As I packed my bags on the last evening of our stay at Llanganuco Lodge, I felt the ground sway beneath my feet. I’ve been known to experience random dizzy spells, but this felt different. Instead of feeling as though I were spinning in circles, it felt as though my feet were literally swaying back and forth on the ground below for a couple seconds.

“Could that have been an earthquake?” I wondered. It seemed doubtful, and Schuyler wasn’t nearby so I couldn’t ask if he had felt it too. I shrugged it off as a dizzy spell and didn’t think …Read More

Llanganuco Lodge is located at the foot of Mount Huandoy and is just a 5-minute walk from the edge of the Huascaran National Park. The park, which was established to protect the Cordillera Blanca mountain range in Peru, is an Unesco World Heritage site and home to the world’s highest tropical mountain, Mount Huascaran. On our second full day at the lodge, Schuyler and I decided go on a day trek to Laguna 69. It’s a famous trek through the Cordillera …Read More

The view the next morning was breathtaking. Having had no clue what our surroundings looked like the night before, Schuyler and I were shocked at the scene in front of us. We discovered that the house we were staying in overlooks a beautiful valley that Andean farmers cultivate for a living. The vast land below us had been divided into plots of varying shades of green, yellow and brown, and in the distance we could see grazing cows and bumbling sheep making their way from one lush pasture to the next. In the distance, mountaintops disappeared into the whitest clouds …Read More

Last Wednesday Schuyler and I took a 1-hour taxi ride from Huaycan to Lima, an 8-hour bus ride from Lima to Huaraz, and then a 2-hour taxi ride from Huaraz to Llanganuco Lodge. The route from Lima to Huaraz was quite scenic; we drove along steep sand ridges that bordered the Pacific coast and through vast expanses of green farmland completely unlike the dusty foothills of Huaycan.

By the time we reached Huaraz and found our taxi driver, it was dark. We couldn’t see more than five feet out our windows, and the …Read More

It’s Saturday today, although I won’t have Internet access until next week, so this entry won’t be updated until then. And since I’m behind, I’m going to begin with this past Monday night. Hopefully it will be less confusing than it sounds.

After what seemed like ages of anticipation, I welcomed Schuyler to Peru late last Monday night. I stood staring intently at the entrance for the international arrivals for about 20 minutes before Schuyler found me. We must have crossed paths somehow—he heading outside and I heading inside—and he found me before I found him. It was a wonderful, surreal …Read More