Trekking in Huaraz
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.
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