Yungas Cruz

  Yungas Cruz trail, Bolivia
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

We spent one more day in Cusco, checking out some cool Inca ruins with 300 ton stones.  Then we took the mammoth bus trip back to La Paz.

We decided to go on a 3 day trek with Catīs Dad and Uncle Ronnie, which we found out later was called the Yungas Cruz trail.  We were foolish enough after only one days rest to go back on another 40- 50 km trek. The trek might have been good with spectacular views, but all we saw were clouds and rain.  we caught a taxi up to the beginning of the trail, but he could`īt make it all the way because of the muddy road.  So we had to walk an extra 10km to the start. The trail consisted of around 30km of pre-Colombian partially paved trail, at around 4200m, before descending into high jungle to the town of Chulumani.

We were around 2 hours from the campsite at around 4pm, so Cat and I raced ahead with the tents, to set up camp before nightfall.  To do this we had to literally run for about an hour, and then put up the tents with freezing cold hands.  It was bitterly cold and we were soaking wet.  Once we got the tents up Catīs dad and Uncle Ronnie, showed up just before sunset, and we all got straight into our tents to get dry and warm.

The following day we made it to the summit of Yungas Cruz by lunch time, and caught sight of a spectacle bear (only 3000 of them left), but it was a long way off. By the end of the day we had descended into high cloud jungle, which was really dense and treacherous.  We camped in the middle of the high jungle, but luckily it had stopped raining. 

We carried on for the whole day trekking through the narrow jungle paths, macheteing our way through the dense vegetation.  The only problem was that we had filled our bottles up at mid day the day before, but there was no where else to get water, so from lunchtime onwards, we had to trek without any water.  By 5pm we could see that we were on the wrong side of the valley to the town of Chulumani, so we headed down to the nearest building to ask for assistance.  Luckily on the way down we came across a pumping station, so we greedily filled up our bottles.  Shortly after we found a farmer to show us the way down to the main road where we caught a minibus to Chulumani.  It was really nice to have a proper bed and meal!