4-day tour 'Santa Cruz'

As you can see, I not only survived the tour but also enjoyed it despite all the adversities.

We were picked up by the bus from the hostel at 6:00 in the morning and drove almost six hours (with a breakfast break) to the starting point of the hike. Even this ride was spectacular, as the bus struggled up to almost 5000 m to the pass. Despite the terrible dirt road, we enjoyed the adventurous ride with beautiful views of the Peruvian mountains.

We were a small group with only five people, of whom Torsten and I were by far the oldest. We finally started at one o'clock. We first passed through mountain villages, then the route became more remote and we gradually climbed from 3700 m to 3900 m up to the first camp. Our tents were already set up and we had tea and crackers for strength. The tents were very old and musty, the mats were thin, and not for the last time we said to ourselves, 'We are too old for this shit.' Nevertheless, we were in good spirits and satisfied with our performance today.

The second day was supposed to be the most strenuous. Like every morning, we were woken up at 5:45 am by our guide Margarita with the words 'Hola Chicos! Sunrise!' We struggled to put on our clothes in the small tent and were rewarded outside with beautiful light on the snow-covered peaks.

We started to climb the pass at 7:00 am, which had to be overcome at an altitude of 4750 m. I was actually afraid of this day because there were 850 meters of altitude to overcome, and that at such thin air. About 30 minutes after the others, I arrived completely exhausted but overjoyed at the top. On the other side of the pass, the view was much better - until then, we had unfortunately hiked through low-hanging clouds and could see little of the landscape. From the pass, we descended to our camp at 4200 m. It was cold, windy, and started to rain. We sat down to eat with hats and gloves, and after a freezing night, there was frost and frozen tent walls in the morning. As so often during this tour, we asked ourselves, 'Why do we do this to ourselves?' But after a lot of hardship and sacrifice, there were always moments of happiness when we hiked through the dreamlike mountain world or arrived exhausted but happy at the camp in the afternoon.

The third day was quite easy and only exhausting because of the length of the trail. After the pass the day before, we now steadily descended, the temperatures rose, and the landscape became more lovely. Our final camp was again by the river, and I allowed myself the luxury of washing my hair in the icy mountain water with liquid soap from Margaria.

On the last day, we only had to walk for a little over two hours to the village, and we could sleep until 6:30 am. We had bright sunshine all the way on our last stage, and we arrived at the destination really sweaty. Stinky, dirty, exhausted but happy and proud of our achievement, we took the bus back to Huaraz, where we treated ourselves to a hot shower.

On the same evening, we continued by night bus to the coast of Trujillo.