Lares Day 1

Friday May 9th

Today was an early start at 6am. We were seen off by our tour guide, who looked suspiciously like she was on her way into the hotel from a night out. As they hand over their charges to local guides for the trails, this town is where all the guides get to party.

Anyway the three of us from the group met with the three others who would be doing the trek with us, a couple from England and Ireland, and a girl from Australia. We had a 2 hour drive to our breakfast point, and then another hour to our drop off point for our trek. We were already in quite a remote area but we were walking into even more remote areas. But our guide, Jose, did seem to know his stuff, and we did have porters and horses to carry our heavy gear.

In fact for those who don't know how this sort of think works, ou really only have to carry your own day pack with a few bits and pieces. All the hard work is done by the porters. They set up camp before you get there, and take it down after you leave, and they still get between the two faster than you do. Some of it is due to their comfort with the altitude, but also just the fact that we are all really city people in the west these days.

Still today wasn't too bad. We started at 3700 metres, and walked up to a pass at 4400 metres. We were fairly fast going, and in fact got to our lunch spot before they were ready for us, so they moved lunch to after the pass. The scenery was pretty spectcular, and as this is supposed to be a cultural trek (rather than the archelogical trek of the Inca trail we got to meet some of the local kids and give them little presents (marbles, ballons that sort of thing).

Once we reached the top, the walk downhill was fairly easy. In total the walk was 12k. Our camp site was at 3650 and was pretty cold, not too far off freezing, but the tents were pretty decent, and we had good floor mats (much better than my cheap one). The meal cooked for us was pretty outstanding, it is amazing what these chess can do with just two rings on a gas stove. As it gets dark early here, 6ish, by about 9pm it seems like a lot later. So it was off to bed early, as we were going to have a hard day they next day.