Walking the Lares Valley trek [34/50]

About 100 Kms outside Cusco branching off the famous Sacred Valley, with it’s numerous Inca ruins, is the Lares Valley that is possibly the most pretty valley that I have ever traversed. Peru and the other Andean countries are not short of valleys, and there are thousands of them each with their own unique geographic and cultural character (Australians got ripped off in this respect). Traveling through South America has certainly challenged my understandings of both space and time, and it is not that the world has not got smaller, people have got smaller. People may now easily move from place to place, either geographically, economically, or socially, but there is very little that resembles civilisation in between (I am thinking Singapore or Kuala Lumpur here and Oscar Wilde once said something like this about that great northern nation). In other words, poor Andean peasants use ponies, but rich Modern peasants use aircraft! And not far from Cusco where I am now, in Amazonian, there are some “uncontacted tribes” or, at least, tribes that reject Modernity. But I wonder what tools they use to tell people to f..ck off, thankfully we will never find out (maybe they unfriend people).

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Dramatic and varied Lares Valley ticks all the boxes of a fantastic cultural trek, similar to Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit of old, crossing a high mountain pass of 4450m. The trek starts in Lares, but as Chris and I didn’t have lots of time, we paid a local man with something that resembled a car to drive us to the next village, Wacahuasi (we could have possibly bought the car with the amount he charged us).

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Wacahuasi is a rustic and isolated village with a picturesque adobe church, thatch-roofed houses and too many Llamas. We asked directions at the local hostel then set off up the valley, not knowing how long it would take us to get over the pass to the other side, to a town with a road. The first part of the trek was easy, moving through the spectacular river valley with the locals doing whatever they do with Llamas. As we got higher up the pass, the air began to thin, and the clouds started to envelop the mountain peaks, nice to watch, but no fun if the weather changes which may occur at any moment at these heights. I spotted a man with a pack of ponies way down in the valley from where we had come, and 15 minutes later, he was overtaking us on the pass. What had taken us two hours to climb, the man had done in a similar amount of time it took me to role a cigarette. Chris noted that Andeans have extra powerful lungs, as opposed to us Moderns that have extra powerful bellies. Chris tried to converse with the man, but as he spoke Quechua (the language of the Incas), he didn’t understand. Chris remarked that after 600 years of colonisation, they still can’t speak Spanish.

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We reached the top of the gravel and slippery pass, gasping for air, and my draw dropped as I witnessed one of the Andes great money shots. On the other side of the pass was a deep river valley with a beautiful blue lake (with frolicking Llamas). We hadn’t expected this as admittedly we weren’t that well prepared, nor informed about Lares Valley. We walked down the pass, past the lake (where the man with the ponies was having lunch with his mates), and continued along the river valley, past some weird looking vegetation and still more Llamas.

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After an hour or two of walking past huge waterfalls and snowy Andean peaks, we rounded a corner and came across yet another beautiful lake, more beautiful than the first. This lake had close by, man-made rock walls (to fence in the Llamas) and jagged, snowy peaks just to frame the picture a little better. I took some photos and experienced one of those few moments in this long journey where one feels totally overwhelming by their environment, jolting them into a reality that pummels their subjectivity, forcing one to engage with the world much bigger than oneself

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2 responses to “Walking the Lares Valley trek [34/50]”

  1. Sean Avatar

    Outstanding!!!

  2. Karen Avatar
    Karen

    Hi Craig
    Lots of llamas, the traditional home of weavers and farmers- amazing vistas.
    Take care
    Karen

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