We Made It To Huaraz
Ieva and I are taking a month off for our 10th anniversary to go to the Cordillera Blanca, Peru to go climbing. If you´re not familiar with the area, this site has a pretty good overview of where we are, and the type of stuff that we´ll be doing if everything goes well.
We just made it in to Huaraz, the small mountain town that will be our home base, and it´s actually been an incredibly easy pleasant trip so far. Despite 24 hours of straight travel, and not speaking a lick of Spanish, all the transportation changes weren´t bad at all.
One of the highlights was the bus ride into the mountains. We got the front-row seats against the windshield on the second level of the double decker bus (exposed!). We followed the coastline for about 4 hours, then crept up to 10,000ft through the mountains to get to Huaraz after another 4 hours. The hotel that we´re staying at is beautiful, and the beer and food are delicious. No stomach problems yet, other than what I brought with me from last week. We´ll probably go bouldering today, mountain biking tomorrow, and then head up to Ishinca (sp?) valley for the basecamp of our first climbing leg of the trip. We´ll stay there for about a week.
While we haven´t run into anyone that we know directly yet, of course we´ve already run into people that we have tons in common with already — one of the nice things about the relatively small climbing world. The people we had breakfast with yesterday are all from New York. A couple of them live in Keene Valley, and one of them grew up and lives in Wappingers Falls (a few miles from Hopewell Junction, where I grew up). They´ll probably head up to Ishinca valley the same time as we will, so we´ll have good company.
More updates to follow!