Odyssey home

When we left off, we were headed for Huaraz.

Huaraz turned out to be a bit of a tease, because there are all kinds of great long treks and adventures in the nearby Cordillera Blanca mountain range, but we didn't have enough time or equipment to go on any of them! We'll add that as a thing to see next time. Instead, we spent a few days wandering around the town, and going for short day-hikes, all in view of the beautiful snow-capped peaks that were out of reach to us.

Then began our Odyssey home. We left our hotel room at 10 in the morning, hung about town, and took the overnight bus back to Lima. Dawn was just breaking as we rolled into Lima, where we dropped our bags at a hotel and spent the day re-exploring our old Lima haunts. At around 6am, when the streets were still empty with a light drizzle falling, we heard the unpolluted sound of hundreds of cooing pigeons in the square outside San Francisco cathedral.

At 10pm, we took a cab to the airport and proceeded to wait for our flight which didn't take off until 1:45am! Right as I began drifting off to sleep, they turned on the cabin lights and served us dinner and coffee at 2:30. (For those keeping track, this is night #2 without a bed). Back to the lovely Mexico City airport by the morning, we felt surprisingly chipper. We occupied our 12 hours there by sleeping some on the benches, enjoying our first non-nescafe coffee in 6 weeks, and doing some programming (me) and poker (Jen).

In the evening we took our final flight back to SF, arriving 63 hours after we left our hotel in Huaraz, to my wonderful parents who picked us up with La Costena burritos in hand.