We finally managed to go back to the system that we had in Quito; book an all day tour to something interesting and not worry about anything else.
So our main tasks for today were to find these tours. Huaraz, like most places we've seen in the Andes so far offers a lot of similar things; white water rafting, trekking, scenery tours and rock climbing. With only two full days to book ourselves onto activities we couldn't just be like Manchester City in the transfer market - we'll have that, oh and that one looks good, yeah throw another one in just for good measure. This, we couldn't afford time or money wise. (Maybe one day). We'd read about all of the amazing lakes and the walks to the lakes set in the forefront of sky-hill mountains and decided that we had to do one. This is booked for Thursday. However we had to book something for Wednesday. What better to book than a glacier tour? Hopefully it lives up to the hype that I've given it in my mind.
Now for what we did today... After the routine motion of a trip to iPeru to find out where to catch combis and what to do we had it set; the pre-inca ruins set in the hills only a few miles away.
We found the combis site pretty easily and sat awaiting our economy ride to our destination when it suddenly dawned upon us that this was not the temperature that we expected for over 3000m above sea level! It felt well over 25°c. To our delight our combis driver and frozen goods entrepreneur offered us ice lollies. How could we say no for 0.50 s/. each (Just take a moment to realise the exchange rate of £1 = 4 s/.). The man was practically giving them away! Soon after everyone on the combis had one.
The journey started off on smooth roads and transcended into surface of the moon texture, we made it no bother however. We tried to then pay to get into seeing the ruins before, to our horror, the man claimed that our 5 s/. was fake... he refused to accept it. This is not the first time that this has happened. We were given two fake $5 bills in Ecuador which we managed to pass onto various others.
The site was worth the hassle of dealing with the fake coin (who even does that). It was a very old and relatively undisturbed site. Dating back to between 600 and 900 A.D.. We were able to go inside and wander around these old homes. What seemed to be the strangest thing about them (other than the fact that they did house mummies at one point) is how they always knew to put certain doors and walls in line with points on a compass! Did they even have a compass then? The knowledge and patience to almost wait for the sun to rise and set and to then make your buildings accordingly is something that is very foreign to modern minds.
After soaking in our daily share of history and archaeology we decided to try and walk back some of the way following streams and tracks. This didn't go entirely to plan when a dog came out of someone's house and scared Emma into a statue. Other than that there were no issues and we managed to pick up a combis further down the hill (successfully paying with our previously denied coin).
Huaraz is pretty good so far and I'm looking forward to what else it has in store for us.
