After I left Trujillo on the bus, I arrived in Huaraz, which is one of my favorite cities in Peru, if not my favorite. Tucked up in the mountains with lots of nature in the surrounding area, it reminded me of my hometown, Jackson, WY.

The air was crisp and clear with a nice chill that made sure you stayed awake. I was in Huaraz for a couple days, but my main goal was to go hiking in the mountains.

Fun fact: while looking up the elevation, (according to Wikipedia which cites sciencedaily.com), the summit of the mountain has the lowest force of gravity on Earth!

 

 

Like everywhere I seemed to go, there was a parade celebrating the anniversary of some event (which I just can’t quite recall, unfortunately).

And like everywhere I went, I stuck out a lot and people in the parade ended up wanting to take photos with me.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but after posting these photos online, quite a few people gave me flack about the fact that I had thumbs up in every picture.

But honestly, I am not sure why I did that in every photo, haha.

The next day, I struck out toward the Laguna Parón, a place that was recommended to me by Cale while we were in Lima. I took the bus to Yungay (or potentially to Caraz, I can’t quite recall) and then immediately headed out towards the lake.

Cale told me that in order to enter the park, you had to pay an entry fee. There is a canyon going up to the lake with a road running through it. I was informed that if you walked further downhill from the road along the river, you could get by the checkpoint without paying.

I was trying that, but the foliage was so thick that I made so much noise, and the guys at the checkpoint heard me and asked me what in the world I was doing. I climbed up the hillside to the road where they were at, told them that I had just lost the path and paid the entry fee. The fee itself was only like 5 bucks or something anyways and it totally wasn’t worth trying to sneak past them.

Past the checkpoint, the road was easy enough to follow for a while. I took my time, and I am not sure how, but I managed to spend a few days up there just wandering around, which I really didn’t mind.

At one point while hiking, as if karma was getting back to me for trying to sneak in, I somehow managed to lose the path. That wasn’t the biggest deal because the canyon was pretty narrow and I knew I just had to keep going up the canyon to reach the lake. What was a problem was the thick foliage.

And when I mean thick, I mean THICK. I was bushwhacking, trying to gain any progress up this canyon. Actually, I think this is why I ended up spending so many days up in the canyon. Sometimes I was quite literally swimming in bushes, using my legs and arms to slowly pulling myself forward while my backpack kept snagging on everything possible.

The entire experience was incredibly frustrating and I spent hours laboriously pulling myself forward.

As if history was repeating itself, a couple guys walking on the easily navigable road uphill from me (although this time I was accidentally below the road) heard me and yelled at me asking what I was doing. I sheepishly scrambled up the mountain, now that I realized there was still a road and I didn’t need to swim in the bushes. (Somehow, I had come to the flawed conclusion that the road ended when I lost it.)

I set up camp a bit afterwards and slept for the night to recover after the exhausting day.

I woke up the next morning to the sounds of heavy breathing and stomping. I sat motionless for a second until I noticed that the sounds were coming from right outside my tent. I cautiously pried my tent’s flap open and saw a big bull with horns like you would expect in a Spanish bullfighting match very aggressively staring my tent down and stomping. I suppose I was on his turf and he didn’t take too kindly to that.

I had no idea what to do but I didn’t want him to charge my tent, which it looked like he was preparing to do. I crawled back into my tent and grabbed my red fleece jacket. I thought that the best thing to do was to make myself look big and intimidating so I held my jacket over my head like a sail to make my body look bigger. I leaped out in front of my tent and started yelling as loud as I could to intimidate him, and it worked! He circled the clearing for a couple minutes, all the while stomping and snorting while staring at my tent. After a few minutes of staring each other down, the bull walked off and left me in peace.

With shaking hands, surprised that I didn’t just get gouged by a horn, I threw my tent into my backpack and continued toward the lake. Of course, the bull had departed in the same direction and I caught up with him and a dozen or so other bulls in very short time. This time, they all stopped and stared at my passing with their heads lowered like they were about to charge. I walked past them like someone with diarrhea who needed to immediately find a bathroom, and they luckily left me alone after that.

And then, there it was. Laguna Parón.

With water bluer than I had ever seen before in a lake, it was hard to believe. I spent a couple days just hanging out in the area.

After I had my fill, I hiked back out.

I don’t remember exactly when it happened while I was in the canyon, but there was a point where I realized that I had not spoken with anyone for several days. I thought it to be an odd experience and I somehow impulsively just said “Hello” out loud just to confirm that I still had the ability to speak.

After departing the canyon, I got to Yungay, where I hung out for a day or two.

I remember getting to the town and being exhausted after walking through the canyon. I just wanted to relax so I sat on a park bench downtown. Another Peruvian sat next to me and just wanted to make conversation, which I was fine with. He just asked me what I was doing and where I had been and other things like that. It wouldn’t have been noteworthy, but while we were talking, an older lady approached us and asked me for money. What was interesting was that I had just been hiking for 5 or 6 days. I was covered in dust and sweat and I stank. The other guy sitting next to me was dressed in a pressed business shirt while typing on his laptop with his phone also sitting on his lap. I recall thinking how bizarre it was that even though I was dirty and stinky, she asked the gringo for money instead of the much wealthier looking guy next to me.

Regardless, I stayed there for a day before I took the bus toward Laguna 69, which wasn’t too far away from Parón.

I wanted to hike and camp in the area around Laguna 69, but it is inside a park and you aren’t allowed to camp in there. As we entered the park, I was actually pulled out of the bus and not permitted to go any further with my huge backpack because they (rightfully) feared that I would camp in there.

They did permit me to camp on the backside of the checkpoint, though, so I stayed there for a couple nights while I day tripped around.

Laguna 69 also had an incredibly blue water that seemed to reflect the sky itself. It wasn’t nearly as big as Parón and it actually was a bit busier with hikers as well, so I didn’t hang out there too long.

The glacier above us started making some deafening cracking sounds. I kept waiting for a chunk to break off and fall into the water, but it never happened, for better or for worse.

As mentioned, it was busy and there were a few groups up there. One of them seemed to be a group 12 or so friends who were traveling together. While the glacier was cracking, they kept talking and another hiker actually screamed at them to shut up because he wanted to listen to the glacier. While they were loud, he also didn’t even ask them before exploding on them. Just like anyone else, not every hiker is polite…

I remember that this is where I gave up on reading El Silmarillion (The Silmarillion), which is Tolkien’s book that narrates the history of Middle Earth before The Hobbit. Since I was in South America to learn Spanish, I thought I would buy a book in Spanish and translate it a bit in order to practice. That book was the wrong one to try learning with. Not only had I never read the book (so I didn’t even know what was remotely going on), it was simply far too advanced. To compound the problem, there were so many fictional words for character or places names and I wasn’t sure if they were Tolkien words or Spanish and needed to be translated. I think I managed to struggle through about 10 pages before deciding to stop reading it. It’s still somewhere in a box in storage at my dad’s place. Maybe one day I will improve my Spanish enough to tackle it…

After spending a couple days hiking around up there, I went back to Huaraz.

I didn’t do much in Huaraz this time, but I did go to a huge market that had all sorts of things like meat hanging from ceilings, fruits, and housewares. Recalling my encounter in Lima where I was jumped, I actually purchased a small straight-edge knife that kept in my pocket just in case anything crazy happened again (not that I would have ever wanted to use it like that).

After popping into Huaraz for a little, I took the bus to Chavin.

Chavin was an ancient pre-Incan culture that existed from around 1200 BC to about 300 BC.

I also went into the Chavin Museum, which had some of the artifacts that had been recovered from the archaeological site.

After spending the day there, I went once more to Huaraz for the night. And of course, there was a parade!

After Huaraz, my next destination was Nazca. There was again no direct bus, so this time I had to go to Lima and get a connection there. The busses worked out so that I would arrive in Lima in the morning and then take a bus later in the day to Nazca.

I arrived in Lima, but I had to actually go to a different bus stop from the one I came in at (which was the same one I originally left Lima from). I needed to walk south along the main highway, which would ultimately get me to the bus stop I needed to go to.

I was walking along the west side of the highway, and I eventually crossed over a footbridge. The very same footbridge that the mechanics told me (when I was leaving Lima) would take me nowhere (although I had just walked there from my destination at the time). That was what eventually got me into the area where I was attacked. I am pretty sure the mechanics were lying and purposely sent me in that direction. I even recall that one of the 2 punks that jumped me was on the phone before confronting and I now wonder if the mechanics had told them about me. Bastards.

Regardless, I walked by them while casting an icy glare before getting to my necessary bus stop and going to Nazca.

The bus got to Nazca late at night, and I and the other passengers left the bus station. There was a gauntlet of people trying to offer us taxis, hostels, hotels, tours, or anything a tourist would need and we had to push our way through them. I wasn’t terribly sure where I needed to go and it took me a few minutes to get my bearings before I went to a park nearby.

I was waiting for my Couchsurfing host in the dimly lit park when a car abruptly stopped near me. A guy got out, and while he was shorter than me, he was certainly stockier and I had no doubt that he was not someone I wanted to mess with. This menacing guy called out to me, flashed some piece of paper, and speedwalked right toward me.

Aside: I feel like I have seen it happen in many movies where some guy approaches another guy with a friendly face but at the last second throws his fist into the other guy’s face and knocks him to the ground. The situation in the park seemed exactly like that scenario, so I wrapped my hand around the handle of my knife and prepared for a face full of fist.

He reached me and stuck out his hand, asking how I was doing. His pleasantries caught me off guard because his demeanor was very threatening.

He informed me that he was a tourist police, although his paper looked so unofficial that I had assumed he had just printed some random certificate off the internet. Apparently, one of the people in the gauntlet had thought that I looked “like a suspicious criminal,” and had called the police on me. He and I agreed that it was because I had refused to accept any of their pamphlets about the hotels or tours.

He talked with me for a bit until my Couchsurfing host arrived and then my host and I went to my host’s house. He was nice, but we didn’t see each other much because he actually gave me the keys to his place and told me that he would be gone most of the time and to just leave the keys on the counter when I left after a few days. Exhausted, I promptly went to sleep.

The next day I walked around Nazca.

I then visited the Cantalloc Aqueducts which helped store and transport water for the Nazcas.

When I went home that night, there were a few new couchsurfers. Among them was Andres, who I would later go on a grand journey with.

On one of the nights I was in Nazca, I wanted to go to Orcona, which is supposed to be a magical place with lots of “energy,” and you are supposed to be able to see weird spheres of energy in pictures that can’t be seen with your eyes. It sounded gimmicky, but I wanted to check it out.

In Peru, a popular way of getting around is via a combi. A combi is basically a privately (and I believe often illegally) operated van that operates much like a bus does. Each van has a set route it travels on with a driver and “yeller” who typically has his head out the window, yelling where they are going. If you need to go that way, you raise your hand much like you would for a taxi, they pull over, and the yeller opens the door for you, shuttles you in, and then you are all off. It’s often times comical, but you get used to it. Other times, they just wait around, yelling their destination, until they get a full car and then they go.

So, I wanted to go to Orcona. I asked someone where the necessary transportation would be, and I was pointed in a direction. I wasn’t quite where I was told to be yet, but I heard someone yelling what I thought was “Orcona.”

I jumped into his van and after a few more people joined, we departed. I was under the impression that Orcona was only 10 or so minutes away, so after about 20 minutes in the car, I started to get suspicious. After an hour of driving and arriving in a seaside city, I realized that I had inadvertently traveled to the town of Marcona.

The driver was nice enough to give me a ride back for free, and I kind of lost my desire to visit Orcona after that, and I never went. I had had enough “magic” for the evening.

Frustrated, I went to sleep, but the next day I went to the airport to fly over the Nazca lines.

The plane was small enough that they had to actually weight everyone to balance out the plane as much as possible. After some preparations, we went up and flew over the lines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plus many more.

One doesn’t have to like everything, and while the Nazca lines were okay, I personally didn’t think it was worth it. I think the flight was somewhere around $200 each for the half hour or hour we were in the air, and the lines weren’t that interesting. The sights just didn’t justify the cost for me, especially since I was traveling on a budget. If you’re in the area and super intent on seeing them and have the money, then by all means, go for it.

I then hung out with some Argentinians who were also couchsurfing at the same place I was. They were fun, but they were sometimes hard to understand since they had some peculiar pronunciations that differed from how all other Spanish speakers spoke.

To make some money, they would do street performances in front of cars while the cars were waiting at red lights.

I even danced behind them a couple times while they were performing which was kind of fun.

Andres (the guy who was also couchsurfing in the same house as I) had already hitchhiked to Cusco a day or two prior and I was going to meet him there. The next morning, I took a bus to Cusco where we began a most exciting adventure, but that will have to wait until next week.