Rolo on Tour

Fully recovered from the Trek near Huaraz I took a nightbus to Lima. Very comfortable but I just cannot sleep in a bus :-(.

In Lima in the very center of Miraflores (the „new center“) I stumbled upon a street where every night lots of people are playing chess. Arriving there I got instantly challengend to a game for 5 Soles (about 1,80$).  After 4 months of not playing I was a bit rusty and therefore a little slow but still the evening ended with me being 20 Soles up :-). The next day went less fortunate but luckily the stakes were only 0.50 Soles a game.

For my dear chess friends here a little fragment:

Me being white with 2 seconds versus 14 seconds left playing Rg5+ and being quite happy him actually stalemating me. Justice!

In Lima I decided spontaneously to book a ticket to spend some days in the Amazon rainforest. For that I needed to fly first to the largest city in the world, which cannot be reached by road: Iquitos.

View from the main boulevard in Iquitos

Iquitos has a pretty interesting history especially involving its role as a centre for the rubber industry at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Too bad for the city that synthetic rubber was discovered!
The day I arrived (with 3 hours of delay) I got shown some parts of the centre. In the artesanial shops around there you can buy really different stuff than in the rest of Peru: Piranhas, butterflies, anaconda skin and lots of jungle medicine. Some impressions:

Somebody wants a souvenir?

Time to go to the jungle: To get to the reserve lodge I was staying I went on a 8,5 hours boat ride. The boat was full of locals and also transported lots of packages to the little communities living along the Amazon. Interesting to see that they mainly carried salt,spaghetti and Inka Cola (the national soft drink in Peru which tastes a lot like gummi bears). The journey was quite amazing, especially the last part sitting on the roof of the boat.

The captain sitting on the roof

And here the backside of the boat

As it turned out I was the only guest at the lodge I was staying at that time. So I had all the possible attention. The first morning we walked for about 6 hours to look for animals in the jungle. Well, I imagined it a lot easier than it was. Most of the time you are just attacked by tons of mosquitos and don’t see anything else. Well my guide Moises was certainly very talented to spot the animals, but as he cannot perform miracles, most of them were very small frogs or ants or some type of little birds. He also taught me to drink water from some type of liane, but you gotta be careful as other types are poisonous.
Deciding that the mosquitos are just too annoying all the other trips were done by canoe. There Moises spotted lots of other animals: sloths, tucans, monkeys and lots of birds. In those occasions a really good camera would be nice as with my digital one you would just see a tree and not the animal sitting in it.
Furthermore we got some glances of river dolphins living in the Amazon river.

One day we went Piranha fishing. Having no experience in fishing at all I needed some tries, but I finally got one (see picture). We had them accompanying our dinner, but they were really small and there was barely any meat on them. But still I guess it is better to eat a piranha than the other way around.

A cute little frog

Gotcha!

My guide Moises

Time for a lunch break

Returning to Lima was really strange. You woke up in the jungle and end up going to bed in the heart of a metropolis. Traveling can be very odd sometimes.

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Time to discover more of the northern part of Peru: The next two stops were the cities of Chiclayo and Trujillo.

If you are looking for new glasses the first one might be worth a visit as I have seen there such a concentration of glasses shops you cannot imagine. Otherwise I would recommend skipping it as it was hard to meet people there, the reason being that there are no hostels around.

In Trujillo at least that was the case. Also there is a nice central square as almost anywhere in Latin America:

Furthermore I finally managed to get some basic salsa lesson and I fixed my bag (see last entry) for 1 Sole (0.37$). Considering I got a 10$ refund from the owner of the dog, I guess I made a pretty good deal on that :-).

In Trujillo there are also some precolombian ruins called Chan Chan. To me it was not that interesting: They were a lot like those in Egypt, just without all the cool stuff!

Time to go back to the mountains I thought, in this case the city of Huaraz. Huaraz is located near a mountain range of the Andes called the Cordillera Blanca. There I took part in a 4-day-trek called Santa Cruz Trek. The trek was pretty nicely organized by some agency and so we only had to do the hiking, as everything else (cooking, carrying and setting up the tents and so on) was carried out by the guides and their donkeys.

The first night I suffered again (like when doing the Quilotoa loop) of altitude sickness and crossing 4750 metres (the highest I have been in my life) the next day was not really helpful to that. Having passed that obstacle although all symptoms disappeared.

Some pictures of these days:

Start of the hike on Day 1

Reminds me of the Matterhorn

A nice place to spend the night

We crossed only the parts without snow and ice 🙁

How will these mountains look in 5 (10,20,50..) years?

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Before I left Ecuador I had to complete 2 more tasks:

The first one, eating guinea pig, was accomplished in the city of Cuenca.

Great Success!

It was not very spectacular, tastes a lot like chicken but is way more expensive.

Further south lies the little town of Vilcabamba with nice hiking opportunities:

Yes, other people make videos too 😉

I like

One of those hikes brought us to a small village. And that is where I completed the second task: Playing Ecuavolley.

Ecuawhat? It`s a very popular game in Ecuador, especially in small villages. It is like volleyball, but you play on about the size of a beach volleyball field with a football, 3 on 3 and the net is 3 metres high. That way you can hardly smash the ball down; but if you think about it, that is probably a clever idea if you are as small as most ecuadorians you rather want nobody to be able to do that, than just all the people from other nations ;-).

Shoes, socks or barefooted: Which is the best outfit?

Trying to stop egoism 😉

That was a lot of fun and we nearly forgot the 6 hours of hiking we did to get to that place. If people are at least half-capable of what they are doing, it is very hard though to force scoring a point, so it can be quite exhausting.

In Vilcabamba I stayed in a german hostel with great german food. Quite nice after 2 weeks of having mostly the same food all the time. They even had Currywurst on their menu, but seriously, who eats that for dinner?

My first attempt to leave the country failed due to a bus which left 15 minutes earlier than scheduled. The second attempt did not go without complications as well, as I found out on departuring, that one of the little dogs of the owners had parts of my bagpack for dinner:

Yummy! Too bad when your bagpack feels twice as heavy suddenly 🙁

Nearly 17 hours (I guess that was not the fastest way 😉 ) of busrides later I arrived in the little beach town of Mancora in Peru. The (party) hostel I stayed in there made it quite hard to find sleep. But with the beach 5 metres away and the benefits coming with that it was still a kind of nice place to hang out:

Probably the nicest view I got so far from my bed

Sunset in Mancora

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Finally I knew where to go from Quito: I went to Latacunga to start the so-called Quilotoa loop from there. One hour after arriving there I had met Stephan from Holland and Maike from Germany and we soon discovered we had the same intentions, so shortly afterwards we planned how we were going to spend the next few days together.

It all started with a bus ride to the Quilotoa lake situated inside of a volcano at about 3900 metres of altitude. Having passed the following obstacle, we were ready to start:

Our first day we were hiking along the crater and we had magnificent views all the time.

The Quilotoa lake, just stunning.

We were quite surprised finding a „beach“ up there!

After that day I felt really sick (altitude ?), but the next day everything was fine again, so the adventure could continue. The next step was to hike to a village called Chugchilan and after having found the right way and going up and down several canyons, we arrived our destination for the night and I could learn some dutch card games ;-).

Discussion: Which one is the right path?

Keeping a tree from falling Bruce-Willis-Style

Our third and last day of hiking should bring us then to another small village called Isinlivi and it was another day of going canyons up and down.
All in all, all the hikes were great. Awesome views, friendly people and many animals (sheep, cows, dogs, horses, donkeys, lamas) on the paths.

What a donkey!

I like the dog´s expression 😉

Getting back from Isinlivi to Latacunga was not an easy task, as we had to ride on the top of a milk truck for a while. It rained and as we got up to 4000 metres again, it was quite freezing for some time. Luckily my clothes passed this rain-proof-test, so it was still quite fun :-).

Milk, me, Stephan and again Milk

All in all a really great trip, especially as we barely met other people. I wonder if it will be the same in 5 years, as it is already in the lonely planet….

A completely different experience was the city of Baños. You could not walk 5 metres without somebody asking you „Hey my friend, wanna do a tour tomorrow?“ Not my thing.

So after having made a bike trip to some waterfalls, which involved climbing down and up the tower which you can see below, I left this area again.

only 26 metres high, so very safe

Maike, relieved to be at the top again

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y venga conmigo!
Vamonos al viaje para
buscarlos sonidos mágicos
de…

Ecuador!“

That´s how the awesome song Ecuador by Sash starts. But what else do you know about this country? I did not know much, that is why it took me some time in Quito figuring out how to proceed.

Meanwhile, I was discovering this city and its surroundings:

Photo taken at the Basilika of Quito, the figure in the background is the so-called Panecillo

View of Quito from above at about 4000 metres, a cable car takes you up there.

Yes, the landscape around is more beautiful than the city itself.

Nearby Quito is a place called Mitad del Mundo and as the name suggests, the equator passes through it. Well at least that is what some french scientists thought in the 18th century and so they built a monument there.

If they knew….

Funny thing, it was later found out by GPS that the equator passes actually 200 metres away, where there is now a museum. In this museum I got a diploma for balancing an egg on an nail:

It is really much harder than it looks!

Also you can make the „flush-test“. People who watched the Simpsons (or paid attention in school) may know this but for everybody else: On the northern hemisphere water flows down a sink counter-clockwise whereas on the southern hemisphere it does so clockwise. On the equator itself it just drops down. This is quite amazing to see there, walking 1 metre north or south and seeing that effect with your own eyes!
Furthermore, if you want to lose weight, you might want to travel to the equator ;-). As the gravitation forces are not as strong here (why, I have no clue, ask a physicist), you lose approximately a kilo in weight. (Of course when you go back it will appear again, so don’t take that advice seriously.)
Wow, there is a lot to learn in this entry. I will see you after a short break.

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