After four nights (five if you include the overnight bus from Cuenca to Chiclayo) and we are back to the mountains! This time it's the city of Huaraz in Peru. It's a little bit higher than we've been based before; This is 3050m, Quito was 2850m above sea level. But once you're this high, what difference will 200m make?
The bus journey was an interesting one. So from Huanchaco (and with it it's larger neighbour of Trujillo) that there was only one bus a day leaving to go to Huaraz and it was an overnight one leaving at 10pm ish - ah. This was not what we wanted at all. Upon consulting the marvellous world wide web, we were able to find out that all you had to do was get the bus to Chitombe, then another separate bus onto Huaraz.
This turned out to be pretty straightforward in the end. Buses left Trujillo to Chitombe every 20 minutes and were only £3 for three hours trip. From there we found a bus onto Huaraz that left just under an hour after arrival into Chitombe (nothing there, not worth a visit, better than Peruvian Stoke but not by much), this gave us the perfect amount of time to collect our thoughts and sort ourselves out with a but of scran.
As the majority of the day was spent travelling, it's very difficult to actually write about the adventures of the day. But with just over seven hours of travelling, it was a good chance to reflect on the time so far of just under two weeks. Firstly, I decided to rank my favourite places so far that we had been. This was quite easy to do in the end actually and went as follows: 1. Chiclayo (Peru) 2. Baños (Ecuador) 3. Quito (Ecuador) 4. Cuenca (Ecuador) 5. Huanchaco (Peru) 6. Piura - aka. Peruvian Stoke (Peru). This list was done as an overall overview of the experience that I had there. Of course there could be a bit of swapping around, but that's a list for you. Chiclayo was pretty awesome, ranging from the pyramids to the extremely helpful policemen, onto the great food we tried and the general liveliness of the place. Piura, I can't really count because we genuinely only got the bus through and stopped at the bus stop for near on ten minutes. So Huanchaco... I guess I was just expecting a bit more. It claims itself to be a beautiful surfing village with life and it ended up being anything but that. The people weren't overly friendly, everything seemed to shut so early, the only saving grace was that the accommodation was actually lovely and the host's cat finally didn't run away from us on the final day. Shout out to Quintu the grey Peruvian cat. What has also interested me on this holiday so far is the amount that I've read. Whenever I used to go on holiday I used to read maybe two books of roughly 400 pages each on a weeks holiday in the sun. I stopped really doing that in recent years which is a shame. However, I bought a couple of crime thrillers at the airport. I didn't really read much for the first week or so, I was only 100 pages through. Then something clicked, maybe it was my desire to finish my book faster than Emma was reading hers. This turned out to be quite an easy task. She was about 25 pages ahead of me at this point and she had a smaller book. I then "went on a mad one" and read the remaining 500 pages of my book in about 3 days.
Furthermore we intend to climatise a bit tomorrow and explore the wonders within Huaraz before trying to find lakes and glaciers in the days that follow. Should be good.
