we had a couple of hours walk in the morning back down into the canyon to an oasis where we stopped for a few hours for a refreshing swim. In the afternoon this meant we had a steep 3 hour climb back out of the canyon to reach Cabanaconde. It was really hot and hard work and would have been good to have another swim at the top to cool off. On the final day we went to a viewpoint to watch condors flying over the canyon. Despite having seen quite a few before now, they are really impressive birds to watch flying and a couple of them came very close to the cliffs so you could really appreciate the size of them. From there we went to the village of Chivay where we visited a hot springs before getting the bus back to Arequipa.