The Ancash regional higher court yesterday sentenced Yungay mayor Amaro Léon Léon to 17 years in prison for ordering the killing of Antonio de la Torre Echeandia, the presenter of a news programme on local Radio Orbita, who was stabbed to death on 14 February 2004 in Yungay (400 km north of Lima).

The two people who carried out the murder, Antonio Torre Camones and Pedro Angeles Figueroa, received the same sentence. All three were also ordered to pay 20,000 soles (5,000) euros each in damages. Léon was arrested on 31 March 2004 at the request of the Yungay prosecutor’s office, which said he had De la Torre killed to prevent him broadcasting a report about Léon.

In his programme “Con verdad y justicia” (With Truth and Justice), De la Torre criticised mismanagement by local officials and allowed listeners to make comments on the air. He had often received threats prior to his death and had already been the target of a murder attempt.

Yesterday I had words from Tim Norris of California Cafe in Huaraz.

Tim and Louisa runs the California Cafe which has become a Huaraz institution for climbers and trekkers from all over the world. They serve excellent coffee and are famous for their rich and filling breakfasts.

Tim is a wealth of information on trekking and climbing conditions around Huaraz and especially on the conditions in the Huayhuash area. Everytime I see Tim he seems to be helping some trekkers or climbers preparing for their adventure with advise and useful infomations.

Also the California Cafe has a great selection of books and magazines and it is a really nice place to kick back and relax.

Tim is also webmaster on

Had words from Kristinn Kristinsson a couple of days ago. Kris is the dutch film director who runs huaraz.com and is famous in Huaraz for making a movie with the Peruvian "Superstar" Sonia Morales. He has just been on a trip to asia. Pictures from his journey can be seen on huaraz.com:

http://huaraz.com/japon/

http://huaraz.com/miffy/

I come across an interesting resource for people planning a trip to Peru today:

"Travelblog - free inspiration" has blogs from Huaraz and other parts of Peru.
The blogs are from people visiting Peru and most have photos from their trips.

A great resource for Peru (the section from Huaraz is a bit thin so far).

I read a post "Huaraz Improvisation and the Escape Tactics of a Depressed Climber" about trails and tribulations with altitude sickness etc. I found it interesting how a traveller coming from Cuzco was describing Huaraz (after some critique of Huaraz, architechture etc.)

"The best aspect about Huaraz is that the people are very friendly and there is no one trying to sell you anything on the street. The street venders sit and wait for you to approach, are very nice and not pushy, and their art and jewellery is more often ...

This is a new website for a new business (Hotel Santa Cruz opened it's doors 15th august 2005).

We are excited to track the trafic and take actions to increace it. Maybe some people will find it interesting to track the website statistics and the actions we take as we are building this website?

First let's take the status today 20th nov. 2005:

Exploring what search engines crawl a "site:domain.com" seach on MSN gives 212 results, the same on Google gives 8 results. "links:domain.com" on MSN gives 13 results and on Google 1 results. I installed the Google toolbar for Firefox today and checked our PageRank, it is now 1.

The numbers from our web statistics (last 7 days) are:

...

Today the homepage was changed so that 3 featured stories are being displayed with photo on the top of our homepage. I hope travellers will find useful information on trekking and climbing in the cordillera blanca easier this way. The list of latest stories are moved to the bottom of the homepage. 4 small images was added to all pages so it should be easier to find our contact information, introduction to the hotel etc.

Also Bjørnar has added a description on climbing Huascaran for those looking for the next big adventure.

The www.santacruzperu.com website is running on the open source software DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com). A couple of days ago this software was updated to version 3.2 and we upgraded our server today. DotNetNuke is running on the Microsoft .Net plattform and is an open source project with over 200.000 members in it's community.

The DotNetNuke (DNN) software comes with some 15-20 core modules (HTML, Links, Image, Blog, Forum etc), in addition there are something like 250 3.party modules available at the time of writing this. Our website are using a few 3. party modules so I will present these briefly:

LanguageSelector and MultiLanguage HTML from Apollo Software. This is what gives our site the limited multi language we have at the moment. When switching language by cl ...

Exciting content has been added to the site recently. Bjørnar Arnesen has added a nice description of doing the Santa Cruz Trek. Bjørnar has done this trek a couple of times and has taken some really nice photos as well. Also from Bjørnar is a description of trekking and climbing in the Ishinca valley.

We have also added a Huaraz directory to the website. Our aim is to include information here on all entities located in Huaraz and of interest to the traveller planning a trip to Huaraz. To become a complete resource input from you our readers are needed. At present entities in the directory can be commented and rated.

A link directory has also been added. This is a resource containing links to websites that has information or services relevant to the traveller going to Huaraz and/or other places in Peru.

My name is Paul and I am the webmaster for the www.santacruzperu.com website.

When not designing software at www.faktnet.com or adding content etc. here and on www.solheims.com (our extended family site) I like struggling up the Andes on a mountainbike or trekking with a heavy backpack in the Cordillera Blanca.

Born	20. october 1963
Nationality	Norwegian
Hobbies	Bicycling, trekking, history and this hotel.