Huaraz

The weather was quite shite in Huaraz, but we decided to have a crack at the famous Santa Cruz trek anyway. It was a beautiful trek and we did get some patches of good weather. Jen and I also got absolutely thrashed at multiple games of 500, winning only one game in ten against the Queenslanders Rik and virgin 500-player Kath.

I think we took 5 days to do the trek, which included a side trip to Alpamayo base camp.

A cool mountain, day 4.

The pass. Countless false summits made it a long slog, but worth it for the views.

After the trek, Rik left us and we hung out for a few days, one of which we went on an ice climbing trip in miserable weather and then mountain biked back down. It was wet and cold, but a lot of fun.

Jen cruising up the overhanging ice wall.

We dried off in our hotel and then caught an overnight bus to Lima. We had a whole day in Lima waiting for our plane to Santiago, and spent most of this in Starbucks doing internet. Lima isn't a pretty city. We did venture out to the beach to watch the surfers surf through the fog, and also ate some fine cerviche (raw seasoned fresh fish), so it wasn't all that bad.

We also found ourselves in a shopping centre when suddenly everything started shaking for a second or two, and all the local shoppers ran out screaming. We weren't sure if it was an earthquake or a bomb, as it was such a short little blast. And we thought the locals would be used to tremors... we found out on good ol' abcnews.com that Lima had experienced a small earthquake, about 4 on the Richter scale, but that it didn't damage anything. We walked away with nothing but 6 new T-shirts.