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.