Starting with this and continuing through the Huayhuash trek.
I’ve moved all the photos to dirtmine.com in an attempt to get things cleaned up a little bit. I wanna make dirtmine more of a personal thing permanently so having photos at lookthatshitup.com didn’t make sense. I still have to do something with that though. massrmvwait.com is borken, i might be doing some debugging tonight.
So Michelle and Annie and I who were all staying at the Way Inn hostel in Huaraz had decided to go do the Huayhuash track together. We talked to Alex and Jen who are seasonal tour guides here in Peru and have done lots of Outward Bound and other work like that. Cool cats.
They told us a lot about the route and arranged an arriero, doney driver, for us. On Saturday we set out to the market and supermarket to buy 10 days worth of camping food, not an easy task, the most I’d ever shopped for was about 5 days for 2 people, never 10 days for 4 people. We got it done, there was a little bit of standing in the way by Annie, struck me as one of the types that doesn’t quite know how to position herself to let others pass or operate freely, maybe I was super sensitive. I don’t know for sure.
We met up with Alex and Jen at their agency office in the evening and met Aquelino who would be our arriero for the trip. 48 year old guy who grew up near the Huayhuash range and has been doing tours through there for 13 years. We bought some bus tickets to Llamac, the beginning of the hike and agreed to meet him at 5:30 the next morning the catch the bus.
We went back to the hostel to get the tent and stove we were renting from Alex and Bruni, the hostel owners. The stove took white gas so we set out at 7pm to try to buy some white gas. Shit. Nowhere to be found. All the appropriate stores were closed so we started trying outfitters and guiding agencies when we came across one that would let us rent a propane stove with 2 burners and 2 of these 1 foot diameter tanks. Huge, but we had no real choice at this point. Michelle got kind of upset because she was suddenly worried we’d have to get more donkeys, I guess she had a long day shopping with us, but she basically yelled at the guy and told him that she’d be willing to pay 3 or 4 times market value for some damn white gas,… like he was holding out on us or something, jesus, the poor guy was just trying to help us out. Interesting beginning. A little hothead after a hard day of organizing, ok, I guess that’s forgivable. The guy even threw in a free tent for the arriero with the rental of the stove ($3 a day).
The next morning we took a cab to the bus station, lobbed our gear on top of the bus and settled in for the 4 hour early-morning ride to Llamac. Aquelino gathered a burro and a horse and we were off to the first campsite, donating some ibuprofen to the old lady beggin pain medication for her back along the road. It gets quite cold camping up there. It’s quite the balancing act trying to stay warm and getting enough air in the tent at 4500 meters.
The second day Michelle was sick - slept through breakfast - and then slowly but surely made it up the pass and over to the next campsite. Luckily she was feeling better the next day and we were able to keep going at a decent pace.
Day three was chill. We made it to a camp where we were able to pay a bit for dinner, the locals cooked us trout and potatoes in their house. Sitting in the candle-lit shack that was the family’s house we took some photos, I didn’t quite agree with Michelle’s philosophy of photogtaphy: Mind if I shine my flashlight in your eyes so that I can take a picture. Mind if I don’t know my camera well enough and blind you with a flash. Opps. Stupid American. But hey, I paid for dinner so I can do whatever I want. I set my camera on a box, set a 4 second exposure and got some nice pictures, I’m not even sure if they noticed.
This all kind of leads into Michelle treating the arriero as kind of a second-class citizen, an employee, rather than an elder and a guide. It took her a while to get over this. Maybe part of it was that she couldn’t really talk to him because her spanish was very limited. This actually shut her out on several occasions… leaving her kind of left out.
Day four we hired a guide to cross an arduous 4800m pass that the pack animals could not get over, nice views, once again Michelle lagging behind taking forever taking pictures of things with the guide obviously agitated as he still had a 1.5 hour ride home after we got to camp. I just can’t stand the: I’m paying him so I guess I can inconvenience him all I want…. At least hurry it up a little bit, be considerate of others. Aaaargh. I had a good time joking with the guide how slow she was.
Day 5 we hiked and saw a condor. We camped by some hot springs and spent 2 hours relaxing in the steamy water. What a nice halfway point. Michelle was being a little snide with Annie. I can see how Annie’s mannerisms can get a little annoying, especially if you’re a little grumpy. Having someone terminate every sentence with a giggle when you’re grumpy is sure to drive you nuts. Michelle just kind of removed herself from the group and went to read her book a lot.
Day 6 we went up the highest pass at 5000m, quite a workout. The next day we had planned to hike up over a ridge without the arriero, once again because it was too arduous. At the bottom of the pass we unpacked the animals and Annie and I talked strategy with the arriero,… it turned out that we’d probably have to spend 11 days if we were to hike that ridge so Annie and I talked to Michelle about what we should do, presenting the situation. She said that if it didn’t make sense to do the pass then we should just keep cruising. Whatever. She didn’t say that she’d be holding a grudge against us for the next 2 days. Especially Annie who was trying to foil Michelle’s vacation plans (not).
Day 7 we were hiking and Michelle was pissed that we didn’t do the pass. Yelling at Annie. Mean. Michelle was lagging behind and missed a river crossing and had to backtrack. We all waited about 40 minutes. WTF? It was my duty to initiate a conversation with Michelle because she wouldn’t even talk to Annie anymore. Ok, fine, here I go, thinking it over in my head…. Hey, sit down, let’s talk for a bit… Nice view, eh? … What the fuck is wrong with your head? Could you stop being a bitch! I was more diplomatic but basically the whole thing was me trying to keep Michelle from bullying around Annie and acutally trying to moderate between the two and try to come to some form of understanding. I had to resort to using a talking rock to keep Michelle from interrupting Annie all the time. Jesus, how about a little respect. Vent. Vent. We just had to get something out of the way because Michelle had just been steaming and that’s not a good suituation when you have 3 more days of hiking left to do. We finished talking and Michelle walked ahead and when I was following I just saw her disappear around the corner wlking down the wrong trial, so I yelled after her to come back down on the right track. Her mind was somewhere else. Annie and I walked to meet Aquelino and We saw that Michelle had fucked up again, this time not following the mian trail and ending up on some kind of a point where she couldn’t get down. We yelled and yelled and finally she started finding the right path down. We started going and waited another 20 minutes later on… still no Michelle, WTF? Turns out she had walked the wrong way when she got down into the valley, she even had a map and all, maybe her mind was somewhere else. The arriero finally went back to find her and yelled at her in Spanish. which she obviously didn’t understand. Oh Boy, what a day, and we still had a long climb ahead of us in the afternoon. Things were tense that evening.
Day 8: Up over the pass where 2 backpackers were murdered at camp 2 years ago, sketchy robbery situation. Michelle didn’t feel like eating dinner and doesn’t like oatmeal so she ate a few crackers for breakfast. Guess what, she didn’t have any energy. Once again she lagged behing and this time got herself caught wastedeep in a swamp. Wow, at least she was able to yell and scream and get some of her infinite frustration out of her system. We waited 35 minutes for her. Another pass that day, it was pretty hard. This is where I did my evil act… I was ahead and I asked the arriero what the route to the pass was and kind of bushwhacked my own trail, Michelle folowing. It was funny to watch her stand there in indecision once she realized that the arriero was going a different direction from us, I was quite confident we’d make it up to meet up with the path. I was just tired of walking paths after paths, I wanted to do some rock scrambling. She asked me if there was a path up there, I said “No,” there wasn’t , but I did say “but I know we can get to where the main path meets up.” Indecisions. After all her screwing up in finding the path she’s now so courageless that she won’t even follow me. She wasn’t listening to what I was saying, just that I wasn’t on a path right then. Oh, my little payback. It was my pleasure to watch her floundering and yelling trying to figure out what to do as I diasppear over the rock lip. Eventually she caught up, but the route she chose was for a traversal in the meadow above and not on the rock face, so she had to walk through another swamp. I laughed to myself. I’m mean. But I think I deserved to play with her a bit after all the shit we’ve been dealing with. She blamed the latest little setback on the arriero for not giving good directions. Bullshit. I knew where I was going. She doesn’t speak Spanish so she maybe just didn’t know that I was NOT following the arriero’s direction. Shrug. She blamed him. That ruined my whole trick. Later on I was up ahead with the arriero when he told me he had to take the burros around the side but I was free to scramble up the rock face, sweeet. He knows what I want. He told the the girls would have to go around :) So I get to the top and wait on them and Annie is kinda dizzy, walking waveringly. Turns out she’s got some kind of nervous disorder and it was maybe set off by climbing a second pass in the day. Her head kept jerking back randomly, and she kept losing balance. She took some medicine at the top of the pass… I took it upon myself to walk downhill or her or behind her to spot her from falling on something nasty for the next hour or so. She almost walked off a 4 foot edge, she was, uhm, kinda woozy. Next it started hailing and raining. What a day. We got to the lake where we were camping and set up tents in the rain. We decided to get up at 4:30am the next morning and hike it out to Llamac to catch a bus back to Huaraz.
Day 9: So we get up at 4:30 and hike out. Sorta uneventfull. The pack animals have a temper. We take different paths from the arriero for about 2 hours and when we meet up again I end up in the donkey driving position for a while. That was fun. Hissing and yelling to make it run faster. We finally got back to Llamac and caught a bus back to Huaraz. The whole way back Michelle is sitting next to me smacking her damn bubblegum with an open mouth, blowing bubbles. I wanted to kill. I said nothing. I decided to just deal. I had had enough of her. The bus tire blew out prolinng our return by 20 minutes. We got back and I took off to have a dinner away, by myself. Away from the madness. The crazyness. The freak show that was my Huayhuash trek.
I learned a bit about people, about myself, and how to deal with them. I saw some amazing mountains. Next time I’d like to have a more agreeable group along.
The next day, Tuesday, I hit the computers and printed out a few photos for the arriero who came by to pick them up at 5pm. He was half drunk, and wanting to go out and get a beer. Fine, When we got to Huaraz it had been raining and we hadn’t had a chance to tip him anything so treating him to a drink or two seemed like a decent idea. We went to share some beers and he kept talking about poor Annie who had been so tortured by Michelle. I think he had a bit of a crush on her. Tortured life 48 year old arriero with a crush on the 21 year old tourist girl. And he had to see her go through hard times. He seemed crushed. Maybe he was just drunk. He wouldn’t listen to me that Annie would be just fine, won’t be bothered by Michelle ever again, and has probably already gotten over all the shit she had to deal with for the last week. I had to basically leave him standing on a street corner,… it got kind of pathetic how he was begging me for another beer. I had to get outta there. Poor guy.
Today I was walking around the market and Aquelino saw me and ws trying to get me to buy him some more beer. Oh jesus, I’ve accumulated another leach. I don’t know, maybe their systems of honor here are different. I basically just had to say good-bye and walk off. It was sad and pathetic, poor guy, but what am I gonna do?
Well, I’ve bought food to go out on another 3 day/2 night trip. Getting out by myself. Some routefinding for a pass. I’m sick of walking trails all the time. The guy in the hostel is asking me if I want to be a partner in a 5 day mountaineering course. Michelle and Annie have both left Huaraz.
I finished reading Counterclock World by Philip K Dick on the hike. Started reading Gaia by James Lovelock and am also poking my head into The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. I finished the Life of Pi a little while ago.
I’ve got a version of Kon-Tiki in German that I’ve been carrying around since Pimentel. The swedish artist gave it to me.
So I’m looking at the server stats at lookthatshitup.com and guess what photo is most viewed,… yup, it’s the hot tub , why am i not surprised. Of course the next one is just the next picture …
I’m kind of surprised at third place ,… maybe it’s cause i sent a direct link to it in an email…
leaving for a 10 day trek plenty to say and lots of pretty pictures. Until then, sit tight… We’re having burros carry our stuff, weenies, but for 10 days, that’s a lot of food. Later on kids…
So here I am in Huaraz… I’ll keep it slightly chronological I guess.
So Jason and I arrived in Huaraz last Thursday morning at 7am and crawled out of the baggage-hold-turned-sleeping-accomodations. In the bus terminal. We’re tired. Weary. I throw my bag in the corner and look for a map. Jason throws his bag next to mine and heads to the bathroom. He gets back from the bathroom and there’s no sign of his bag. Yay, opportunity theft. I knew noone could drag my big bag out the door but Jason was pretty minimalist, moreover, his bag was a little day-pack. The kind of bag that a lot of gringo travellers keep their valuables in.
Shit.
I wait around in front of the bus station fending off opportunistic cabbies and hostel purveyors and restaurant owners and kids selling candy. “Gringo, Helado? ” “Grinngo, Taxi?”… Jason’s out running around seeing if he can find a trace of his bag when after abuot half an hour a cabbie pulls up and walks up to me with a half-full rics-sack and asks me if I just had a bag stolen. “My friend did…” I look in the bag and sure enough, it’s got Jason�s stuff in it. I paid the cabbie a $3-ish finder�s fee and he was happy. Jason finally got back after another 20 minutes and I was trying to pull some kinda “You won’t believe what you cant buy off these street vendor’s” kinda trick but someone had alread told him that his bag had been found… so much for my little joke. All that was missing was his soap and toothbrush. That was a nice scare.
Huaraz is probably a good sign of what Cusco will be like in terms of getting hassled by guides and all kinds of other people who want to sell the gringo something. We had some breakfast and found ourselves following Victor, thr muntain guide, to a hostel where we could chill out for a while. Whatever, it’s just for a night or two.
That night Jason and I just kicked it around the main park drinking some wine talking to some chicas from Lima who were in Huaraz for Semana Santa, leading up to Easter. Good Spanish practice. On and off people walk by and want pictures taken of themselves with the tall gringos.
We caught up with Martijn and Loes, the Dutch couple on Friday, they were also hanging out with some other British girls we had met in Vilcabama, EC. Oy, Gringo Trail. We headed out to the Pastoruri Glacier with them on Saturday. Nice time up there, organized tour, but still OK to get to know the area. Jason was trudging aruond the galcier in his beach slippers, you go boy.
Saturday night I downloaded and burned a copy for ‘The Streets - Original Pirate Material’, thanks Mr. Tmo, it’s great having access to my CD’s from down here. Martijn had been jonesing to hear it and we were trying to turn Jason on to it all. We listened to the whole CD in Cafe California, owned by Tim, Californian, whom I traded some mp3’s with on Sunday. I got some good stuff. He got some good stuff. Yay. He went to school with Michael Franti. Hehe.
Sunday was a day of saying goodbye to the current gang of kids. We just spent it hanging around Huaraz. Over lunch some street kids were trying to sell us some candies. We feed them some leftovers and then took the two that were wearing rags on their feet show-shopping. We felt good about contributing and the kids were beaming. So happy. They still smelled pretty bad though. Next, we’ll have to buy them a shower.
Sunday I moved into the Way Inn Hostel owned by Alex and Bruni, Brits. I had run into a few of the habitants there at the Cafe during the previous days. They have movies, a great kitchen, comfy beds, friendly atmosphere, and allow smoking inside (boooo).
Sudnay night I started getting Sick. Loose Poop and Fever. I was knocked out for all of Monday and only casually ventured out on Tuesday.
Wednesday it was finally out for a day hike to Laguna 69. Very impressive sub-glacial lake. Pretty. I rode back with a group of high-school girls from the US doing a semester with an organization called the Travel School. Travel around South America learning normal HS subjects half oe each day and travelling and learning local issued the rest of the time. Pretty Cool.
Whistles here are out of hand. There’s people blowing whistles all night long. I’m told it’s some kind of a security system, neighborhood watch kinda thing. Andrew (Toronto) from the Hostel and I spent a little while on night sitting on the roof-deck of the hostel blowing our own whistles, jamming their system, making a farce of theit nighttime noise pollution. It was fun. They were confused. Gawdam they’re so annoying at 3am.
I’m trolling for people to do some 3-7 day treck with now.
So I’ve had my Canon A70 for a while now and here’s what I think in comparison to the Nikon Coolpix 880:
Canon Rulz:
1. On/Off switch can’t just be bumped to turn it on.
2. Movies have sound!
3. Shutter sound is audible, good for other people using it
4. Audio comments on pictures
Canon Sucks:
1. Macro Autofocus often screws up
2. Flash on Macro overexposes like nobody’s business
3. Doesn’t display filesizes
4. Case is more scratched after under a month than my Coolpix after 4.5 years.
5. Can’t use slow-fill flash with manual controls only in automatic night-shot mode
6. Dammit, autofocus will only focus on middle or the camera tries to decide by itself. The Canon let me select one of 5 areas to focus on.
7. To shoot with manual-focus the screen must be on so if I await some show with manual focus I’m draining the battery the whole time.
I do like being able to take movies with sound. It’s fun. What annoys me the most is how easily the case is getting scratched up because I’d like to sell it when I get home and grab a camera that I’ve researched a little more. I like the Canon A-80 a lot more because it has a swivel screen. We’ll see. I’ll probably buy a digital SLR when I get some positive cash-flow again anyway.
Ok, so it’s been a while… bouncing around hanging around different people, reuiniting with others. it’s pretty fun.
So, a summary on Pimentel, Peru. It’s located just outside Chiclayo which has a pretty neat market of magical items and is apparently one of the faster growing cities of Peru. Hanging out in the park we ran into a few local kids in their early twenties who where out from college at the time and were just hanging around so I spent most of my time bouncing around with them.
Arturo was the one who was the most, uhm, persistent, in spending time with us and it was actualy pretty hard to shake him at times when you just wanted some chill time to hang out and not constantly be invited to his house, not that being invited into someone’s house to meet the family is a bad thing.
I think it was the first night that we where hanging out in the park drnkin wine that I got to talking to Arturo, he’s studying airplane mechanics in Lima and has gotten into the hip-hop scene there a bit so the whole crowd we had in the park ended up evolving into a little freestyle-beatbox party. Pimentel, Peru. Who’d a thunk it. I copied Arturo some music a few days later. He doesn’t have any means of playing mp3’s so I just made him normal music CD�s.
Then there was Vicente whom I liked. He had a good mellow disposition. A kind smile. Reminded me of my old teammate and friend, Jay Bolin a lot. His aunt sells Chicha, the home-brew alcoholic drink that tastes a bit like stale champagne or a dry white wine with a bit of a cloudy look to it. An aquired taste I think, but it was very enjoyable splitting the bottle with Vicente. I copied him some mp3 CD’s of reggae. Poor kids, it’s so hard for them to get exposure to music and then it’s even harder to get any money together to buy it.
Beto was fun. He’s the third-in-command on a fishing boat and was really enthusiastic about sharing his experineces with that. He had a video that was filmed on his boat of which he proceeded to make me a copy, we watched it at his house later and he insisted that I take it with me. I reckon it will be in my next package home. I gave him some jazz and blues mp3 cd’s. :)
Watching a local futbol match was fun, Eating the Ceviche (fresh fish in lemon sauce, kinda) was awesome. The hostel we were in seemed to rent rooms out by the hour on the weekend, that was entertaining. I bought a ring that I still can’t get off my finger.
Jason learned a bunch of wire jewelry making from the artisan, Fanta, who had his blanket out on the beach every day.
On Sunday morning I met Lars, the Swedish artist who was living in a house along the beach, trading his artwork for rent and working teaching English and German at local institutions. He was having some students over to practice english as a group and he flagged me into the house to see if I wanted to join. There was already one girl there and no more students showed up so we just yapped for two hours, and he offered me some food. Good guy. He mentioned a book that had a bunch of listings for travellers that wanted god families and places to stay with and I was turned onto US SERV AS a cool program to put travellers in touch with resources to meet like-minded people to stay with. I looked up Floyd and found Ed and Randye Grallah, nice. I showed him the glass pendant that their son Eli gave to me for my birthday.
Lars invited me to go teach German with him on Monday night as his German wasn’t all that strong. He even paid me 20 soles, his pay. One of the girls in the class showed me back to the bust station after the class, and used the opportunity to show me off to a few of her friends at the shopping center where she apparently worked. Such a novelty. Big white redhead boy. Chiclayo doesn’t get a huge amount of tourists.
Tuesday we were off to start heading for Huaraz. Jason was by my side. We’re hoping to meet up with Martijn and Loes again, they were fun to hang out with. Arturo was gonna show us where the bus terminal in Chiclayo was but when he showed up in the morning he had his bag packed and was telling us that he was coming to Trujillo with us (a town that’s on the way). His uncle lives in Huanchaco just outside Trujuillo so we cruised there and stopped by at his uncle’s house. We found out later that we could sleep at the house for 10 soles a night,… uhm, ok, hanging out with Arturo has been a lot like that. He’d kind of come along to lunch and then have us foot the bill. Bring us to his uncles house and tell us that we’re staying there. He’s a good guy. I think he means well. He’s ust a little overbearing. I don’t mind paying for him from time to time, I just like to make a choice ahead of time and not just have him expecting it. He was starting to feel like a leech after a while.
And then there was the point where we were sitting around the street in Huanchaco and he was whistling and cat-calling at girls walking along the other side of the street. We should have never though him how to say ‘pretty girl.’ Now he’s just constantly yelling it at them and then giving me or Jason an poke and we’re autimatically drawn into his web of on-the-street harassment. Luckily the ladies here are pretty desensitized to it. Some probably thrive in it. It’s just not my style. Nor Jasons. And we don’t much appreciate being drawn into getting the dirty looks. Different world. We’ve had many conversations about this gender ralations topic here.
I tried surfing on Wednesday and with sore arms from paddling we said our godbyes and Jason and I took a cab to Trujillo to catch a night bus to Huaraz. Well, it’s Semana Santa here and travel is all kinds of booked up. We went to four different bus companies and they were all sold out. The better of them for 3 days. Pleading with the last company the guy told us that we could ride up top in the bus for about 3 hours but after that they were sold out so we’d have to go underneath. Uhm, that usually just store baggage underneath,… OK. I asked to see and sure enough in the back of the bus one of the baggage compartments was set up with a mattress and space for a few people to lay down. We really didn’t like the prospect of staying in Trujillo another day so we hopped on the bus and were shuffled underneath 3 hours later. It would have been fine if there were 4 people under there, but the 2 guys that showd up in the last minute pretty much cramped us up to the ponint of spooning with strange Peruvian men. The door was left a bit open so we could get oxygen. We had a light switch that we were told to keep off or the cops might notice. We had an emergency call button in case we really needed to get out or something.
I slept some. It was uncomfortable. I think I slept better than I would have in a seat though. We got to Hauraz at 7am.
Gotta go now… change some clothes before a night on the town…
I’m not really in the writing mood but I’ve got some more photos up so have a gander at the new ones starting with the that link…