Huaraz City

After our short trip to lower altitudes the mountains were calling us again: Our next destination was Huaraz, the hiking capital of Peru and, as rumours have it, nicknamed „the little Switzerland of Peru“. As we like to drive long distances by day to see some more of the country we were facing an 8 hour (scheduled) ride from Lima to Huaraz and were looking forward to it - well, not so much anymore after sitting in the bus, seeing all the windows being blocked by the bus decoration and being told multiple times that we are not allowed to eat during the 8 hours non-stop drive 🤷🏻‍♀️ (side note: luckily the seats in the bus were massive, so we were able to hide from the camera eyes of the staff behind our front neighbour back seats and still have some food, but boy, we were annoyed!). So, 10 (and not 8) not-so-relaxing hours later we arrive at Huaraz at 22:30 and go out to look for our hostel. As always, we did not really check out the city much in advance, thinking (as always) that a city with such a name among tourists will be touristy - OF COURSE we were wrong again 😄 So we started walking, got to our neighbourhood and our first impression happened to be just another half-built dirt-and-gravel road leading into a dark alley where our hostel was supposed to be… But it was, and we did not got robbed! Furthermore, it turned out that our hostel was in the superduper local area of the city and near the official city market which just happens to spill out into the streets of three or four more blocks, always busy, noisy and smelly, but - once you got used to it - it was also super interesting and exciting to run around between the colourful shouting women of the Andean Highlands and to inspect their goods!
Apart from the massive half-legal market, the city is full of outdoor shops due to its surrounding hiking destinations, allowing Alina to trade her 18 L backpack brought from Swizzy into a wonderfully cheap but surprisingly practical new daypack allowing more stuff to be packed (for both hiking and incoming souveniers ;)). We stayed in Huaraz for a full 9 days (which was the longest stay in one city of our whole trip!), starting with two days of doing nothing to acclimatize to the altitude of 3053 m for the several hikes we‘ve planned - they of course all need a separate post.Meer informatie