Welcome to Peru!

Our first week in Peru was mainly spent at the beach, from here on out it will be getting colder and there isn’t masses of things to do in the north of Peru, so after meeting up with our friend Scott and two other guys he is traveling with, we spent the first week or so here traveling down the coast for beach town to beach town. Scott is still teaching Grace to surf but I’ve decided I’m more of a fair weather surfer, I’d rather soak up rays on the beach than surf in the Pacific. You have to wear a wet suit here to surf and me in a wet suit is the opposite end of the spectrum to what I consider fun, there are whales here and I don’t want to run the risk of a mistaken harpooning! So lately it’s just been lots of tanning, I’m now the most brown I’ve ever been, which mainly just makes me look like a need a good shower.

So far our thoughts on Peru are that it’s nice, the food is a lot better than the rest of South America, especially chifa a mix of Chinese and Peruvian cooking, although were less keen on Inca kola, a fizzy drinks that seems to be a national treasure here, it kind of tastes like panda pop and is a bit to sweet for our taste. Women here love an oversized hat and taxi drivers always think you want a taxi. Even if you just got out of a taxi, even if you’re getting onto a bus, even if you’ve just told the previous 10 taxis in a row of traffic you don’t want a taxi, they still think if they bib and nod at you, you’ll cave and decided they’re right, it really was a taxi you’ve been after this whole time, you’ve just been playing hard to get. In fact everyone here loves bibbing, it seems to be a trend in South America, bibbing for no reason, even if you’re the only car on the road, but here in Peru they have personalized horns, which is an unexpected and loud twist. The people here are very friendly and actually speak some English which makes life a little easier.

Eventually we had to leave the beach and headed to Huaraz, a really beautiful town up in the Andies. It is absolutely stunning but also freezing cold and coming from the coast I really felt the change in altitude. This is the first time I’ve had altitude sickness badly, normally I just get headaches but this time I could feel my individual organs throbbing and felt constantly sick, luckily Scott was a diligent nurse and brought me tea made with Coco leaves every few hours which helped a bit.

We spent the first day in Huaraz exploring the town, it’s the third most populated town in Peru and is absolutely bustling with life, we managed to find a shop selling coats and bought some fake North Face jackets that so far have kept us warm against the wind, we just have to hope they don’t fall apart at the seams when it rains!

On our second day in Huaraz we wanted to do a hike to one of the beautiful glacial lagoons in the mountains. The boys all opted to do the 8 hour hike to Laguna 69, an absolutely stunning blue lake at 4700m, but as I was struggling to climb the stairs of my bunk bed without feeling queezy, I thought a 4700m climb may be a bit much (fun fact the average skydiving height is 4000m). Instead we opted for a trip to Laguna Llanganuco, a lower down Laguna which is apparently the inspiration for the paramount pictures logo, how could we refuse?

The Laguna itself was stunning, the trip to see it however was an absolute shambles. The trip was supposed to be 9am-5pm, we were picked up late and then walked around town to different agencies, none of whom seemed to claim ownership of our tour, we were eventually added onto a group of people on another tour. However no-one would read our ticket or speak to us to clarify we were headed to the same destination, until Grace lost her temper and shoved our ticket at the guide shouting “will you just look at it!!”, which terrified the guide into finally helping us and became a fun catchphrase for the rest of the trip (Grace is not a morning person incase that was not immediately clear). Once we were shuttled to the correct bus we realized we were the only English speakers on the tour, that included the ‘english speaking guide’ we had paid for, I guess they didn’t specify how much English he spoke, but we were expecting more than just the word ‘okay’. That did not however deter him from directing his whole tourist information speech directly at me, for several hours. To be fair it was nice to know my Spanish is now good enough to understand a talk about geology, but unfortunately that was only a small part of the tour and I didn’t get much of the rest! The first few hours of the tour consisted of a long drive accompanied by a Spanish guide to the scenery, our first stop was a pretty plaza, we’re still not too sure why, but there was a photo opitnity infront of a random church that we’re still kicking ourselves about missing out on! After that there was a long drive to the lagoon.

The lagoon is beautiful, with cristal clear blue water, surrounded by beautiful snowcapped mountains, we could have spent the whole day here walking around, but unfortunately we only had 40 minutes before we had to be back on the coach. We walked about a quarter of the way around the lake before we had to head back. Although the walk was beautiful it wasn’t the best idea while still suffering from the altitude and I managed to throw up on the side of the lake, which Grace found hillarious and pointed out that I’m always sick in the most beautiful places we go to, lake Atitilan, the Galapagos Islands and by a glacial lake.

We left the lake at 3pm and were taken to a restaurant nearby, unfortunately the only food available was chicken feet soup or fried Guinea pig, after just being sick I didn’t think I could stomach either. As it had taken so long to get to the lake and the trip was supposed to end at 5pm we assumed we would be heading straight home afterwards, so we just grabbed some biscuits.

Instead of heading back south we headed north for another two hours, again stopping at another plaza, we we marched off the bus and into a shop to try a spoonful of caramel and immediately marched straight back onto the bus and began traveling back in the direction of home. The caramel was nice but not quite worth a two hour trip! On the way back we had several more 5 minute stops to take photos infront of churches and to look at not much at all, one stop was to look at a rock that ‘had a face on it’, if you can call a circular rock with a lump in the middle a face. Everyone on the bus was getting more and more frustrated and less people bothering to get off everytime. Around 7:30pm, on our 9am-5pm, tour we stopped to watch a pottery demonstration, the guy was literally in his pajamas watching TV when we turned up, it was actually quite interesting and I’d decided to just go with the flow at that point and enjoy it. After a full day stuck on a coach haven only eaten a packet of biscuits Grace however, was about to explode with anger and when the guide spent another ten minutes trying to chat to her in Spanish instead of getting on the bus…well let’s just say it was probably a good thing he didn’t speak much English!

We got back home around 8pm, a total of 11 hours on the tour probably about 4 hours of that we spent outside of the coach! We grabbed a quick dinner and then had to get straight on an overnight coach to Lima! Hopefully our time here will be a bit more rewarding.

I’ll let you know what we get up to here!

Lots of love,

Alice x

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