Huaraz

I'd been planning on coming to Huaraz ever since my first few weeks of Brazil, when I was shown photos of it by a girl I met.

Huaraz is situated around the Cordillera Blanca mountain range, and is near the highest mountain in Peru. The city itself doesn't have much to do, but there is lots of trekking, outdoors activities and places of natural beauty nearby.

The first day I got here I decided to do absolutely nothing except catch up on sleep and spend the day watching Netflix and also on FaceTime with people from home. It was really relaxing.

The day after my friends from Lima arrived at the same hostel. I had signed up to do the rock climbing and they also signed up too. In the afternoon we got picked up by the instructor and taken to the rock climbing spot. This was a terrifying/ good/ never want to repeat experience. We thought we would be taken to a climbing wall but he just took us to this massive cliff edge and tied the ropes around the tree and we had to abseil down it and then climb back up.

It was really hard because there in some places was literally nothing to hang onto. The first one was tough, and the second one although harder was less scary because we knew what to expect. Although I'm glad I did it I don't think I'll be taking up rock climbing as a hobby anytime soon.

The place to go here is Laguna 69 in Huascaran National Park. An amazing, bluer than blue lagoon which is 4,600 metres above sea level. The next day I got up at 5am in order to go and do my final trek in South America! The trek was supposed to take six hours but we managed to do it in four. At first you have to climb up to the Laguna which takes about 2.15 hours. This wasn't too difficult but the altitude made it a lot worse.

Once we got to the Laguna we took some photos and then ate lunch but it was freezing up there and started hailing so we didn't stick around for as long as we could have. The way down was around another 2 hours and then we lay on the grass and slept until the rest of the group came down.

The bus back took ages because of road works but the evening was just spent eating dinner and socialising. Now I'm going back to Lima to catch my flight to Bogota! 🇨🇴 I've really enjoyed my time in Peru - three weeks has gone so fast because there's so much to do - but now I feel I'm ready to move on to the next leg of my journey.Read more