Acts of courage and desperation
Some people eat all the egg yolks and others do well to nibble around the edges.
Travelling well and at length requires three things: time, a bit of money, and courage. I don’t think travelling in itself is a brave thing to do – it’s more a privilege, and easy enough if you have the luxury of those crucial first two things. But there are plenty of micro (and sometimes macro) moments that require bravery: asking for help in a language you’re not confident in, for example, or taking a Civa bus through the Peruvian mountains.
My family WhatsApp group is named the Kruger Park Bravery Society in recognition of all the times we have been collectively courageous in the face of angry elephants threatening to crush our car when visiting my mother’s homeland. A drunk, charging elephant is up there with the things that scare me most in the world, but to paraphrase Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter, courage takes many forms. For Dave, it’s being handed a plate of eggs by a smiling Airbnb host whom we don’t want to offend, and eating the tiniest piece of white off the edge of them.
Dave hates eggs and always has done. I didn’t realise until I met him just how difficult that makes breakfasting in any situation away from home. Eggs are a breakfast staple across all of Latin America (and often appear as a lunch and dinner staple, too), which suits me just fine because I love them. Scrambled, fried, poached, baked – eggs have always been my breakfast of choice and I eat them every morning in non-travel life.
This makes me really quite useful to the wider Hughes family, in fact, since none of them can bear to eat eggs in any form. I have been known to make disappear no fewer than eight egg yolks during fancy restaurant meals attended by multiple Hugheses. And on Friday night, when Dave and I arrived quite late into Huaraz, I inhaled another four while our kindly Airbnb host, Doris, wasn’t looking.
Since Dave is sitting next to me right now, I feel obliged to disturb him from seven hours of Pokémon gaming and give him right of response (we are on a bus, naturally: this week’s newsletter comes to you from the road out of Huaraz, in central Peru).
He says: “Eggs are creepy and disgusting. Also I can’t believe you’ve just googled ‘alternative word for eggs’. Have you heard of the word ‘synonym’? That’s all I have to say and now I will return to my Pokémon.”
So there we have it.
Blastoderm aside, the past week can be sliced into three key acts of bravery, which feel important to tell you about after last week’s laundry musings prompted frankly a weird amount of interest, notably from my own father, who sent me a message – his only ever remark about this newsletter – to say, “Well if the writing doesn’t work out you could take in laundry”. Like some medieval washer woman. (I’m not totally against it).
On the way down (across?) to Cusco three weeks ago, when we were on a schedule to meet our friends Zlata and Greg, Dave and I stopped over in Nazca for the spooky desert drawings but missed out other places, figuring we would go back through when we had more time. One such place was Ica. It feels like everyone we’ve met in Peru since has told us, “You gotta get to ICA!” (Most have been American). Dave also has a friend called Simon who once spent six whole months in Peru and the only recommendation he had to give us was: “Go to Ica!” (To be fair to him, he went to Peru so long ago that he contracted bird flu and made world news headlines as the “white devil” who brought disease to Latin America.)
Well, Simon, we made it to Ica – and more specifically, to Huacachina, an actual desert oasis down the road from Ica with palm trees and miles and miles of desert surrounding it. The place looks just like a cartoon oasis, albeit with a couple of rooftop bars and souvenir shops that take card payment.
Two of the things that attract both fun-loving American housewives and people like Simon to Huacachina are the fact you can tear across the dunes in an off-road sand buggy and then throw yourself down said sand dunes on a snowboard. And so began the first major act of bravery of the week.
I wasn’t nervous, because I hadn’t thought too deeply about the thing until we arrived in the desert. I was preoccupied, probably with writing one of these newsletters, and had delegated all planning responsibilities to Dave. But then the reality of what we were about to do started to creep up on me, until it was ringing in my ears like tinnitus. Sitting in a cafe enjoying a rare and wonderful salad, I watched as not one, but two separate gringos hobbled past on the street below, each with an arm in a sling, looking a bit sorry for themselves.
I happened to be messaging my friend Serina, who visited Huacachina a few years ago herself. “Did you go sandboarding??” I asked her, “Did you enjoy it??”
Serina is typing. Serina is typing.
“I enjoyed it,” she eventually replied. “I did graze my arm, I remember... You have to watch out for rocks. I’d probably think twice before doing it again.” Super.
There are dozens of tour operators in Huacachina offering exactly the two-hour experience, but we ended up booking with a company called “Safe Trip Ica” because it had good online reviews and an inspired name. Also, Dave managed to get us a 15 per cent discount on the listed price (about £9) through some haggling, so at least if we broke our limbs we’ll have saved some money doing so.
At 4pm on Wednesday afternoon, we met our driver, a man of zero words and zero trepidation, one of the many too-cool-for-school sand-buggy dudes who exist in Huacachina to spend their days and nights performing insane stunts while racing across the dunes. The buggies themselves are completely open but we strapped ourselves in with full-body seatbelts, similar to ones you might get on a rollercoaster ride, which it turns out was quite fitting.
Before we could head off, we spent too much time watching a French girl argue with the tour operator about seating arrangements, for which I accidentally became a translator. In patchy English, the girl told me to tell him, in my patchy Spanish, that she was “very small” and “needed to sit in the front seat” without any other people next to her bar the driver, so that she could get a good view. Apparently this was something she had requested when booking the trip, either because she was some kind of social media influencer, or, more likely, a wannabe influencer.
She was neither small nor polite about it, and I was scared to be the messenger that got shot in the process, but eventually she sulkily agreed to sit behind the driver, not alone but on the end of the row for maximum views. The two front passenger seats were taken by a Puerto Rican couple, who had their own additional private tour guide with them (sitting unhappily between me and Frenchie), who it seems had been hired specifically to take photos of them.
And so began our Instagram shoot. After half an hour or so of absolutely insane driving up, down and over sand dunes the size of skyscrapers, we stopped for pictures. The same thing happened on the way back, with a sunset backdrop. The view was stunningly beautiful, though Dave and I were very distracted and cracking up from watching the competitive photography taking place all around us.
Puerto Rico duo unfurled flags to pose with on top of the dune buggy, while French girl stood angrily next to them wanting her turn on the set. Eventually, the driver (whom I’d come to quite like) saw us watching and made us have a go on top of the buggy ourselves (hilarious results below), but not before French girl rolled around seductively on the car bonnet, issuing commands to the Puerto Ricans’ private tour guide to begrudgingly take photos of her in and above the sand.
“Is it your honeymoon, or do you do all your holidays like this?” I asked the Puerto Rican couple. “Like what?” said the guy, folding up their human-sized Puerto Rican flags and additional props.
In between all of this came the sand boarding. I don’t know what I was expecting – some kind of introductory course? Instructions? – but our driver simply gestured for us to lie down on a snowboard, beforing hurling us one-by-one down the 100-metre sand dunes to our death. Spoiler alert: nobody died, but I did take a spectacular tumble after being the first one to volunteer to go down the steepest, final dune. After that, a few people decided they’d had enough and we returned to the buggy to pursue photo backdrops once more. I’ll include a video of my performance on the web page version of this newsletter. Awesome fun, despite the diva dramas, and I’d definitely do it again.
From one of Peru’s most tourist-heavy activities to one which may never before have been tarnished by gringos until our arrival.
One of the few non-hiking pastimes Huaraz has to offer are natural hot springs, and there are several thermal bathing sites dotted around the map. Dave loves a bath and I love any excuse to get in a body of water, so we decided to ease our way back in to mountain life with an afternoon spent lounging around in some of nature’s hot tubs. Or so we thought.
Our accommodation in Huaraz came through a previous Airbnb connection: during our second stint in Buenos Aires back in November last year, we stayed at the Casa de Valentín, which is a very beautiful and artsy guesthouse run by a Peruvian woman called Kathy and her dog, Valentín. Kathy told me to message her when we eventually ended up in Peru, and so I did. She then put me in touch with her mum, Doris (the bringer of eggs) who also runs a guest house – in their hometown of Huaraz.
There are a couple of thermal springs mentioned in the guide books, but Doris recommended a different one called Chancos, where she said the water was much nicer and you could enjoy the addition of a sauna. We were sold.
The buses in Peru may be shockingly disorganised, but the colectivo system is on point. For the uninitiated, colectivos are minivans each seating around 14 passengers (or up to 32 semi-seated, standing and crouching passengers if the driver is particularly foolhardy) that zip across and out of cities in lieu of a decent bus system. They are private enterprises and the driver sets off once his van is full enough – which means you could be waiting anything between 20 seconds and 20 minutes for the journey to begin. People also flag them down along the route, especially out in the sticks, which means you can often find yourself sharing a seat with a chicken or several small children. But poultry aside, colectivos are great because they’re much more reliable than buses and usually only cost a couple of soles, even when travelling a long way.
Dave and I hopped on a colectivo out to Marcará, a village outside of Huaraz, then hiked the last 45 minutes uphill to Chancos springs. I couldn’t see any water as we approached the site, but I figured perhaps the pools were hidden behind the big corrugated iron gate advertising baños. We paid our entrance fee and walked in… to see a series of concrete buildings with wooden doors, and a lot men sitting around watching football on a tiny TV screen.
We must have looked lost, because someone in a cleaning apron pointed us towards one of the concrete rooms we marked out as the saunas. “Cuevas”, the sign read, which was strange because I didn’t think that meant “sauna” in Spanish. I thought it meant “cave”, but that had to be wrong.
Turns out, the Chancos saunas were indeed caves. Actual caves. Dark and drippy, cut-into-the-natural-rock kind of caves, but with metal doors secured to the openings to trap the freaky hot steam funneling out of them. Presumably the steam was thanks to the same geothermal mysticism that produces hot springs and other nice things we were hoping to experience, but I’ve made my feelings on caves pretty clear once before in these newsletters, so I don’t need to tell you it wasn’t my exact idea of fun.
We sat in the cave for our designated 20 minutes until our skin became poached and our heads dizzy enough to brush aside the claustrophobia and fear of being locked in by the angry little cleaning man waiting outside. Since it was impossible to see into the back of the cave, I thought it was entirely possible that the bodies of previous spa dwellers could be piled up somewhere, which could help to explain the funky smell somewhat.
Pores cleansed, we exited the cave alive and wandered around for a bit, searching for signs of water. Once again, I asked someone where we might find the thermal baths and once again we were pointed towards a series of doors, this time attached to concrete cubicles – and then, because clearly my brain had evaporated in the steam, I submitted to getting in a very large and unsanitary concrete bath.
When we visited the Pucón thermal springs Chile, the set-up was a series of outdoor natural ponds, each one a slightly different temperature, surrounded by lush vegetation and a cool, fresh-water river running nearby. Chancos was more closely aligned with the Ipswich Crown Pools public leisure centre after the Saturday kids’ club have been and left their verruca plasters in wake. I got in the bath, I ran the giant hot water tap. I was committed for the promise of the high mineral content; I tried not to think too much about the rest of it.
Finally, the third major act of bravery this week involved, you guessed it, a hike. I’ve made no secret of the fact I’m not very good at heights, and yet I still keep coming back for more hairy walks along the many terrifying mountain ridges of South America.
Huaraz is a hiker’s paradise, and attracts professional mountaineers for the vast number of peaks and hiking routes within reach of the city. There are no easy Sunday strolls in the Huaraz region: most of the popular hiking routes take multiple days and involve some form of camping without flushing toilets. The city itself sits at 3,052 metres above sea level, and is surrounded by the Cordillera Negra and Cordillera Blanca mountain ranges – the latter of which includes Peru’s tallest mountain, Mount Huascarán (“Wantsan” in Quechua, 6,369 metres) – so you can see where this story is heading.
Scouring a couple of blogs and online guides for tips on where to go for a reasonable day’s hike (as opposed to the five or seven or even 10-day options that tall and ruddy-cheeked Swiss and German backpackers come here for) we settled on Laguna Churup, a two-to-three-hour circuit up to a beautiful lake beneath a glacier in the mountains, described as challenging but doable and “a good warm up” while acclimatising to the high altitude.
Holy hell. We climbed more than 700 metres in just under five kilometres, reaching an altitude of 4,450 meters via crumbling cliffs and scrambly rock faces accessed by chains and metal rock climbing holds. And this was the easy option!
After a few happy hour pisco sours later that afternoon, we decided to sack off our plans for a second, even longer hike the following morning and take a gentler tour of Laguna Paron by bus instead. But that’s a story for another day.
Travel bits and tips from this week
We actually started the week in Cabanaconde, which didn’t get a look-in during this newsletter. It’s a tiny village in Cañon de Colca, a beautiful valley with drops of 3,300m – making it twice as deep as North America’s Grand Canyon.
There we stayed in a cheap and pretty basic hostel, which was decent but absolutely freezing at night. I wore a wooly hat and all my clothes to bed.
Cabanaconde is another great spot for hiking, but also for seeing condors.
From there we headed to Ica and on to Huacachina down the road, where we stayed in a lovely hotel-y hostel-y guest house. It had a pool!
I ate the best chicken and avocado salad at Wild Olive Trattoria
And we had some drinks at Mosquito Bar, which had a cool roof terrace, no mosquitos, and a hilariously 90s playlist.
Oh! We also spent an afternoon wine and pisco tasting at the Bodegas Vista Alegre vineyard in Ica, where we learned that Peruvians are still angry at Chile for stealing their Pisco fame.
Our sand dunes tour was taken with Safe Trip Ica, but others may be less selfie-oriented.
From there we spent a short night here in Lima in a fairly ropey area of town…
And on to Huaraz, to stay with lovely Doris. What a week!