Brasil

I was reading Charles Darwin´s account of his travels on the HMS Beagle from 1831-36 and came across a section early on where he wondered how large a population the abundent land of Brasil would one day support. Sir Charlie was right to wonder as today there are about 190 million of them, and in our past month´s experience here, a happier, more smiling bunch of south Americans you will not find.

We flew from Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia at some ungodly hour over a month ago to Sao Paulo, where we did not crash on landing. This was a good thing. We hung out for a couple of days there and somehow we ran into Jonathon, the Paulista we met at Paracas National Park in central Peru a couple of months earlier. We still boggle at the likelihood - or unhlikelihood - of running into the sole person you know in a city of 20 million. Still, Jon was his usual helpful self and his missus told us that Brasil was not entirely full of gun-toting banditos waiting for the next unsuspecting tourist to wander down their street. We had no problems in Sao Paulo, but the weather was crap so we hit the bus station and made for the coastal route to Parati.

Parati was an old gold and coffee port on the Costa Verde founded by the Portuguese about 400 years ago. It grew rich and the merchants built fine houses. A little more than a hundred years ago the trade in coffee and gold from the mines in Minas Gerais slowed to a standstill and the town fell into disuse and was eventually abandoned. Thanks to this, the merchant´s houses lay untouched for a little under hundred years until, in the 1960´s, it was ´rediscovered´ and restored. These days it is a truly beautiful piece of colonial Brasil. We spent three days there.

Rio de Janeiro was as it looked in the postcards, but it was far cooler down on the streets. We lobbed at first into Botafogo and were good tourists and checked out the Pao de Azucar (Sugarloaf), Cristo Reventador (Christ the Redeemer) and the neighbourhood of Santa Theresa. We also managed to head out to one of the seediest bars I have been to since a squat party in Hackney and got rather trashed on cheap beer. It was fun. But we decided after visting Ipanema one day that we should move across town, so this we did and began to enjoy our time in Rio even more. Ipanema is an uber cool part of Rio, close to the beach and with loads of things to do every day. I ended up meeting with Mr and Mrs Westcott at the northern end of the beach most afternoons for a chat and a few body waves, initially to plan our assault on Lapa on a Friday night.

We hit the streets of Lapa well after midnight and the scene that greeted my eyes reminded me immediately of the late Sunday session at the Notting Hill Carnival. Every bar was teeming to overflowing, every street was full of people, all with a bottle. Guys walked around like waiters with trays selling shots of tequila complete with fresh lemon while others cooked chicken skewers over hot coals and others still sat on massive eskies containing beer, beer and more beer. I was in my element. Our mate Leo, a local lad, was showing us all the nooks and crannies of Lapa and we finally decided on a club to get into, which we did: 5 Reais for women, 10 Reais for men. While not everyone in our party was overwhelmed with the music, I thought it was ace. The deejay played a mix of garage and dubstep and breaks-that-weren´t-breaks and it sounded top class to my ear. Think Bucky Done Gun and Sergio Mendes and heaps of other Brasillian funk and you´re somewhere close to getting it. But 6:30am rolled around and we made it back to our room. We missed breakfast.

We bought a flight and flew from Rio to Fortaleza on the northern coast a few days after the Lapa episode. Fortaleza gave us both the creeps but we were only there to catch a bus a few hours further north to Jericoacoara. We planned to spend five days in Jeri but ended up spending 10. Jeri is a town with streets made of sand, surrounded by fixed sand dunes and two large beaches. One was a haven for windsurfers and kite surfers while the other was more suited to regular surfng on it´s light, easy wind waves. We did have the pleasure of watching Pepe, the Brasillian national kitesurfing champion, practise his moves in the waves; What that kid can´t do on a kite ain´t worth doing. We also met Beto who taught us to surf. For me, I´d ridden bodyboards from a very young age - about four from my recollection - and petered out at about 20 or so, but for some reason had never tried standup surfing. Amy and never ridden a surfcraft of any kind but was very determined to learn. So we went out every day with Beto on our soft-top mals and surfed surfed surfed. We are getting better.

We left Jeri and travelled down to Canoa Quebrada which was about three hours south of Fortaleza and spent two nights there. The high sand cliffs backing the beach and the profusion of barracas (beach bars and restaurants) combined well with the gentle sea and went spent the day getting some sun and drinking beer. But we decided to move on to another beach further south, this one called Ponta du Mel. Ponta du Mel was hard to reach and when we got there, we discovered that we were the only tourists in town. All of the barracas were closed and there appeared to be nothing to do. So we stayed there for the night and ate the delectable food at our pousada and made tracks the very next day. Only one taxi comes to Ponta du Mel each day so we waited and waited for it and got on board for the journey back to Mossoro. Then we waited some more for the bus to Natal. We spent the night in Natal and caught the short bus to Pipa which is where we are right now.

Pipa is a well developed town (it has cobbles in the streets instead of sand) with loads of places to eat and drink. But better than all that are the three beaches nearby. We spent all of yesterday on our sunchairs at Praia do Madeiro, a coconut palm lined curving bay with a great righthand longboard wave rolling off the point and water filled with dolphins and turtles. Throw the plates of fresh fruit and hand-delivered caipirinhas into the mix and you have what we have been seeking in Brasil: Paradise. And the reason we decided to come here is that I am 30 years old on this 26th day of August. We booked into very a nice pousada and are enjoying ourselves immensely.

The cold land that is Bolivia

Today in Santa Cruz de la Sierra it is 23 degrees and sunny. A decent wind blows and the local punters stroll about the Plaza 24 de Septiembre eating ice cream and looking fabulous. BMWs and Porsches roll along the streets and there is boutique shopping to be had all over the place. We are both finding it hard to believe that we are still in Bolivia. There are no llamas in the streets, no beggars, actual trees grow forth from the ground and the air is sweet and humid. We left La Paz from its El Alto airport at 4,010m yesterday wrapped in our fleeces, thermals and beanies which is basically the way we dressed every day while in Bolivia.

Leaving Peru was not as simple as it should have been. We were aware that strikes were taking place in the general triangular area between Cusco, Arequipa and Puno. We asked around and researched as far as we could and were assured that if we took one particular bus, they would take a slightly different route to avoid the strikes and arrive in Puno for a connection which would take us to the border at Desaguadero and on to La Paz. We thought we'd made a good decision as there were a lot of locals on the bus with us - surely a sign that this time we would not be purposefully lied to by another Peruvian. The bus left at 10:00pm and stopped in sub-zero darkness at around 4:00am. Nobody knew where we were and the locals who had paid for their service to Puno were a tad irate (welcome to our world). We drove a little further until the sun came up, then after the driver and his helper fucked around and failed to make a decision of any kind for an hour, we grabbed our bags and walked for two hours in the freezing post-dawn light across the physical roadblocks, somewhere a long way from Puno.

The remainder of the trip went like this: 11-seat Combi with 23 passengers from that place to Juliaca, 11-seat Combi with between 11 and 20 passengers from Juliaca to Puno, taxi with a girl from the mid-west United States (Greenbay Packers fan) from Puno to Desaguadero, passport control and so forth, taxi with US girl to La Paz. Total expected travel time - 12 hours. Total actual travel time - 18 hours. Thank god we were out of Peru!

We dropped our passports with the requisite paperwork into the Brazillian Embassy as soon as we hit La Paz so that we could plan our route out of the Andes and onto the East Coast of South America. We got them in on a Friday and had to wait for the weekend to pass and pick them up on the following Tuesday. This meant that we couldn't go to either Lake Titicaca or Rurrenabaque as we would need the passport on both of those journeys. So we took Chris and Hamish's advice and booked a day's mountain biking on the 'World's Most Dangerous Road' with B-Side Adventures. These folks were a darn fine outfit: dual suspension bikes, good food and a top guide who made the ride go from feeling like it could be rather dangerous into a thoroughly enjoyable and safe day.

Back to the Embassy and we picked up our visas with no hassles. We're going to Brazil!

Our next stop was to follow Mike's suggestion and go to Rurrenabaque for a visit to the Pampas. We also took his suggestion to avoid the minimum 20-hour bus journey there and to fly instead. Far more expensive, far more enjoyable. We wanted to check out the jungle too, as it would be our only trip to the Amazon.

The pampas was absolutely top shelf. Loads of animals and birds including alligators, caimans, pink dolphins, red pirhana, macaws, monkeys, anaconda, kingfishers and many many more. Cruising up and down the narrow muddy river on a long boat with the alligator-, caiman- and pirhana-infested waters every day was a real treat. We decided not to swim with the dolphins because as with a lot of Australians, we have read accounts of the stupid tourists going for a dip in the cool clear waters in the Daintree and only to be swallowed by a big nasty croc. When there are 'gators and caimans on the banks and flesh eating pirhana in the water, you just don't go swimming. Three days of pampas down, two day of jungle to go.

We jumped back in a larger boat after a night in town at Rurre and went in the opposite direction to the pampas and into the jungle. Our arrival at the lodge in the trees some hours later was not quite as exciting as I had hoped, because the jungle looked very, very similar to the rainforest on Fraser Island. Sure it's pretty, but not the impenetrable stuff that makes the use of a large and sharp machete 100% necessary and that which I had been hoping for. We saw one monkey and one bird in our two days, and both of those were from a large distance away. Our guide was crap too, but it was still nice to get out amongst some trees.

No sooner had we made it back to La Paz for the night than we were on another bus out to Lake Titicaca. It's high up there, 3,810m to be precise. Nadine had said that the views from the Isla del Sol reminded her of the Cyclades in Greece, a place I had visited twice in the past. And fair play to her, but there were echoes of Greece to be found there. Actually the landscape views may have been more impressive with the gigantic range of the Cordillera Real lined up from left to right, though here was no resemblance to be found in the architecture. After two nights on the Isla and with only a few days left before our departure to Brazil, it was time to move on. So this we did and were lucky enough to run into and dine with our Danish pals from the Canon de Colca trek out of Arequipa a few weeks ago.

We have a plane booked to fly us from here in Santa Cruz to Sao Paulo, Brazil tomorrow morning. Any city with a population larger than Australia's should be a genuine blowout. We will try not to get mugged.

Bye-bye Peru

A month is a long time in footy. And a second month in Peru is even longer. Since I last wrote, we have escaped the land of the thief, the liar and the truth-twister and reside at present in the tranquilo city of La Paz, Bolivia. But I won't elaborate on any of our hijinks in Bolivia today as there is plenty to tell of what happened between the descent of Nevado Pisco and our transit to La Paz. Sorry that there are no photos with this post. I've tried many places over the past week that have DVD readers, but have had no joy.

We had a beer with Mark in Huaraz just before he jumped on a bus to meet with a mate in Lima. We were in a good state of mind after out hikes in the Cordillera Blanca and were in no mood to deal with a teeming city of 8 million, so we caught a bus more or less straight to Ica and spent only two hours in Lima in the hours just prior to sunrise. Ica was nothing to speak of, another dry and featureless city on the central coastal plain of Peru, but the oasis at Huacachina looked in the flesh the same way it does on the back of a 50 sole note. The only oasis in Peru, Huacachina is surrounded by a sea of sand that looks similar in my mind's eye to the Sahara desert. All the tourists who pass through here (and there are many) do so to take a dune buggy trip out into the dunes, try a little sandboarding and drink heaps of booze at the few bars around the lake. We spent three days there and felt very much like Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day. It was good to move along.

We did take a short trip to the Paracas National Park which is a 35 minute speedboat ride out into the Pacific. A variety of birds, sealions and crustacea inhabit these islands that make up Paracas, and we saw them all. We also visited what was an interesting precursor to the Nazca Lines, a giant candelabra imprinted on the side of a hill. Naturally, modern science has no clue as to how or when it was made or by whom. But crusty sea pirates, fishermen and the like have been blowing out to it for centuries. At around 170m high, it was impressive.

Nazca is the capital town of the driest are in Peru. Rain comes to Nazca and its surrounds once every decade. If you look good in brown, this is the place for you. Similar to Huacachina, the tourists come to Nazca for one thing: To catch a morning light-plane flight over the Nazca lines. This we did and we saw all of the main lines as instructed. However, to call these things 'lines' is to misrepresent what they really are. I've seen pottery from other ancient cultures and also from the Nazca, but to see these intricate designs blown up to a size that only allows them to be viewed from 400m in the air is rather impressive. Commercial flights started crossing the Nazca plain in the early 1950's and you could imagine the surprise of those first pilots as they crossed the figure of the monkey or the hummingbird, the whale or the spaceman. Our photos were quite crap, and we should have bought the postcard set.

A note to all of you planning to take the flight as we did - Don't eat breakfast before you go up. It makes concentration on the lines harder than it should be.

Next stop was Arequipa. This town, like EVERY other one in Peru has a main square called Plaza de Armas. Back in the day these squares were typically surrounded by the governmental buildings and a military armoury, hence the adoption of the name Armas. Anyway, the Plaza in Arequipa is beautiful, the best in all of Peru in my opinion. I did not however take a photo of this plaza because I'm stupid.

From Arequipa we took a few days to hike in and out of the Canon de Colca (Colca Canyon), the world's second deepest at 3,126m. Mike had strongly suggested that we go further afield and hike the deepest (by an additional 161m), the Canon de Cotahuasi, but we were lazy and opted for the road more travelled.

Having travelled in India some years ago, I thought that public transport could not possibly be as crowded as it was on local trains in Kolkata. I was wrong. On the six hour journey from Arequipa to Cabanaconde, the Peruvians squeezed nearly 120 people onto a 48 seater bus. It was a fucking joke. Descending a moutain pass of 4,840m with that much extra weight cannot possibly be safe and I had a low, gnawing sense of doom for the majority of the bus ride.

We hiked down the canyon wall, stayed a night in comparitively salubrious accommodations on the canyon floor, met some cool Danish folks, hiked along the floor some more the next day, took a dip in some nice pools and hiked back up that afternoon. During the ascent, we were lucky enough to see four male Condors at very close quarters. The largest bird in the world is impressive when it flies very close overhead.

The following morning, waiting for the bus, Amy spotted someone she used to work with at the Indooroopilly Pig 'n' Whistle about seven years ago. Small world. We all stopped at the Cruz del Condor to, you guessed it, spot Condors, and talked about all sorts of stuff and agreed to drink beer in Arequipa the next day. As it happens, the Condors we did see were a very long way distant and instead I got a shot of the tourists scrambling to see these birds. We'd already seen them the day before as I said, so we left on the earliest bus we could back to Arequipa. We met with Anna and Mike as planned and drank an awful lot of beer in the lovely afternoon sun.

The 'classic' Inca Trail to Machu Picchu is booked out for three or four months ahead, so if you want to hike this trail you need to nominate a date before you leave, pay the money and turn up in Cusco in time to start the hike. With such a flexible itinerary, we did not want to nominate a date as it may have meant that we would have to skip places of interest to make the trek. Besides, it is bloody expensive to hike the classic trail, and we were sure we could save a few bucks by turning up and taking one of the alternative routes.

We had heard a great deal about the Salkantay route to Machu Picchu. It was over twice as long as the classic route (75km instead of 30km), has less people on the trail, goes over a higher pass (4,850m instead of 4,200m) and has two gigantic mountains to view for a few days, Humantay at 5,917m and Salkantay itself at 6,271m. After our efforts in Huaraz we thought that these statistics added up to a more challenging trek, so off we went.

Of course, because all tour operators in Cusco are pathological liars, very little of what they promised us or any of the other 11 people in our party was actually true. Sure if you bent the truth and viewed it from their skewed angle, some of it was kinda true, but mostly we were all sold a pack of lies. Rather than delve into specifics here, let me summarise it by saying that the trek, the guide, the helpers and the overall ambience of the trip was crap. We did however meet a bunch of top people. I guess you'd rather have met good people and shared an ordinary experience with them than have had the best trekking conditions with a pack of assholes.

Machu Picchu itself was an impressive site and I believe it has been voted as one of the New Seven Wonders by anyone who has access to the internet. Around 90 million people voted which is a far more representative sample than the one guy who decided the original seven wonders all those years ago.

Getting out of Cusco was more challenging than it ought have been. People resident in the triangular area between the towns of Puno, Cusco and Arequipa had decided to strike or blockade the roads between these towns to protest against poor social conditions. I have no idea of the specific reason behind these blockades, and neither do the Peruvians or Bolivians we've spoken to. We bought a bus ticket to La Paz via Puno on the assurance that the bus would take an alternative route. When the bus pulled up at 4:00am in sub-zero temperatures at who-knows-where and the driver told us we would have the start walking, I couldn't say I was surprised. Luckily, we stayed on the bus for a while and we drove for another hour. There were indeed physical blockades and at about 7:00am we started walking.

By the time we made it to La Paz our 12 hour direct journey on one bus had turned into 18 hours by way of one bus, one stint on foot, two minivans complete with spewing small children, and two taxis for the final 350km of the journey. Initially I was pissed off, but it actually became kinda fun. We were happiest when we received our stamps from the stern Bolivian border guards. We had ben in Peru for 49 days. That's seven whole weeks. I would say that the scenery in Peru got a grade of A. The people unfortunately got a big old F.

We have a lot of things coming up in Bolivia, with one completed yesterday and the next starting tomorrow, and we plan to get out of the mountains on around July 24 when we'll fly to Sao Paulo, Brazil. We have high hopes for Brazil and rely on Jo and Nadine's assurance that Brazil is all that we hope for and more.

Nevado Pisco

Mark, Amy and I went into a trekking agency and stated our desire to climb Nevado Pisco (5,752m). Pocho the owner pulled out the map of the mountain and with his green highlighter marked Base Camp (4,550m) and Moraine Camp (4,880m) as the two places we could camp before making a summit attempt. We agreed that it would be a better idea to make the attempt from Moraine Camp as it would mean less climbing on the summit day. The glacier and snow started maybe 60 vertical metres from this camp. Of course, we had no idea what all this really meant. We only knew that Pisco was a non-technical summit, that is, there was no ice or rock climbing to do at any point during the climb, walking only was required. This also makes Pisco the most climbed significant (above 5,500m) mountain in Peru.

Mark, Amy and I had met our guide, Richard, the day before on a day's ice climbing excursion to the Pastoruri Glacier. We chose to do this because none of us had worn mountaineering boots and crampons, or used an ice axe before. Similar to your first day on skis, the feel of boots of this type is very awkward to the uninitiated. And as it went, climbing the 20-25m glacier wall was a good craic too.

Richard had brought a lot of gear. Unlike the Santa Cruz trek a week earlier, there were no donkeys planned to help haul this gear to Base Camp. Mark had suffered food poisoning the night before departure, which on the back of the day of ice climbing left him feeling a little fragile. I had eaten very little in the five days prior due to my illness and was definitely below full strength, while Amy generally feels the exertions of hikes in this area due to the altitude. So when we got out of the car at the trailhead, the first things Richard said was, "My proposition is that we hire a donkey to carry the technical equipment". As an investment in our health, we voted unanimously in favour of this proposal.

All the same, the hike to Base Camp was tough. From the start at Cebollapampa (3,900m) to Base Camp (4,550m) was a steep and twisty track with loose stone over a mobile dusty base for the entire length of the trail. This took us four hours of hiking. After a small lunch, we set up our tents and I went to sleep for few hours in an attempt to gain some strength for the days to come. After dinner we were all in bed by about 8:00pm.

We left Base Camp late at 10:00am for the hike up the nearby ridge, down and across the moraine and up again to Moraine Camp. We had to take our personal equipment and some food with us, but this time without the donkey, so our packs were heavier than the walk to Base Camp. The first ridge was extremely steep and we stopped frequently to catch our breath. Fortunately it was also reasonably short and we completed the pitch in about 45 minutes. From the vantage point at the top we looked out at the post-glacial wreckage of the moraine. It resembled a cross between a hapahzardly placed overburden dump and the moon. It, like the previous day's trail, was extremely mobile: rock fall was very common and could occur with a stronger-than-usual gust of the wind. Large granite boulders moved underfoot frequently and parts of the trail, which would have been extremely difficult to follow if not for Richard, fell away underfoot. At one point I said to Mark, "If an earthquake happened now, we'd all be killed".

After crossing the moraine and climbing the ridge we were rewarded with the sight of a large green lake at the base of the Pisco glacier. A good place to stop and have some water. From there it was only a short hike up another mobile spine-like ridge to Moraine Camp (4,880m). This camp was set in a natural drainage area for Pisco's glacier. Again, any earth tremors would have caused a million tonnes of granite boulders to come crashing down on us. A big dump of rain would have washed us all away. There were another nine climbers at Moraine Camp in addition to our party. All were planning to attempt the summit the following morning. We hung out in the sun for the afternoon, checking our equipment and wondering what the climb would bring.

We rose at midnight and left at 12:50am, the first party to leave. Richard guessed that we would take five hours to reach the summit, which would have us arriving on the top at sunrise. We had a breakfast of coca tea only and set out along the smooth granite protrusions below the glacier using headtorches to light to way. The moon had risen and was bright, but it had passed being full and didn't offer enough light to allow us to hike without extra lighting.

We reached the bottom of the glacier in a half hour and waited while Richard prepared the rope. We attached our crampons to our boots and affixed carabiners to our harnesses. Richard then tied us all together at eight meter spacings along the rope. Richard was first, then Amy, then me and Mark was at the end. Everyone had an ice axe which could be used either as a walking stick upside down in the ice (the pick end in your hand) or as an aid if you fell or had to cut a foot hold out of the ice and snow. Because we were climbing in the night, the snow was very crisp and had a heavy ice crust. A skiier or snowboarder would find such snow conditions unpleasant, but for mountain climbers using crampons it provided sure footing.

The first climb was a wall of ice and snow which sat at I would guess a 70 degree angle. Due to the numbers of climbers using the route, there were plenty of footholds to use. And that was a very good thing because no sooner had Amy started to climb the wall than her right crampon fell off. At maybe five metres above the rocks below she panicked. I climbed up and cut a bigger foothold for her and we ultimately had to take both crampons off and change them over as the crampons were on the wrong feet (it is difficult to distinguish with those crampons which was the left and which was the right side, especially under the light of a torch at 1:30am at 5,000m in zero degrees celcius). Then we hiked up and cross rolling snow fields in the dark with huge hollows and formations appearing to the left and right at random. I became very cold and the toes of my left foot began to stick together. I have read enough accounts of mountaineers who have suffered frostbite to begin to worry about losing a digit in the cold myself. In particular, Michael Groom in his book 'Sheer will' told his story of losing all toes on both feet after spending a night on the flank of Kangchenjunga in the mid-80's. Groom's tale was top-of-mind right then and there. I was unlikely to come to that sort of injury, but I did not want to ignore what could be a sign of frostbite. Richard ensured me that this feeling is normal, and not to worry. Still worrying, we continued on.

Mark became tired more quickly than I expected. He told us later that we had not slept at all due to a stabbing feeling in his chest when he tried to breathe. An asthmatic in his youth, we later theorised that the thin and cold mountain air at 4,880m played havoc with his breathing.

The darkness was bearing down on my morale. While the moonlight lit in ghostly contrasts the black rock against the white snow on peaks all around us, we hiked more or less continuously for three hours and there was little to see except the trail in front of you. We were walking up very steep hills of ice, so steep that you had to turn your shoulder to face the trail and walk in a crab-motion using the ice axe to lean into the slope. At 4:06am, I felt defeated: There would be no sunlight for another two hours and I had no idea how far we had come or how far there was to go. I hoped desperately for sun, for the red glow in the sky. And we were getting higher and higher. Richard told us that we had climbed to 5,400m.

Amy began to lean on her ice axe and dry retch into the night. A strong wind was blowing on us from our right. It blew up the near-vertical ridge and over onto where we walked. I yelled to her, suspecting altitude sickness, "Are you sick?" "I'm cold and hungry", she replied. We walked some more and she continued to dry retch. Then, we stopped and I walked behind her to hug warmth into her and form a shield against the wind and I felt her shaking uncontrollably from the cold. Mark selflessly offered his wind breaker and after asking her a couple of times if she wanted to turn back, getting no sensible response, I made the decision to turn back. We had reached 5,500m by 4:33am but had a further one and a half hours to reach the summit. The wind was howling and I later guessed that the ambient air temperature was -2 degrees with maybe a further -10 degrees of wind chill. To illustrate this, I discovered after we had descended that my metal water bottle which was inside my backpack was near to frozen solid.

So we turned around, with Mark now in the lead and he had taken only 10 steps when his crampon broke in half. We could not fix it, and we were still in the wind with Amy squatting on her heels hugging her knees trying to stay warm and shaking, so Mark and I swapped positions in the line and I took the lead and we moved as quickly as we could to escape the punishing wind. By this time I too was very cold. I had lost all feeling up to the ankle in my right foot and the feeling in the front half of my left foot was also totally lost to me. At last we escaped the wind and Amy began to warm up.

Mark was making tough ground back down with only one crampon. Those same steep hills we ascended in a crab walk were descended in a similar fashion, which is made doubly difficult with only one boot to grip the ice and snow, and for a guy who hadn't slept. Finally though, the sun began to glow in the sky. It was difficult to perceive initially, but as we made further progress down the mountain, so too did the sun make progress into the sky. The multitude of peaks around us began to look like a still life, painted onto the canvas of the sky. They were Kerouac's 'patient Buddhas lookin at us saying nothin'. It was awesome.

We passed all the other climbers on the way down. Mostly they had started at a touch after 3:00am and would reach the summit in full sun at 7:00 or 7:30am. We made it back to Moraine Camp at about 7:00am and got straight into our sleeping bags to warm up. Mark had his first sleep of the day and having been so cold, Amy and I got some needed rest and warmth into ourselves. It is hard work for the body to stay warm in conditions like those we had just encountered.

We had a small meal of chicken noodle soup and packed up camp. We agreed to hike all the way back to the trailhead at Cebollapampa and take a car back to Huaraz via Yungay. We walked back down and across the moraine, that dense cluster of unstable granite boulders and all the way along the dusty trails to the road, a total descent from the mountain heights reached in darkness of 1,600 vertical metres. When we reached the road, we had walked for 11 hours.

We took one car to the town of Yungay. This particular town was completely buried by a 7.2 earthquake in 1970, killing all 18,000 inhabitants (remember my comment in the moraine). We were supposed to take a collectivo back to Huaraz, but that kind of transport is punishing, and we didn't need more punishment, so we paid extra for a private car for the hour long journey. Mark, Amy and I met up for a well-earned meal and beer and discussed what had been a great adventure. I certainly had developed a healthy respect for the mountains, far greater than I had before.

The ascent I have described happened yesterday, Wednesday 6 June 2007. Egoists may say that we failed to climb the mountain. We say that we merely did not make it to the summit of a mountain, having climbed a long way. We learned a lot about ourselves and the Andes. I believe that our greatest learning and experience was in our unity and selflessness. The egoist may have made the summit, but to do so would have endangered the life of one of more in our party (who can say if anyone would have made the summit?). In our unity and selflessness, we shared an amazing experience.

Today my legs are sore and we are leaving Huaraz tomorrow night for the beach and some sandboarding in Ica. After a little more than two weeks here, it has been quite a time.

Peru

We tossed up the options: To go further south and remain in Ecuador, or to head for the coast of northern Peru. We'd spent a full month in the mountains and felt that a few days in flip flops would be just the ticket. So we packed our bags in the delightful town of Cuenca and caught the bus to the Ecuadorian border town of Huaquillas. Entry and exit formalities were straightforward, though the same cannot be said for the navigation of the multiple taxis, touts, money changers and buses. In the process we were both relieved of a good wad of US dollars and charged twice an already expensive cab ride from Huaquillas to the Peruvian town of Tumbes. We did not swear (much) at these misfortunes, rather, we took them as a 'glass half full' occurrences and vowed to be a little more alert to the swindlers in future.


Our super luxury bus to the surfing town of Mancora was stopped en route by the drug squad who has somehow pulled out bags off first and were inspecting them as we disembarked. Amy wondered later if something could have been inserted into our luggage when we had our backs turned iside the Peruvian passport office. It was a good thing we only lost some money then! No damage done, just a little scare.


Mancora was lovely. When the swell is happening, it has one of the finest left-handers in the world. The swell was definitly not happening during our stay, but as a novice surfer, it was just about perfect in the afternoon when the tide came up and the little waves peeled perfectly off the point. Despite having ridden bodyboards for my whole life, the act of riding a longboard for the first time was quite a thrill. Amy suggested we do more of this in our lengthy Brazillian beach stint during August and September. A good idea methinks.



Five days passed quickly in Mancora. The only bad thing to happen there was Chelsea winning the FA Cup. We spent the next couple of days 10 hours south at Trujillo and Huanchaco, where we checked out some significantly pre-Inca ruins at Chan Chan. Interesting stuff that relied somewhat on your imagination due to their busted state. Mud don't last, that's my tip to all of you in the building game.



Ruins are only interesting for a few hours: We had to move on. Another 10 hours on the bus and we had arrived where I write this, in Huaraz. A mate had told us a year or so ago that the mountains in this area were awesome. He was right. After the disappointment of not being able to see any peaks because of the poor weather in Ecuador (with the exception of the morning after the nine hour Quilotoa mission), the first thing we saw upon arival were three huge snow capped mountains. In previous posts I'd used words like 'looming' and 'towering' but these were poor word choices. Those mountains have nothing on these. The following morning, sitting in a rooftop cafe gazing northwards down the valley at Huascaran, Peru's highest mountain at 6,768m, you could see the pale green luminosity of the glacier and thought, 'fuck yeah!'.


We acclimatised for two days and went out for a four day hike along the Santa Cruz route. Our party of nine tourists was larger than we'd been told by our agent, but it worked out really nice as everyone was a cool cat. The peaks were ridiculous and the view from the 4,750m Punta Union pass was spectacular. Mike and I agreed to get up early the morning after crossing the pass so that we could walk back up there as the dawn arrived. Then we would take unobstructed photos in the special morning light that makes everything look soft and beautiful (except anybody's face after a Bethnal Green houseparty circa 2002). Mike was up before me at 4:10, and we both looked up at the pass without the benefit of moonlight and made out the cloudbank sitting exactly where we intended to hike. We agreed to go back to bed.



Some weird sickness got me after we returned. If you believe the health section of the Lonely Planet you might think it was Dengue Fever, but who can say for sure? In any case, we have some more climbs and cool stuff to do before we leave Huaraz and I'll write you about that next time.