Lima and Huaraz

Since leaving Ica and the sand dunes, I've been to Lima, Huaraz, and now I'm in Huanchaco Beach on my way up the coast. I made life really easy on myself in Lima and had a good time with it. I believe I was there for four nights, which is not what I had been planning on. I was only there because I had to go through the capital in order to catch a bus to Huaraz.
I headed to a very relaxed hostel in Boranco with a lot of character. Joe and I had checked it out when we had been in Lima in early October and had decided we'd eventually come back and stay. The rooftop patio was an excellect place to hang out, with beautiful veiws of the ocean which was just a five minute walk down the hill.
I stuck around for a few days and relaxed. One day I went surfing, another day I wandered around the whole district and found some street musicians, and on one of the evenings I treated myself to a seaside buffet. I stuffed myself stupid while watching the sun set over the water. I was so full, that once I managed to slowly walk back up to the hostel I climbed into bed and passed out until the next day.
Among other things, I read a book about the Italian coutryside, and had a wrestling match with some little French kids. They didn't speak english but they made it clear they wanted trouble when one day I entered the living room and was greeted with a playful growl, a pillow to the face, and a kick to the shins. The two boys were probably around 5 and 7 years old and they were a lot of fun. They were traveling with their father, their very pregnant mother, and an aunt, all just hanging out at a hippy hostel in Peru, making big meals every night in the kitchen. It was my first encounter with children travelers on my trip.
When I was done being lazy I finally hopped onto a bus and made the 7 hour ride to Huaraz, the hiking center of Peru, and the starting point to some of the best hikes in the Andes Mountains. While there I did a couple of day hikes, and a three day trek. One day I just did an aimless jot through some hills surrounding the city, and another day I took a taxi to some ruins up and outside of town, and from there hiked back down to some thermal baths on the edge of the city. It was about a two hour walk down and I had some puppy dogs follow me the whole way. They had playfully come up to me at the ruins and I gave each of them some of my snack and a good stratch behind the ears. From there on out they were mine. They followed at my heels and brushed up against my legs all the way to the thermal baths where I had to say goodbye. No dogs allowed.
At the thermal baths I met some Argentinian girls. When we got to talking we found that while I was hiking down from the ruins, they had arrived in Huaraz and moved their things into the same room at the same hostel I was staying at. Two guys from Uruguay were the only others in the room at the time and when we all met back up later that night we found that the guys had already met the Argentinians breifly earlier on their trip. I guess that just goes to show how small the backpacking world can be.
 We all had a good time with the full room. One of the guys had a nice ukelele that he could play excellently so we had some nice jam sessions with that and my guitar. I felt kind of bad at time being the only one that didn't speak fluent spanish. It wouldn't have been a huge problem but all of their accents just seemed so strange compared to the Peruvian spanish I had been learning from. I'm at the point where I can carry on a semi decent conversation with a clear speaking peruvian, but everything seemed different with these guys. with their shortened words, different accent, and pace of speech, I had a hard time understanding even the simplest of things and had to convert back to english much more often then I wanted to, or usually have to.
 When I headed off on my three day trek they were all planning on heading up the coast within the next day or so. We said goodbye with expectations of seeing one another again somewhere down the road as we were all heading to the same beach town.