The Cordillera Blanca

Peru is pretty famous for it´s mountainous terrain... One particularly speckky area is the Cordillera Blanca, which crams in 50 mountains over 5700m high into a 180km long range - thats 50 mountains taller than any in Europe. This includes the second highest mountain in South America and scene of the Touching the Void movie....

Having seen the movie I wasnt about to try to climb to the top of any of these mammoth rocks but I did take a 4 day walk around of a few of them, and have to say I felt very very small. Hopefully the photos will describe this better than I could.

The peak on the right here is Alpamayo - a very famous mountain in mountaineering circles. Though I´ve got to admit I´d never heard of it before. It was voted as the world´s most beautiful mountain by UNESCO, a bunch of people that obviously know much more about mountains than I do - though how they came up with that is anybodys guess. In any case the Peruvians are quite proud of their mountains, and this one in particular.

I was a bit surprised to see so much livestock rearing throughout what is probably Peru´s most famous National Park. Cows, horses, llamas, donkeys etc are all over the place, and theres apparently nothing done to minimise this . I guess National Park management is very different in Peru, the guide I spoke to thought that all these large animals were very important to the ecology of the area, as they are the food source for a whole range of wild animals - condors, pumas, bears etc.

Wild Bonsai plants. Crazy.