Pisco, Pisco Sours and 'hueveando' around

After we got back from our Santa Cruz trek, we’d decided to have a few days’ rest, then attempt a proper ‘mountain climb’. What this means is basically you try to reach the top of a snow covered mountain, which involves putting on the full gear (ice axe, crampons, harness and ropes), so it’s more full on than normal trekking. The mountain we were going to attempt to climb, Pisco, is 5,700 metres high, or almost a kilometre higher than Mont Blanc, the highest in Europe. It should be pointed out that proper mountaineers would do this peak in their sleep, and would refer to it as simply a long trek, however any mountain like this still involves an element of risk, you’re wearing ropes for a reason, namely that when you’re walking on the snow, technically on a glacier, you’re potentially walking over crevasses that are covered by new fallen snow and therefore can’t be seen…the rope is there to prevent you falling in. In theory, our Santa Cruz trek should have given us adequate acclimatisation for the altitude, however that all went wrong when we discovered 13 Buhos, or ‘Luchos’ bar.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, a couple of quiet drinks on a Thursday night with a couple of French friends we’d met in Quito, and subsequently on the Santa Cruz trek. However the bars here have a habit of making it very difficult to leave. The owner of this bar in particular, a guy called Lucho (the typical South American nickname for Luis), is simply the friendliest bar owner I’ve ever met. They brew their own beer using coca leaves (in addition to the usual hops, barley, water and yeast), and it tastes really great. The bar had a really great mix of Peruvians and ‘gringos’, and we staggered out of there at 4am. Then repeated the following night. So it turns out, medically speaking, that to acclimatise properly to altitude, getting pissed till 4am in the morning isn’t regarded as particularly beneficial.

Anyway we set off on the Sunday morning, with a nice 2 hours’ trek to ‘base camp’ at 4,600 metres. Pisco is right behind me on this picture...

A few hours’ sleep, then up at 1 o’clock in the morning to start the trek (the aim is to reach the summit early in the morning, before the snow gets too soft through the heat of the sun… bearing in mind that Peru is pretty close to the equator so the sun’s really strong). To actually reach the snow line, it was necessary to cross the ‘moraine’ first. What happens with the mountains here is the snow falls on top, so on the steeper, higher sections you’ve essentially got fresh snow on top of the rock. As the snow drifts down the mountain, it compacts under its own weight into ice, forming the glacier (with the crevasses, or cracks), this tends to be less steep. Over time, the glacier moves down the mountain (if you ever watch the David Attenborough type programmes, they often show this movement speeded up, it’s relatively quick for a natural phenomenon), and the action of the ice moving over the rock, as well as the sheer pressure of it, breaks up the earth underneath into boulders, rocks, rubble and sand. This is known as the moraine, and on Pisco at least it was a few hundred metres wide, over a kilometre long, and in the form of a huge channel with steep walls.

The first challenge was getting down into it. This involved a steep sandy path, with precarious footholds and a very steep drop if you slipped. Needless to say our guide José and Carine skipped down it like a couple of mountain goats, leaving me panicking like a little girl behind them. Once we’d got past this, what should have taken us an hour and a half ended up taking double the time, as the altitude sickness kicked in. Carine was feeling dizzy and nauseous, and neither of us could walk more than a few metres at a time without stopping. It was physically exhausting, with the snow line, our target, constantly seeming closer but getting ever further away. By the time we reached the snow line, at 5,200 metres, we were shattered, and the sun was coming up. We managed to walk for another hour on the snow, to reach the ‘col’ of the mountain at 5,300 metres, before we had to call it a day. ‘Col’ means shoulder, it’s basically like the lowest point of the ridge joining one mountain to the next, but it was a target to aim for in that it allowed us to see over the other side of the valley and enjoy the views. To have carried on to the summit proper would have taken another 4 hours or so, so we weren’t even close. To be honest, if we’d been properly acclimatised, we’d have made it further up, but I doubt we’d have made it to the top, you just have to be in incredibly good shape for that.

At the exact time we reached the highest point we were to go up to, the church service for Carine’s grand father Gaston’s funeral was taking place in France, so it was nice to pause and think of him and all the family back in France.

Getting back to base camp was even harder, scrambling over big boulders is hard enough with fresh legs, with tired legs it starts to get a bit tricky. And the final path up out of the moraine was even scarier in the daylight when you could properly see how big the drop was. Carine even managed to trip and fall off one of the ridges, luckily the gradient wasn’t too steep and she managed to stop herself falling to far (insisting on shouting out she was fine even as she continued to slide down the slope of loose rock and sand). Eventually, 9 ½ hours after setting off, we made it back to base camp, very tired and exhausted and ready for some sleep. You just couldn't beat the view from our tent 'window'...

The following day, with fresh legs, we trekked over to ‘Lake 69’ (and yes, it does have the same connotation in Spanish). This was a fantastic day’s walking (just a mere 5 hrs this time), over paths that were narrow at times, but not quite as bad as the day before, with the reward of a view of Chacraraju mountain overlooking the lake itself as you come over the ridge of the mountain separating the two valleys. Probably the most spectacular scenery I’ve even seen when out trekking.

It was quite enjoyable as we took the ‘motorway’ (i.e. easy) path back to the road, passing day trippers looking absolutely exhausted, making us feel a bit better about our own physical trekking ability. Our guide was a top bloke, but he was a genuine expert mountaineer, and these people are seriously a breed apart.

Back in town later that day, we hit the bars again, this time discovering ‘Xtreme’ bar. Again, a quiet Thursday night beer turned into a 4am finish (quite how we managed to pull ourselves out of bed the next day to do a 35 kms mountain-bike ride, I’m not sure…), as Maria and Ericka working in the bar turned out again to be the loveliest friendliest people, giving us freedom of choice on the music selection (they even had Big Country!), free cocktails every so often, and so on. Carine ended up dancing on the bar along with the girls working there, pure class.

We had so much fun we decided to stay on till the weekend, however the combined effects of days out walking in the mountains plus nights out on the piss were more than my body at least could handle, and by the last night I was shattered, back in bed by a none too impressive one in the morning. Can’t hack it like I used to unfortunately.

Anyway as I write it’s Sunday, and we’re off to Lima tonight, from where we’ll grab a bus to Huacachina (an oasis in the desert, literally). From there we head off to Cuzco (for Machu Picchu) via Ayacucho. There was some crazy talk last night of having a couple of weeks off the cerveza and Pisco Sours, we’ll see how that goes…

Gary