Huaraz is the main town for those wanting to visit the "Cordillera Blanca", or the "White Range" of the northern Andes. Saying that the town sits at the bottom of a valley must be quickly followed in the same breath by saying that the city is at 10,000ft. That is, of course, if you can catch your breath. On the west side of town rises a non-snowy range, the "Cordillera Negra", while to the east rises the snowcapped Cordillera Blanca, with several peaks over 20,000ft. Huaraz is not large, not small, perhaps 125,000.
 |
| (slightly photoshopped, to show how it really looks, too much varying depth and light for my camera skills!) |
[In the early 70s, an earthquake crumbled a glacier wall and released a devastating flood, killing 25,000 people. Not sure what the population was back then, but the percentage is huge, no matter what. A taxi driver was 13 and remembers it "like yesterday", the day when so many classmates disappeared or lost every single mother/father/uncle/aunt.]
The terrain is beautiful. The high, snowy peaks poke up behind a wall of rock that makes up the range and clouds push and spill around them. Glacier-cut canyons hide small lakes, and water melts, trickles, then flows icily down through the valleys. This time of year, wet summer, the ravine floor is springy with turf and dotted by "alpine" flowers. The hillsides angling down from the rock are breezy with sharp sunlight or sharp rain, and weather can change in an hour. Locals bring their livestock up to graze or tend to small plots of potatoes, etc., nestled against the slopes. These deep-cut canyons are called "quebradas" and each is used by a collective of locals who take turns guarding the mouth against rustlers. Diana, our hostess at the Lazy Dog Inn, could tell me the number of families using each of the quebradas. Farther downhill, houses begin to appear, then villages, until eventually you drop all the way down to Huaraz with its obligatory Plaza de Armas and central church. Of course, north of town, one can get a less idyllic view of a big strip mine up in the Cordillera Negra.
To get to Huaraz from Lima, we took a "super-cama" bus, an overnight ride with seats that recline to 180-degrees. The Lima bus station at 11pm seems like some kind of off-world spaceport, but soon enough we were horizontal in our seats and arrived at 6am in Huaraz. The altitude there is significant, though it affects people differently: Jen almost unaffected, me just an occasional headache hardly worth mentioning, Carter sometimes uncomfortable, Paul not happy with it, Farnaz literally puked one day (running out to the grass from the sauna in nothing but a skimpy towel). The Lazy Dog Inn is 2000ft above Huaraz, putting it at 12,000ft, while our elevation when visiting the Llaca Glacier topped out at 15,000ft. That's the highest I've ever been. One day, Jen tried an uphill run from the local pueblo ("Marian") up to the Inn…a couple of times locals hollered out to her "Where you going?" and "Good luck!"
Staying at the Lazy Dog puts you within a couple of kilometers of the sheer walls of the range. I took a couple of walks up the road and, since this is low tourist season, we shared the terrain with just a handful of locals with their livestock or bags of harvest on their backs. The women mostly wear the traditional garb, including the hats specific to the Huaraz area. These hats have a folded fan of ornamental material on them and, apparently, the number of folds in the material reflects marital status and status as an elder. Many families may have a cow or a burro, their main wealth, but no grazing plot. Often the kids are tasked with taking the livestock uphill to the open grass. I came across a girl of roughly 9 years and her little brother; when they asked the typical question of gringo aliens "Tiene caramellos?" ("Do you have candy?") I had to say no. Up to that point, it had been hard for me to get pictures of the native dress in a comfortable way, so I asked if I could take her picture. "No," she said. But as I walked away she called after me, "But my brother doesn't mind." Nevertheless, she ran up to stand in the photo. Farnaz and Paul stayed for the whole week, and they had a couple of opportunities to be closer to the locals: first, they were invited along to a birthday party at a local woman's house (which had the typical cordoned-off area indoors to raise their guinea pigs), and second, they went to a little closing show at the preschool run by the proprietors of the Lazy Dog (just like a school show in the states, except here all the moms taking pictures with their cel phones are in tradition Andes attire).
The Lazy Dog is kind of a progressive hacienda, a compound with casitas and rooms for tourists, horses that will come munch on your houseplants if the barrier falls down, greenhouses and gardens, and the preschool. The couple in charge, Canadian expats, provide dinner and breakfast in the common room, great rooms with fireplaces and compost-toilets, and free advice on getting around the hills. There are not that many people, but still I became familiar with the other visitors, some of whom are volunteering at the preschool. Speaking of volunteers: we had the chance to go into Huaraz and have lunch with one of the local Peace Corps volunteers, J Lynne, who works on health programs there. Her apartment is just off the Plaza de Armas where a loud stage was set up, blasting music to a small crowd of people milling about. There are plenty of ladies in town wearing the local attire, but it felt very particular to turn a corner by the grandstand and come upon a 16yr-old in full traditional regalia, her "sunday-best", standing among the rowdies.
At the Inn on the first day, I discovered that I was already familiar with a family visiting there…they are affiliated with the embassy and were, in fact, the "welcome" family that invited Jen over for dinner her first week in the country. They are funny sorts, friendly enough, but one of their teenage daughters seems a taciturn, unhappy sort (perhaps because she was dragged to Peru and, soon, will be dragged to Equitorial Guinea, for the large part of her teenage years). This family went up to the Llaca Glacier on the same day Jen and Carter and I did; they even ended up hiking back with us.
The hike to Llaca is not so far as the crow flies, but we opted to pay for a car to drive us up the abysmal road so we'd only have to hike the downhill. Since Carter was joining Jen and I, it seemed prudent. Even so, as it would turn out, it was asking too much of Carter. One note on all the SUVs driving around on smooth pavement in U.S. cities: up in this area they seem to handle their rocky roads and flash floods with nothing more than frontwheel drive Toyota station wagons. The taxi dropped us off at the end of the road from which we could see the base of the glacier. We decided we wanted to touch it and set out scrambling that way. The end of the glacier is a little spooky, the slate-blue ice melting and dripping and periodically rocks or gravel roll down it's face. It feels like something moving.
But, of course, these days it is losing more than it is moving. Another visitor mentioned being there a year prior and that the glacier had lost an acre since then. By the time we were done with the glacier, we had expended 2 unintentional hours, so we started the hike back to the Inn. At first it was lovely, the green valley below the glacier being so pretty, with rock walls rising up on either side and a stream the same color as the glacier twisting through it. We even saw the andean squirrel-bunny (the Viscacha), a large rabbit with a squirrel-like tail. By the bottom of this section, before the steep downhill, two things happened. First, we met up with and joined the embassy family we knew and, second, it began to hail. So hail, then rain, then hiking in the middle of a cloud. It would have been adventurous, but by the last hour of the 4 hour hike, Carter was literally miserable with fatigue and altitude-discomfort. Jen and I swapped carrying him for probably the last 2 hours.
The day after this, I took a hike with Paul up the other nearby quebrada, Cojup. But this time, just setting out from the Inn and turning back upon hitting the bridge at the canyon mouth. Jen went in the morning to see the preschool, Carter had a mellow morning letting Wayne, one of the proprietors, go through a very explicit introduction to horsemanship (leading, brushing, feeding, etc.). Farnaz happily donated time planting in the greenhouses and, later, Jen went on her uphill "run" from the pueblo. We hung out around the fireplace until it was time for Carter, Jen and I to go into Huaraz and catch the 11pm overnight bus back to Lima. Just before daylight, I was awoken on the bus by a car honking…and from the smell, I knew I was back in Lima.
 |
(from Google)
|
The terrain is beautiful. The high, snowy peaks poke up behind a wall of rock that makes up the range and clouds push and spill around them. Glacier-cut canyons hide small lakes, and water melts, trickles, then flows icily down through the valleys. This time of year, wet summer, the ravine floor is springy with turf and dotted by "alpine" flowers. The hillsides angling down from the rock are breezy with sharp sunlight or sharp rain, and weather can change in an hour. Locals bring their livestock up to graze or tend to small plots of potatoes, etc., nestled against the slopes. These deep-cut canyons are called "quebradas" and each is used by a collective of locals who take turns guarding the mouth against rustlers. Diana, our hostess at the Lazy Dog Inn, could tell me the number of families using each of the quebradas. Farther downhill, houses begin to appear, then villages, until eventually you drop all the way down to Huaraz with its obligatory Plaza de Armas and central church. Of course, north of town, one can get a less idyllic view of a big strip mine up in the Cordillera Negra.
To get to Huaraz from Lima, we took a "super-cama" bus, an overnight ride with seats that recline to 180-degrees. The Lima bus station at 11pm seems like some kind of off-world spaceport, but soon enough we were horizontal in our seats and arrived at 6am in Huaraz. The altitude there is significant, though it affects people differently: Jen almost unaffected, me just an occasional headache hardly worth mentioning, Carter sometimes uncomfortable, Paul not happy with it, Farnaz literally puked one day (running out to the grass from the sauna in nothing but a skimpy towel). The Lazy Dog Inn is 2000ft above Huaraz, putting it at 12,000ft, while our elevation when visiting the Llaca Glacier topped out at 15,000ft. That's the highest I've ever been. One day, Jen tried an uphill run from the local pueblo ("Marian") up to the Inn…a couple of times locals hollered out to her "Where you going?" and "Good luck!"
Staying at the Lazy Dog puts you within a couple of kilometers of the sheer walls of the range. I took a couple of walks up the road and, since this is low tourist season, we shared the terrain with just a handful of locals with their livestock or bags of harvest on their backs. The women mostly wear the traditional garb, including the hats specific to the Huaraz area. These hats have a folded fan of ornamental material on them and, apparently, the number of folds in the material reflects marital status and status as an elder. Many families may have a cow or a burro, their main wealth, but no grazing plot. Often the kids are tasked with taking the livestock uphill to the open grass. I came across a girl of roughly 9 years and her little brother; when they asked the typical question of gringo aliens "Tiene caramellos?" ("Do you have candy?") I had to say no. Up to that point, it had been hard for me to get pictures of the native dress in a comfortable way, so I asked if I could take her picture. "No," she said. But as I walked away she called after me, "But my brother doesn't mind." Nevertheless, she ran up to stand in the photo. Farnaz and Paul stayed for the whole week, and they had a couple of opportunities to be closer to the locals: first, they were invited along to a birthday party at a local woman's house (which had the typical cordoned-off area indoors to raise their guinea pigs), and second, they went to a little closing show at the preschool run by the proprietors of the Lazy Dog (just like a school show in the states, except here all the moms taking pictures with their cel phones are in tradition Andes attire).
The Lazy Dog is kind of a progressive hacienda, a compound with casitas and rooms for tourists, horses that will come munch on your houseplants if the barrier falls down, greenhouses and gardens, and the preschool. The couple in charge, Canadian expats, provide dinner and breakfast in the common room, great rooms with fireplaces and compost-toilets, and free advice on getting around the hills. There are not that many people, but still I became familiar with the other visitors, some of whom are volunteering at the preschool. Speaking of volunteers: we had the chance to go into Huaraz and have lunch with one of the local Peace Corps volunteers, J Lynne, who works on health programs there. Her apartment is just off the Plaza de Armas where a loud stage was set up, blasting music to a small crowd of people milling about. There are plenty of ladies in town wearing the local attire, but it felt very particular to turn a corner by the grandstand and come upon a 16yr-old in full traditional regalia, her "sunday-best", standing among the rowdies.
At the Inn on the first day, I discovered that I was already familiar with a family visiting there…they are affiliated with the embassy and were, in fact, the "welcome" family that invited Jen over for dinner her first week in the country. They are funny sorts, friendly enough, but one of their teenage daughters seems a taciturn, unhappy sort (perhaps because she was dragged to Peru and, soon, will be dragged to Equitorial Guinea, for the large part of her teenage years). This family went up to the Llaca Glacier on the same day Jen and Carter and I did; they even ended up hiking back with us. 
The hike to Llaca is not so far as the crow flies, but we opted to pay for a car to drive us up the abysmal road so we'd only have to hike the downhill. Since Carter was joining Jen and I, it seemed prudent. Even so, as it would turn out, it was asking too much of Carter. One note on all the SUVs driving around on smooth pavement in U.S. cities: up in this area they seem to handle their rocky roads and flash floods with nothing more than frontwheel drive Toyota station wagons. The taxi dropped us off at the end of the road from which we could see the base of the glacier. We decided we wanted to touch it and set out scrambling that way. The end of the glacier is a little spooky, the slate-blue ice melting and dripping and periodically rocks or gravel roll down it's face. It feels like something moving. 
But, of course, these days it is losing more than it is moving. Another visitor mentioned being there a year prior and that the glacier had lost an acre since then. By the time we were done with the glacier, we had expended 2 unintentional hours, so we started the hike back to the Inn. At first it was lovely, the green valley below the glacier being so pretty, with rock walls rising up on either side and a stream the same color as the glacier twisting through it. We even saw the andean squirrel-bunny (the Viscacha), a large rabbit with a squirrel-like tail. By the bottom of this section, before the steep downhill, two things happened. First, we met up with and joined the embassy family we knew and, second, it began to hail. So hail, then rain, then hiking in the middle of a cloud. It would have been adventurous, but by the last hour of the 4 hour hike, Carter was literally miserable with fatigue and altitude-discomfort. Jen and I swapped carrying him for probably the last 2 hours. 
The day after this, I took a hike with Paul up the other nearby quebrada, Cojup. But this time, just setting out from the Inn and turning back upon hitting the bridge at the canyon mouth. Jen went in the morning to see the preschool, Carter had a mellow morning letting Wayne, one of the proprietors, go through a very explicit introduction to horsemanship (leading, brushing, feeding, etc.). Farnaz happily donated time planting in the greenhouses and, later, Jen went on her uphill "run" from the pueblo. We hung out around the fireplace until it was time for Carter, Jen and I to go into Huaraz and catch the 11pm overnight bus back to Lima. Just before daylight, I was awoken on the bus by a car honking…and from the smell, I knew I was back in Lima. 
No comments:
Post a Comment