PASTORURI GLACIER TOUR...DAY 4

As the previous few days, we had to get up early for our tour. Since we had time to walk around that morning before the tour, I decided to find another little breakfast cart to eat at. I found this one man who had a cart that looked cleaner than the elderly woman we had been going to. What made it even better is that his drinks were only S/.50 and his quaker tasted much better to me. We had breakfast and then went over to the tour agency office to wait for our bus. The bus that arrived was the smallest bus we had been in yet. It was still bigger than a combi so it was ok. Our main attraction was going to be el Nevado Pastoruri (el neh-VAH-doo pahs-toh-RU-ree) but we were going to see other things along the way. I'm not sure if this is the correct translation but I think nevado means snow peak. The Andean Mountain Range is famous because it's a tropical mountain range. Pastoruri used to be an enormous glacier but due to global warming, it's rapidly losing its body mass. It's estimated it will disappear within 10-15 years :((

Chozas

Along the way, we saw some interesting chozas (CHO-sahs: huts). Our first stop was Pumapampa (puma-PAHN-pah). It's a spring full of oxidized water. Everything was nice and orange and we could see some snow covered mountain peaks in the distance. I'm not sure how far away it is from Huaraz but I think it took us about half an hour to reach it. When you walk close to the water, there's this sort of well where you can see the water bubbling. As always, we spent about 15 minutes there, maybe even less. Our guide went on to tell us that the area had once been underwater because marine fossils had been found there.

Pumapampa

We continued on our journey until we got to the Puya Raimondi (POOH-yah rai-MON-dee)  field. We had about 15 minutes to walk around and take pictures. Puya Raimondi is a plant that only grows at altitudes of 3,800 to 4,800 meters above sea level (12,450- 15,748 feet) in the Peruvian Andes. Its lifespan is between 40 to 100 years. It can grow to be anywhere from 6 to 15 meters tall (19-50 feet) when fully erect, no pun intended :P and the round porcupine thing can be a couple of meters tall as well. It was discovered by an Italian scientist in the 1820s and named after him a little over a century later. The plant releases between 8 to 12 million seeds when it blooms, which is after about three decades. The Puya is now an endangered species. This is due to many factors: climate change, herders starting fires for farming land, a lot of Puya communities are isolated from each other causing inbreeding to occur therefore making them susceptible to diseases, insects, etc. Peruvian officials say they're taking the necessary measures to protect the endangered plant but all of us in Peru know the poor plant is going to die out because if they're doing anything at all, it isn't much.

Puya Raimondi

After we saw the Puya Raimondi plants, we got back in the car to go to our next stop which was this wall that had some drawings on it. I really don't remember if our guide told us anything about what they meant. I don't think he did and we were only there for less than 10 minutes.

Once our time was up, we got back in the van and headed towards Pastoruri, our final stop for the day. All the while we got to see a few wild animals here and there. When we finally got to Pastoruri, we parked in a sort of parking lot at 5,200 meters above sea level (approximately 17,00 feet). Our guide asked for anyone who had possible heart problems to only go to the foot of the mountain (aka the halfway point) because the climb was going to be extremely difficult for them. Then he asked us to hurry up if we wanted to ride horses all the way up to the halfway point. I didn't want to walk, so Daniel and I rented a couple of horses for S/6 each from a small Andean man. Our horse ride was about 8 minutes and I felt so bad for Daniel's horse because Daniel weighs almost 200 pounds since he's six foot two. His horse looked like it was struggling to breathe. We finally got to the foot of the mountain and since we weren't sure about what to do, we waited for our group to catch up. When our guide was about 150 meters behind, we could see he was signaling for us to walk up the mountain. We also noticed that a woman who was with her two young sons, was having a hard time walking up to the halfway point. Oh my god was that a somewhat difficult walk up! I'm pretty sure it was difficult for the both of us because we had ridden the horses up to the foot instead of walking up, so we hadn't warmed up at all. I felt a little lightheaded at times and I'm not sure if that was because of the walk uphill plus the altitude or because of the walk/altitude and the fact that I was eating along the way :P.

I felt extremely relieved when we reached the snow. The view was definitely rewarding. There were a few small lagoons, which looked like ponds to me and snow covered peaks everywhere. 

Some people decided to hike even further up and walk on the snow. I didn't want to do that because our guide had told us that Pastoruri is melting at a rapid pace so we shouldn't do anything that can cause it to melt any faster such as walking on it and getting the snow dirty because by doing so, the dirty snow would attract heat, in addition to making it unattractive. Pastoruri Glacier used to cover the top of the mountain as one solid piece of ice but now it's divided into two pieces. There also used to be an ice cave up until 2007 but it's now gone :( In it's place is a lagoon.




I was resting on a rock when Daniel decided to explore some more further up and asked me to go along with him. I really didn't want to walk anymore but Daniel gave me his puppy dog look and since he's just so darn nice to me and I'm so evil, I decided to be nice for once and go along. We walked towards where there were a lot of rocks stacked up on top of each other like in the picture below.

The climb wasn't easy but not extremely difficult at the same time. We had to be careful about where we stepped because the rocks could have gone out from under us and neither of us exactly had the proper shoes on for that kind of terrain. From there we sat on a rock and relaxed for a few minutes. That's when got the bright idea to propose and almost dropped the ring down the mountain as he was opening the box. I should have known that why he wanted to get away from the group. A few minutes later our guide began asking everyone to start heading back. We decided to deviate from the marked path and came upon some oxidized water along with a small lagoon.

It was definitely easier going back down. When we got in the car, we still had to wait for some other people for a few minutes. We must have spend about an hour and a half at Pastoruri. The guide wasn't bad but he wasn't great either. He certainly didn't tell us as much information as the guide from the Chavin tour. I had to find out that endangered Puya information on the internet. I'm glad I had the chance to go to Pastoruri before it completely disappeared and I enjoyed the tour because it was just so relaxing being there and admiring my country's beauty.