For about 9 € I had booked two tours today that cover most of the tourist spots in Cajamarca. At 9.30 we left in a small bus to Cumbre Mayo, an interesting formation of rocks at an altitude of about 3500 meters. Our guide was really nice and took us to a walking tour a bit longer than the usual tours (about 2 hours walking). He pointed out several times that the walking was very easy for “you young people”, so that the Peruvians had no chance to object in any graceful way. Still afterwards all the people from Lima complained a lot about how exhausting it was.

Luckily I was not the only Gringo, there were two Swiss tourists who had travelled all the way from Mexico by bus. We had some talk, but it disturbed me that I almost couldn’t understand anything when they were talking to themselves – even though technically in German (I usually feel good understanding most peoples’ talk, except for French and Swiss German). During the walk we saw ancient water channels the Inca used to get drinking water from the mountains to Cajamarca, but unfortunately I had forgot to recharge my camera, so no pictures of that. Up there almost everybody was freezing, because the cold wind was not what we had expected after the very nice weather in Cajamarca.

In the 90 minutes break until the next tour I got to recharge the camera a bit, so I could take pictures of a dairy business run by a Swiss couple (Cajamarca is famous in Peru for its dairy products, in fact most of those are produced in Cajamarca, because they have very fertile soil and a lot of grass). They had a lot of Swiss cheese and posters, but even if they use Swiss technology it is quite old (or let’s say traditional). The Swiss couple was again with us and commented that dairy factories in Switzerland would have looked like that 50 years ago. Additionally they seemed to apply Peruvian standards of hygiene, because everybody can walk through and touch almost everything. What they gave us to try was very tasty, though and most of us bought at least something.

Afterwards we went to a nice garden and the other major tourist attraction, the Ventanillas de Otuzco, a pre-inca necropolis. On the way there our street was blocked by workers and we had to turn around, which was very difficult. In the end we had to enter a private property to make the turn and the owners eyed us very suspiciously. That did cost us some time, but we just made it to Otuzco before it closed.

After the tour I had a nice pizza and went to bed relatively early, because the alarm for the next morning was set to 3.30 a.m. for the bus to Chachapoyas.

It could have been so easy, but the bus from Máncora to Chiclayo already was a bit late on departure and since it picked up some passengers at unplanned stops (probably the driver made some extra money) we arrived about 1.30 hours late – exactly the time to change to the Cajamarca-bound bus. Of course that one was punctual, it left the terminal right before we entered. The next bus would leave at 1.30 p.m., which is 14 hours later. Luckily a Peruvian lady was also affected so we were two discussing with the remaining staff in the bus station (they were about to close). In the end we agreed to take the next bus (what other chance did we have), but I managed to make the bus company pay for my hotel (a very basic one though) – I had not expected that to be possible.
So I walked around Chiclayo a bit in the morning, but it really seems not to offer a lot for tourists. At least I found a nice café for breakfest.
The next bus was absolutely new and very nice. Apart from that the curtains were closed, because people often throw stones at busses on this route, the view was spectacular. So besides wasting almost the whole day I would have definitely missed those views on the overnight bus.
We arrived in Cajamarca when it was already dark. Because most bus stations are in close proximity to each other I walked around asking for a bus to Chachapoyas and was slightly disappointed again. There is no overnight bus at all, so I’ll have to waste another day. Thursday I will have the pleasure to catch the bus at 4.30 a.m.
The rest of the evening was more successful, I booked two tours for the next day and found a decent hotel close to the main square. It’s just 7 Euro per night in a single room and has hot showers (which is a luxury at times here in Peru). It was a bit spooky finding my room in the labyrinth-like structure of the hotel with most floors being dark, but in the end I even managed to turn on the light on my floor (one of three switches did the trick).
Good thing the tour starts at 9.30 tomorrow, I’m looking forward to it 🙂

Both me and my roommate in the hostel got up shortly after 5 a.m., to start our treks. I met Pia at 6 a.m. and we walked to our tour agency. Kevin, another French tourist had decided to join last-minute so we were four tourists and two guides.

At first we ate a basic breakfest, then our car arrived and we rode a bout 1,5 hours to our starting point at 3800 meters. There we paid the entrance fee to the National Park Huascaran (65 soles) and started our hike. It was very cold and windy, but beautiful. The first few hours we walked straight through the valley were we met a British mountain biker and two Australians hiking without a tour. Then we went up to our camping spot at 4500 meters. When we arrived, it was already getting cold, so we quickly set up the tents. While we had tasty sandwiches for lunch (with cheese, meat and avocado), the dinner was just awesome. A soup, pasta and tea – pure luxury far away from civilization. Meanwhile my clock showed 5 °C and we were all freezing. Our guides told us it was forbidden to light a fire, but we still had a small one. Otherwise our only option would have been going to sleep (and it was not even 8 p.m.). They had even brought Marshmallows and we had a lot of fun when they started reading our future in the fire. Kevin felt a bit ill and went to bed early, but we enjoyed the fire a bit more.

The equipment (tent and sleeping bag) were also really good, but still it was cold during the night, so we did not get too much sleep. When we got up at about 7.30 the sun was just beginning to unfreeze the frost that covered all our things. My water from the little river that I had filled in the evening to let the purification pills do their magic overnight was also half ice.

The breakfest was incredible – we had pancakes with banana and apples as well as chocolate cream. It was without doubt my best breakfest here in Peru till now. At about 9 a.m. we were all ready and started our climb. Kevin was still feeling bad (most probably due to the altitude), but was determined to continue the trek, so we went all together.

The path was ascending quickly and at about 4700 meters I was beginning to feel the altitude as well (slight headache) and was really hoping it would not get worse. Fortunately it did not. Still the altitude causes a very stange feeling of exhaustion that is not comparable to the feeling e.g. after running a competion or working hard for a long time. It really felt like being seriously ill and you had to decide between going on or dieing there. When we finally reached 5094 (thats what my GPS said) everybody was relatively quiet – quite a contrast to the first day when we talked a lot and made a lot of jokes (including dirty ones, quite a challenge in Spanish…). Kevin was feeling very bad, but he went on without complaining much. The view from our highest point was really astonishing, but it was cold and we were all wanting to go down again, so we just took a few pictures.

We decided to have lunch at 4700 meters, because Kevin just could not go on and the girls were hungry as well. I still had some headache and was not very keen to eat anything, but they persuaded me to eat some sandwiches and afterwards we were really all feeling a lot better. Soon we reached 4200 meters and it felt like being newborn. We ran the last meters to the campsite and climbed a big rock

Unfortunately we were not relatively close to civilisation again, so we could not make a fire. When it was getting really cold we were trying to set up a very small fire, but watching out for people Leo and me both saw a light for half a second. Nobody answered our “Hola?”, so the Peruvians felt they had to search the whole area, but there was nobody. Because Because robberies seem to happen at remote spots, we to ok precautions and put anything valuable into our tents this night and distinguished the fire. We were in bed directly after dinner (which was good as always) at about 8 p.m. The night was slightly warmer, but still we did not sleep more than half of the time, so I had some time to recalculate my travel plan. I was already staying longer than planned in Huaraz, but it is so nice I might have stayed longer. My conclusion, however, is that I would have to take the bus the day we end our trek to avoid too much stress the rest of the time or having to shorten the trip.

On our third day (Thursday) we enjoyed the luxury of waiting until the sun was really warm and got up at 8 a.m. We enjoyed our nice breakfast a last time and started to walk at 10 a.m. Because we were just going down and the way was easy we already arrived at our final point at 11.30 and the car arrived 5 minutes afterwards, so we were back to Huaraz even earlier than planned. After having our last lunch we all went to take a shower and Pia gave me her pictures (she has a really good camera). We had agreed to meet at Café Andino at 5, so I went a little earlier to buy my bus ticket. I used the Peruvian way of asking people how to get to the Movil office, but due to the descriptions being quite vague I was arriving late at the Cafe, but still was the first one

Soon we were all enjoying the great hot chocolates and talking about the trek, our past experiences and upcoming travel plans. We had also invited Moshe from Israel, who was also taking the Movil bus tonight, but to Lima.

Afterwards we were all hungry and decided to have Pizza. We somehow finished 4 family pizzas with 6 people, but it was extremely tasty. The only downside was I had no time to get some information about Trujillo online and write this blog post, but sometimes you cannot do everything at once… After the Pizza we had a kind of goodbye ceremony and it really felt like leaving people I had known for a far longer time.

The bus went almost on time and after receiving the included snack and saving it for breakfast I was already asleep till we reached Trujillo.

Friday was really stressful. I finished my thesis almost the whole night (I know it was my fault not to do it earlier), went to IBM to say goodbye to everybody, packed my thinks, enjoyed a really nice farewell dinner with almost everybody from my house (the Casa Roja) and head to the bus at 10 p.m.
It was quite a different experience compared to Flores, the bus actually left on time and was really clean, silent and comfortable. Here in Huaraz we are staying in a very nice hostel and have used the day to acclimatiyze (had no problems fortunately) and tomorrow we will get up at 6 a.m. to go to Laguna 69. Hopefully there will enough people for forming a group to do the legendary Santa Cruz Trek for three days. We just met a lot of Germans here in the hostel and have to get some sleep now. The next 4 days will be tough and directly after the trek I will most probably take the night bus to Trujillo. Stay tuned 😉

On sunday morning, my second full day in Huancayo I was again the first to wake up and because of the freezing temperature decided to stay in bed a bit longer. I happened to think about my experiences during the past two days and like to share some thoughts with you.

You could say this trip was my first real backpacking experience – I indeed had a huge backpack, was traveling alone, didn’t plan any activity in advance for this weekend and even stayed at a stranger’s place. On the train I guess everybody had an awesome experience, because somehow all backpackers seem to share the general attitude of being interested in getting to know people, culture and local traditions. These deep experiences and thoughts that getting rid of every-day life back home, work/study duties and all the routine things we do seem to put most of us in a kind of philosophical state. Somehow traveling together in an open and spontaneous way really binds together. It was amazing how naturally we talked to everybody else on the train, exchanged phone numbers and knowledge about the places we saw and Huancayo, our final destination. I am not someone to easily trust people I barely know, but in this case it was different. Like Couchsurfing it’s somehow a small community and at least I felt these people were somehow like me, leading to an intutitive feeling of trust.

I don’t know why we behave so much differently than I could imagine back in Europe. Is it the local culture we’re embracing, the sense of freedom away from home or just neccessity because we just don’t have a network of close friends over here?

Especially that weekend I felt is was the perfectly right decision to step out of the comfort zone and try something new and admittedly both frightening and promising in advance. It’s an extremely rewarding feeling to realize how social, friendly and plainly happy humans can tbe together without any materialism, luxury and entertainment and despite language barriers, different cultures and barely knowing each other. I’m already looking forward to my full three weeks of backpacking!

I woke up at 7.30 without any hadache and ready to do something. Still I stayed in bed till 8 reading the New York Times, because it was so cold. Then I got up and enjoyed the sun a bit on the rooftop before having breakfest. Marco had told me he will work from 9 to 11.30 but when I got back up to my room I met him and Jana (also German, Marco had met her in Huaraz and told me yesterday evening she was arriving today) was already there. Marco headed off to work and I had another breakfest with Jana talking about various stuff for hours until Marco called us to meet at the Plaza Major downtown at noon, so I quickly told the Belgian couple and we headed off using a colectivo, a taxi that picks up everybody who wants to join on the way up to 6 passengers, but we were lucky to only drive with 2 others.
When we arrived I was astonished about how many friends Marco had invited, our group now consisted of 2 Peruvians, 4 Italians, 2 Germans and 2 Belgians. At first Marco didn’t like to have such a large group, but in the end we took 2 (!) taxis to Huayucachi. Since we even had to take our luggage into the cabin there wasn’t much space and I was really happy when we arrived. There was a small festival ongoing and we were all hungry, so loocked around. There were two tables with old women serving food. We split up because the Belgians and I wanted to have cuy (guinea pig) and the others had chicken. The cuy was tasty, comparable to rabbit or chicken.
Afterwards we started our walk in a small street. We saw some baby dogs which were really cute, but when we had already passed them their mother came and barked at us protectively so we went a little bit faster. She still came after us and unfortunately I was last so she bit me, but luckily I wore a jeans, so her teeth didn’t reach my skin. Still it was a pretty strong bite and bled a little bit, but I don’t want to know what had happened to the girls with shorts. At that moment I also thought it was good to have the rabies vaccination.
The trek itself was very nice and we talked a lot. Marco was very entertaining and played his flute a lot. He also told us a lot about the history of Huancayo and we saw a church, that was built by the Spaniards in the 16th century being one of the first catholic churches in Peru.
We were in the sun almost all the time, but I was again a bit worried about getting sunburnt as I still only have spf 45.
We reached the top of one mountain at almost 3800 meters and the view was breathtaking. It felt like being on top of the world 🙂
Only minutes after we took the pictures at the top the sun was hiding behind some other mountain and it quickly got dark. The way back was just climbing down offroad and much stones were loose, so it was impossible not to fall sometimes. We were just lucky the moon was shining bright, othereise we would probably still be somewhere in that mountain searching for the way. When we arrived back at were we started we were a little bit afraid to encounter that dog again, but fortunately we didn’t. Instead of having to take a taxi we went by microbus this time back to Huancayo, which was equally crowded but cheaper.
Back to Huancayo Jana,Marco and wanted to go to a vegetarian restaurant, but it was closed, so we ended up in a chifa, but still had vegetarian food.

Afterwards we were all pretty tired so we showered and went to bed relatively early again.

It’s friday 29th of June – a national holiday here in Perú. My alarm goes off at 5.10 a.m. Luckily I have everything packed so I just grab my bags and some food and head off to the Metropolitano station. It fooles me a bit – at first the station is closed even though the first bus should already go through and then the display shows the next line A bus, the only one working for me goes in 40 minutes. Fortunately it still arrives on time and I am at the train station at 6.20 a.m. In line I already meet a guy from France and a couple from Belgium.

(I’ll switch to past tense here) We were able to skip the relatively large crowd of people waiting to get in, because they already had a ticket and we didn’t. The luggage was checked with metal detectors according to the Indian system – if it beeps they either do nothing or open the bag, close it almost immediately and it’s approved. The ticket check is about the same. We just have a pdf printout, with our names and passport number – I don’t have my passport with me, but they don’t even check the name.

There are 6 passenger cars – 4 are touristic class with 48 very comfortable, inclinable seats each, air conditioning (with the caveat of sealed windows), luggage storage and access to the observation car featuring a bar and even an included Pisco Sour. The real backpackers of course met in the classic cars – it was about half the price, but also included breakfest and lunch, coca leaf tea and touristic information via speakers in Spanish, English and French. The seats were actually comfortable and we had tables and could open the windows to take pictures. It turned out one car was only for online bookings and the the tickets to “clasico 2” were those sold at travel agencies and in supermarkets. It turned out that our car was almost full of tourists, while the other one had many Peruvians on it. There were a few empty seats, but the train was generelly quite full. I was sitting together with a Polish couple, but since there were four empty seats next to ours they left and the Belgian couple I had met earlier joined me, because their seats pointed into the wrong direction.

The train took off only 10 minutes late, which doesn’t really matter on a 12-hour ride. The locomotive was honking all the time, because the track goes right through the city and there were people, dogs and cows on it. We went through some parts of Lima which are not recommended to walk as a tourist, although they are not really frightening. Even though we went very slowly the train was already shaking vigorously to all sides, it feels as if the track was just good enough for the cars not to derail.

The whole railroad was build from 1870 and the track until Huancayo was finished in 1907. It includes many zig-zack switchbacks to be able to climb those mountains and thousands of workers died in the extreme situations up in the Andes. It was built to transport goods and the bi-weekly passenger train just goes because the train company was caused to offer this service by the government. Nowadays it is a lot cheaper and faster to go by bus(they only need 8 hours and the cheapest ones cost 1/4 of the train fare).

Those 12 hours went by amazingly fast, I chatted with the Belgians a lot, we got our foot airplane-style (although I guess most stewardesses will never in their lives experience turbulences comparable to the shaking in the train), but it was good. When I used their window to snap some pictures I talked to a group of three from the U.S. and found out two of them were from California. I asked them were exactly and guess what – they had just finished their studies at the UCSB in Santa Barbara. The world is so incredibly small!

During the trip we made three “touristic stops” were we could get off and walk around for about 20 minutes each. At the first stop the most interesting thing was a turntable, where three men turned around the whole locomotive by hand – the train changed its direction. There were also some old locomotives we could climb on and ring the bell 🙂

The second stop was a nice village called “Matucana” with a nice center, markets and crowded of people. Some kids were waiting for a train to dance to “Moscow, moscow”, which was nice but somehow strange in terms of unexpected.

Of course the most impressive was our third stop at “Galera”, the highest train station in the world at 4781 meters above sea level. The nurse started walking around offering oxygen, but it seems as if nobody was really sick of the altitude in our car. The Californians (is that a word?) even dring half a bottle of Vodka – I guess that doesn’t really help. They don’t even have a place to stay in Huancayo and try to make calls from the phone. Actually we had cell coverage most of the time, but it was very loud and they spoke almost no Spanish. Additionally most of the hostels seem to be full as well as buses going back to Lima as most people only drive to Huancayo and not back during the night.

After Galera we descended to Huancayo which is at about 3300 meters going through “La Oroya”, a small town infamous as being among the 10 most polluted places in the world – the largely unregulated (even state-owned for most of the time) mining industry left a dirty legacy. Especially the still active smelter for copper and lead and the zinc mine lead to most of the pollution. Unfortunately we didn’t stop, but the river didn’t look like it actually contained water.

About an hour before they told us we would arrive I had called Marco to tell him when to expect me as he wanted to pick me up from the station. He is a local mountain guide who made his hobby a profession. He is recommended in several books and the people owning the place where I live in Lima recommended me to ask for him. When I was searching for hostels I thought about trying to couchsurf and his was one of the first profiles I stumbled across. We took a taxi to his house, which is really big and is really luxurious for Peruvian standards. The living room, kitchen and bathroom are very European and he has a whole room for Couchsurfers with three beds.

I was now starting to feel the altitude (headache) and I guess I should have eaten less. Marco was really nice and offered me a lot of things, but  I just asked for coca leaf tea had a really good one from fresh leaves and went to bed very early. While it was really nice when we arrived during the night the temperature drops extremely to not much more than the freezing point and not even this house had any kind of heating or insulation, but I had enough blankets.