Intense Hiking

Argh I´m trying to find flights to Cuzco so that we can go to Macchu Picchu after volunteering, but they are so expensive. The bus ride there would be 14+ hours and is apparently pretty awful and everyone says don´t do it. So that leaves taking the plane, the cheapest of which I can find is over 200 round trip, plus another 100 for while we are there taking the train to Macchu Picchu and actually being there. Gross. I don´t want to do it but I do. We´ll see.
Anyway, yesterday, we went to a glacier in Huaytapallana (meaning where flowers gather, in Quechua), about a two hour bumpy combi ride away from Huancayo. We drove alongside a river, often going over really narrow bridges or even driving through it. I went with the other volunteers and a group of other people who had come up from Lima to hike the mountain. Bundled up with a ton of layers because we were so high up and near the snow. The base of the mountain was at about 15,000 feet and we hiked 8 km total (about 5 miles). The way there was really tough because I got pretty bad altitude sickness combined with the exertion of hiking. Stomach ache, headache, dizziness, all that good stuff. Had to rest a lot and really wasn´t feeling well. Eventually, the guide gave me coca leaves to chew on and those helped a lot - I didnt feel sick for the rest of the day. It´s what everyone here uses for altitude sickness and I was pretty desparate at that point. Yes, coca leaves are the basis of cocaine, but to make a tiny amount of cocaine, they use a tonnnn of coca leaves. Went up one mountain, back down the other side, up and down another, and then arrived at the glacier after a little over three hours of hiking. It was gorgeous, really out in the middle of nowhere, way out in the Andes. As we were hiking, we passed a bunch of lakes and lagoons, some of them an ugly brown and others a beautiful agua-marine color that reminded me of Laguna Quilotoa, the crater lake that I went to in the Ecuadorian Andes. Snow peaked mountains, glaciers in the distance, vast endless brown mountains, green fields everywhere we looked. The path was pretty dangerous, lots of walking on unstable rocks and near cliffs, but luckily no one got hurt. There was a little boy hiking with us who the guide somehow managed to carry on his shoulders and run despite all of the barriers on the path. Eventually after lots of water and chocolate and what seemed like forever, we could see the glacier. From a distance, I could see pèople trekking up the mountain pretty far up, and I thought that was what we were going to do. I was too tired to be able to do that so thought I wasnt going to get to climb the glacier. As it turned out, our group just climbed a little bit up the glacier, pulling ourselves up against a rope that the guide had brought. When we reached a certain point, we sled down the glacier on tarps, which was really fun but pretty scary because it seemed like we wouldn´t ever stop. The guide stopped us by pretty much letting us slam into him. The glacier had icicles hanging down from it and was this enormous mass of ice and snow so huge that I couldn´t even see the top of it from where I stood at the bottom. An intense journey there but definitely worth it. The hike back was really easy in comparison and we walked really fast the whole way back with very few breaks. A little bit of uphill but not too much. A lot of the downhill was steep and I had no idea how we had been able to walk up that on the way there. Arrived back at the bottom and most people had chicken soup because it was so cold, I just had some coffee to warm up - all they have here in instant, thought, not very good but at least it was hot.
After the ride back, I did my spanish homework (just writing a little bit of past tense stuff in Spanish about the day) and then knocked out without dinner by 7:30, we were all so exhausted. Slept a tonnn.
This morning after breakfast, we went to the Sunday market, which is a pretty big thing in Huancayo. Longer walk there than we thought, but not too bad and managed not to get lost. There was a long road with tons of stalls of everything from American clothes and shoes to Peruvian jewlery and traditional clothing and bags and food and artwork and anything you can think of. Pretty similar to the one that I went to in Ecuador, but a bit bigger. Bargained a lot and bought a bunch of stuff. The people were actually less willing to bargain than the people in Ecuador, but I still managed to get some pretty good deals, just walked away from the people who wouldn´t bargain with me. We were the only foreigners at the market, I still haven´t seen a single other foreigner in Huancayo besides the volunteers. I would think there would be at least a few.
I wish I could put pictures up, but my computer is dead and the computers here don´t have slots to put my camera card into and I didnt bring along the cord. So you´ll have to wait for pictures till I can charge my computer again in Nazca or Cuzco in a couple of weeks.
I locked myself out of my room and the house and the volunteer coordinators are out in the mountains until later tonight, so I have to wait to go back to the house until the others are back from buying chicken at the open market. Hopefully they will be back soon, though.