Huaraz
I recently went on a trip to the mountains for my first Peruvian holiday, so I figured I might as well skip the introduction stuff and make my first post from Peru about that. It was Peruvian independence day on July 28th, so we had a 4 day weekend and most of us interns planned a trip to Huaraz, a town in the Andes north-east of Lima.
First I'll start with ChavÃn, an archaeological site we got to see ( Wikipedia article ). Apparently it's a UNESCO heritage site now that I look at that Wikipedia article, pretty cool... Anyway, it's an old religious site from ~1500BC, so way before the Incas and everything. You can see the sunken square plaza behind me where apparently they sacrificed animals (and maybe people), with the big temple building in the background. A lot of it is covered in grass and soil and just looks like a hill now, but it's being excavated right now in a lot of places.
This is a detail of the main temple wall you could see far behind me in the first picture. The alternating big stone, small stone pattern is to help resist earthquakes, which apparently it does a good job of since it has been standing for 3500 years in a very earthquake prone region. Also if you look closely in the top right of the picture, where you can see the highest parts of the wall, you can tell the people who built this got better at cutting stones as the years went by in construction.
Me inside the awesome ancient temple (after waiting in a 2 hour long line). Lots of really cool tight dark passages in here, no big rooms really, and the ceiling was really low. I felt a little bit like Indiana Jones, even though there was a giant line of tourists outside.
A pretty bad picture of the stone god statue in the center of the temple. The room it's in is cross shaped, and still very tight and cramped as you can kind of tell.
This was one of my favorite parts, and sorry for another bad picture. As you can kind of see behind the rope (really bad picture), there are two snake heads coming down and kind of pointing to the side. That's because the stairs lead up to the main temple from the main walkway from the square plaza, and after a ceremony when everyone was walking by, the snakes told the commoners to keep walking and not head up to the temple where only the nobles where allowed. I just thought that was really cool comparing that to similar simbols we have nowadays.
Review: here's a miniature model of the whole site without all the dirt covering it.
On to another day of the trip when we traveled to the national park with highest peak in Peru, Huascarán. Here's another Wikipedia article just to prove these are real places I guess. It's also the highest peak in the world that's in a tropical region; you can tell from the picture that the temperature is still pretty mild where I was standing, not that far from the snowy peak. We were driving around in our tour bus on the dirt roads up there at this point, and from here we went into the canyon to the right of the peaks.
So here we're inside the canyon at this cool lagoon with big mountains on each side. I could see glacier type snow only a short hike up from here and still it wasn't too cold.
Another day and back to the same national park, but coming up the other side. The peak in the background is a different one from yesterday, there were a ton of them around.
We kept climbing in altitude and got up to these big open grasslands. A few shepherds live really sparsley in huts around here, but other than that there really is nothing. Some of the shepherd kids dressed up their sheep and were charging tourists to take a picture with them whenever a bus stopped. You can see cows faintly in the background of this picture, and the pool in the foreground is a really deep and clear spring.
Nearby the only plants that grew besides grass were these huge yucca type things. They bloom by sprouting those stalks out of the top of them and then die. And our tour guide said they supposedly only bloom during a lunar eclipse...
We parked a little big up the road from the last picture and then hiked a bit to this glacier at around 5000m of altitude. There were pretty much no plants here this high, just rock and snow. Some people rode horses up to this point instead of hiking, and I was jealous because the altitude was killing me.
Ok there was at least one plant. This is my attempt at a fancy picture using a point and shooot camera.
we headed back down to Huaraz after the glacier, this is our hotel room. No heater but plenty of blankets on the bed.
This is the view from the roof of our hotel. Yes that's an owl.
And lastly, since we did come down for independence day, this picture was taken at an independence day parade at a town right next to Huaraz.
That was my trip for the first time I've gotten to go outside Lima since arriving. Hopefully I'll get to see more of Peru! In the meantime I need to post lots more about my trip in general, should be up soon...