We decided to leave the crowds of Cuzco which can get pretty hectic at times, the city has changed to say the least. I was here not so many years ago and no doubt it was a popular spot
then but the change in the last few years is phenomenal. The quiet guest house I stayed in with Conor Reynolds in 2000? is now a posh restaurant that serves what they call "nuevo Andean cusine", basically the same old dishes of cuy, papas al la huancaina, etc except served in smaller quantities and carefully arranged on a large white plate with a piece of lettuce on the side. Its not bad though. Crumbling back alleys have been restored to
former, or in many cases beyond former glory. Prices although have rocketed and ladies dressed in traditional garb hang around street corners with several alpacas in tow, "messter, photo, meester". All said its a fabulous old place once you can avoid the gap year students on drinking binges!
So we had decided that our next stop of any decent length would be the old hunting ground of Huaraz were we could climb and trek. But how to get there? Dad had recommended the town of Ayachucho. It is en route when you glance at the map. However, on more careful inspection you can clearly see nearly all traffic goes via Nazca and Lima, so also does the paved road. One fellow I spoke to who was planning to visit Ayacucho had booked a bus via Lima representing two sides of a triangle.
It was at this point that Granville, Sue´s very quiet teddy bear who is the official third member of this trip quipped "darkest Peru".Isn´t that were Paddington came from? Did you know that its his 50th birthday? Well there you have it, it was decided we were to travel overland through the central highlands to Huaraz and perhaps find
the family home of Paddington en route. Without much further ado we booked ourselves a bus with lots of wheels that was capable of the road to Ayacucho, "18 hours no more" the lady in the kiosk said!
We boarded at 7pm and the first few hours of road were pretty good but everyone woke up when we turned off the asphalt. From that point there were three 4000m plus passes dropping down to 2000m in between, all on terribly bumpy unpaved roads. True to form, the bus with many wheels
broke down and produced large amounts of smoke from some unknown point. We stood around on the side of the road giving out till a mechanic arrived over the hill at high speed. The scenery was spectacular, although sometimes I was a little spooked to look out the window for fear I might tip the balance of the bus and we´d roll down the hundreds of meters to the valley floor. I feared some of the many wheels mightn´t be on the road, but suspended over the drop due to the sharpness of some of the turns. However, we rolled in to lovely Ayacucho 24 hours later with particularly sore bums.
We spent two days in Ayacucho because its a fine city. According to our guide book it was off limits for some time as it was the home of the Sendero Luminoso, but things have quietened down these days and its more commonly known for the amount of colonial churches it has. As Barry Long pointed out, it is also deep in earthquake territory. There had been two in the last week above 5 on the Richter Scale within 100 miles of us according to my research on the web. Both quite close to the surface, however we haven´t noticed either of them.
We also took time to visit some old stones! These are the ruins of the Wari capital not too far from Ayacucho. The Wari people were knocking about here between the 6th and 12th centuries and ruled the show here in Peru for some of that. It was a nice day out, however we are a little fatigued of old stones at this stage, I think we may have overdone archeology in Cuzco!
From Ayacucho we then took an overnight bus to Huancayo were apparently my oldest brother Lewis fell into the public loo in the market when he was a wee one. We didn´t stay too long here before catching a collectivo (communal taxi) to La Oroya. We stopped here for fried egg sandwiches and coffee. You know when your getting close to La Oroya beca
use all vegetation is dead; it has a refining plant and smelter for the surrounding mines. It has been listed as one of the worlds worst polluted places. The water for our coffee for example apparently had 50% more than the acceptable level of lead according to the World Health Organisation. More interesting I thought was that the air we breathed there had 85 times more arsenic, 41 times more cadmium and 13 times more lead than amounts considered safe. With this in mind we got another collectivo to Cerro de Pasco!
Cerro de Pasco is another mining town with a huge dirty opencast pit that you can´t see the bottom of. It also has lots of greasy chicken and chip shops where we indulged. At 4300m altitude its also the town were Peruvian football clubs play unacclimatised opponents who are much better them, in the hope of a win, much to the danger of their health! We didn´t think much of spending the night here either so took another collectivo with a crazy driver, down to 1900m in less than a 100km to the city of Huanuco. Nearly 20 hours after leaving Ayacucho we could go no further, besides, this town advertised itself as having the best climate in the world and at least there was air to breath and it smelt fresh.
We spent one day in Huanuco enjoying the city and drinking coffee. Its another fine city but I was
bunged up with a cold so the day was spent pottering. The next morning we found ourselves another collectivo that took us to a place called La Union. This journey took the guts of the day, climbing up more bumpy roads in our car. We discovered in La Union they love to dig holes, see photo. The main street looked like an elephant had been practicing on his pogo stick. This town was the key to our overland travel to Huaraz, however, the road to it from Huanuco was not marked on any map we could find.
It was somewhere here that Granville had pined his hopes of finding the Paddington family, but after a bit of a search we all agreed that darkest Peru must surely mean the jungle. The landscape here was beautiful and lush and far from dark. We caught an early bus over high passes to Huaraz the next morning.
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