Just got back from a great Easter weekend! I went with a group from the organization we're volunteering with here at IdukayPeru. There were 3 of us volunteers (me, Pear, and Lorena who is from Spain), and 4 Peruvians (Alex, the president of IdukayPeru, his brother Erik, their cousin Crocher, and their friend Raul). All I knew before we left was that we were going somewhere where there are lots of trees that's about 4 hrs. away to go camping and riding horses. Yes, that's about it! As with everything here in Peru, we catch bits and pieces, and are always pleasantly surprised by how different things are when we arrive :)
In a nutshell, we went 4 hours by bus to the most beautiful place with HUGE green mountains! We HIKED up and down steep winding roads, through pastures with cows and horses, through somebody's vegetable patches, over cliffs, across streams overlooking waterfalls ... hiking was definitely an adventure! It was great.
The first night we stayed at the top of a mountain in a hostel with about 35 to 40 people in bunkbeds in one room. The coolest thing about it was that Canta, the name of the town, wasn't a touristy-tourist area... by that I mean, people come here to go camping, but they are all Peruvians. It's not geared toward anyone else; there aren't any chain hotels or restaurants... In the hostel we stayed in, there were all kinds of Peruvian families in there sharing beds with their family members and kids. It was very refreshing to see everybody just gathered together like that and no one was worried about being catered to or having to sleep in the best conditions.
The next day is when we did all of our adventure hiking because we hiked down the mountain and ate lunch by the river rapids at the bottom. Then after our big hiking adventure (where I did happen to lose my favorite green Reebok jacket in the vegetable patches somewhere! shoot!) we hiked back UP the mountain! When we got to the top we took a bus to the absolute TOP of the tallest mountain there! It took about an hour to get to the top and road was extremely narrow with no rails, just cliffs that dropped straight down the side of the road. I couldn't look... it was about A HUNDRED TIMES higher and scarier than when my family drove that narrow winding road around Mt. Washington a few years ago!!!
When we got to the top of that mountain, we all stayed in this tiny little village and slept in the basement of someone's house named Mr. Mosquito who had about 10 twin beds in one room (no bathroom). The 7 of us shared 4 beds which we pushed together because we had to pay per bed (so we saved some money) and it was freezing cold there so we needed to stay as warm as humanly possible! That night everyone in the village had an Easter procession with music around the town until 6 in the morning. Now, I wish I could tell you about the Easter procession and how cool it was, etc... but honestly, it was SO COLD outside that we were all huddled under a mound of about 10 blankets wearing every piece of clothing we packed with us (except for Raul, the one brave soul who ventured out into the procession solo). It was freezing! So I heard the music from the basement, and the music was great!, but that's all I can report on about that... Paris and I had to use the bathroom so bad at about 4 in the morning and ventured into the woods (there weren't any bathrooms) as fast as we could so we could get back under our covers as fast as possible as well, and I leaned up against some kind of plant that is really painful and it stabbed me in the leg and I smacked it off of me and ended up with bumps all over my leg and hand. The next day when we were hiking again my friends saw it somewhere else and told everyone to be REALLY careful not to touch it and I was thinking, 'yeah! now you tell me!'
The next afternoon Paris, Crocher, Lorena, Raul, and I went horseback riding up another mountain, and of course I have a couple side notes about this escapade as well! First of all, I'm really scared of horses! I just don't like them. Every experience I've had in the past with horseback riding has ended in some kind of disaster or near-disaster... and I´ve just tried to stay away from horses altogether for years now. Well, with that said, when you're in PERU and everyone is going horseback riding, it doesn't make any sense to sit at the bottom of the mountain all by yourself... you only live once, so you've just gotta suck it up and hope for the best! Of course, the second I got on my horse, I was thinking, 'Sarah??! What are you doing!!?? You've gotta get off this horse!' but I didn't, and I ended up going on the absolutely most petrifying horseback riding adventure of my life... up (and down!) the steepest mountain EVER with a 10 year old boy named Jesus as our guide! It was terrifying! All I can say is that I can't believe my horse didn't collapse and I didn't fall off and die! Lol... The whole way I kept telling my horse, Negra, 'te amo Negra (I love you Negra); bueno caballo (good horse)' literally hundreds and hundreds of times. And during my horse nightmare I remembered Silvestre's saying to do one thing that you're scared of everyday... and I was thinking... 'Ok, last night I did the terrifying bus ride up that narrow, winding road. Today I'm doing a death tour by horse. I really don't want to do anything else in Peru that I'm scared of! It's freaking me out! I've done way too many things here in Peru that have almost given me a heart attack!'
And what do you know... when we get back down the mountain from our horse back riding, we have to take another bus back DOWN that super winding narrow road that I was scared of in the first place! I never signed up for the 'do TWO things in one day that scare you,' so I think I've reached my limit... I'm going to try to stay at the bottom of all mountains for at least a week! :)
When we arrived back in Canta, we caught another bus to Lima which was about 3.5 or 4 more hours in transit. After trying to sleep for about 30 minutes, all we could do the rest of the way was just laugh because these buses we were taking this weekend weren't like the Cruz de Sur fancy buses we had been spoiled with for our past long-distance trips. These buses were nuts! The driver was flying around curves, passing cars at every given moment, and the whole time we were driving on back dirt roads, not highways. So we were bumping up and down, bouncing in and out of our seats the whole way.. Paris and I just kept laughing because there was nothing you could do about it. I think a couple of the people with me banged their heads pretty hard on the roof of the bus from all the bouncing around. After 4 hours of THAT, all we could think about was how happy we would be in our warm sheets in our 'own' beds that night... and I slept like a baby! I didn't have to go out into the arctic weather in the middle of the night to find a place to pee, I could just walk 10 steps to an actual bathroom :) Ahh, the things we take for granted!
