If you read that to the tune of Lady Gaga's "edge of glory" then you win.
Day Two of the Lares trek and certainly the most challenging of the four days on the trail. We woke up to some local ladies and their young girls selling their handmade goods in the middle of our campsite. Permission to do so is the exchange they barter for letting us camp on their land.
The first half of the day consisted of a 4 hour hike straight upward to the summit of 4,400m (14,500 feet). The air was rapidly thinning as the temperature dropped at an equal rate. The variety of weather we experienced on this day put East Coast fickleness to shame. It went from sunny and warm to a hail storm within 20 minutes. We spent many of our breaks sucking in little oxygen and switching out clothing layers.
The hikes seemed to get more or more beautiful. We would look behind us and could not wrap our heads around how far and how high we had hiked so far!
The trails were very narrow pathways on the very edge of the mountain, similar to the road on the way to the start. We couldn't help but peer over the edge of the trail at the long way down. It was absolutely terrifying and breathtaking.
Photographs really don't do it justice. Each break we took was mostly spent looking around, soaking it in. At this point, we were high enough to be in the clouds. This also happened to be the point of which all of the hills started to be filled with llamas. Just hundreds of wild llamas.
After 4 hours of strenuous vertical hiking, interrupted by ridiculous picture taking, we finally reached the summit! It was equally amazing as it was windy. We took some more ridiculous pictures and then basically sprinted to a lower altitude.
As we descended, the sun began to come out (again) and we stumbled (pretty much literally at this point as our legs were toast!) upon a random but beautiful lake. Willie asked us if we wanted a photo and we said "si" and did this:
I'm going to blame that on the altitude. What is even better about this moment is that this is when we saw our beloved blue tent about 100 yards away- LUNCH! If only Daniel knew how much we looked forward to seeing him each day...
After lunch we had a pretty easy hike (comparatively) to our next campsite. More views, more llamas, more ridiculous photos of each. Bored yet?
This llama and Eric share a haircut.
We followed the long and windy road shown below and finally arrived at our campsite. It was located behind the garden of a local man who kindly let us camp there and use his... Gasp... bathroom! Complete with toilet bowl and flushing water. Between that and Daniel's amazing Lomo Saltado (a Peruvian dish with steak and peppers) we felt like we were practically glamping! We had a wake up call in another 10 hours so we retired to our tent where we quickly used all 10 of those hours for rest. Minus a few more animal calls during the night, the complete dark, amazing stars, and an 8 hour day of challenging hiking made for a perfect night's rest.
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