There's nothing like heading out into the mountains alone. While all natural landscapes can be dangerous and require some preparation, not every trail on Earth needs to be done with a guide. Sometimes, the ultimate freedom one can find lies in just going out by yourself.
Along the entire trail: alpacas galore! They freely roam these high plains, but belong to traditional herders, some of the last pastoralist cultures on Earth.
The trailhead is already at 4200m above sea level, but the hike takes one up another 600m, right up to Mt. Ausangate's impressive slopes.
Up here, in the thin air almost five kilometres above sea level, only the hardiest forms of life survive: grasses, mosses, liquens and small plants that have evolved to keep things compact and out of the way of the wind.
Even that high up, the peak of Mt. Ausangate towers another 1.5km above you.
Thorny shrub on the trail.
Alpacas grazing peacefully in the dramatic landscape.
We humans are minuscule and, quite frankly, irrelevant compared to nature, that much becomes clear in these mountains, which the Inka and other indigenous people refer to as Apus, deities that control the weather. In may ways, this is completely correct: it really is these mountains that control the weather in the entire area, from their steamy foothills down in the Amazon rainforest, all the way up to their snowy peaks.
Alpacas are infamous for spitting at you, when you annoy them. But, as with any animal, they treat you as you treat them. Keep calm and inoffensive and so will they.
The higher up one gets, the more insane the landscapes become. Depending on the minerals that have been washed down from the peaks for thousands of years, the lagoons and glacier lakes take on different hues. Blue, turquoise, pink, red, green - the landscapes seems as if a careless painter had spilled his colours across the mountains.
Every time one thinks about how remote and inhospitable this place is, a local family walks past, as if to prove the point that humans can and do survive anywhere, with their cultures tailored to the requirements of their environments. In fact, only our culture, the Western one, is completely out of sync with our surroundings and we will see how this turns out for us, eventually.
Not all lagoons are pink. Some are a bit less extravagant, but by no means less beautiful.
Alpaca herders.
Walking opposed to the harsh winds is not easy, not even for an alpaca.
And after the trail, finally, a reinvigorating bath in a hot spring, Pacha Mama herself gently warming up my sore legs.