The Way Inn Lodge, and the Way Out of Huaraz (Sniff, Sniff)

Upon finishing the trek, I went for a day of rock climbing at Chancos, a short drive from Huaraz, and even did a bit of outdoor lead climbing for the first time. It was fun.

The next day, Ashley (the welsh from the Santa Cruz trek) and I moved to a new hostel, about 13 km out of Huaraz, in the mountains, called "The Way Inn Lodge".


The place was great, just great vistas and outdoor activity out of the city. I found some partners for some outdoor bouldering (lots of fun, accompanied by bleeding toes and fingers):

((Is that an extremely cool chalk bag or what?))

And did some great day walks:

I spent about 5 days there, hiking, climbing, getting bitten by sandflies and sunburning my upper lip (I have a bit of a Baron Harkonnen look going now), but the time has come to (very sadly) move on. I´m taking the night bus to Lima tonight, and from there a 5 hour bus to Ica, the best place in Peru for sandboarding and earthquakes.

BTW no. 1:
A file containing all the pics (both for this post and the Santa Cruz one) can be downloaded here.

BTW no. 2:
I fixed the poll and you´re all invited to get me to drink peruvian spit beer.

Yes, I´m still alive

This is the first real update of what´s been going on with me since I got to Lima, about 2-3 weeks ago. I didn´t like Lima at all, partly because of the ominous descriptions of crime in the big city Lonely Planet is busting with, and partly because it just didn´t seem tht interesting. The few things I managed to accomplish in my the short time I spent there were:

- Eating in a popular ceviche restaurant (the dish was nice, even though they bombarded it with coriander).

- Coming to grips with the fact that everybody in Peru (possibly in all of South America) has better spanish than me, even that dumbass Israeli who took a piss in the river which his guide was using to wash food and dishes (we´ll get to that in a later post). It turns out that: a. "Buenos dias" is not enough. b. Even though spanish and french seem similar to me, nobody understands me when I use a not so eloquent mixture of french babble and english.

- Lonely Planet tells of a place called "Plaza San Martin", which features a statue of Madre Patria, the symbolic mother of Peru. The thing that drew my attention to it, is the story behind the culpture: itturns out that the spanish had given specific orders to give the statue a crown of flames (llama in spanish), so the the local peruvian artist supposedly placed a small figure of a llama on its head. To my giant disappointment the top of the statue´s head isn`t visible from street level. Oh well.

- The hostel I stayed in had a DVD player, and so I finally saw "Pirates of the Caribean 3" (boring), "Borat" (fucking funny as hell) and fragments of "Hostel 2" (don´t even ask).
During those 2 days I also managed the rather simple task of buying an overnight bus ticket to Huaraz, the alleged trekking capital of Peru, which was a bit expensive but well worth it - I slept like a baby.