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.

Soroche and Seizures - Welcome to Huaraz!

What I didn`t mention on my previous post was that before I slept like a baby, I had a short chat with Steve, an american guy who was planning on doing the famous 10 day Huayhuash trek.

We ended up going to the same hostel in Huaraz (the hostel I had planned on was closed when we arrived), and spent a few days of acclimatizing with some day trips:

Laguna Churup (meaning "silence" in Quechua)

Lake Villakocha(?)

The original plan had been to find more people, in order to lower costs, but the city was quite backpacker free at the time, possibly due to the earthquake that may have scared people off (even though it was no where near Huaraz). So, as it turned out, it was just Steve, a guide named Heimer, our donkey driver Eddilberto, and myself. The trek was beautiful - following are some choice pics (if you´re interested, you can find all the pics I took on the trek and day walks on a 40 Mb file downloadable from here. Just choose one of the servers, usually Rapidshare is the easiest, and follow the instructions).

A massive glacier:

Going up to one of the passes:

One of the many alpine lakes in the region:

Can you spot the Viscacha?

Here it is:

Once again, same as in Nepal, I had to deal with AMS, aka altitude sickness, aka Soroche, which
meant frequent headaches. There was a period of 2 days I was a bit overcome with AMS, practically crawling from campsite to campsite, and spending 14 hours a day sleeping. This had my guide a bit worried. He had encouraged us along the trek to drink mate de coca (coca leaf herbal tea), which the Peruvians believe is very good in treating Soroche, and was quite clueless as to what else can be done.

When we met another guide at one of the passes, I overheard the short consultation, and even with my (virtually non existent) Spanish managed to extract the following dialog (roughly translated):

Heimer: "The Israeli has bad Soroche."

Other guide: "Did you give him mate de coca"?

Heimer: "Yes, of course I did!"

Other guide: "Oh. Too bad."

How reassuring.

Anyway, as concerned as he was, Heimer didn´t think that avoiding taking lunch breaks at 5000 meters high mountain passes might help a bit as well. At least I survived.

The really unusual part of this experience, and the main reason I didn´t really have time for updates, came 5 minutes after we got off the bus back in Huaraz. Steve took about 10 steps and suddenly collapsed in a fit of convulsions. Thank god the good people of Peru helped out, and except for a very confused American I didn´t have to handle any other immediate threats. Or so I thought.