Peru, part I

We´re now in Peru and have been here for a little over a week.  We still have the Inca Trail hike coming up (oh crap, oh crap, oh crap) but have done some pretty unique stuff in our time so far here.  I think when last we spoke, so to say, we were just about to leave beautiful Colombia.  Getting from Bogota, Colombia to Lima, Peru turned out to be quite the unexpected (and uninvited) adventure.  Yeah, we were in the airport in Colombia, muddling through million-mile-an-hour Spanish as usual and trying to figure out just what the hell the lady at the ticket desk just told us.  Well, at least it was clear where our gate was, so we proceeded down and got in line to be checked into the waiting area by one of the Avianca Airlines employees.  Whilst waiting, I couldn´t help but wonder just which seats were ours, since under the ¨seats¨ portion of the ticket it simply read ¨SBY¨ both of our tickets.  Not being the sharpest tool in the shed, I kind of just shrugged it off and continued to wait.  It was only when we were about 4 people from the front of the line that I realized that ¨SBY¨ probably meant ¨Standby¨.  Shit.


Sure enough, the flight was overbooked by at least 10 people.  Time to hurry up and wait.  We snagged a friendly Colombian fellow who´d spent 11 years living in New York and enlisted him as our unofficial translator.  He was in the same boat as we but also had to catch a connecting flight to Chile.  We told him we´d give him a seat before we took them, if it came to that.  Hey, small price to pay for a translator, right?  So, long story short, we ended up taking the offer that Avianca gave us --- two free flights anywhere Avianca flies plus a free meal in the airport.  Sweet deal, no?  Yeah, well, Avianca doesn´t really fly anywhere near where we live at all and there are, to use the clinical term, a shitload of restrictions on where we can fly and when.  Ugh.  We´ll see if we can even use those things at all.  On a side note, anyone living in the San Francisco, Washington DC, Miami, or New York areas interested in some SUPER sweet tickets at a SUPER sweet price should drop me a line.  :)


We arrived in Lima at somewhere around 2 in the morning, having already canceled our one night hotel stay in favor of staying in the airport all night.  At around 3 in the morning the StarPeru ticket office opened and we switched our 9 AM flight to a 7 AM flight and got into Cusco, Peru early that morning.  (Note:  StarPeru is to Avianca as filet mignon is to a burning paper bag of feces.  Yes, I took the SATs and can do analogies quite well, thank you very much.)  We had to wait a little bit for our hostel room to be ready but once it was we took a 5 hour nap, got up and grabbed dinner, then went right back to bed for another 9 hours or something. We were beat.


For those of you who don´t know, Cusco is the jumping off city for most Macchu Picchu travelers.  It´s a city  of about 350,000 people that´s situated at an elevation of over 11,000 feet (that´s 3,400 meters to you wacky metric types).  Now, we thought that since we come from majestic, aerial Albuquerque and all of its 5,000-ish feet of elevation that we´d be fine and dandy here up in the Andes mountains.  Well, hot damn, it´s a hell of a lot different.  Drinking a couple beers here is like beer bonging straight tequila back home.  Walking up a flight of stairs here is like running a half marathon back home.  Carrying a 50 pound backpack here is like.....yeah, yeah, you get the picture.  Analogies for the win, I suppose.

Downtown Cusco.  Viva el Peru, indeed.  Am I right?

One thing we´ve quickly found out is that, similarly to other Central and South American countries, the Peruvians like to party.  A LOT.  There have been multiple fiestas that we´ve stumbled across.  Fiestas in parks.  Fiestas downtown.  Fiestas on islands (I´ll get to that in a bit).  So, yeah, here´s a quick video of the celebration of the Virgin of Copacabana (in Bolivia) that I shot with my cell phone in downtown Cusco.  The dudes with the long nose masks all had beers in their pockets.  I almost get run over by a motorcycle cop at the end of the video (damn gawking gringos!).  Apologies in advance for the quality of the video.  




Anyhoo, we spent a couple days just cruising around Cusco, getting some business taken care of (up until a couple days ago we really had no idea where we were going in Europe and certainly didn´t have any tickets to anywhere), and generally just taking it easy.  We decided that, in no small part based on my mom´s advice, we should take a trip down to Lake Titicaca (yes, Beavis....Titicaca....calm down) and spend a couple days.  We sought out a reputable tour agency, no small feat in these parts, and booked a bus tour down to Puno, a city near the lake, as well as a couple days exploring the islands on the lake.  Little did we know the trip we were getting ourselves into....


The bus trip down made several stops at museums, ruins, and an extremely picturesque spot en route at the highest point on the road from Cusco to Puno (over 4,300 meters, which is something like 367,000 feet if my calculations are correct).  I´ll give you a quick rundown (and a friendly reminder that pictures of all these things and oh so much more are available on an ongoing basis at flickr.com/photos/chrisandleann ).




- Andahuaylillas - Cool little chapel and museum combo. Only checked the church out from the outside, but the museum had some neat stuff including modified Inca skulls. The elite classes of Inca culture stretched the back of their skulls out from very young ages and ended up resembling something similar to a conehead. If you´ve seen the newest and lamest edition of the Indiana Jones movies, Crystal Skull something or other, these skulls will look really familiar, if only a bit less crystally and annoying.




- Raqchi - Although not really proniounced ¨Rocky¨, I couldn´t help but sing the triumphant soundtrack from Sylvester Stallone climbing those stairs in Philadelphia in the movie. I did it so much that Leann looked like she was going to explode. Sometimes I just think that I´m lucky not to get Lorena Bobbit´ed in the middle of the night. Anyways, this place is an old Inca site consisting of the massive (and mainly intact) walls of a temple as well as multiple stone storehouses. The site was used, in part, as a waypoint for the Inca to deliver foods from Cusco to Puno.




- Raya Pass - The aforementioned spot in the Cusco-Puno pass that´s located several million feet above sea level. Those of us who didn´t have oxygen masks suffered immediate high altitude pulmonary edema and swelling of the brain. Nah, not really, but it was pretty damn high up there. The views of the Andes were spectacular (also on Flickr) plus there were some cute kids there chilling out with alpacas (the Peruvian little brother of the llama).




- Pucara - Another museum site with interesting skeletons. Maybe it´s the former archaeologist in me or maybe I´m just a sick bastard, but I am endlessly fascinated by skeletons. These ones also had the misshapen skulls. Small but good collection of lithic and ceramic materials there as well. Oh, and of course there was the obligatory dude walking around with alpacas on leashes, much to the extreme delight of the one child in our group.

We arrived in Puno after a 9 or 10 our ride slash tour and checked into our hotel for the night.  Early the next morning we were picked up to go on the next leg of this particular adventure --- Lake Titicaca.  We bussed out to a boat and boated out to a series of islands.  The islands were:


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Uros - These are actually a series of floating islands. Seriously. The islands are man made. Don´t believe me? Wikipedia says so, and Wikipedia NEVER lies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uros. It´s true. Students, make sure to only use Wikipedia for citations on your next term paper. Anyway, this was an odd stop. We witnessed some islanders reproducing the making of the islands by way of small replica islands. Super cool. We met some of the inhabitants. Also cool. We were introduced in pairs to one specific island woman who showed us into her grass hut. Sort of cool but kind of awkward. We got the hard sell on the crafts the islanders had made. Not that cool, but okay. We were then bid adieu by the island folk who sang us native songs (kinda cool), then moved on to ¨My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean¨ (more creepy than cool), and finished by saying, in unison, ¨hasta la vista, baby.¨ I could have done without that last part, for sure. Unique stop, in more ways than one. We jumped back in our tour boat and headed on to...




- Amantani island - We docked here and got out to a waiting throng of native folks. This island is home to about 4,000 folks and their native language is Quechua. We were to stay in the home of some islanders. It was kind of exciting, pretty strange, and entirely awkward (that word again). We met out host mama and she led us to the house where we´d be staying. Here´s some evidence about how enormously huge I am compared to the locals:

Pretty Alice in Wonderland-esque, eh?  Well, so we had lunch with our new mama, who didn´t really speak much Spanish at all, so we spent it in relative quiet.  Good stuff, all vegetarian.  We ended up meeting our new papa as well, who was fluent in Spanish and chatted with us about everything from Barack Obama (he was pretty excited that los Estados Unidos had elected a black man) to the Spanish (whom he associated with violence and blood....an attitude that´s actually pretty common in Peru, moreso than other Latin American countries we´ve visited) to the power system of the island (combination solar power and generators).  The island has two very high peaks, Pachamama (Mother Earth) and Pachatata (Father Earth).  Father Earth is represented by the sun and Mother Earth by the moon, by the way, for those that are interested.  The peaks were waaaaaaaaaaay up there but provided for awesome views and pictures (Flickr, people, seriously).  We saw another fiesta that had significant amounts of raging fires associated with it, which was cool, and then got dressed up in native clothes and had a small fiesta of our own, which was kind of weird and contrived but still pretty fun.  Good stuff, right?  Well, one communication breakdown between the wifey and I led to some serious consternation.  Turns out that Leann had read ahead of time that we were expected to bring gifts to our host folks.  I had no idea and the tour agency didn´t mention this.  Leann was confused about when and where this was supposed to take place so she didn´t relate the info to me and we just went on our merry way.    We had zilch to give these folks.  Well, we had a small backpack with stuff in it, but I was doubting whether they had strong interest in my underwear or our toothbrushes.  Shit.  Well, at least we can give them some cash, right?  Yeah, well turns out that no one in the entire country of Peru can ever make change for a 100 Soles bill.  I might be exaggerating on that point, but oh just barely.  I´d resigned myself to giving them the whole 100 when a kind lady from the Netherlands, Simone, lent me a 50 spot.  I gave the 50 to our mama at the end of the stay with warm and honest thanks for sharing her home and delicious food with us.  The experience was, again, both unique and exciting combined with awkward and potentially exploitative.  I´ve read that some agencies try to rip the locals off on this deal.  I hope that wasn´t the case with ours.  The next day we boated off to...


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Taquile Island - Pretty tame after our Amantani experience. We checked out some woven goods, grabbed some coffee, and got a lesson about the region from our guide. We also learned about the neat ways that men declare their intentions by way of what type of cap they wear and which way they let the top of the cap fall on their head. Essentially, married men wear red caps and single wear red and white caps. There are some other variations that I can´t recall. The funny thing about the ¨single¨ caps is that those fellows who let the top of their cap fall to the right of their head are looking for a good time (rather than for a wife). I guess there are quarterly fiestas and a lot of the local dudes try looking for love on these occasions. However, when we had lunch the kid who served us also had his cap tilted to the right, a fact that I noted to the young British girls in our group. Maybe he got some phone numbers out of the deal, I don´t know. Lunch was grilled trout and was delicious. We hopped back on the boat and took the 3-4 hour ride back to Puno. A few of us met up for dinner and beers and then called it a night.




We hopped a much shorter bus back to Cusco, since we didn´t do the tourist stops on the way. The bus was actually a double decker bus and we sat up top, which was awesome. Also awesomely inappropriate was the fact that they showed the movie ¨Splice¨ with Adrien Brody on the bus despite the fact that he makes sweet love to a weird mutant creature in graphic detail and that there were kids on the bus. Whatcha gonna do?

So now here we are, back in Cusco.  We´ll spend the next couple days getting regaled by stories reviling the Spanish, possibly checking out some local ruins in the Sacred Valley, and getting ready for our big trek for 4 days up to Macchu Picchu.  Honestly, I am really looking forward to having the chance to stay with my family in Spain and just not stay in another damn hotel for a little while.  I haven´t seen my Spain cousins in something like 17 years, since I went to Europe as an exchange student.  See you soon, Marta and Marcos!


Oh, and check out our Flickr site at flickr.com/photos/chrisandleann if you´re so inclined.  :)