¡Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays everyone from both of us.  We´ll be spending Christmas trekking around Mt Fitz Roy in the southern end of Argentine Patagonia, so please forgive the lack of personal phone calls this year.  Hope everyone has a great holiday season and we´ll post again soon!

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Cajamarca and the Northern Loop

After we left Trujillo, we headed back inland to Cajamarca. With about two weeks to kill before Fish, Sue and Alexa came to visit, we planned on doing a circuit through the northern sierra of Peru, which “they” say is pretty far off the Gringo Trail. We found most parts to be pretty [...]

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The Huayhuash Trek

Normally blogs are posted chronologically (most recent coming up first that is), but the HH trek story would probably be better read in the order it happened. Start with the first, then work your way back. Enjoy!
The Story to Come
Huayhuash Day 1: Huaraz to La Union
Huayhuash Day 2: La Union to Queropalca
Huayhuash Day 3: to [...]

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Huayhuash Day 7: Back to Huaraz

The first combi out of Baños to La Union was at 6am, but we decided the night before to relax a bit and catch the next one around 9am.  Our memories were telling us that we could get a bus to Huaraz at 6pm from La Union, so getting to town early was not a very [...]

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Huayhuash Day 6: Evac to Queropalca

After the night before, we knew we wouldn´t be trekking that day.  We also knew there would be an important decision to make soon: do we wait out the sickness or do we evacuate?  We had a few things working against our will to wait it out:
1) Lodging.  It was Thursday and the biggest holiday [...]

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Huayhuash Day 5: Carhuacocha Rest Day

Our rest day at Carhuacocha started out innocently enough.  We slept in a bit and then made breakfast (instant coffee with oatmeal and raisins, just like every other morning).  Unfortunately the calm of the morning was broken pretty early with the arrival of the ¨Community Representative¨.  The lovely man in Queropalca who had taken our [...]

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Huayhuash Day 4: Laguna Mitacocha to Laguna Carhuacocha

We woke up on day four and packed up camp. Around 8am Edmundo ambled into camp. As we were half expecting, he brought us a full kilo of cheese instead of the half kilo we had requested. Who can blame him for trying to make a bit more money? And either [...]

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Huayhuash Day 3: to Laguna Mitacocha

With a short day of hiking ahead, we packed up and left the campsite around 8am. The first half of the hike was pretty uneventful, though of course very beautiful.
Around 11am, we stopped for a bit of a snack. As we were getting ready to start again, a condor came up over the ridege and [...]

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Huayhuash Day 2: La Union to Queropalca

Beep, beep, beep…it´s 3:30am and we´re awake. Kind of. The idea was to chatch the first (and advertised as only) combi to Queropalca – the start of our trek. Combis usually only leave when full, meaning they usually leave lat. However, since we saw this as our only option of transport we wanted to be [...]

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Huayhuash Day 1: Huaraz to La Union

After a few days of preparation, our adventure started at 6am on Saturday. The first leg was from Huaraz to Huallanca, four hours south east. The highlight of the ride was an aweful martial arts movie dubbed in Spanish: hero´s brother killed, hero goes for revenge, hero gets girl. When I could manage to pull [...]

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