Peru

(Very) unfortunately, we had to be up at 2:30am in the morning so we could get to the airport 2 hours before our 5:40am flight to Cusco. (Cheapest flight, worst departure time, don't recommend.) We didn't get much sleep that night, of course. Our drive to the airport was interesting since it was pitch black outside and we were essentially the only ones on the street. Big contrast to the crazy, bustling city of Lima during the daytime! Once at the airport, we first felt highly pissed off that we had to sit on the ground for 2.5 hours waiting for our flight to depart... but our feelings soon turned to delirium since we were running on no sleep. I don't remember what was so funny, most likely nothing at all... but we sure laughed a lot. I then stuffed my face with a ham and cheese croissant and a giant strawberry donut. Mmm mmm good. The flight to Cusco was only a little over an hour, but it was the scariest flight I think I've ever been on. I'm not sure if it's always so turbulent over that area of Peru, but if so, I'm not sure I have the guts to get on a plane again and fly there when it comes time to spend my last month there!! It seemed like almost the entire way our plane was shaking from side to side. Not fun. But the flight attendants (young and attractive, of course. We're in Peru, remember?) didn't even have a hint of worry on their faces and somehow managed to still serve us all drinks as the plane bounced around... WITHOUT SPILLING. Where do they learn these skills?

Arrival in Cusco... also not fun. We'd been warned that the second we got there, people would be trying to sell us things. Well, they were right, multiplied by 1000. We got off the plane and before we even got to the baggage area, our poor ears were bombarded with loud Andean music from a live band. At seven in the morning. We were not happy, not happy at all. We kept asking ourselves, ¨What the hell?¨and declaring to everyone that ¨This should be illegal!¨. We were so tired we could barely even think. I felt like I'd been hit by a train. But somehow we managed to get our bags, rent a cell phone for 10 bucks (what a steal! Unless we lose it), and haggle in our sleep with some taxi drivers for a cheaper fare to the city center. They all tried to tell us it'd be at least 25 soles (too much) to the center, but after sleepy arguing, we somehow got it down to 10. Our taxi driver had a travel agent escort, which we thought was odd. I made a point to ask them squarely why there were two of them, so they'd know that we knew it was weird (you know?)... but in the end the travel agent turned out to be super friendly and made sure we got a room at our hostal of choice, Osiris in the cute, hilly San Blas neighborhood.

Even though it was only 7:45am and we had the whole day to explore the town, well... we didn't. We passed out and didn't wake up again until 3:30 in the afternoon. We walked around our neighborhood a bit and decided after only a few hours that Cusco was our new favorite town. The San Blas neighborhood is in the hills above the main square. It is very artsy and laid back, there are countless wonderful cafes with delicious food and baked goods, and it´s incredibly cute because all the streets are so tiny a car can barely fit through and the streets and walls are all cobblestone. It's a great mix of Spanish and Inkan architecture. A lot of the building walls still have their original Inka stone foundations and it was pretty amazing to see the stones up close... you can't even fit a credit card between them because the fit of the huge, interlocking stones is so perfect. Cusco was once the capital of the Inka's from which they spread out and conquered lands to the north and south (all the way up past Ecuador and as far south as parts of Chile and Argentina!). The town is apparently designed in the shape of a puma, too. Another great fact that I just discovered online... I guess in 2006 Cusco was found to be the point on Earth with the highest ultraviolet light level. Isn't that nice?

We spent our first evening at the South American Explorers Club, conveniently located just down the street from us. (It's an informational club for travellers that hosts weekly events, too.) They were having an unlimited cocktail night. We were still pretty tired but figured we'd try it out anyway. It ended up just being mostly the club staff and a few of their friends... and sleepy party pooper Rachel and Kerri in the corner on the couch. We drank our first pisco sour (the national drink, made with pisco [grape brandy], egg white, and some other odd ingredients). It's supposed to be smoother than a margarita, but I can't say I liked it that much. We also had some great baked potatoes with yucky South American chunky cheese along with our alcohol. They all kept trying to serve us more drinks (in miniature cups), thinking it would wake us up, but our eyelids just kept getting heavier and heavier. We were highly entertained, however, by a 41 year old British man who we can only describe as being similar to a young British fraternity boy. He was the most hyper person I think I have ever met, perhaps because of all the whiskey he had been drinking. He was the DJ for the evening and everytime a song came on, he jumped up and smiled and yelled like it was the first time he'd ever heard music in his life. TLC´s ¨I'm Pretty¨came on at one point and he deemed it his most favorite song ever. We realized there was a problem when we found ourselves reading a magazine in the middle of the party... at that point we knew we had to say goodbye and just go to bed.

The next days we spent wandering around town, snapping photos of every cute cobblestone street we passed and saying ¨no thanks¨to all the women and children (dressed in their traditional clothes with their most photogenic llamas and baby goats) who asked us to pay to take a photo of them. We went to the main plaza, Plaza de Armas, and snapped a billion more photos of the two churches and the plaza itself because it was all just so beautiful. We visited the Inka Museum, which thankfully included artifacts and information from all the pre-Inkan societies (who the Inkans conquered) as well as the Inkas. We later walked down Avenue del Sol to the Cathedral of Santo Domingo/ruins of Qorikancha (Temple of the Sun). Qorikancha was once one of the most important Inkan temples, dedicated to the Inkan sun god Inti, with floors and walls covered in sheets of gold and with a garden of golden statues. But when Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro came in the 1500s and conquered the Inkas he and his men took most of the gold with them. (At that point they had one of the last incas held hostage. Pizarro told him that if he surrendered the gold of Qorikancha, his life would be spared... but even after allowing the Spanish conquistadors to steal and melt down all the gold, Pizarro decapitated the inca anyway.) Qorikancha was later turned into a monestary of the Dominican order. Some of the stone ruins of Qorikancha are preserved within the monestary walls, giving the whole compound a really interesting dual history. In the 1950s a large earthquake destroyed most of Santo Domingo, but the Inka walls of Qorikancha withstood it all.

Our favorite restaurant was called Cafe Ritual Cultural... it served up some great banana pancakes and 3 course lunches that stuffed us silly. I'm not so sure they liked us so much, though. Everytime we tried to pay, something was wrong... either they thought we were giving them counterfeit 5 soles coins, or we gave them too big of bills and they couldn't make change and had to run across the street with our money and buy rice or something. It's annoying how the banks give out 50 and 100 soles bills, but most of the time people don't even have change for a 5 sol coin and ask you over and over if you´re suuuuure that you don`t have anything smaller. Same thing with Ecuador. Bah!

Anyway, we were going to go visit the Inka ruins at Sacsayhuamán (remember how to pronounce it with the catchy phrase ¨sexy woman¨), just a few kilometers north of our hostal (up a billion flights of stairs), but we decided we'd try to see the ruins when we come back to Cusco after our visit to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. Plus we were still a bit worn out from not sleeping well the previous nights and didn't feel like that much exercise. Instead, we spent our last day buying our train tickets to Machu Picchu before we caught a local bus to the nearby town of Pisaq in the Sacred Valley.

Oh, one last thing. As we were walking back to our hostal one last time after breakfast on our last morning, we saw a GIANT dog the size of a horse prancing down the street ahead of us... with a tiny plastic bag in his mouth filled with biscuits. It was the funniest/cutest thing. The dog kept glancing back every so often to make sure his master was following him, and then once he was satisfied he'd turn around and continue on. I want a dog that does that! That's the crazy thing about Ecuador and Peru... nobody has leashes here, their dogs just are so loyal that they follow their owners wherever they go. I'm not sure I want a dog the size of a horse, though.

Bye for now, Cusco! I´ll be back in a few weeks...

Lima is a giant city of 8 million people. It has everything from shanty towns to really nice business/tourist districts that look almost like La Jolla. My pen pal Garrett, who has lived in Lima on and off for 5 months, was nice enough to scout out a really cool hostal for Rachel and I in a great area of town called Barranco. It's very artsy and safe, plus its right on the cliffs by the beach. Our hostal was in an old mansion and even though we had to stay in a dorm with 6 other people, it turned out to be one of the best hostals we´ve stayed at. It was really social and we met some really fun people there. For some reason it was mostly Americans and Australians.

We were picked up from the airport by a friendly guy with a car named Herby (don't ask me the name of the driver, we only asked for the car's name). But there was a slight problem... Herby looked like he had been through a war. Maybe even two. And he was still somehow chugging along. For some unknown reason, there were slash marks all over the interior of the car (did someone have a knife fight in there? Silly Peruvian boys) and a lot of the metal was exposed. We were a bit worried Herby would die on the way to our hostal, but somehow he made it to our destination... though we did stop and start about 20 times during the drive and our 35 minute ride was accompanied with the nice smell of fresh gasoline. I casually asked our taxi driver how old Herby was, and he said he was born in 1993. That's as old as my Volvo and it does NOT look like that. Hmm. Something fishy was going on. Anyway, back at the hostal later that evening, two girls from Canada arrived at around midnight. They told us about how their taxi driver's car had broken down on a cliff (on a curve), and they had to wait and hour while the driver and another male passenger pushed the car around so that the gas tank would be facing downhill so the car could start again. We asked if their car had a name. You guessed it... it was good old Herby.

The next day we spent in the historic old town, which was a surprisingly long drive from Barranco (I kept forgetting how huge Lima is). We checked out the catacombs in the Monestario San Francisco, which is still to this day a church of the Dominican order. The catacombs were the first public catacombs, intended for public burials and viewings. The benefactor, of course had a giant tomb all to himself, and everyone else had to pay as well to get the ¨good¨burial spots. Though they were buried 12 to a plot, stacked one on top of another, so I don't really know why they were so excited to be buried there in the first place. The rest of the monestary itself was really gorgeous... from the rooms with giant religious paintings in the Ruebens and Cusqeño styles to the beautiful tiled walls around the central garden (in the moorish style, from the Spanish influence), to the central garden itself. It was also really neat to see the different rooms used for washing and dressing, meetings, as well as the choir room. Their dressing room had drawers for everyone, carved very elaborately, and above each dresser was a saint or a martyr (with the way they were killed depicted graphically... stabbed, burned alive, hung, etc). One dresser was actually a secret door to the catacombs below. The library was the best of all... it had fun winding staircases going up to the second level, beautiful carvings on the walls and ceiling, and old books from the 16th century onwards. Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures of anything

Lunchtime was next. We had a buffet lunch, served to us by French nuns! Supposedly for dinner they gather around and serenade guests with a rendition of Ave Maria, but we opted for the cheaper lunch menu, which was delicious. We even got to try chicha morada, a traditional Peruvian drink made from purple corn among a lot of other fruity ingredients. It was really good... and really purple.

We spent the rest of the day wandering a bit more around old town. A few boys catcalled us (they either hiss, whistle, or yell sweet nothings like ¨queen!¨ or ¨princess!¨) as we walked around, and we decided our new response was to make a really terrible, ugly face instead of just walking by and pretending we didn't notice. Or we laugh hysterically like hyenas. This either causes most guys to burst out laughing along with us, or they just shut up. It's fun.

Later we walked along the cliffs from Parque del Amor (Park of Love) in Miraflores and almost made it back to Barranco before we hit the end of the cliffs and had to take a taxi the rest of the way home. Parque del Amor has a giant statue of a couple making out in the middle of it and some neat tiled benches (kind of like in Gaudi park in Spain). Delfin, the famous Peruvian painter and sculptor, designed the park and its statue of love. I'm actually going to live at his house when I return to Lima (and maybe even meet him!) because my friend Garrett was nice enough to buy me two nights at Second Home (where Delfin lives) on the cliffs of Barranco (www.secondhomeperu.com).

That evening we sat around talking and drinking with all of our hostal mates. One girl named Jahan, from New York, told the most hilarious stories. She had us cracking up all evening. I particularly enjoyed her description of Cusco... ¨This was the first place I really felt like ´Wow, I´m in Peru, man!´ I mean, it was like New York City with all the great nightlife, but then I'd walk out of a club and there'd be a fucking llama standing outside the door!¨. (Now that we've been to Cusco, I can vouch for that odd sight, too!) The woman who worked at the hostal was also really young and fun and she organized a night out at a nearby club for all of us. A Peruvian guy started talking to me there, and even though it was a bit hard to understand his rapid Spanish in the loud club, I still managed to talk to him in half-Spanish for most of the evening, which was good practice.

One of our dorm mates was a guy who´s traveling the world for a year with the Watson scholarship... it's basically $25,000 of free money, and the only stipulation is that you don't come home until a year is up. He was using the money to study music in different South American countries and had some great stories to tell about his experiences so far. He even got to live with a Guatamalan pop star for a while... and had to look the other way when the singer would bring in his 25 different girlfriends. Our new friend was pretty hilarious, though I have to note that he had some, err... disgusting bathroom and eating habits, haha.

We wandered around the beach near Barranco later in the day. An chubby older man bicycling around a box of ice cream kept following us along the beach, thinking that if he waved to us just one more time we might cave in and decide we wanted ice cream. Then he changed tactics and started asking us where we were from. We ignored him and started walking back up the cliffs to our hostal... and waaay down below on the coastal highway we could still see him, just a tiny speck now, waving furiously at us. Haha. He just didn't know when to stop. We then went to Miraflores, a nice area of town just north of Barranco. We chatted with a man in the park (in Spanish!) about visiting Colca Canyon in the south (2x deeper than the Grand Canyon), got some ice cream and dinner (in that order, we really confused out waiter), went grocery shopping at an amazing grocery store (it had purple corn and biodegradeable bags, what more could one want?), and that was about the last of our adventures in Lima.

The ice cream here is terrible. It can´t compete with the delicious Magnum bars that Ecuador (and all of Europe) has. It´s quite unfortunate. Other than that, however, our first few days have been pretty interesting...

Right before the border we stopped randomly. We thought it was the border, but it turned out it was just a dinner stop. But the only place to eat dinner was a tiny stand on the side of the road serving beans, rice, and chicken on a stick. Rachel opted for the safe beans and rice and I got the chicken on a stick with some mayo... deeeelicious! Finally got to the border, which was straddling a river, where we saw a rainbow, a goat with a tumor in its udders, and a tiny monkey. It was pretty laid back and easy to get across, just a bunch of stamps and back on the bus we went.

The rest of our bus ride from the border to Piura was fairly uneventful. It was just extremely hot. We were drenched in sweat for 3 hours. The moon was full and beautiful and that´s all we could see for miles.

When we got to Piura in the evening on our first day in Peru, we couldn´t see much since it was almost 10pm. All we noticed was that the taxis here are really cheap, midget sized Daewoos that seem like they are about to fall apart. Somehow our taxi fit 4 travelers and 4 giant bags on the way to our hotel (we traveled with a Canadian couple we met on the bus). Magic. We went to get some pizza down the street for an extra late dinner with the Canadians. During the meal, we tried Inca Cola, which is the Peruvian soda of choice. It's neon yellow and has an aftertaste like bubble gum. Odd, yet somehow it tastes pretty bueno. We had a little problem after dinner when we tried to pay in US dollars and the owner wouldn't accept our 5's because they were too old looking, but it worked out in the end.

The hostal we stayed at was a bit weird. There were a lot of shirtless men who liked to walk by our room at 8am repeating Rachel´s name over and over in high pitched voices.

The next morning, Rachel aquired a Peruvian boyfriend. A woman told us we could get some small change from a mysterious black door across the street, so we took her word for it and walked over to the door and Rachel asked through a hole in the door... the guy inside said he couldn't make change for us but told us about some casas de cambio a few streets over. We thanked him and then sat down for a bit in front of our hotel to look at our map real quick. A few minutes later a woman ran across the street and handed us a piece of paper. It turned out to be a hand-drawn map of the location of the casas de cambio from the guy across the street. But best of all, it included his name, phone number, and the words ¨OK. Baby.¨ Yay Rachel. Classic.

We then decided to go to Colán for the day, which is a beach town an hour and a half away from Piura. After a bus ride through the desert (the north of Peru is all dirt and shrubbery... and HOT) we found ourselves in the wild wild west, aka the port town of Paita. This town is ridiculous. I don't think I saw a single plant in the entire town, it was just dirt, more dirt, mountains of dirt, shacks, buses, and tuk tuks. (It was a big surprise to see the tuk tuks here as soon as we crossed the border! I had no idea they were popular outside of Asia.) A nice policeman showed us where to find a colectivo taxi that would take us the rest of the way to Colán. There were 5 of us in the taxi, ready to go, but the taxi driver was adamant about fitting in one more person. Rachel ended up in the front seat sitting above the stick shift next to a Peruvian man with a load of brooms. She made a joke about how it was so squished up front and her new friend assured her that it would be fine because she was ¨thin, just like Barbie!¨.

Colán, the supposed resort for the jet set of Peru, turned out to be completely deserted except for Rachel and I. We were the only people there other than the actual residents, dogs, and crabs. We somehow always seem to find the most deserted towns and hostals. And again, the town was all dirt. At least it had some interesting dirt cliffs to mix things up a bit. We stayed at a hospedaje, or a family home with some rooms to rent out, right on the water, literally. There was no beach, just the water up to our back porch. The owner was a bit scatter brained, ADD, super friendly, and confusing. Half of the time we didn't understand what he was telling us even when he spoke in English, and the other half of the time he was repeating himself. Our room was in the back of the house and we had a nice ocean breeze blowing through. Or so we thought. Antonio (I think that's his name) tried to sell us on the room based on just that, yet the nice breeze mysteriously disappeared at night and it was the most hot, uncomfortable, and restless sleep I think I've had on this trip so far. To top it off, I was eaten alive by mosquitos on every appendage of my body, including all over my face! Who do those mosquitos think they are? Speaking of mosquitos, we discovered a bit too late that the northern coast has malaria. Yet everyone there assured us that ¨los animales¨were harmless and we'd be fine. I guess we'll see soon enough!

We took a walk around the dirt road our hospedaje was on. Well, more like we walked 100 feet in one direction, saw an endless sea of more dirt road, one empty, lifeless restaurant after another, and it was hot... and then we turned back. That was the extent of our exploration of the town, minus our mad dash along the shoreline to view the backsides of all the deserted beach houses and see some funny looking crabs. I slept, Rachel read a bit, and we had some lunch at our place... delicious delicious fish. I inhaled mine. Dinner was more fish. We chose to eat at one of the 20 deserted restaurants on our street and were served by a cute abuelita (tiny little grandma). We ended up chatting with her in Spanish after our meal for a good 20 minutes or so. She was hard to understand sometimes because she was missing most of her teeth, but we were pretty proud of ourselves for being able to talk to her for so long. We played with her son's dog and her cats for a while but after I screamed after seeing a giant grasshopper, they ran away (oops). And so we went home, too.

The next morning the woman running the place assured us that we could just go outside on the dirt road and wait for a camioneta that would pass by ¨right now¨and take us back to Paita so we could catch our bus home. We waited outside in the hot, hot sun for a while. No sign of life, much less a camioneta. Some random woman with a bucket from across the street came over to us, sat down, and asked, ¨Why aren`t you getting on a camioneta? They are right there in the street going past us.¨Well, they weren´t, and she apparently a bit loco. She left, and finally a few minutes later we heard some manic honking coming towards us in the street. It was our camioneta, coming to save the day! It honked a good 20 times more before it realized we wanted to hitch a ride. We hoped into the old white van and soon we were cruising the streets of Colán honking at every human being. Occasionally the driver whistled at the ladies. After we'd squeezed in some more people and were at maximum capacity, we headed up the cliffs toward Paita.

Our bus ride back to Piura proved to be quite entertaining. It included a salesman who spoke for about 40 minutes on the dangers of intestinal worms in children and he even had some great, extra large, color photos of worms ´n kids to show us to illustrate his point. After his speech, he tried to sell us some natural laxatives so that we could clean our intestines out the recommended 4x per year. A few people actually bought the packets. After he was satisfied that he had sold enough, he launched into another spiel about a vitamin powder that you can sprinkle in and on anything you eat... nobody ended up buying that one.

We unfortunately had to go to the airport asap once we got back to Piura because here in South America they give your flights away if you don't show up 2 hours before your departing flight (this goes for local flights). We hailed a cab on the street and ended up having a lovely chat with our taxi driver about how beautiful we were. It was actually really fun to speak with him in Spanish, and he was impressed with our ability to actually understand him since he said most tourists have no idea what's going on. But as we got closer to the airport, he suddenly asked us if all the girls in the US were beautiful. This turned into him telling us how ugly every single Peruvian girl was, and that compared to them we were ¨reinas¨(queens). I asked why, since I think there are a lot of beautiful Peruvian women. He said it was because of our faces. I guess he`ll be moving to the United States soon...

Once at the airport, we realized that we were super early... the lights weren`t even on in the building! There were two guards who were nice enough to turn on the lights and fans for us. Then we just sat around for 2 and a half hours. I had a grilled cheese sandwich when the restaurant finally opened. That was about it. Our flight to Lima was pretty smooth and we got there in about an hour and 10 minutes... not too shabby. San Diego-Berkeley style. But even better, the plane was the most modern one I'd ever been in, the snacks were delicious and choclately, and all of the flight attendants were young attractive males. Haha. More on Lima next time!