July 6 2015

We arrived in Huaraz….I cannot tell you how we arrived in Huaraz, really. It happened in the wee hours of the morning, so that the first thing that I saw when the sun finally made its slow way up was the tops of mountains above the buildings. Not small mountains. Real mountains. Nevado.

I do know that it involved a bus…one of those massive Marco Polo tour buses that is basically a Taj Mahal on wheels. Marco P would have considered himself very lucky indeed to have tackled the Silk Road in one of these monstrosities. The big sleeper buses kindly provided by Movil tours of Peru (if you kindly pay of course) are like riding in airline first class without the air (except maybe in the tires.) Snacks and drinks were even served.

But despite this, I did not sleep very well as the bus ground on in the darkness. I don’t get comfortable easily, being long of limb and achy of joint, plus a well-documented tendency toward car sickness. I merely had to trust that the destination…Hauraz, the principal city of the mountainous Peruvian state of Ancash, deep in the Central Andes….was getting closer.

The bus left our starting point, the city of Lima, in the late evening from a crowded station near downtown; the city’s soccer arena dominated the view outside. Like everywhere else in Lima the impossible is routinely performed here. It was certainly a physical impossibility that more than two buses could fit into the narrow alleyway generously termed a station at one time, negotiating as they did the swarms of taxicabs around the entrance. But despite this anywhere from sixteen to seventeen leviathan sixed buses were in fact crammed into this space, proof of the Peruvian knack for not allowing the impossibility of things stand in the way of everyday life, such as it is in Lima.

The trip was uneventful until about 4 am in the morning when I awoke from a stupor just short of sleep to realize that the cadence of the motor had changed and that the cabin of the bus was now beginning to sway rather violently, first to the left, then to the right. We had reached the mountains, doubtless, but there was no possibility of confirming this; only blackness outside the curtained windows, and distant views of head and tail lights that shared a winding road, and you didn’t really want to think too much about the headlights, not with the speed they came rushing past. There was to be no more stupor. For two more hours the bus lurched its way along unknown roads passed unseen vistas until, finally, we were there.

We checked in to the Hotel La Joya as dawn broke. This hotel is also the tallest building in Huaraz; sadly, we were informed that no rooms faced the view of the Cordillera Blanca, the legendary white mountains, which we had come to hike. Instead, we had a sixth floor view over rooftop water tanks and chicken coops at an adjacent hillside that was not, truthfully, unimpressive.

 We went down to breakfast, came back to catch up on sleep, and then rose again to find the entire city mostly closed down in its mid-day siesta. Nevertheless we found a quiet restaurant that was open and sat down for a meal of Lomo Saltado. This place did face the mountains, and the view is below.

Huaraz, and the Ancash area in general, is sometimes known as Peru’s Switzerland. But perhaps it is truer to say that Switzerland is Europe’s Huaraz; for the mountains here are greater, being in many cases over 6000 meters tall. The city is dominated by the imposing, 22,205 foot double pronged massif of Nevado Huascaran…the tallest peak in Peru, and the tallest mountain anywhere on Earth in the tropical zone. In 1970 a powerful earthquake shook the entire region; the entire city of Huaraz was destroyed when a dam upstream burst, and an avalanche of mud, ice, rock and water slammed into the city, flattening virtually every building and killing 20,000 people in seconds. The same dam had burst in a 1941 earthquake that killed 6000. The modern city has been completely rebuilt; almost nothing remains of the original Hauraz except a few buildings near the Plaza del Armas. The rebuilt city has a modern, open street plan with broad avenues that has far less charm than the narrow winding streets of other colonial or pre-colonial cities such as Cuzco; but since the narrow streets proved a deathtrap for the inhabitants of Huaraz, this had to change.

I tried not to think much of this as we strolled about the city. Huaraz is a thriving town, not exactly sleepy in daytime and very busy in the evening, with every shop on every main street full. Most of the traffic appears to be local. It is not quite yet a tourist town; regular tourists of the type that infest Peru’s other big draw attractions, such as Machu Picchu and the Nasca lines, do not generally come here; the picture taking, souvenir buying, comfort loving crowd has not yet embraced Huaraz. It is too far off the beaten trail, and doesn’t offer enough that is easily obtained. No notable Incan ruins nor signs of ancient alien visitors here. The draw of Huaraz and its surrounding towns is rather in the mountains that lay behind them, accessible only by long and uncomfortable car rides and then, past the point where the roads turn to burro trails, but foot or by hoof. If you want to take pictures in this place, you have your work cut out for you.

And this is why they do come to Huaraz. They come here to get out; to get into those lofty and inaccessible mountains, to trek and snowboard and climb. You don’t see many tourists here but the few you do see are almost all that outdoorsy type, of that breed that is now being termed ‘eco-tourist.’ Alpine hikers from Europe, dirt bags from the West Coast, college kids from all around the world craving adventure; people wearing North Face and Patagonia and Marmot and Mountain Hardware; those who travel the world in search of places where they can go to get away from the world.

Our first day in Huaraz was spent walking about the town and getting familiar with it (especially the ‘Gringo’ side of town that caters to the outdoor enthusiasts.) We decided to use this day to acclimate to the altitude and get ourselves ready for what was to come. The next day, we planned to take things up a notch…and I mean way up.