9:00 PM

Yesterday I met two cousins from Canada, Gabriel and Frederick, who are at the end of their trip.  We were on a bus together from Lima to Huaraz, Ancash, a province of Peru North of Lima.

The outskirts of Peru are unlike anything I've seen.  A man was defecating in a park, trash and brush piles are burned in the same parks.  People live in houses made of concrete, and/or straw, plastic, bits of material.  Pollution is worse here than in the city center.  Once we left Lima city, we were into the mountains.  The ocean on the left, giant sloping sand dunes and rocky cliffs on the right.  Here and there are scattered squatting villages.  The people there claim parcels by marking them with rocks.  If they continue to improve the property over the course of five years, the land becomes theirs.  This property is desert land, near the highway.  Houses are adobe brick, dirt floor, straw roof, one room.

The trip took 8 hours on winding roads up mountain sides.  I sat next to Milagros, a chubby charming twenty something girl from Lima who has family in Mancara, Huaraz.  She was my informant for the trip and pointed out sugar cane fields, potato farms, Hare Krishna settlements (Peruvian Hare Krishnas have a huge settlement on the desert ocean.

The road was in the Andes, specifically between two regions called the Cordillera Negra and Cordillera Blanca.   I have many photos to post but the connection is iffy here, in Caraz at a hostel.

Last night Gabby,  Fed, and I teamed up to find a place to stay.  Fed is fluent in the local Spanish, he's lived in Lima for years, so I was confident we'd find something cheap.  We went to Carhuaz (different than Caraz) and the town was full of construction workers who are there to build a municipal project.  The roads in these up-mountain towns are concrete and wonderfully maintained.  The agriculture is rich and green once we passed the desert.

Finding no place to stay, we backtracked to Mancara, home of Milagros's family.  Her name means "miracle."  She almost died at birth.  The only available room was in a church-bought resort.  It cost 17 dollars a night per bed.  This is a steep price and out of budget, but the sleep was good.

Why was it good?  We stumbled into a local festival.  We danced wild with the locals to their local brass band as fireworks reported above us.  Everybody was drinking and hollering and whistling.  They kept pulling us gringos into their circles.  At 1:00 AM a huge tower of bamboo was lit, and a wick sparked a 20 minute firework display.  The explosives laws are loose here, and I have firework rocks in my hair and I was burned on the neck (nothing serious) by a spark.

Til 4 we danced and then went to bed.  Tonight we are in Caraz.  Saw some very old ruins today as the sun set, and crawled in ancient caves.  Very tired.  Miss my family and Helen and my friends back home.