The Adventures of Andrew Maurer

The bus was a big touristy looking double decker bus. We were thrilled to see such varied landscapes – countrysides, deserts, the impoverished outskirts of Lima. We weren’t so thrilled openning Alex’s bag to find that his laptop had been swapped with a Cruz Del Sur pillow. It’s a huge blow – not only is there the lost value of the laptop, but it will now be much more difficult to process and upload photos to the internet. We’ll have to find hostels with computers and we won’t be able to edit the photos since we don’t expect hostel computers to have photo editing software installed.

What happened was that a man got on the bus like everyone else and was behind us. He helped Alex get his daybag up onto the luggage racks above our heads. We sat down. Ten minutes later, we saw the man leave the bus, still in Lima. We later found out that he claimed to have forgot something important in Lima. 30 minutes later Alex went to get his bag and found that the laptop was gone and there was a Cruz Del Sur pillow in its place.

We arrived in Huaraz and there was a security guard who checked every passenger’s bag for the laptop as they disembarked. We had told the worker on the bus and he had called ahead to the bus station and reported the theft. No luck. Teo from Caroline’s lodging then picked us up and drove us to and helped translate first at the normal police department and then at the tourist police department. The policeman said that if we really wanted (as if he were really inconvenienced) that we could get a police report, but we would have to wait until the bank opened on monday to buy some sort of special official paper for S4 ($1.33). He said that he couldn’t help us further because he claims it is the responsibility of Lima’s police department. He then told us that if we were to go to Lima’s police department that they would claim it is the responsibility of Huaraz’s police department. I couldn’t believe he was saying this. I asked him, so.. “la policia de Peru no funciona?”. “si”.

We went to Caroline’s hostel and were happy to unpack our bags. I hadn’t wanted to unpack my big bag in Lima since I figured it would be near impossible to get everything back in. We then went for dinner – I had 1/4 chicken with fried rice, salad and fries and Alex had the special with some sort of noodles, rice, and meat. It was quite the test for me to have another chicken dinner (we were served chicken pasta for lunch on the bus). This was because as we were leaving Lima we saw a filthy pickup truck loaded with probably 100 chickens – dead… de-feathered… slimy.. and ready to be taken to restaurants for preparation. It tasted fine – it even came with some spicy salsa.

The next day we followed the GPS track to Wilkaiwan. As we left Huaraz at 7:30am, the people in the streets were already getting ready. We each bought 5 fresh and piping hot buns for S1 each ($0.33). It was a relativelty short hike, bringing us from Huaraz at 3100m to a high point at 3600m. Including stops, detours, and lunch at a restaurant when we got back to Huaraz it was about 6 hours. We were happy to get back and have hot showers.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to go for a hike with a high point over 4000m. We may begin the Santa Cruz trek the following day (3-4 days).

Note: The following photos don’t look very good since they were imported by Picassa and were somehow “auto-enhanced”. I’m not sure what the palabra is for auto-enhance, so I’m not sure how to turn it off. I’m hoping to figure it out. It’s too bad I’m such a cheapskate and don’t want to pay more than S1 ($0.33) for internet. It’s more the principle of charging your own clients for internet when they’re already paying S35 per night.