The turkeys were wandering the alley in front of our little hostal, aimlessly pecking in the early morning light by sign that promised, in loud letters, both internet access and cheese (the glory!). We slept fitfully by their clarion call, and eventually rolled out of bed at six for breakfast.
The señora was kind enough to provide us a full desayuno Americano (American breakfast) for the absurd price of three soles ($1). For one of the first times in Peru, I washed down more than bread with my orange juice (which, by the way, all old Peruvian women swear will keep even the Devil at bay). As I was sipping my mate de coca (tea from the coca plant), Marcus blanched a bit, and ran upstairs. The señora rushed after him helpfully, but Bodie legged past her up the stairs, hot on his roommate's heels. Turns out Marcus is often temporarily sick, and just has to toss his cookies and he feels worlds better. Go figure.
After paying for our stay, we shouldered the rented gear, gave the room a last once-over, and headed out into waking arms of Huaráz. Our mission: 1 – buy water; 2 – find a taxi to take us to the trailhead. The first was none too easy – by a colectivo stand we found a small storefront that was dedicated to all things freshly harvested. We tried to ask the lady for one of her 2.5 L bottles of San Something water, but she was busy refereeing an argument between two ancient Quechua speakers. From what I could understand of her placations, their discussion must have gone like this:
Old Wrinkly Man: “Rice is too expensive. Instead, let’s buy equal parts rice and [word I didn’t understand]
Old Wrinkly Lady: “You are being silly. I like rice. Also, my shawl makes me a very cute old lady.
Old Wrinkly Man: “I vehemently disagree, and so will make hooting noises. Hoot. Hoot.”
And so on.
Meanwhile, we had done a very good job in the second part of our mission. Matt had located an only slightly-crazy looking man with one of the white, boxy colectivos, and he would take us to the trailhead at Olleros for a paltry six sóles each. Bottles of water in hand, we dutifully sloughed our backpacks into the trunk and squeezed together in the back seat.
The cab driver, whose name I forget, now, can only be known as The Man of Too Many Jesuses. This overly religious driver had put Jesus about everyone one can – on his wheel, glove box, dashboard, rearview, armrest, – and, for good effect, wore an intricate crucifix. The Man of Too Many Jesuses did drive unholily fast, however. We often took turns at speed, and so often had that uncomfortable “here we go…!” sensation that it seemed as though only the stern gaze of Glove Box Jesus kept us on the road.
At one point, during a long stretch up the double-barreled highway, The Man of Too Many Jesuses pulled the Ark to a stop and began backing up at maybe five m.p.h.. Surprisingly, it was some two minutes before someone thought of a polite enough way to ask, in Spanish, what the hell he was doing. By way of explanation, he opened his door and hopped out, a wide grin plastered across his face.
While we were all still swiveling our head to find the ambush, he hopped back in, this time with a large chrome-steel crescent wrench, grinning like he’d won the lotería. Bodie, riding shotgun, managed to not laugh long enough to ask him if the wrench was his. He smiled back with a handful of teeth. “lo es ahora” he said – “it is now.”
If you want to walk back to Chavín from Huaráz, however ill advised that may be, you can’t actually leave from the mean streets of the capitol. Instead, you have to have a cabbie (see: Man of Too Many Jesuses) drive you along the winding road up a nearby peak, to the small town of Olleros. After a good tense 15 minutes of “did-we-just-get-a-flat-tire?” sort of noises from the rocky road, the good driver will deposit you where the road stops, at a thin yellow bar.
It was here that we found ourselves at roughly nine in the morning. The sun was shining cheerily, and our outsized bottles of water sloshed happily as we stuffed them into our bags. As the car pulled away to pick its way back down the slope to Huaráz, we let the town sink in. Past the yellow bar, a small plaza lay, dusted on the edges by ladies in traditional garb knitting and smiling and waving. It was all very Disney.
We smiled and waved back (though I cannot say we knitted, too…) and shouldered our packs with appropriately manly grunts. At a brisk walk, we set off down the cobbled road, ostensibly the first steps home.
I would like to take this space to say that I have had quite a few of these first steps. As a rule, the sun always shines, your backpack is always light, and there are natives on hand to smile and cheer you on. Based on my camping record, it would look as though I genuinely enjoy living on an outdoor shoestring; being an Eagle Scout should engender a good love of hoofing it, so to speak. I would also like to take this space to say that anyone that believes this is a nitwit; I don’t like camping. Not in Appalachia, and not in the Andes. Each time I go along, I end up coming out roughly even on the enjoy-myself-o-meter, but promise myself that this will finally be the last time. I apparently have memory issues.
The road out of town only held its paving for a quarter-mile; it soon faded to hard-packed dirt under the shade of pines and eucalyptus. The path would trend upward gently, then let us down. Dappled in the morning forest light, everything seemed very agreeable, and, indeed, it was. Not a half-mile from the Knitting Brigade we made our first stop of the trip, a quick picture break at a burbling brook in a clearing.
The creek burbled just as a good creek should. There were mossy, glossy rocks, satisfyingly white water, and a good decent ploosh when you went to the bathroom in the puddles. Just kidding on that last one – we went in a copse a bit back. Anyway, we took a few pictures and marched on, taking the path down a valley.
It began to become clearer we had left civilization after the brook. The only signs of other people were houses – farmsteads that clustered on the far-off fields in morose clusters. The forest gave way to golden grassy fields, and the path became a two-rutted road, wallowing with mud and the poo of livestock. The farmhouses grew fewer and farther between, separated by expansive fields and excessively aggressive bulls. Now and again, we would spot a child or two clinging shyly to fenceposts. Usually they would duck their head, smile, and say “buenos” – a short form of good day.
As tree cover disappeared completely, we left our last village behind. Its narrow main street was our path, and the children were scooped off dingy concrete steps by women in colorful dresses as we came closer. We were watched, silently, from the shadows of doorframes and stoops, and the chatter that died as we came through was almost never in Spanish. Yucca plants (which grow to improbable size here) lined the path out of the few houses, and as we stopped for a second, someone pointed out that their leaves were carved – Quechua graffiti that could be easily translated as “Pika loves Ronal” and other universal declarations of “we’re here, living like everyone else.” The only one I managed to find in Spanish was this one (below), which reads “el que escribe me es puta." Quite literally, it is “he who wrote me is a bitch.” I spent a good bit of the next few miles contemplating the hombre who wrote that.
The road spread, and became what can only be described as… a river. As the field melted into each other, one hill after another, the ruts of the road became swollen with run-off from somewhere, and ran downhill in a clotted creek, straight down the path. We resorted to tip-toeing along the river’s edge, or playing games of hopscotch on the most solid-looking clumps of grass. My undying respect is reserved for anyone who can leap elegantly across water with a tent lashed to your back.
We started up a game of “Contact,” which, it must be said, is the ultimate in no-equipment word games. It requires only three, but is more fun with more. I would explain the rules here, but honestly, I make a botch of it. I know this because it took Marcus nearly ten minutes to re-instruct the group after I tried to teach it. It was so incredibly engrossing that, at one point, we were sitting on a small rise after a hill, catching our breath and playing the game, and we completely lost ourselves. Legs splayed, we played for a good twenty minutes before someone said “Peru” and it occurred to us that we were not only not in a living room somewhere, but that we were far from any somewhere.
But where were we? Ah, almost lunch time. As I said, the valley floor had started to rise, leaving the moist farmlands for expansive plains. We walked at a steady incline, each step grubby and dry in the dirt. The valley stretched in all directions, an aching expanse dotted by tufts of grass and hardy yellow flowers. On each side of us, mountain ranges rose like a curtain, silent reminders of what was to come. As we moved to lunch, the air began to become thin again, and whistled desperately in and out of out throats.
We did not have a map. Maps are for women, and people who don’t actually know how to camp. Instead, our cagey plan was to take a picture of a map we’d seen in the Andes Camp office. The crayon-colored lines assured us that we were on the right road to nowhere, and soothed pestering thoughts about our destination. I do not want to over-exaggerate, however. Matt did bring a small GPS, which told us, to within 15 feet, exactly where we could be found on the face of the earth. The problem was, however, that our GPS did not talk to the camera, and both insisted that we were somewhere, anywhere, wherever we wanted to be, between Olleros and Chavín. This made stopping at Sacracancha rather an issue.
Sacracancha was to be our lunch spot – on the map, it was shown as a friendly triangle, promising: shelter, a good resting spot, and, should we be so lucky, a Port-o-Potti. It was looking more and more unlikely that we could make lunch there, however. The only broad valley now stretched to the horizon on all sides, so that everything we could see bowed up the mountains at the plain’s close. We eventually just picked a spot like any other on the wash and ate our little lunches. I packed myself bread and lunchmeat and mozzarella. Over mumbled mouthfuls of cold and greasy mystery meat, we played Contact on the windy plains of highland Peru. Played, that is, until it began to rain.
The clouds swept in from every direction. From behind us, the sky darkened, and ahead, the mountains were lost in a steely fog. The rain began falling in earnest as we packed up, stinging drops that lanced down in a fine spray. Though we donned our ponchos and shells, we were still stung by the drops that whistled down sideways. And always, the walking – silent and fast in the twilight.
Small huts would dot the plain, now and again, and I thought enviously of the dry herders / farmers / undiscovered mummies inside, snug in their wattle wrapper. As a grey veil gripped the ranges, blurring the edges in a rippling blanket, we marched on, shells sparkled with drops of rain. Dusk fell, and the rain continued unabated, lashing our sides in the mountain wind and chilling everything it touched. In fact, when it came to set up camp, we were so thoroughly lost that we would have walked right past it, had it not been for ze Germans.
They were visible first just as a pink blotch. We had climbed to the end of the valley, braved the wind and rain, and stood at the foot of three mountains. We knew we had to pass by one in the morning, but our camp’s location had to be at least partway to that pass. Lucky for us, then, that there was a little Teutonic Pink Tent waving in the breeze from a nearby hilltop. Had we not spotted it, I probably would be in Ecuador or something by now.
The first emissaries to our lost party were not German – they didn’t even have interesting accents. Rather, they were Peruvians, who cast appraising eyes at our wet, bedraggled faces and confirmed that the hillock they had camped on was indeed the best for our group. Though I never knew the name of the man who came down to save us from tentage disasters, we may safely call him “Sir Strokes-a-Lot,” on account of the facts that: 1) I respect him, and, 2) he never took his stroking hand off the burro he had led down the hill.
The Germans themselves, who were, apparently, employing the Peruvians as Sherpas, were everything we could have asked for. The tootled their English, and were suitably tracksuited and pale and spindly. They kept using the phrase “how do you say…?” and claimed, with perfect teeth, that they were “on holiday,” bless them. It struck me that someone should have mentioned the Alps to them – they are rather closer – but we were already bustling past them to find a good patch to pitch our tents.
This is the point in most of our camping stories where food is cooked, silly chit-chat is made, and everyone involved tucks themselves into comfortably snug sleeping bags. It was not, alas, to be. The rain that hung across the mountains kept pounding our camp full-force, slapping anyone without a raincoat on and making lighting the dinner stove an exceptional chore.
The blame shouldn’t all go on the weather. It was, we think, mostly “John’s” fault (see: Day 11 for reference). As we made to pump the stove for dinner, the plunger popped out, the gasket broke, and the seal to the tank fell neatly in two at our wet feet. This led to rather serious cursing and pontification on exactly what and how much John could put up his own fuel tube. We were men without fire, on a windy hilltop in the remote Andes, with only bags of pasta and a crew of Germans for company.
Matt made to ask the Peruvians (who had just served the Germans high tea) if we could use their stove to boil water for our pasta. With slow, sad shakes of their head, they said they’d only brought enough for the Germans for the next week, and any extra use would leave them short. With a sympathetic nod, they sent Matt on his way back to us, emptyhanded.
Let this be said of Stanford students: we will go to inordinate lengths to prove that we can fix things that might not be fixable. Matt, himself free from the Cardinal Cult, had unwisely left four Stanford males with a piece of gadgetry, severe need, and a large problem. By the time he got back, Bodie had already left for his tent, to get the duct tape.
With some judicious tapage, careful pumping, and swift elbows to the case, the stove was soon cheerfully ablaze on top of our rock, eager to boil water for us. We wasted no time, and poured our pasta a steam bath. When it was done, we dumped in two cans of soup bought in Huaráz and took turns passing a spoon we stole from the Germans around the pot in the waning light. The sun set swiftly behind the mountains, and a chill wind kicked up across the plateau. We quickly finished our pot, and retired to the biggest tent with a brownie, a pack of cards, and a small flask of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. The rain kept up a stiff tattoo on the rainfly of the tent as we got more and more sozzled, yelling out Contact clues and bellowing as we were beat at cards. After a rollicking two hours, we split tents and tucked ourselves gratefully into mummy bags. Some 5,000 feet below us, Huaráz slept.
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