The Way Inn

With the celebrations of Peru's independence day scheduled over the weekend and Ben's knee being a bit sore for a long trek we decided to head back into the hills to camp at the Way Inn and do some easy day walks. It's a lovely place that's less than 20km from Huaraz, but the bumpy dirt road makes it feel much longer. We camped on one of the terraces that had a fantastic view back to Huaraz and down the valley.

Admiring the view

Churrup

The night sky from our tent

Ben spent a lot of time looking for hummingbirds

It was wonderful being out of the noise and bustle of Huaraz, but having a cozy, fire-warmed lounge to spend the evenings. We splashed out and had the dinner there on our last night, with our friend Cass, who had mountain biked from Alaska, and his friends, who were driving from Alaska to the southern most tip of Tierra del Fuego in a big converted Leyland truck. It was a great dinner, made more interesting when a local farmer turned up demanding recompense for his turkey that he swore the truck had run over. The English couple swore they hadn't hit anything. The turkey was produced as evidence and apparently didn't look that squashed and eventually a compromise was reached.

American Kestral

As the sun started to set it turned the rain over the far hills golden . . .

. . . deepened the clouds and painted the mountains . . .

. . . until with a last splash of colour, it set.

Sobering news

When we returned to Huaraz it was to two pieces of bad news. My Granny had been having some mystery symptoms back in NZ and when we got back to civilization it was to find out that she had pancreatic cancer and the prognosis was very poor. It was terrible news and Ben and I spent a lot of time discussing what we should and could do.

The other piece of bad news concerned some of the friends we'd made staying at Jo's Place. It's a wonderful place to be based, very basic but nice with a big grass courtyard and very social. We'd mostly met mountain climbers like Eric, Nik and Amber from the US, Derek from South America, Carl and Nina from NZ (the first kiwis we'd met in two months) plus Cass on his epic mountain bike ride and others. Just before we'd headed off to the Way Inn Eric had noticed that Ben and Gil, two American climbers, hadn't made it back from their last trip. He had raised the alarm and gone out with the search party. The two were found where the snow ridge line had given way, after they had summited one of the peaks.

It was a sad time. We made the decision to return to NZ knowing that we would head back to South America.