Cordillera Blanca and the Laguna Parón

We booked it for the Amazon basin. After twenty hours on a bus, we were still on the coast. Spirits were low and we decided that we didn´t have time for the jungle.

On Dima´s advise, we headed to the Cordillera Blanca in the high Andes.  For the first fifty hours in bus transit, highlights included a fruit juice and calling home. Fruit juice on a bus: take an orange, cut a hole in the side, put your mouth up to the hole and squeeze. So funny to watch a bus full of people doing this. The last ten hours was in the Andes through the beautiful Cañón del Pato - a cavernous meeting of the lightly coloured Cordillera Blanca and the darker Cordilelra Negro. Thirty six hand-cut tunnels and some very steep edges. Pavlo watched anxiously out the side of the window.

In the city of Caraz, we settled in for a rest and staged for a trip into the Laguna Parón. It was a nice hike with more than twenty river crossings.

At one point, a waterfall rendered the path impassible. I went low and found a steep traverse (5.7) to get across. Pavlo went high and got well acquainted with some steep rock slopes.

Then a rainy night at 4200m elevation in one of the most epic camp sites I´ve ever found - at the end of a massive sand spit right on the water. The cloud cover was thick, but we could see each of the six > 6000 m peaks surrounding us one at a time.

In the morning we headed upward for the vista. Granite walls and perfect blue lagoons, we touched the glacier at 4500m and turned around.

After the four hour descent to the road, we walked 22 km before a truck finally picked us up. When you ride in the back of a cargo truck with holes in the floor and zero suspension, the world is a gun fight and every turn is on two wheels. But we hit home just as darkness falls and the rain picks up.