Expedition: Pt. Three - The Last Lost Love of the Laguna

I woke up in a start, as the deep recesses of my mind vibrated in alarm. There was a rustling outside the tent, a slight and subtle sound of leaf and leaf, and though Jeff and Alex couldn't hear it deep in their slumber, I knew something was wrong with the sound. Could be robbers - but at 14,000 feet? Cougars, panthers, or jaguars? Rock slide? I remember moving my eyes from left to right and back again in vaudevillian excess, conveying fright as distinctly as possible for no apparent reason. A shadow appeared in the dawn light covering the tent and then - a tongue. And licking. And snorting.

I carefully unzipped the tent door to see a shaggy brown cow tear a twig off the nearest bush. We sat there, staring at each other as I munched breakfast.

The plan was nothing but ambitious: hike up and back to Lake 69, pack up camp, walk down the mountain, find a ride an hour back to Huaraz, catch a night bus to Lima, and be at work Monday morning - all in 18 hours. What could go wrong?

The trail out of the valley was steep and intimidating, creeping along a sheer rock face a thousand feet high. Miles of scrub, damp needles, and granite gave way to barren white rock jumbled by endless slides. And then, at first a reflection, the blue sliver of success. The path flattened, narrowed, then burst forth on top of a boulder. There it was: Lake 69, at ten in the morning.
Nothing seemed of much importance after that.

On the night bus back to Lima, sitting at the front with the low cinderblock homes of Huaraz fading into another dark cold trip south, I wondered what is the point of camping if not to be uncomfortable and unsure, even for just a minute.

Expedition: Pt. Two - Headaches & Heartbreaks

The first step was a right, pointing east, with the morning sun at my face. We had awoken at the beginning of the valley's dawn, as the first bits of light slipped through the self-imposed fog of the high Cordillera Blanca, to ready ourselves for the day ahead. We hoped to hike the entire trail to Lake 69 that day, a tantalizingly possible feat sitting there in the morning sun. Our path would take us from Cebollapampa through the valley, up over the granite wall into the high mountains and onward through boulders and meadows to the lake. From our campground, the trail stretched twelve miles; a more than respectable distance, with almost a mile in elevation gain. But on that first right, into the sun, it didn't matter.

The sierra of Peru is much like the Sierras of California taken to its fairytale conclusion; everything is steeper, snowier, taller, more transcendent than even those most transcendent of American peaks. The scale of the mountains is staggering, a range absolutely beyond comprehension. Every vista stretches for miles, innumerable waterfalls tumble down endless cliffs, and always, always, more above you. There is no end to the heights. North America has three mountains above 6000m. In our national park, we saw nearly fifty.

By noon, when we stopped for lunch on the switchbacks leading out of the valley, I could feel the altitude coursing through my blood vessels, pounding away at the walls with little ball peen hammers. Cebollapampa, our campground three hours back, is at 12,000 feet and we've only been going up since then. We all popped our pills - available without a prescription, like usual - and took our chances.Though it's midday, we're getting our first taste of hail off the mountain, sometimes falling in complete sunshine, sometimes mixed in with the fog. Halfway up the switchbacks we're treated to a visual reward: a plummeting nine-tier waterfall running off the altiplano. As the image alternates from our left to our right and back again, we debate its height. All agree hail is better than rain.

A few ridges and a few hours later, we clamber over a small boulder and look out on the most surreal valley I could have imagined. I was honestly surprised to see it. A massive plain, over a mile wide and eight miles long, rests between vertical cliffs of granite, some rising to peaks of over twenty thousand feet. The meadow is made up of a dense mat of lichens and mosses, shrubs and sparse tufts of grass, each one a golden firework caught mid-burst. Oxygen is difficult to come by, so Jeff and I take a breather by an old signpost. Our map tells us the good news: there in that field, sitting on that rock, looking at a green poof, we're at 14,600 ft. Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the Lower 48, is 14,505.Without much change, the mood goes grim. We're an unknown distance from the lake, our heads are pounding, light is fading. A sharp wind tumbles down from the mountain, cutting across the plain, chapping our skin and making life just that much more difficult. We're stuck; we can't retreat, we can't stay exposed on the mountainside, and we can't risk the conditions at the lake. It begins to hail. I'm miserable, Jeff's miserable, Alex is going delirious, and the weather is turning against us. A lone French climber passes us - the first person we've seen all day - and she's heading downhill. She points to her head, saying she cannot go on. As she slips beyond the ridge, I see something bright and dull next to my pack. It's a cow vertebra, long since cleaned by the snow. I hold the bone up to the horizon: Oh, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune!

After some fruitless debate, we decided to pitch our tent behind a little toe of the mountainside, the only area we can find with any sort of protection from the wind. A few cows saunter over to investigate, and finding no comfort, content themselves on some low bushes. Our bodies floating away on the thin air, we throw in the towel on getting to the top. It's about two in the afternoon, and we're napping the day away...

Expedition: Pt. One - To Huaraz, with love

For the record, I wanted to go to Ica, the southern sunny city of pisco sours and rolling dunes. Instead, I'm sitting in a Cruz del Sur bus sailing through the night to Huaraz, the hiking capital of the Peruvian Andes, trying to get comfortable in a seat designed specifically (and poorly) for sitting. We're due to arrive at dawn, but I can't sleep; the tires, the lights, the slick hum of new pavement, the dull glow from the bus rattle through my mind. A waning moon slips a little light through the clouds, and every little crack and fissure in the rock reflects it into my blurry eyes. In the moonlight, it's like coasting through clouds rendered in negative...

Dawn breaks over Huaraz in a wave, the sky rushing through greys and purples and hundreds of hues of orange and rose. Jeff, Alex Dadok (another Yalie burning through Fullbright's money) and I are waiting outside a hostel, hoping to ditch our packs for the day. We are planning to spend the day seeing the sights and catching our breath; Huaraz, even tucked in an Andean valley, is over twice the height of Denver. We spend the day at the Cafe Andino, an American-run rooftop retreat for hikers complete with flirtatious waitresses and disheveled Canadians.

After picking up our packs, we catch a cab out to Yungay, the nearest city of any size to Huascaran, the highest mountain in Peru, fourth highest in South America, and over a half-mile taller than Mt. McKinley. Yungay will always have a difficult relationship to the mountains; in 1970, an 8.0 earthquake dislodged a slab of rock and ice a half mile wide, a half mile tall, and a mile long that fell vertically off Huascaran onto the city, killing thirty thousand. Only the tops of the plaza's palm trees remain. The city was rebuilt a few kilometers down the highway.

Our taxi drops up off at the main corner of Yungay, where dozens of white Toyota Corolla station wagons idle. After a brief bit of negotiation, we hop in one of the many and peel out up the dirt road to the mountains. A minute or two in, our driver - a slick looking fellow named John - mentions that we're not in a taxi but a colectivo. The subtle difference, as I quickly discover, is a colectivo will stop at nothing to fill itself with tired looking Peruvian farmers and a taxi, well, won't. Twenty minutes into a gut-wrenching spin up the hillside, we've picked up six passengers, three of whom are in a pile in the trunk next to our packs. Despite the load, John is flooring his Toyota along the gravel road, breaking only to navigate a hairpin; I spend the entire ride with my hand on the door handle, watching rocks fall off the road thousands of feet to the valley floor. The drive takes over an hour, an hour I am grateful to see pass by. John promises to return in three days to pick us up.

Our campsite, Cebollapampa, is deserted. A small river splits the meadow in two, and a few lazing burros stand quietly, occasionally munching some turf. Light is fading in the valley, and though I can see the imposing faces of cliffs on all sides, the distances and heights are all vague. Huascaran is lost in the fog of its own creation, the tropical sun sending up huge clouds of mist that obscure the peak. We set up our tent, eat a hearty meal of mashed potatoes, and go to sleep.

I awoke at dawn, to see this:
On the other side, we see this:
We hoisted our packs and hit the trail.

Skulls & Gold: Christianity's Finest

Last Saturday, Jeff and I gave in and did the tourist trip to Lima Centro, the original downtown laid out by Francisco Pizarro and home to the city's main historical centers. We got a ride to the Plaza San Martin, named after the liberator of Peru, and started walking north towards the Plaza de Armas.

A little history from a history major: the Spaniards who arrived in Peru in the 1530s were some of the most hardened fighters in Europe, veterans honed in combat against the Moors across the Iberian peninsula. They were not, by any stretch of the imagination, professional architects. So when Pizarro moved his colonial capital from Cajamarca to the banks of the Rio Rimac in 1535, he drew on his personal background in sketching out his new city, favoring a design based on the fort-town of Santa Fe, a military camp built by the Christians at the siege of Granada in 1491. The strict rectilinear grid, broken only by a main square, was a complete departure from the unplanned, convoluted streets of medieval Europe and, in broadest terms, marked western civilization's first comprehensive city plan since the Romans. With the passage of the Laws of the Indies in 1580s, Pizarro's design became the official town plan in the Spanish Empire, the basis for thousands of pueblos stretching from California to Tierra del Fuego; not bad for an illiterate thug.

Anyway, a lengthy pedestrian street connects the Plaza San Martin to the Plaza de Armas and serves as the main shopping area in the district. You can buy or sell anything you want, though the liberal use of 'the hard sell' can be fairly unnerving. I barely tolerate that tactic in English, let alone in frantic Spanish.

The Plaza de Armas is immense, flanked on one side by the ornate cathedral, on another by the presidential mansion, and the third by Lima's City Hall. It's all very colonial, and quite beautiful and orderly and Baroque. As we walked past the Plaza towards the Church of San Francisco, I saw a bunch of kids doing skateboard tricks off a hand-made grind pipe on the sidewalk in front of the Presidential Mansion. Now that's punk rock.

The Church of San Francisco isn't too exciting from the outside, though the massive flocks of pigeons show the true devotion to the memory of Francis of Assisi. After a few minutes wait, we began our tour of the monastery.

The ornate wooden ceiling of the main staircase, though missing several large chunks from assorted earthquakes, started a fundamental theme in our tour: Christianity is a giant gaudy expression of a faith that either conquers continents or heals the sick. Though trying to follow the example of Jesus or St. Francis, every nook in the monastery is covered in a precious metal pulled out of Potosi by mita-bound slaves. Such is empire.

The end of the tour was a trip through the catacombs, which were quite spacious but not particularly tall, much to Jeff's difficulty. The first series of rooms had nothing in them, though Jeff and I debated how a roof made of bricks could support itself without any sort of vaulting. Apparently 27,000 people were buried under this one monastery, a number I doubted until we reached the Giant Skull Pits of Doom! In adjacent rooms are two cylindrical holes in the floor, each about thirty feet wide, filled with thousands of skeletons. The top layer was a frighteningly beautiful swirl of skulls and femurs doing an eternal Busby Berkeley in the dark.

What was more shocking was the noticeable pieces of litter thrown in with the skulls. I'm not a strong adherent to Christianity, but even I won't risk 27,000 Limenos haunting me for the rest of my life. Como se dice "boo!'?

On Class

Winter has begun its slow slide into spring here; every once in awhile a little bit of blue will sneak into the sky and things will start to cast shadows. Enticed by the promise of sun, Jeff, Diego, and I joined with the few other people we know to head for Cieneguilla, a resort valley about an hour to the east of Lima. By some fluke of meteorology, Cieneguilla is fog-free year round, making this desert oasis a Palm Springs for Lima's upper class.

Out beyond the city, there is the most horrifying desert imaginable; dead walls of dust and rock roll into hills on either side of the two-lane road east. Nothing can scrape together an existence out there. I thought we were in a mine, like one of those big operations out in Utah where no one cares about the landscape as long as bauxite prices are high. Despite the fog, Lima is the driest major city in the world; goodness, I believe it.

Cieneguilla is really more of a single street than a town, a long straight burn through the valley flanked on either side by lawn clubs and country retreats. We got off our combi at our club, Mesa de Piedra, hidden behind a King-Kong gate. Consisting of a large outdoor restaurant, a pool, and an expanse of lawn, Mesa de Piedra was completely empty; it was 9.30am after all.

I spent the day lounging on the grass, harassing the two llamas near the entrance and otherwise doing nothing. Strangely, every so often a troupe of dancers would come out to the restaurant and do native dancing which, from what I saw, involves skipping a few times, stopping, and yelling, "Yah!' Very strange. Maybe the strangest part was that this wasn't some tourist enclave, this was a place for Limenos to relax in the winter. It's like if you went to the Balboa Bay Club and a bunch of Southerners came out and did a hoedown.

I should note the band, whose four-hour set of traditional Andean music included such traditional favorites as "Hotel California" and "El Condor Pasa." Nothing like late-70s rock on the pan flute.

An hour back to Lima, I took a shower and took a nap. The sun takes a lot out of a man, even in the winter.

Yo No Soy Marinero, Soy Capitan

Wednesday was a national holiday honoring Santa Rosa de Lima, the first saint born in the New World and patron of Peru. Rosa is famous for her extreme penitence, from sleeping on a bed of broken glass, to wearing a crown of iron thorns, to rubbing acid on her face to avoid men's leering eyes. What better way to honor this woman than to cut work and go fishing.

Jeff and Diego Bandini insisted we go to Tip-Top, a bizarrely American restaurant in Miraflores for breakfast. First, I should mention Jeff's fascination with Tip-Top comes, in my opinion, from the mistaken impression that Tip-Top is some sort of Peruvian Denny's; a Denny's without breakfast, without all-night hours, and without the Moons Over My Hammy. I had a clasico burger, which in Peru apparently means a burger with relish and mustard and nothing else. It was good, I guess, but certainly no Denny's.

A short taxi ride to Chorrillos later, we're standing on a pier haggling rates with Julian, captain of the mighty Marina, a 15 foot fishing skiff. After some half-hearted bargaining, we hop into the Marina and paddle towards the jetty. Actually, Julian is doing all the paddling, and though the sea is fairly flat, Jeff nervously offers anti-nausea medication. I decline, but Diego and Jeff refuse to take any chances.

We're fishing with lengths of line wrapped around small blocks of wood because poles are for losers. Our bait, our live bait, are small creatures collected from the beach called muymuy, and though I'm told they are crabs, muymuy look exactly like giant fleas. Whatever they are, they don't entice the fish, as we go empty-handed by the jetty. Technically, I caught several rocks, so our time didn't go to waste.

I should mention that Diego got seasick and returned his Tip-Top to the briny deep, Jeff felt uneasy, and I was fine. So far, gastroesophageal junction 1, Lima 0.

Like usual, we all came back to Miraflores and sipped espressos by Parque Kennedy on a Wednesday afternoon. Self-employment sometimes works.