Reading The Time Traveller´s Wife, and in it came across a nice poem by Derek Walcott. It´s about finding yourself...

Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved

you all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Aaargh, Huaraz...
Got up at 4am but half an hour later, at the trek agency, I heard the trek was canceled for today. They hadn´t been able to warn us because they didn´t know what hotel we were in. Apparently one of their groups had just turned back from another trek, and their minibus had been bombarded with stones by the strikers, making them very afraid. This is the second day of the strike and the agency doesn´t want to take the risk.

So I´m stuck here one more day, but there are worse places to be stuck in. Because this is kind of like paradise... At the risk of deterring the non-foodies from continuing to read this blog... food has everything to do with that. I guess I should call this blog tobiaseatinginperu. Anyway, so yesterday i went to the vegetarian restaurant again, had big soup, big plate with lentils, rice and seitan, and then went to eat at another restaurant with other friends. I had already been in that one, and that time I had ordered a BIG pasta (which was not really an option on the menu and which the guy made bigger especially for me) and had ordered another one after that. So when I came in this time, the guy recognized me and asked me ´do you want a big one again´and I say ´no thanks, normal, I´ve just eaten' :-) Damn, I´m such a glutton.
Soon I´ll go to Cafe Andino again and have another one of their heavenly breakfasts. Need to eat a lot on my last day before the trek - which I have been saying for three days now...

Perhaps some people may find it strange that I´m online so much, but when you travel for three months, you take your time and this blog serves as my personal diary. Also it´s obviously nice to be in touch with the homebase. I can do anything here: skype, webcamming, msn (add me at go_veggie@hotmail.com if you like).

Still in Huaraz.
Ok, the strike is ´fuerte´, as they say, and we can´t leave Huaraz today. So we will go tomorrow and hope we can get out then. Getting up at 4am. We have decided to join an organized group (without eating their food or using their tents) to be safer. Several people have been killed by bandits on this trail, and we figure that if we´re a group of ten, they won´t stop us so easily.
We´ve been shopping at the market yesterday and today for food. Here´s a (very dark) picture of what I´m taking, for a week. Apart from this, there´s also rice and pasta.

Something more about food, which remains a very important subject...

Yesterday I had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant. Big soup, meal, drink and salad for about 1 €. Some of the veg restaurants here serve meat too. I had picked the dish of the day, and hadn´t asked what it contained. I took a few bites from the meat substitute that was on the plate and it tasted and felt suspiciously like chicken. As the waitress passed by I asked ´no carne, right?´ She said ´si, carne´. At that moment I spit out what was in my mouth, but then she added ´Carne vegetal´. Phew.

I had dinner at the wonderful Cafe Andino again. Don´t know if I already talked about it, but it´s a wonderful interior, a library, a balcony with a view on the Andes... They only thing they have to eat, apart from pies, is big breakfasts, but they are available all day. So at 8pm I had a veggie breakfast, consisting of thea, fresh orange juice, a big bowl of fruit with muesli, three sauces, two slices of toast with bread, and a big dish of potatoes with vegetables and three big slabs of tofu - first time I saw tofu here. Wonderful. At 3 euro it was quite expensive for Peruvian standards.

On the street you can get big pieces of watermelon or pineapple for 0,15 euro. At lunch today we had a liter of juice for 0,60 euro. It was a filling meal in itself.

To give you an idea of how Huaraz is situated, here´s a picture. You can hardly see it, but it´s in the centre of the photo.

Hmm, looks like we may not be able to leave tomorrow yet. There may be a general strike. In that case the trek is postponed a day, and we might go iceclimbing instead. Veremos...

A postmodern picture: me blogging in a cybercafe. As you can see I found out that my electric razor plug actually fits the power outlet here. I left my sideburns (sloppy job, I know) because this is the place to experiment and because I want to introduce the Peruvians to the Fine Art of Elvis Imitation :-)

Huaraz, rest day and preparation for the trek.

I decided to start the Huayhuash circuit tomorrow and will be back the next Monday. If you´d like to know more about the trek, see http://www.i-needtoknow.com/huayhuash/index.html. It sounds quite scary from this page, but we´ve met enough people who´ve done it and I´m sure we´ll be fine.

Yesterday night I attended a church service, to get soaked into some more culture. Weird spectacle. The seats were plastic garden chairs, and in front were drums, big microphones, keyboards... There was a veeeeeery long talk by someone - guess it was not a priest - which I understood only for 30 percent. Then this same guy started to talk for fifteen minutes in a weird language, I can only guess Hebrew. As if he was excorcizing devils or something. All of a sudden, he started to cry, I don´t know for what reason. It kept on and on and I left before the service was finished.

Health flash: apart from the pain that I had in my neck and higher back, I have no problems. Crap is looking OK. Just some blood when I blow my nose - dunno what that means - and a slight cold. I guess I´m pretty safe, not eating animal products.

Yesterday on the road up the mountains, they were playing Let it Be in the car. It struck me for the first time what a wonderfully wise song this is, and that to let it be might just be the biggest thing one can ever learn in life.

Thought of this: ´Wherever we are, we are on our way home´
Would this get me in the Oxford Quotations Dictionary? :-)

See you all later!

Tobias

Around Huaraz
Another fun but exhausting day. We drove up the mountains of the Cordillera Negra with a little bus. On the roof were rented mountain bikes, with which we descended back to Huaraz. Most of the time we cycled downhill on dirtroads, but now and then we descended on very small and rocky tracks, where the descent was a lot more technical. Modesty forbids me to say I was the only one to dare to descend a very technical part with a lot of rocks and steps. Our guide, a very cool American dude, was apparently impressed, telling me ¨this is really your sport man!´.
All in all, it was a great experience. While going downhill on the easy parts we could appreciate the snow capped mountains of the Cordillera Blanca ahead of us. Kind of dead tired now.

I´m in a dilemma: shall I do the next trek with the guys or not? It´s the Cordillera Huyawash circuit, an 8 eight day long and very challenging trek. For one thing I feel I haven´t really rested enough, taken a real holiday, as everything was kind of physically intense so far, and 8 days is very long. On the other hand, now that I´m here... and this is one of the classic treks in the world (rated the third most beautiful, and the best in South America, I heard someone say). We´d leave on Monday but I need to make a decision soon because we have to get the burros and the arriero. Veremos...