„It’s mental”- Huaráz and neighbourhood

Waves of headaches kept on coming and going. The lack of sleep (an overnight bus from Lima to Huaraz: about 300 km in 8 hours) and the fact that we didn’t stop at 3000 m (Huaráz), but kept on going till 3 800 (first picture, Laguna de Llanganuco) didn’t help either. Not to mention the quality of the roads: majority curvy, mud road. And the seats on the buses: en el fondo. But this is how it had to be experienced. This is the reality there. This and the 5-6000-meter cordilleras of the Andes. Hundreds of peaks above 4-5000 m, and hundreds of lagoons. Que hermoso!

The headaches were sometimes so strong, I could feel the veins in my forehead pumping, beating. This is why I didn’t buy a local’s opinion: “altitude sickness is mental. Kids don’t feel it”. There must be mental component in it, no doubt about that. But when walking the 3 km round trip between 4800 and 5000 meters, a poor 7ish year-old-nino fainted next to me. So long for mental.

We made the 3 km camino in about 3 hours. Every now and then you had to sit down, because you felt too dizzy or weak to continue, sometimes you walked like you were walking on the moon, small paces, like a drunk man, sometimes the headaches were bursting, sometimes you had to pee like hell. Sometimes you thought you can’t make it. Sometimes you tried to convince yourself: it’s mental. But the thought: there’s a glacier and a lagoon at the end! And the thought: you are actually walking at 5000 m! That made you keep going. That made you stand up every time. That and the cordilleras around you: some snowy, some rocky, some sandy.

It also brought some comfort that the camino was full of locals: selling coca candy, lemon candy, coca leaves to chew, renting horses to carry you half the way, offering themselves to carry you up or down, where the horses wouldn’t go. Comfort and extreme heaviness, sadness. It is just an other job in the end, but still, for the reason of compassion, you could just hope you won’t be needing their help, but can walk yourself if possible. This again had huge incentives.

And we made itJ Pastoruri, Parque Nacional de Huazcarán, Peru, there we went!