01/10/2012 - 02/10/2012 - No Huarez

Lagoon 69 in all it's glory - loving the new iphone panoramic feature

Hugging the sandy coastline

Then back into the mountains

Great views along the coast on the outskirts of Lima and of our journey back into the mountains, although we didn’t enjoy them as much as a German guy up at the front. I think he must have taken 300 photos and 2 hours of video on the 8 hour journey – and we thought we were overdoing it on the camera action! Once in Huarez we couldn’t get to the restaurant quick enough – we’d both been craving a decent curry almost since the trip started and had our eyes on Lonely Planet’s pick of Chilli heaven for a few weeks! The food was phenomenal (despite Tony almost choking on a chilli!), but the service was a massive let down – another English guy giving the rest of us a bad name.

At least we had some
good morning views

After numerous photo
stops, the walking started

The first blue (ok, turquoise) lake of the day

Getting there...slowly! The lake was another chunk above the top of the waterfall

What lake are we thinking of?
Lake 69 dudes!

More reflection time at this lake

Another crack of dawn start for our next trek – unfortunately given our time constraints we couldn’t manage the 4-day Santa Cruz trek – so had to settle for the day trip to Laguna 69 (if anyone can shed any light on the reason for the name, we’re all ears). Why you need to get picked up at 6am to be dropped off for 30 minutes at 7:30 for breakfast is anyone’s guess – we’d definitely have preferred the extra half hour in bed! Tony struggled to maintain his cool as the 3 South African sisters had us stopping every 5 minutes on the journey for photo opps, so it was a relief all round when the walk started. Having lost our altitude acclimatisation after dipping down into Huacachina and Lima, going up to 4,600m was more of a struggle than expected, but a power snooze part way up supplied the required energy for the final climb. The lagoon was a perfect teal colour, and being back up amongst the glaciers was awesome.

You can just see the lake
in the distance

The sweeping path back down
the valley

The karaoke bar at the end of our street – Sopranoes – hadn’t been open the whole time we were there so Tony missed another chance to stretch his vocal chords. Gutted.

Mountain daisies

The start of a long road
back to Huarez

Key Learnings:

1. We’d perhaps dismissed Cruz del Sur buses slightly too quickly – the films were in English with Spanish subtitles, and the wifi was a step-up!

2. Don’t drink a litre of water before a 3 hour minibus trip, even if you are trying to avoid the headaches associated with altitude sickness. You will end up paying for it…