Ready to go, looking south along "our" valley to Las Tres Cruces.
Raz was so kind as to lend me his gaiters for walking through the dripping paramó - a real pants-saver, thanks man!
The valley stretched and strechted and never seemed to want to end.
When we found the Ingañan - old inca road - it was mostly a wide swathe of green through paramó tussock, occasionally with stones lying around.
The weather was promising as we crossed the ridge at the end of the valley, at which point we had to take a decision:
either continue upward and walk along the ridge of the mountain to our left,
then steeply back down to the next valley floor (plus: views, views, views;
drawbacks: wind, more climbing, steep descent)
OR
take the lower route along this valley floor (right on the picture) which
would spill into the next valley without too much in the way of steep
descent (plus: probably quicker, not having to go up, then down again, avoiding steep places with the burro; drawbacks: no views, pot very wet and marshy).
Ioana and I opted for the high road, and the guys with Ricardo and his burro for the low road. Meeting point was an old bridge in the next valley, a short way beyond the point where our paths would meet again anyway.
Who's laughing now?
Ah, I did see one large bird in the distance
Not sure what Ioana saw there, but maybe it's her Yeti impression.
Looking cool - literally
As windy and cold as the top of that ridge must be most of the time (we had a sunny day), these little buggers manage to flourish there.
Jumping for joy on top of the mountain. The trek's not really set out for great views along most of the way, so we were so happy to have come up and see the panorama (more on that later).
The beginning of the climb back down to the valley floor. It did take us 2 hours to reach our meeting point...
... which is to the bottom left of the picture (probably hidden behind the foreground), and another 1.5 hours to get to our campsite above the lake in the distance.
Filipe was right, in his comment to my previous post: our donkey was the only higher lifeform we met for most of the trip (a few riders excepted). There were few birds and one mouse in some Inca ruins as well as 2 or 3 horses and 2 donkeys after our climb down the ridge. No frogs, no nothing, even though the place couldn't possibly have been any wetter. Okay, so most of it was above 3800m AMSL, but the emptiness was noticeable.
Ahem, so team "Mountain Ridge" arrived at the meeting point 3 hours after having parted ways with team "Low Road". Much to our surprise, we didn't see anyone waiting for us there. So there were only 2 options: either they had kept going because they had gotten sick of waiting for us slow folks or they hadn't yet arrived because of some unforeseen problems. Neither of which was good.
Turns out they had gotten bogged down in marshy areas and the burro refused to cross the worst parts, for fear of getting too bogged down...
...but (as we learned later) after endless detours, losing sight of driver and donkey and finding them again purely by chance, we saw them making their way down from one valley (coming from the left) into ours on the opposite flank. If you look closely, you can see the specks - that's three people and one donkey.
Knackered.
A little less knackered but with wet feet.
We finally got to the campsite along the Inca ruins of Paredones and after another chilly meal (more instant noodles and frijoles for some), I decided to take a few more pictures, knowing I wouldn't be able to get to sleep at 8pm anyway.
The night was wet again, but this time we moved the stone the burro had been tied to out of reach of our tent, so that the worst it could do was make surprisingly loud chewing and regurgitating noises.
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