Leaving a Nennie trail

4 december 2022 - Cusco, Peru

Dear future me,

The objective for the past two weeks was to relax. Well, I did succeed in decreasing the number of adventures and I increased the number of slow days. So this is going to be a very boring blog. After riding in the mountains for a long while, I decided to go to the coast to do absolutely nothing. I tried the same in Huaraz, the lively mountain hub for backpackers, where I wrote my last blog. But everything there was screaming to me to take a hike (literally) and it made me feel even more tired. So I left for the desert at the coast where the altitude is zero and the sun is high in the sky. In this paradise near the beach, with bungalows and a beautiful swimming pool, I absolutely failed in doing nothing, On the first day I visited Caral, the ancient city of 4500 years ago! Build on the cerro’s (hills) next to a river valley, the pyramids and structures of this settlement are mind-blowing. I’ve never been to Egypt, but it is amazing to see this proof of old civility in the midst of a lot of sand. I spend the whole day with a Peruvian family whom I met at the hotel. Apart from the fact that I hardly understood what they were saying, I did enjoy the company to explore that site. Overwhelmed by the stories of old times, I got even more tired. Which made me succumb to my original idea and yes, I did nothing the next day. Just lying around in the sun next to the swimming pool, swimming a few 100 laps, and lie down again. Really nice, doing nothing, but somehow the travel gods didn’t agree and made me suffer to the bone for being lazy. Or rather to the skin. I got severely burned.

I spend three days in agony of the pain that my red purple skin was giving me. I tried to deflate the situation by getting back to the mountains and find some cool air. But just right at that exact moment, the gods decided to put a trick on the weather. Instead of cold air and the start of the rain season, the mid part of Peru has to deal with a real drought. No matter which altitude, 3000 meters means high temperatures and a clear blue sky. Furthermore this area is covered with thermal hot baths, the last thing I want to think about with a skin that still keeps on burning from the inside. So instead of enjoying the natural resources of the water, I was sleeping as much as I could without moving. The next challenge was not moving while riding offroad through the mountains. Although I figured that it was gonna be a torturous ordeal, I found that riding on a bumpy stony road helped me to forget my derma problems. At 4000–5000-meter altitude it also kept me nice and cool plus the views on the altiplano with its yellow colors and blending lamas got me distracted. I even passed an orange lake. Really funny. I made my way from Churin to Tarma to Huancayo and entered a playground for the wind again. In my Alaska-Florida blogs I described those areas as playgrounds for the kids of the gods to make weird shapes of the rocks. Here they give these formations beautiful names like Wawi Wawi or Torre Torre. Similar to the Aboriginals in Australia the local ancient people, called the Wanka’s, believe that a giant snake is responsible for the shapes of the valley.

By that time I could relate to the idea of a giant snake. As my skin started to shed, I left a trail of skin flakes all over the place. The housekeeping must be very pleased with me. You can follow the trail from Hauncayo all the way to Cusco. There are bits and pieces of me in Ayachuco, the birth ground of the Shining Path.  Where mothers still are searching for their sons and daughters, who disappeared during the terror campaign. Tiny Nennie leftovers cover the street of Andahuaylas and Abancay. The rest of me is hold together inside my motor jacket and pants during the ride over mountains into valleys and up the mountains again. Going from windy, fresh air up on the greyish sierras to the heat in the green invested valleys. All the way to Cusco I’ve been trying to figure out if places seem familiar to me. Because in 2010 I roamed this country with a motorcycle group of Motortrails. Then we covered the whole south and middle of Peru, which helps me to skip a lot of those places this time around. So no Machu Pichu or Colca Canyon for me in 2022, since I already have fond memories of a fantastic journey back then with a similar fantastic group of people. There is only one place I do revisited this time: Cusco! I remember that we saw of lot of places in the surrounding area and that we had a tour inside the most famous modern Inka city in the world. But during that tour I was sick, so the whole experience is a bit blurry. Or was that because of our visit to the Irish Pub? Well this time, I feel well in my new and pinkish skin. Ready to sit back and enjoy nothing more than the pleasures of this old town. Good massages, nice restaurants and if you roam the streets, you automatically get informed if either Argentina or Australia won the match at the World Championship Soccer in Qatar. And that is important for a Dutchy who just saw her country move up to the quarter finals.

See ya later,

Annemieke

Foto’s

2 Reacties

  1. Michael:
    4 december 2022
    Hoi Annemieke, jouw mooie reisverhaal brengt weer mooie herinneringen boven. Zo ook dat de tijd voorbij vliegt als je niet zo nu en dan, zoals jij doet, er “even” tussenuit gaat. Geniet ze ….
  2. Rian:
    7 december 2022
    Hoi Annemieke, is dat alweer 12 jaar geleden???
    Ook nu weer prachtige foto's van een mooi Peru.
    Geniet ervan, ik geniet op afstand met je mee.