My day tour from Huaraz on Saturday 2nd June, 2018.

I’m having a rest day today. Sunday?? Day of rest?? After a long 10 hour day on a tour (with Mony Tours) from here to various of places of interest in the region in a bus that’s past it’s use by date. If I’d known how bad the bus was going to be I’d have booked with another tour operator. The tour itself was interesting, though, and worth the 60 soles I paid (overpaid??). I think I saw the same tour for 45 soles with a different tour operator (probably on a better bus). The Mony Tours bus I was on had little or no suspension, rattled the whole trip, had no air conditioning and was hot and stuffy, only a Spanish speaking guide and my seat had no leg room so I had bruised knees at the end. To cap it off, my aisle seat was next to a passenger who pulled the curtains and slept for much of the journey, so I couldn’t enjoy the spectacular mountain scenery! The first stop was at the town of Yungay, where we toured the remains of the town destroyed in the devastating Sunday afternoon, 31 May 1970 landslide/avalanche triggered by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake just off the coast of Peru, almost wiping out the entire population of the town; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Ancash_earthquake - looking at the area destroyed by the avalanche it’s hard to believe it could have travelled so far from the towering mountains surrounding the area and it’s understandable that the residents would have felt quite safe there, so far from the mountains. It is considered to be the world’s deadliest avalanche.

From Yungay the tour bus climbed high into the Andes in the Corderillas Blanca area on unsealed narrow roads to a place where it appears another landslide blocked a valley high in the mountains creating a small picturesque lake (Laguna De Llanganuco) of turquoise water at an altitude of 3850 metres. I suffered the same breathlessness there as I did in Cusco. The surrounding snow-covered mountains are nothing short of spectacular, some rising to almost 7,000 metres, and so steep some resembled the Matterhorn in Switzerland! I took lots of photos there. This was the highlight of the day. Native Peruvian women were serving Coca Tea and traditional Peruvian food such as Cuy (Guinea Pig) with beans and corn – I just had some tasty deep fried, sweet, corn bread cooked in a small stone room so dark you could hardly see what the women were doing, knowing we were stopping for dinner on our way back to Huaraz and only an hour or so from this stop. I had the fish and chips there – the fish was trout, butterflied and boned out, coated with seasoned cornflour and deep fried – very nice, actually, and only $9.00.

The last stop, half an hour from Huaraz, was at a shop selling pottery and ceramics – of no interest to me as I have no room for souvenirs in my backpack but a popular stop for some of the other tourists on the bus, all of whom were of Spanish ethnicity (I was the only Gringo on the tour). Got back into Huaraz around 8pm and walked back to my Airbnb from the tour depot to get some exercise.

Mañana I may do one more tour from here before heading to Trujillo, further North but on the coast, on Tuesday, 5^th, where I’ll spend maybe 4 or 5 days exploring that area.

My sweet corn bread snack cooked in a room so dark you could hardly see, about to be served - $1.00.

The remains of an upturned partly buried building in Yungay after the 1970 landslide.