In Backpacker land....

 This Guy, I swear.



 One of the strange things about global youth culture has been the creation of what I call "Backpacker Land" - where kids on gap year go to get drunk and have adventures in some place exotic, and in the process create a space that is basically the same everywhere.

Here's some random facts about Backpacker Land:

In Backpacker Land...
- There's that one creepy 50-year-old dude who refuses all accomodation except mixed dorms.
- Tibetan Prayer Flags. Everywhere.
- You will sit in a hostel's basement watching 'The 300' with stoned Israelis.
- The same topaz bracelet is on sale on 5 continents.
- You will get a burn on your right inside calf.
- You will lose all interest in ever visiting Australia.
- You'll get too drunk to remember if you're in Thamel or Khoa San.
- You will lose money gambling on pool games with prostitutes.
- There are 238 cover bands that all play Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69".
- A Canadian will drone on about his "really authentic cultural experience".
- You will haggle with a street vendor over a 20 cent reduction in the price of a t-shirt.
- A horribly sun-burned girl from Essex named Gemma is getting her hair braided.
- You'll get Temple fatigue.



Into the Colca Canyon

After arriving at Conor and Michelle's digs in Lima, we decided that our first stop would be Arequipa, Peru's second-largest city.

The road to Arequipa

The drive there was interesting in itself, beginning with the coach. Ignoring short-haul flights, the way to get around Peru in comfort is with luxury bus lines, of which Cruz del Sur is the most prestigious. It's more like traveling by airline: You get a big soft reclining seat, a pillow, blanket, meal service, the whole deal. The security procedure is similar too. Everything goes through a metal detector, bags are searched, passports are checked and re-checked, and it's assigned seating only. The trippiest part though, is the cop that comes on board just before departure and videotapes everyone on board. Oh, that and the on-board safety video that lets you know that every coach is GPS equipped, and if any unscheduled stops are made, the security forces will be alerted immediately. It all makes you feel really safe, at least for a moment until you realize that they probably do all these things for very good reasons. Then you feel a little nervous.

The drive was through some nice scenery, mostly coastal desert contrasted with the occasional fertile area that line the rivers flowing out to the Pacific.

 Arequipa at night. I have no idea why this is the only picture of the city I can seem to find.

Highest on our itinerary in Arequipa was a trek through the Colca Canyon, which lies a short drive from the city. It's the deepest canyon in the world: 4 kilometres from the cactus-lined trails along the river to the snow-capped mountains above. Dizzying.

I think we were about half-way down at this point. The knees were already on fire.

 Started from the bottom now....ah forget it.

The descent into the canyon was rad, loads of breath-taking views. At the bottom, we were relieved to here that our trekking was over for the day, and we could kick off the hiking boots and relax. And what a place to chill out - it was like a little Peruvian hobbiton. Our lodging was run by a local family who had built a perfect little idyll (by my perspective, anyways, ha!) at the bottom of the canyon. A few gardens, thatch-roofed bungalows, four sheep, one pig, a few chickens, two dogs, a friendly kitten, and perfectly groomed grass kept that way by the aforementioned sheep. Oh, did I mention cheap cold beer?

 

I thought it was unlikely to get any better, but then as the sun set, the fireflies came out dancing, and the kitten decided to have a cuddle on my lap. And it was not possible to be more relaxed that day.

 The two best travelling companions a guy could ask for: The wonderful Michelle and Conor.

Until the nest day where our lodging at the bottom of the canyon had a pool and hammocks. Hammocks I tell you! And that's all I have to say about that for now.

Peru Food stuff.

 

This is glorious ceviche - raw fish marinated in lime juice. Here it's mostly obscured by the giant sweet potatoes though. I ate this everyday my last 5 days in the country.

Very typical lunch: fried fish, a little salad and potatoes. With an appetizer and a weird corn drink they give you will cost you about 3 bucks.

 

Making ice cream the old fashioned way. The steel pots are in tubs of ice, and they spin them around and add magic or something and ice cream comes out. Look, I'm not a scientist, ok? In Ayacucho.

 

Never got around to trying this one.

 

Chicken stall.

Fish stew, another delicious typical dish. Corn kernels are one of the sides. The waitresses at this restaurant (two sisters) asked me if I liked Peruvian girls, when I said yes, they high-fived one another. That was funny.

Guineau Pigs in the sack. And no, they don't keep them as pets. And yes, I tried it. Tastes like chicken, but really rich and fatty. Also cuter.

Raucana

Lima is surrounded by shanty towns. They climb precariously up the barren hillsides surrounding the city. There was one in particular that I've wanted to visit for a long time - Raucana.

 Raucana was founded in 1981 by communist cadres from Ayacucho, Apurimac, and other People's War heartlands. It was a strategic move to begin building a base of support among the poor workers of Lima with the goal of eventually surrounding the city with a mass of revolutionary people. The site chosen was just 1km South of the national highway - the road on which nearly all of Lima's food comes in on each day.

Right from the beginning, Raucana has been a combative place. It takes its name from a man killed fighting the police in the struggle to found the settlement. During the height of the civil war period, it was a no-go zone for police, defended by armed guard towers, and was the site of frequent pitched street fights on the highway.

Reading about these events in Peru had a big influence on me politically when I was growing up, so naturally I wanted to see the place for myself, even though this is hardly the place that gets written up in guidebooks. No surprise since according to the Lonely Planet, anywhere in Lima outside the main tourist areas are lawless death-traps, which is bullshit, but whatever.

What me and Conor saw when we got there was a bit of a surprise. Today, Raucana seems to be a very poor, but basically functioning neighborhood. There were shops selling basic goods, a couple of restaurants, and kids running around in new clean clothes.



The housing is bad, of course, it's mostly cinder-block construction, currogated metal roofs and other improvised-type works. But there's also a concrete soccer pitch and a recently-built small park.



Unfortunately, a lot of our curiosities would go unanswered. Much as we'd like to start doing interviews asking about the current state of politics and the recent history of the place, it probably wasn't such a good idea without really knowing the score.  So instead we settled on a stroll though Raucana, dodging the odd foraging chicken and daredevil kids on their bikes. We had a quick lunch of fried chicken skin, potatoes, and corn kernels and made our way back to Lima as the sun was setting.

Andean baby, baby alpaca.

Andean baby swag: All baby alpaca everything.

Laguna Churup: A Secret World

The young Dutchman I was hanging out with the night before was apparently a flake, since he had yet to show up on the street corner we agreed to over beers, or maybe he just couldn't hold his liquor. Either way it was fine, since it turns out a nice European couple (she Belgian, he Swiss) would be joining me this morning for the 7am collectivo ride to the trailhead for the Laguna Churup hike.

Two teenage girls (and sheepdog) driving their flock on the trail

I had wrongly assumed that the villages along the way would have some food for sale but I was mistaken. It so happens that my last chance for a real breakfast, the "village" just before the climb - Piteck - is just an abandoned farmhouse beside a dirt road in the valley. So I ended up fueling the whole day on the three bananas I brought and a couple of cookies kindly given to me by the Europeans. It was a hard day too - over 12km distance with 1000 metres of ascending. Trips like this may be why people have remarked that I look so thin in some of these photos. It's true that I lost weight on this trip (now regained) but it was probably only 5lbs tops. I'm just skinny, folks.

The trail ahead looked ominous. We knew we were heading straight into a crack in a massive wall of mountains way above us, and the snow-capped peaks that were our target got more and more shrouded in darkening rain clouds the closer we got. It was something straight out of Mordor.

Up the cliff, through the crack and you're there

The ascending was difficult, this being above 4000m, and involved a tricky section near the end. The only way up was to go over a cliff face beside a cascading stream whose source was the laguna. Luckily there were some steel cables bolted into the rock for the trickier sections, otherwise it would be impossible without specialized equipment.

And sweet goddamn was it worth it! Once we got over that cliff it was like we had entered a secret world. To set the scene: The luminous Laguna Churup, with the glaciated Nevada Churup towering above you. Completely surrounded by mountains, it's so still you can hear a pin drop.

The Pastoruri Glacier: Getting High

One of my last days in Huaraz I took the trip up to Pastoruri Glacier. It's at 5000m, which is pretty damn high. Getting there, you pass through some gorgeous high-plateau grazing land before climbing up into some seriously stark and savage moonscapes.

One of the dudes was warning us tourists about the dangers of altitude, which was mostly just for show to get us to buy the coca leaves and coca-leaf tea from these girls at a restaurant with whom he clearly had some kind of arrangement. But of course I bought some anyway. He was explaining how to chew them, putting them beside your gum, but I was like, "Dude! I'm a grown-ass man, I think I know how to take drugs in my mouth!"

Not many stories for today, just lettting the views speak for themselves:

(I was listening to this on headphones while I took in the landscapes that day, shit was oddly and powerfully stirring) 

Cycling to Callan Punta

Partly burned out from the day before so I decided to sleep in, which meant I missed most of the early morning departures for day treks. After breakfast I felt a whole heck of a lot better though so I decided to rent a mountain bike. I asked the dude what a good ride was and he suggested "Callan Punta" - a mountain pass in the Cordillera Negra overlooking Huaraz. Oh, and it's at 4200m.

 The view from the pass and the piece of shit that brought me there

Now, as some of you know, I occasionally suffer from what I like to call "Stupid Young Man Syndrome." The real bitch about this disease is that your worst outbreaks are asymptomatic. See, the stupid young man in me was saying, "well, it's only 1200m of climbing, you've done that before!"

But Stupid Young Man was overlooking a few things, among them:
 -The last time I did a climb of that magnitude, I had been cycling seriously for the previous three years, whereas now, the longest ride I'd done recently was a 10-minute ride to the movie theatre.
 -Those climbs were done below 2500m
 -The other climbs were done on a road bike perfectly fitted to me, whereas at the moment I was staring at a monstrous mountain bike with an infertility-inducing saddle, fat studded tires and front suspension set so loose that I was going to lose half my power on every stroke. So of course I said 'Fuck Yeah!', bought some bananas and a bottle of water and hit the road!

I'd say it was about 15 minutes in when I realized there might be some problems. Let me just say that whoever designed that saddle ought to be shot. The pain was nasty - all of it concentrated 'down there' - and I could barely go up on the pedals for relief because then the suspension would start bouncing up and down like crazy and it felt like I was going nowhere.

Looking down at Huaraz

It would be two and a half hours before I reached the pass. I bonked about two thirds of the way up. "Bonk" is cycling jargon for when the glycogen in your blood is depleted and you need to start burning fat for fuel. It sucks. Really bad. It basically means you hit the wall and are facing mind-numbing exhaustion. Put a fork in you, etc.

Now, I've bonked before, but I've never had to dismount my bike. This day though, I did, several times. I'd come around a corner, the road would pitch up something fierce while I got hit with a brutal gust of mountain wind and I'd just stop. I'd get off my bike, gutted, stare up at the road ahead and say to myself "come on motherfucker, just one pedal stroke at a time!" And then try to get going again.

This is about the time that the village dogs started showing up. See, the city dogs are all chilled out, and just seem to sleep in the shade all goddamn day, whereas these mountain dogs were snarling, nasty, demon-possesed Cujo sons-a-bitches.

After a couple of swerving freakouts, I armed myself with a stick and would literally beat their faces as they chased me along trying to bite my calves. It worked, barely.

Occasionally I'd pass some locals and ask them "how many kilometres to Callan Punta?" I don't know if they had some kind of motivational conspiracy going, but for the whole last 5k, they always answered me with "uno!" Heh, that worked too.

Long story short, I made it.

I posed for a picture and the top and started the descent the way I came. Predictably, it was night and day. The road was mostly clear, gravity kept me going fast enough that the dogs didn't bother chasing me, but not so fast that I needed to take any big risks. It was just a gorgeous, smooth coast back down to the valley.

This dawned on me about 5 minutes into the descent and a huge gleeful smile came across my face as I thought, "holy fuck! you're cruising the Andes dude!" And a little after that the smile stayed, but I wasn't thinking much of anything at all. Worst day ever. Best day ever.