First of all, if you look at the map over to the right, it appears as if my city hopping is a simple trip to the next town over... this is deceiving. In fact, the distance between each city is at least 7 hours on a bus...usually 10. Fortunately, the buses here are the big luxury coaches and nothing like the "chicken bus" experience through Central America.

Huaraz is situated in the 2nd highest mountain range in the world and is surrounded by 22,000 foot snow-capped peaks called the Cordillera Blanca (White Corridor) . I arrived here with my travel mates Jakob, Cheri and Chris and checked into some crap hotel that only costs 10 soles a night (about $2.90). The next day, Chris and Cheri took off to do the famous 4 day Santa Cruz trek through the valley while Jakob and I took a more relaxed approach by hiking to the local "mirador" (look-out point), finding a new hostel, and then seeking out the coldest beer in town. But, like always, everyone I meet and get along with well has somewhere to be much sooner than I ever need to go there and soon after, I was on my own again. The next day however, I met a really cool Australian kid wandering around cluelessly because he had just arrived in South America the day before and couldn't speak a word of spanish... I'm surprised he even made it here... after getting taken by a crooked taxi driver in Lima for $40 for a ride that should have cost $3, I suppose he was just happy to be in an easy going town speaking english to me. After proper intros we decided to look into some day trips to check out the cool scenery around here.

One thing I've recently noticed which is cool is that whenever I was traveling in a group of people, there was always one person who was sort of the default leader that did all the talking and negotiating because they had the best spanish... that person is now almost always me. Whenever I am in a group now and the person we are dealing with says something ridiculously fast that just sounds like one huge incomprehensible word... everyone just turns and looks at me with wide eyes and mouths hanging open awaiting a translation. That's kinda fun.

So I am missing some cool pictures from this beautiful area because I lost a few memory cards to a pickpocket in Lima... which is where I am writing from now... so those photos are gone. Still have my camera though so that's good. I hate when I get lazy and don't watch my crap properly... there's is always someone watching for you if you aren't. Hopefully, I will be able to get pictures od the mountains from Jakob or my new Ozzy buddy when they come back through Lima.... until then, there's only 5.