Santa Cruz-Llanganuco
The Santa Cruz-Llanganuco trek is located just north of Huaraz, and goes through Peru's highest and most spectacular mountain range, the Cordillera Blanca. The 5-day trek can be done in either direction: I chose to start in the Santa Cruz river valley, and to work my way over to Laguna Llanganuco. Amazing scenery, and the trek is the easiest and the most popular in the Huaraz area.
Hola no gracias
When I started out on the Santa Cruz hike this morning, I did it with the full intention of doing it alone, and of doing it without any help. Well, apparently doing it without any help at all is simply not how you do it. It seems that, at the least, virtually everyone hires a donkey to carry their gear. For the first hour or so of the hike, I constantly ran into random local dudes leading a bunch of donkeys, who kept asking me: "¿donkey, amigo?". Pretty soon, I got so tired of this, that every time I saw another donkey dude approaching, I just greeted him with: "hola no gracias" (lit: "hi no thanks").
Santa Cruz-Llanganuco hike begins
This morning, being all prepared and geared up from yesterday afternoon, I left the town of Huaraz, and my 5-day Santa Cruz-Llanganuco hike began. Didn't get quite as much sleep last night as I'd hoped for — as it took a while to pack my bags in the evening, and to sort out everything that I don't need for the hike and can leave in Huaraz — so I wasn't up until about 6:30am, and I wasn't on the combi out of Huaraz until 7am (all about an hour behind schedule). But it turned out that this wasn't too late at all: day 1 of the hike went fine, and I finished the first day's route with time to spare.