The Adventures of Andrew Maurer

Luckily Alex slept through the night and was starting to feel a bit better. He had decided the night before to try to put his pack on a donkey if it was heading down this morning. We slowly got our things together and Miguel made us breakfast – eggs with bacon and a “soup” of condensed milk with flour. It was actually pretty tasty. Alex wasn’t able to eat much, but did have a small amount of soup.

When no donkey came, we began to head down. We were going to hike down to Hualcayan and hopefully get a car back to Caraz from there, which would save the 3-4 hour hike to Cashabampa. Miguel warned us that it was Sunday and that there would be less traffic. We said our goodbyes to Miguel and left him our cheese and sausage as a token of appreciation. Alex also left him some money. Miguel said that we were welcome back any time.

It was about 3.5 hours back to Hualcayan. We arrived in the early afternoon. The whole way walking down the valley we could see the one road into Hualcayan and I was watching for cars. Not one in the whole time we were descending! I was reminded about how small Hualcayan actually is.

I asked the one person who was there in town with a car and asked about returning to Caraz. He said that there wouldn’t be any cars going back to Caraz this afternoon and that it would cost S90 ($30) for a private taxi back to Caraz. I said that we only had S20, so he said that we could catch a ride with him when he went into town at 4am the next morning.

After about 4 hours of waiting, I had given up on a car a while ago, a car came and I ran up to it and asked if he was going to Caraz. When he said si, I jumped with joy. Neither Alex nor I had been enthusiastic about the prospect of tenting a night, waking up at 3:30am, and commuting back to Huaraz in the wee hours of the morning. It was about 1.5 hours back to Caraz down a very poor road that switchbacked endlessly down the mountains and back to the valley where the main highway is.

We payed S7 each for the ride to Caraz and the family that was driving us was very kind and drove us right to the collectivo station. We arrived just past sunset and then got on the 1h40m collectivo back to Huaraz, S6 again.

I had been crossing my fingers that they’d have a spare room at Caroline’s Lodging, our hostel in Huaraz. I was worried that it would be full since we were arriving so late. Luckily there was a room available, though it was tiny and a matrimonial. We were relieved to be back and went straight to sleep.