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| Jesse touring the mountain side in Huaraz |
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| Beautiful Oasis Huacachina |
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| Jason shredding sand |
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| Getting crazy at Wild Rover |
Knowing that we needed to speed up our travel time, we left Dibby and Ciara at Huanchaco and made haste to Huaraz. Huaraz consists of 23 of the highest peaks in South America. The town is organized around tourism, and we were immediately swamped with local Peruvians asking us to sleep in their hotel or book a trek with them, but we maintained our cool and refused until we were able to sit down and eat breakfast. The Lonely Planet advised us to book our mountain bike adventure with this local guy named Julio. He has a lot of experience guiding in the area and we felt safer having an exceptional guide. We were told stories of travelers getting lost in the area because their guides sucked. The hostel we stayed at was a bit more expensive then we hoped for, but we were told Huaraz and other touristy locations are bad for cheaper living. The hostel also had a fair selection of movies that we were able to watch in English, which was a nice change from the horrible films that have been playing on our buses. We met Julio in the morning and took a van ride up to 3,800m where we began our mountain bike decent. At first it was mostly downhill, 2-lane gravel road biking, but we soon took the off-beaten single lane track that consisted of rocky terrain and beautiful mountain back drops. Our solid, full-suspension Specialized bikes took most of the brutal terrain, but a few of the other bikers had issues with popped tires and torn chains. The biking lasted for about 5 hours with short breaks. Luckily, no one had serious injuries other than Jason taking a huge bail and scrapping his arms and chest...too bad I didn't get that on the Go Pro! Mountain biking is one of my favourite sports and the biking in Guelph, which normally occupies my summers, pales in comparison to my Huaraz experience. Feeling a bit sore, we lazed around for the rest of the day playing cards until our bus at 10pm. Saying goodbye to Huaraz, we took a six hour bus to Lima and then a four or five hour bus to Ica. Ica is a boring city, so we quickly hopped onto a short taxi ride to Huacachina. WOW! What a picture perfect place! Huacachina is a beautiful oasis town, which was basically designed for resort living. Our hostel was cornering three massive sand dunes and the pool was directly below one of the largest mounds. The hostel was also host to a few animals including a cute fluffy puppy, a few tortoises and a few rabbits. Later that afternoon around 4pm we went on a dune buggy adventure through the desert hills to a location where we were able to sand board. Unfortunately, we got sucked into spending a little extra souls (actually called solas, the Peruvian currency) on actual snow boards instead of these wooden boards that were more common. The hills were not as extreme as imagined, but we were amazed at the wonderful back drops of the massive desert and the twists and curves of the sand dunes. After sandboarding for an hour, Jason and Graham climbed to the top of a tall dune to take pictures of the pretty sunset. The dune buggying was fun as well, it felt like a fast roller coaster as the driver took us on drops that made us bounce around in our seats. The next day we relaxed and swam in the hostel's pool and prepared ourselves for the dreaded 18 hour bus ride to Cuzco at 6pm. To our surprise, we lucked out and had class, lower level leather seats that could extend almost to a bed-like state and a few movies that actually didnt't suck for once. We were excited to get off the bus and start partying for Lee's birthday in Cuzco. We found an awesome Irish hostel called Wild Rover where, I wont get into detail, we rocked out hard...that shit was cray. Tomorrow we embark on our 5 day Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu!!! Waking up at 4:30am tomorrow is gonna suck...wish us luck!
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