goodbye huaraz!

I’m about to leave Huaraz, and I can’t believe how fast time has gone by. I saw, experienced and learned so much, that I don’t know how to summarize it. I can’t even remember how I saw things a couple months ago, because so many things have just gotten natural to me now. For me that’s a fluent process, and so I can’t imagine that most of my friends have no idea of the life that I’ve been living here. Not only the school, in which I was working, but also the culture and the daily routine in Huaraz have influenced my experiences here. I remember how, quite a long time ago, so many things were completely new and weird for me. For example that you buy bread by the price. Or that you “don’t trow of paper on the toilet” (in Julia’s words). There are still things that I don’t understand or that I’m not used to, but sometimes I really feel like I’ve been living in Peru for a while. I know where to buy what, have an overview about the area and also my Spanish is good enough to survive. Only my Salsa-dancing still needs some practicing. And even though I have to get out of Huaraz from time to time, I know I’m gonna miss it.

In a few days I will exchange my house to a life, where I’ll constantly be moving and living out of a backpack. On one hand I really can’t wait to “hit the road” and on the other hand I have to admit that I’m a little nervous about it. I just know that it’s exhausting to be travelling all the time and I guess I also shouldn’t forget that South America isn’t the same as Europe. But I think after being here for a couple months I’m not all that ill-prepared and I’m looking forward to all the things and places I will see and experience.

All I know now though, is that I’ll be heading south, and spend New Year’s in Cusco.

paracas, peru

As it’s starting to get summer here now, we followed the invitation of a friend to go camping to Paracas for a weekend.
School ended on Wednesday, after a workshop day and two parties, and so Kato and I went to Lima on Thursday night. We arrived early in the morning, and went then to get breakfast close to a friend’s house. Unfortunately the McDonald’s only opened at 8, so we had some time to kill, which we spent hanging around in the parking lot between all our stuff.
After breakfast we woke Miguel up, so we could leave our bags at his house and spend the day in Miraflores and Barranco. Miguel decided to come with us, and our first stop was the Chocolate museum in Miraflores – some friends had  told me about it, and we all agreed that it’s a must-see.  It is a very small, cute museum, and you get a free tour where they give you some infos about cocoa and the process of making chocolate. But the best part was definitely the little museum shop and all the free samples you get to try.
After that we separated, and Kato and I did a little bit of shopping, before we took a bus to Barranco, another nice part of Lima which is also a little quieter.
There we went to the beach, ate our lunch, and waited for Miguel to get off from work. He picked us up, we had dinner together at his house, and even though we were more than tired, we went to this cool bar again, where I’d already been once before.
There we met some other people, and also Maria and her boyfriend had arrived in Lima by then.
On the next day we had to get up very early, and then left straight for Paracas, which is a 3-4 hour drive.
Paracas is a little town, not only in the desert but also in a bay. It has lots of nice and expensive houses and most of them are just used for vacations. Close to Paracas is the entrance to the “National Reserve of Paracas”, where we went to set up our camp – off the road, right at the beach and in the middle of the desert. We were quite a bunch of people, and after we put up out tents and stuff, we started with our “windsurfing lessons”. Some of the girls there were not only pretty good windsurfers themselves, but also teachers. In the beginning I didn’t really want to try, since I’d never been on a surfboard before, but I convinced myself to try it and I was really glad I did. It was a lot easier than I expected it to be, and a lot of fun. Unfortunately the wind got pretty strong early in the afternoon, and so no one really felt like going into the water anymore. So we just hung out at the beach, went back to Paracas to the store, and in the evening we grilled.
Still, I was very tired, so I didn’t stay up too late and went to my “bed” in the back of Miguel’s car soon.
In the morning I woke up early, because the car felt like an oven, and went for a little walk along the water. It looked like a great day, and it was really hot. We went swimming, and windsurfing again, and I just spend all the time in the sun (which paid back with a nice, little sunburn). This day the windsurfing was a little harder because we had a bigger sail and the wind was stronger, and so it was really exhausting. But I was still happy we got the opportunity to try it J
We packed our stuff in the afternoon, and before we left for Lima, Ale and Miguel took us to another bay, way off road through the desert. It was an amazing spot, and we just sat there and enjoyed the view for a while, while some of the guys got on their surfboards again and did some “wave-windsurfing” – looks pretty awesome.
But then it was time to go back, and after dropping Maria and her boyfriend off in Paracas, we started out journey back to Lima.
There we had pizza, watched a movie and spent one more night at Miguel’s house, before I went back to Huaraz on Monday and Kato left for Cusco.

trujillo, peru

Because of our engagement and our hard work AUFWIND (the organization I work for in the school) told us that they would pay for a small trip for our teachers and us volunteers. We had a hard time deciding where to go and especially when, but after all we found a weekend where everybody was free and went to Trujillo, a city on the coast of Peru.
After a little stress at the busstation because our teachers showed up late and last minute before the bus left, we went on a night ride to the west, from the mountains again back to sea level.
We arrived in Trujillo at 4 am, and then took a taxi to our hostel, which was a little outside in Huanchaco, and there Maria and I went to sleep for a couple more hours while the teachers already took off to the beach and downtown Trujillo.
After an amazing breakfast and a little discussion about where to meet, Maria and I went to downtown as well where we all met up again and started a tour to see some of the sights around Trujillo (there are LOTS of ruins).  We had our own “private taxi”, which brought us to all the places and there we always had a guide. First we went to the “Huaca de la Luna”, a temple built by the Moche culture in the desert. I really liked it, even though I didn’t understand everything because our guided tour was all in Spanish. But the ruins were impressive and there was a lot of art, which I though was really cool. After that we went to have lunch in Trujillo (so much food!) before taking off again to other ruins. This time we went to the more famous ruins of Chan Chan, by the the Chimu culture. The original city of Chan Chan is huge, and a lot of it is still not excavated. So we only went to a temple, and one of the palaces where the “kings” were buried. Just this one palace was so big, that I had a really hard time believing that it was only one out of 10. It was also pretty impressive, but the whole sightseeing-thing started to get exhausting and understanding the Spanish got harder. That’s why I was kind of happy when the tour was over – even though that didn’t mean that our day was over, because we still had to go “shoe-shopping”. Our teachers told us that shoes are cheap in Trujillo because they are made there, but we were not prepared for what was awaiting us. Isles and isles full of little “cabins” full of shoes – it was overwhelming, and after a while we couldn’t see the shoes anymore. But I found a really nice pair, which was the goal, and after Maria found something too, we tried to get out of there and back to the hostel as fast as possible. We asked around for the right bus to Huanchaco, and back at the hostel we enjoyed having a quiet evening with some good dinner (waffles with chocolate and fresh fruits, mhhhh!) before passing out after this long day.
On the next day I woke up very early – but I actually enjoyed it, because I could have some time for myself on the rooftop reading my book before everybody else got up. We all had breakfast together (the food at the hostel was really good, and this day I dared to have fish for breakfast, which I did not regret), and then a long meeting about work. But after that we finally went to the beach, which was just right next to the hostel. There were quite a lot of people, but we found a nice spot, hung out there, went swimming and I enjoyed being on the coast. Our teachers also got some fishing rods and Madeley really caught a fish (which found a sad ending in a little plastic bag) – they were really excited about getting out of Huaraz and being in a bigger city and on the beach.
For lunch we went back to the hostel, then back to the beach again. But this time we just walked around and looked at the famous “caballitos”, some traditional little boats made out of reed.
Then we split up again, because the teachers wanted to buy some more shoes (I couldn’t believe it because each of them already got back to the hostel with a huge bag of shoes the night before) and Maria and I felt more like hanging out at some nice place (so we found a McDonalds with a nice view over the main square haha). We already had our backpacks with us, so we could go straight to the bus after that, because it was already time to go back to Huaraz.
So we spent another night on a bus, before arriving up at 3000m again early in the morning.