laguna 69, peru

This week, again, we only had very little school. So we decided to go for a hike, since we haven’t done many yet and time is just flying by.
Through our friend from the hostel we booked a bus that would take us to the Laguna 69, one of the most visited lakes in the area. The bus picked us up at our house at 6.30 in the morning and off we went. The bus ride was quite long, a little over 3 hours. First we went up north through a few other towns, and then the way took us up on an unpaved road to the east. We entered the Huascaran National Park, and kept going for another while. The weather was terribly foggy - we passed another one of the best known lakes, the Laguna Llanganuco, but all we could see was white fog and mist.
At the beginning of the trail the bus dropped us off, and a guide from another tour explained us the route and when we should be back. So we were on ourselves now, but everybody told us that the trail was obvious and impossible to miss.
Maria and I met a couple from the states, and with them we started the hike, and kept meeting them every once in a while through the whole tour.
The trail first took us through grasslands with a river flowing through it, and after a while it started to get rocky and it led us upwards. Most of the time we couldn’t see much because of the fog, and sometimes the landscape reminded us of some horror movie. One time we almost got lost, because cows had trampled a little trail through some grasses and it was more visible than the real trail, because for that one we had to cross another river.
We passed another lake, just seeing that there was some water next to us, and we started to get a little worried that the fog would be that bad at our destination too. And also we started to get tired, because we just kept going up and up, and were already at an altitude of over 4000m. We knew we should be there soon, but we didn’t really know when. We were already pretty exhausted, when we met the first people coming back from the lake – and they told us that it was only ten more minutes, and also that the weather wasn’t that bad up there. Our energies came back, and the first glance at the turquoise water was just amazing. The color almost seemed unreal, and the lake was surrounded by snow covered mountains, peeking out of the fog. It was cold, but that didn’t influence our enjoyment for the view – it really looked like the pictures on the post cards, and even way better.
We were the first ones of our group, so we knew we didn’t have to rush to go back. The first thing we did was to sit down and eat – and then we took tons of pictures, hoping that at least some of them would catch the beautiful scenery.
After about an hour we started our way back down, which was (obviously) a lot easier and faster than going up. Again we walked right through the fog, sometimes not seeing more than what was 10m in front of us. It took us an hour less to go down, and again we were the first ones. Waiting in the bus, I already fell asleep – but when we started driving that was just impossible. It felt like the road was way worse than before, and we could not sit still, but were being shook around for over an hour before we finally reached a “real street” again. I fell asleep again and when I woke up we were already close to Huaraz, it had gotten dark and was raining like hell.
We were tired and it was cold, but back at the house we had some tea and food, and were glad we spent the day out in nature. Also we could cross something from our long list of things we still have to do here. And now we know why almost every tourist goes to the Laguna 69 – it was definitely worth it J