Travel Logs

Peru: January, 2005

Todd Snelgrove's avatarPosted by

011505 Day Drinking in Lima, Newark, and San Francisco

San Francisco Cathedral, Lima

After three days of cancelled flights I finally got on a plane to South America, via New Jersey.  On Wednesday, Thursday, and again on Friday I’d arrived at the Ottawa airport nice and early for my 6pm flight only to get sat on the US Customs secondary inspection Group W bench for an hour or more before being grudgingly admitted to the American side of the airport, where my soon-to-be-cancelled flights sat patiently awaiting cancellation.

At this point in life my demographic, blasé grooming, and cultural interests meant getting pulled in at the border was something of a formality – or at last a lingering habit – but the surprise reappearance of my same-named birthday-sharing twin* slowed things down significantly during these four crossing attempts.  Or disappearance, actually.  Turns out other-Todd-who’s-not-me had recently been listed in the database as a missing person**.  “Congratulations, officer,” I said.  “You found us.  Now can I go try to catch my plane?”  

I only made that joke on the first day.  

And then, as I alluded to in my opening paragraph, once I got through customs*** my flights were invariably cancelled, each time for weather (whether Ottawa’s or Jersey’s) until finally, on the fourth day and with a departure time of 6am rather than 6pm, I went through my standard Group W procedure (during which the Customs officer of-the-day made it very clear that he wasn’t going to let me fly; fortunately his supervisor told him he had to) and actually found my bum in an actual seat on an actual airplane.  Woo!  And not just any seat…no sir!  In fact, this bum was sitting in one of those fancypants seats up front in business class!  Not that I had any actual business to be up there, but thanks to my mother’s gratuitous aeroplan points I did indeed have a ticket to be up there, so for this guy and his butt it was a steady stream of comfy, complimentary Crown and Cokes along with upscale hors d’oeuvres all the way to Jersey.

I got to Newark at 8am and softened the blow of a fourteen-hour layover with more of the same in the Presidential Lounge, where I seemed to be the only person actively cheering for the Steelers as they came back to beat the New York Jets 20-17 and knock them out of the playoffs.

At 10pm I staggered onto the redeye to Lima and slumped into my oversized full-reclining seat.  I made my dinner selection from the tantalizing and varied menu, ordered a couple of drinks and started a movie.  Eventually my eyes could stay open no longer and I slept until about five minutes before we landed.  At the airport I randomly met a Congolese-born Belgian guy who had lived in Peru for twenty-two years.  Christian and I were going to the same hostel so we decided to share a cab; by the time we got in the taxi there were five of us travelling together.

No wonder there were so many backpackers going to the same place; it was probably the nicest budget accommodations I had ever seen.  The hostel was housed in an old barely-renovated mansion directly across the street from the San Francisco Cathedral.  The foyer was three storeys of greenery leading up to an open roof.  Plants and animals were liberally scattered amongst a labyrinth of spiral staircases.  Going to the bar upstairs felt like climbing a DNA strand through a cloud of forest, and when you get up there you just might have to step around a lazy iguana or an enormous free-range turtle. 

Eager to save money wherever I could, I ended up splitting a room with another Belgian guy who had shared our cab ride.  We checked into our spartan-but-adequate room and after a nice hot shower I hit that upstairs bar for a quart.  It was only a bit after 8am so I kept it at just one.  While I was up there I looked through the menu and was thrilled to see hamburgers listed for the equivalent of just seventy-five cents Canadian each!  I thought I was in heaven until I learned that the Peruvian beef producers were in the midst of a months-long strike.  It seemed that I would have to subsist on a strict pollo diet for the foreseeable future.  Ah, well.  At least it looked like whatever I’d be eating it would be cheap.

Though I’d only managed a handful of sleep amid a twenty-four-hour business class free-drink-a-thon I was feeling surprisingly robust, so I swished my bottle empty and took a tour of the church across the street.

The San Francisco Cathedral was built more than four centuries ago and it’s a beautiful building chock-a-block with cool paintings depicting the Passion of Christ and the life of San Francisco and stuff, but the real meat is in the basement. 

Did I say basement?  I meant “catacombs”.  

Did I say meat?  I meant “bones”.

Amazingly, Lima had no cemeteries until the mid-1800’s.  Instead, mourners would deliver their dead to churches, where the bodies would be stolen away to the basement.  It is estimated that the three storeys of catacombs that lie beneath the San Francisco Cathedral hold the remains of 75,000 people.  Oh, and the bodies weren’t buried, oh no.  They were just left there to become skeletons.

About fifty years before I got there someone had taken on the unenviable task of sorting all the bones in the San Francisco catacombs, so the visitor is confronted with enormous bins full of femurs, ribs, ulnas, and what-have-you.  The bin of skulls made for a popular photo op.  Also morbidly picturesque was the pit of skulls and bones thoughtfully arranged into a circular mandala.  

Spending eternity with a piece of trash. Nothing to smile about.

Though my laugh-a-minute tourist schedule had me visiting the Spanish Inquisition museum next my drunken fatigue caught up to me instead, so after a bout of typing at a nearby internet cafe I went back to my room and faceplanted into a midday sleep for a solid five-hours.

*That’s right, there is (was?) a person out there with the same first and last name as me, and we share a birthday too; same year and everything.  And not only that, his police stats, that is his height, weight, eye and hair colour all match mine as well.  I know his police stats because he tends to get into even more trouble than I do.  ‘Matter of fact, the only time I’ve ever heard this mystery man’s name it came from the stern, unsmiling mouth of a man with a badge.

**I couldn’t help but think that he might have been vacationing – or getting up to some sort of no good – in southeast Asia, which had just suffered a devastating tsunami that missing-person’d almost a quarter of a million people with a single wave.

***Last asterisk for this entry, I promise: On the Friday evening once everything got worked out the officer pointed out that I travelled a lot and I always got pulled into the border even though I never seemed to get in trouble.  That was certainly true.  He added that this was a waste of both my time and their resources and I readily agreed.  He handed me a piece of paper.  “Here’s an address,” he said.  “Write to them and explain the situation.  Maybe it will help.”

I did and it has [knocks wood furiously].  Since receiving a response to my letter stating that I would henceforth be treated the same as everyone else I have only once been pulled in at the border, and that was because a camper in the next row had set off some sort of sensor.  Could’ve happened to anyone.

[knock knock knock…]

011605 Day One Part Two

The view from my top-floor room

Having spent my first morning in Lima, Peru drinking and touring the nearby catacombs, I spent my first afternoon in Lima, Peru sleeping like a drunken corpse.  I somehow managed to interrupt my slumber before day fully succumbed to night and I found my way to a small, nondescript restaurant to break my fast.  I asked for a menu and was instead inexplicably served a stew-like plate of meat and vegetables.  It was too early to argue so I shrugged and dug in.  

After brupper I did some legwork enquiring about getting a bus to Pisco the following day before making my way back to my hotel/hostel.  Along the way I was touted by touts trying to sell this as-yet untanned* touristo any number of illicit delicacies designed to derail my evening, from eager chiquitas, cocaine and marijuana to…well, I don’t really know what that last guy was trying to sell me but whatever it was it was definitely illegal, and no doubt it would have been fun.

But with the day already beginning to wane I figured that I could make do with whatever fun I could find back where my day had begun; at the bar on the top floor of my hostel.  But lo, when I got up there I was befuddled to behold a general lack of beer.  Funny, there had been plenty of beer in the fridge when I was there earlier in the day.

No problem, I figured it wouldn’t take much wandering to find a cold beer or three and so out I went.  And what do you know, the first spot I find who’s there but Christian, the Congolese/Belgian/Peruvian guy I had met when I’d arrived at the airport that morning.  He was there with his best buddy Angel – who had arrived in Peru the day before – and they were loaded.  Turns out they had drank all the beer at the hostel’s cafeteria before migrating to this tiny hole-in-the-wall and not only that, by the time I arrived they had already cleaned out the small fridge at the bar.  So we dug into several rounds of warm beer and traded drunken travel stories.  Those two guys had travelled to more than forty countries together, they had plenty of stories to tell and they all seemed best when told loudly.  

Angel and Christian (I just now noticed the Biblical leanings of their names) didn’t need the service of touts – it seems that Angel had literally had his hands full when he had crossed the border at the airport – and as he crumbled a corner off of a delicious Nepalese temple balI into double-wide Rizla I started to glean that they were both a few caps and stems into their evening already.  A handful of beers later a couple of young chicas walked by and Christian stumbled out of his chair to give chase.  Given his state I was quite amazed that he was able to lure them back but he did, and soon the four of them were flagging a cab to go to a disco.  

I suspect everyone was relieved when I opted to not join them.  Instead, I spent every remaining sole in my pocket on beers and brought them back up to the hostel cafeteria.  I met a friendly couple from Gatineau up there as well as a French guy named Bruno.  Though he outdistanced my French by kilometres, he didn’t speak much English but no matter: we had a good time hanging out.  Bruno was a rather interesting dude.  When I pointed out how easily we were conversing he said, “We do not speak the same language but we can share the same dreams.”  My jaw gaped a bit at the beauty of his statement, and when he saw this he quickly clarified: “I did not say that.”  Just as I was expecting him to disclose the author of such a fine quote he instead doubled down on the poetics: 

“It is The Earth that has told me this.”  Wow Bruno, just: Wow.

I finally drank enough beer to call it a night and headed to my new room.  I say “new” because while I was out drinking with Angel and Christian the hotel staff had decided that they needed the four-bed room I was sharing with a Belgian stranger named Pascal so they simply moved all of our stuff to another room!  Well, almost all our stuff.  Actually, none of my stuff.  I knocked on the door of my old room and to the astonishment of the family of Germans staying there I walked up to the kids bed, reached underneath it and pulled out my bag.  It was encouraging to note that my subtle hiding place had worked, but it was still weird that those people had had unfettered access to my undies ‘n stuff.

That said, our new rooftop room was much, much nicer.  Sure there were a lot of stairs to climb but the view of the San Francisco Cathedral from up there was divine.  Pascal the Belgian was pissed off at me because he thought I had moved all our stuff to the new room without telling him.  I think I managed to make him believe the truth, but he was still being weird.  I’m glad I shook him.

*I’ve long-convinced myself that touts and scallywags in tropical climates seek out the whitest tourists, expecting those without tans to be freshly off the boat, as it were. 

011705 Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition (and Congress)

When morning rolled around I arose refreshed and ready to get on top of my day.  I found a large bank a short stroll away and shunning (for now) the dozen or more currency exchangers who lingered on the sidewalk with the same flagrant black-market bravado as the hash dealers who lined up every day behind the McDonald’s near my high school I went in and battled a baffling string of inquiries and interactions before walking out with a pocket full of soles (Peruvian currency is the “sole”) and a confused case of mental whiplash.

I asked one of the sidewalk touts what their exchange rate was and promised myself I’d trade my money on the streets from now on.  I was travelling with very, very little money (because I had in general very, very little money) and I was eager to stretch things as thinly as I could.  

With that in mind, I killed the rest of the morning at the nearby Museo del Congreso y la inquisición, which doesn’t charge admission.  Lest you think I am specifically creepy (and cheap) I should like to point out that the specifically creepy Inquisition museum (and its significantly less creepy Congress component) is the most popular in all of Lima.  

And why not?  It’s free!  (And creepy.)

I had almost finished the full museum tour with a Spanish group when I noticed a small English tour just starting out so I hopped on that and actually learned a thing or two.  (Despite doing well – on paper – in a full-credit Introduction to Spanish course during my second year of university I don’t speak or understand Spanish enough to, well, to say or understand much at all.  This entire trip tended to prove this on a moment-by-moment basis.) 

In short, the museum has some very unnerving exhibits and installations on display, all intended to offer the visitor a visualization of the otherwise unimaginable horrors that befell many of the nearly 1,500 innocent people who had the great misfortune of being “processed” through this, the headquarters of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. (I shudder just typing such a horrid title).   

Amazingly the inquisitors had plenty of rules around just how they could torture people, and a doctor was kept on hand during the more delicate procedures to ensure that the inquisitees didn’t die until the moment they were supposed to.  These and other indignities were presented with the help of very realistic wax dummies placed in very unreal situations. 

What an ugly, ugly world this was. 

The English tour group included a couple with their young daughter in tow, a girl maybe four or five years old.  As the tour approached the main and most graphic torture chamber I pulled the mother aside and suggested that the next room might freak out her little girl.  She just laughed and said, “It’s all right, she’s a weird kid.”  We filed into the room and were confronted with a dummy who had his hands tied behind his back and a tortured expression frozen onto his face.  Two mannequins in the corner pulled on a rope, hoisting the wax prisoner to the ceiling by the binding around his hands, putting him in a very uncomfortable position to say the least.  “Hee-hee!” squealed the little girl, pointing up at the horror.  “Mommy, mommy!  Look at what that funny man is doing!”  Mom turns and gives me a raised eyebrow, like they visit torture chambers all the time.  Odd kid, sure, but I think the mom might be a little endangered too.

In an irony that I can’t quite put my finger on, after a 251-year run that killed a surprisingly few thirty-two people (guess those torture-doctors were pretty good at their jobs), the Inquisition Headquarters closed in 1820 – just a year before Peru gained independence from the Spanish Empire – and the building became the home of Peru’s brand-new Congress and later their Senate.  That part of the museum was much less horrible, and equally less interesting.    

Back at the hotel I quickly caught up with Angel and Christian and got the lowdown on what I had thankfully missed from their continued hedonism the night before.  We made quick and vague plans to meet up in Cuzco a week hence and I dashed to my room to grab my things before rushing to check out.  I found the station in time to literally run for my bus and barely catch it.  Four hours and a $3 fare later I was in Pisco, 250 kilometres south of Lima and namesake for Peru’s de facto national tipple (which is also called “pisco”, obviously). 

I hustled around until I found a place that would let me haggle them down to $3 for a room and scoured the travel shops for the cheapest tour of the penguin-rich Ballestas Islands, booking myself a ticket for the following morning.  Then I was left with nothing but to scope out a good cheap meal and find out what Pisco was like.  I did indeed score a pile of good, hot food for almost no money at all but I allowed myself just the tiniest taste of Pisco.

Pisco the city, that is; I saved the city’s nom de plume shooter for another day.  After dinner and a brief walkabout I opted for an early night of corner-store beers consumed alone in my room with my alarm set nice and early in anticipation of my upcoming boat tour.  I wanted to be on time and awake for my first-ever penguin experience!

* * *

Though I had with me on this trip a new-fangled point-and-shoot “digital” camera – one that could even afford short videos – the world was still a ways away from infinite photographic storage capacity.  As such, you may find a relative dearth of photos throughout this narrative, and in this post in particular.  I trust that the reader won’t find this overly disappointing, and in exchange promise that I will ultimately be including herewith virtually every photo and short video that I took on this journey.

And I think you’ll like ’em.  So do stick around.

011805 Birds, Burgers, and Boarding

It was early when the alarm screamed me awake but no matter.  Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed or glazed over and disheveled, I was excited.  As I sloggily skipped along the mostly-barren streets to meet the tour that would take me around the Ballestas Islands I was thinking of a weekend spent at a friend’s northern Ontario cottage several years before.  I’d occupied a rainy afternoon by drawing up a comprehensive list of nearly two hundred things that I wanted to get done during my short time on this Earth.  A “bucket list” as it were, though that drizzly day pre-dated the Rob Reiner movie by more than a decade, so I wouldn’t have known to call it that.  Instead I titled it simply: Things To Do.  Anyway, my list included some stuff that was basically impossible, like “play in a major league baseball game” or “visit every country in the world”, but it was mostly achievable things like “learn to speak Spanish”, “meet Edie Brickell”, and “own a convertible”.  And one of the admirably high number of things I managed to check off of that long-lost life agenda before it became long-lost was “see penguins in the wild”.  Which I was currently on my way to do, so with my pending checkmark in mind I strolled with more of a bounce in my step than you would expect from a guy who’d drunk as many solo room beers as I had drunk the night before.

A bus drove a group of us a half-hour south out of Pisco to Paracas, where we transferred to a medium-sized tourist boat.  The trip to the island would take about an hour but not long after we departed I got my first taste of the remarkable sites I would soon be seeing in Nazca when the boat circled around an island and brought us face-to-face with a large and unmistakable pattern etched into the side of a sandy mountain.

The Paracas Candelabro

Pottery found in and around the Paracas Candelabro dates back to about 200 BCE but the stones that enhance the sixty centimetre-deep trenches that outline the fantastic geoglyph date from some time later and were likely brought from elsewhere, so nobody is quite sure when the Candelabro was created, nor can many people agree on who built it or why, but one thing mostly everyone agrees on is that it sure does look like a candelabra.  And that it’s a pretty damn cool thing. 

Photos were clicked and off we went, for, as you might recall, this was not a Candelabro boat tour, this was a penguin boat tour!  When we finally neared the Ballestas Islands the first creatures we encountered were a group of sea lions sunning themselves on the beach, but that zoological wonder was soon super-duperceded by the avian amazement of birds that dominated the islands.  Oh the birds…they were everywhere!

Sure you got your cormorants (both red-legged and otherwise) and sure you got your blue-footed boobies, but of the nearly 7.3 gajillion birds fluttering around this island at least half of them were penguins.  And each one of those adorable little waddlers was a cute little checkmark off my list.  Oh, I was beyond excited, jittering like a three-year-old at xmas and holding my hands to my cheeks like a teeny-bopper at a Beatles concert.  It was awesome!

How many penguins can you count?

The boat circled the group of islands several times and we saw all manner of wildlife, and really, it was quite simply a fantastic journey.  Sure, it was no Galapagos (or so I’m told), but the excursion cost $8 instead of $1,000+ so I was happy to settle for now. 

Sea lions in the shade of the arch

Back in Pisco I found myself a cold beer and some lunch and you would think that would make for quite a day. But not for this cowboy, dear friends.  Not this day.  And can you believe things got even better?  To wit:

I checked out of my hotel and got a bus an hour-and-a-half inland to Ica, where I hired a three-wheeled taxi.  The tiny cab took me up a road that had been carved into the side of a mountainous sand dune and around a distant corner and then, all at once I laid my eyes for the first time upon Huacachina, a real life, honest-to-goodness oasis.  The town presents a simply incredible vista and it was one that I initially saw on the back of a fifty-sole bill.  As a matter of fact, it was seeing the mirage-like oasis on the money that first caused me to inquire about Haucachina, and now here I was.

Fifty soles?!?  The place looked like a million bucks.

The deck of my hotel

Huacachina was nothing but a lagoon ringed with palm trees and pleasant hotels and restaurants, overshadowed on all sides by some of the tallest sand dunes in the world.  Seeing Huacachina for the first time was absolutely breathtaking.  I immediately found a great hotel with a pool and a thatched bar – the whole nine yards – for just $3 a night.  I felt like I was at No Name Club Med.  And not more than twenty minutes after checking in I found myself careening over those monstrous sand dunes in a dune buggy with a number of snowboards (curiously the locals referred to them as sandboards) strapped to the back.

Oh, just imagine the fun.

Actually, there’s no way you can imagine how fun this was.  I don’t know if I can put it into words, but let’s see if this helps a little: 

Two powerful dune buggies carrying a half-dozen touristos bombed through an endless desert of dunes for about three hours, catching 100% air as we hurtled over each peak and plummeting straight down the other side, only to immediately hurtle up towards the top of the next sandy tower.  It made the scariest rollercoaster look like a kiddie park carousel.  The fun level was through the roof, and that was just the getting there.  

Two sandboarders prepare for a run

When we arrived at the top of a nice steep mountain our drivers cut their engines and their assistants would leap out and start to grease the bottom of the sandboards.  For our first run we were all encouraged to try going down on our stomachs rather than standing up.  I was still a season away from my first crack at snowboarding so I was happy to try it the easy way.  

And I tell you, what a thrill!

Clutching the board to my chest, just the slightest nudge sent me reeling down the hill at breakneck speeds – almost literally I suppose for there was nary a helmet nor any whiff of safety equipment anywhere in sight – and I was screaming with uncontrollable, panicked laughter the whole way down. 

At the next hill I decided to try it standing up.  I knew nothing about bindings and the like but that was a moot point as the sandboards had none.  Instead I balanced like one would on a skateboard, but the sand was so soft I couldn’t gain enough speed to keep the board properly skimming on top of the powder.  After four dunes I had done two standing and two on my belly and it was clear that the real speed was achieved when laying down.  

After the fourth run the guides were ready to take us back but I begged for one more dune.  “You want a really big one?” my driver asked through mirrored sunglasses.  I said I sure did and he yelled something in Spanish to the other driver.  The other guy laughed and shrugged and put his machine in gear.  

Well friends, they drove us to a dune that was easily eight hundred feet high, likely more, and I swear it sloped down at about a seventy, maybe a seventy-five degree angle.  I stood at the top with my freshly greased board and I don’t mind telling you I was having second thoughts.  But the theme of the year that had brought me to South America in the first place was Coming Alive in 2005, and if that theme meant anything it meant that I should needlessly and without question risk life and limb at every opportunity, especially if it meant sliding down one of the highest sand mountains in Peru on a plexiglass board smeared with Vaseline just a mere eighteen days into the new calendar.

Right?

So I laid myself flat on the board and shoved off.  In an instant the world became a blur.  I know I hit eighty kilometres an hour going down that monster, I just know it.  I was certainly going too fast to safely dig my toes into the sand to steer, as I’d done on the other hills.  Luckily I didn’t need it, and when the hill levelled off enough for me to stop safely I jumped to my feet with a feeling of miraculous, ecstatic victory.  

The next guy that came down didn’t fare quite as well.  He was also riding on his stomach, and when he hit a bump in the sand the front tip of the board came up and smacked him sharply on the forehead, just above his right eye.  I was next to him just seconds after he reached the bottom and already he had a cartoonish goose egg growing out of his head the likes of which I’ve not seen before or after.  It was nauseating to look at.

“Dear lord,” I cried, averting my eyes in horror.  “We have to get you to a hospital!”  

“Oi,” he laughed, reaching up and gently feeling his Flintstonian lump.  “Nah,” he said casually, “Awl be ‘a’right!”  Soon his friends were beside us, taking the piss out of him and agreeing to a man that I was definitely overreacting, insisting that their buddy got worse lumps on a good night at the local pub.  I quite expected the kid’s head to explode but who was I to argue with a bunch of feisty Irishmen?  Ah well, it was his noggin and not mine, and that mishap notwithstanding the whole afternoon ransacking through the desert remains one of the single most fun experiences of my life.  

And it didn’t hurt that the last dune our buggies crested presented me with a panoramic view of that most wonderful sight, the gloriously picturesque Huacachina oasis.

My hotel hosted a barbecue social that evening, all you could eat and all you could drink for $5.  If there was indeed a strike amongst the Peruvian beef industry it didn’t stop the chef from tossing burger after burger onto the grill.  In the end I gave the rest of the crowd a run for their money, managing five delicious hamburguesas and countless rum and cokes before undergraduating to muchas cervesas and barely not dodging a handful of Marley-sized giggle sticks that started going around like hot potatoes in a lava lamp.  

I don’t remember going to sleep but I woke up, so I must have.

011905 Staying Alive, in Huacachina

The calming beauty of the Huacachina oasis was such a blatantly pleasant place to wake up that I grogged myself straight to the front desk and slapped down $3 for another night before stumbling my self-sabotaged mind, body, and spirit directly into the nearest hammock where I relaxed my eyes and pondered my Impressionistic memories of the previous evening’s antics.  In my slowly-awakening mind, ever-stumbling slurs and slanders descended into late-night social overtures of anti-gravitas that rose in direct parallel with my slippery slope of anti-memory and semi-consciousness.

None of which helped me get back to sleep.

In response, or possibly self-defence, I spent most of the day lying in that hammock trying my best to not do a damn thing.  And why not?  At ten soles per night these hotels charge prices similar to what you’d see on the backpack circuit in southeast Asia, but the accommodations are easily twice as nice.  This place was the closest I had ever come to a true resort stay, and with a loose itinerary and no travel partner to egg me on a day off was an easy call.

At some point during my lazing I made friends with a fellow Canadian, and when night approached Steve and I found a small bar nearby that was offering an all-night 2-for-1 happy hour of their already ridiculously inexpensive drinks.  It was here that I tried my first-ever pisco sour (and my second-ever, and my third-ever, and my fourth ever…), the local drink of choice.  And I do mean local; pisco is a distilled grape juice named for the town of Pisco which lie just a mere three kilometres east of our little bar.

By the time I switched to ordering pairs of piña coladas (and at ninety cents apiece I ordered a lot of pairs) I was slathering enough to start feeling self-indulgent and melancholy.  You see, this was the first anniversary of my most recent house fire, a harrowing experience that was recent enough that it was still inciting mental repercussions on an almost daily basis, and drunky me felt the need to mark the unfortunate anniversary by drinking a cheers my fellow fire victims Dave (who was the person who suggested “Peru” when I asked where I should go on this vacation) and his then-girlfriend Julia.  

But I couldn’t cheers this cheers alone.  Nay; such momentous trauma had to be shared.

Aside from Steve and I our little bar just happened to be occupied solely by women, which meant that Steve was otherwise occupied when I became overcome with the urge to spill my tale.  So I introduced myself to the unfortunate girl who was sitting on the barstool next to mine, ordered us each a pair of pisco sours and proceeded to unload upon her my traumatic tale of woe, a telling that took much longer and was nearly as distressing as the actual event itself.

(Which went like this: After a 3am nightcap with my downstairs neighbours we all fell hard into our respective beds.  Meanwhile, a wicker basket in their living room somehow started smouldering and eventually burst into a fire that engulfed their ground-level apartment in flames.  By a miracle of luck and desperation Dave – temporarily blinded by a flash explosion and with considerable burns to his face and arms – threw himself and Julia out a window before pounding on my door and trying in vain to kick it open.  However I heard the pounding and woke up on the top floor of my split-level apartment in a room filling with smoke.  I grabbed my cat and the guitar case that was closest to the stairs and ran out the door, only to see the cat dash back into the house.  As I ran back up to my apartment – which was now completely full of smoke, though only seconds had passed – to resave the cat I had no idea that the epicentre of the inferno happened to be directly underneath the staircase, and that had the stairs given way I – and the cat, who was clinging to me hard – would have fallen straight down into the basement and, well, I wouldn’t have been sitting in Huacachina toasting the unfortunate anniversary with a pair of pisco sours in front of me and two more piña coladas on the way.)

When my story was done and we’d cheersed away both our pisco sours I finally scared the poor girl off with my standard pickup move where I pretend I’m a midwife (don’t worry, it never works) Steve slid into her seat and started ordering us more drinks.  Which was just fine until it wasn’t.

Now, I can’t tell you if it was truth, drunken paranoia, or simply a surefire excuse for calling it a night, but my drunk and belligerent friend ultimately swore that he saw the bartender pour something untoward into our drinks, and he swore it loudly and accusatorially whilst staggering to his feet and knocking the stool noisily to the floor.  Luckily none of this led to the end of Steve, but it did rather hasten the end of our evening.

Ah, but doesn’t paradise always have its pitfalls?  Regardless, when the curtain fell on our night out on the oasis it was just a short zigzagging stagger to the relative safety and comfort of our high-end budget hotel.

012005 From the Dunes to the Lines

012005

Despite spending the bulk of the previous day laying around in a hammock gazing sleepily at a real-live oasis I awoke feeling far from refreshed.  I’ll never figure it out.  

(Perhaps the bartender did put something in my drink.  He would have had dozens of opportunities.)

No matter, for I had been prudent enough to retain a small amount of anti-nauseant inhaler which, combined with a shower, a couple cups of coffee, and three good shakes of the head readied me for a lengthy but unarduous travel day that would slowly whisk me away from the oasis paradise of Huacachina.  When lunchtime neared I hired a small unkempt taxi to take me over the sand dune to the nearby town of Ica, where I hunkered into a modicum of street food before sitting meditatively for an hour or more waiting for my bus to arrive.  When it did I grabbed a couple of beers and a can of Pringles for the road and was treated to a relatively comfortable* afternoon enjoying the repetitively scenic ride to Nazca.

Yeah, that Nazca.

The afternoon had faded into the rearview mirror by the time I disembarked into a throng of touts at the Nazca bus terminal, each one fighting the others for the privilege of not booking me a hotel/flight package.  Y’see, there was still plenty enough day left in the day for me to happily spent an hour or more backtracking between every single hotel in the small town, eventually playing the cheapest ones off of one another until I finally haggled a place down to twenty soles for the night.  I dropped my stuff in the room and immediately turned tail to hit the sidewalks once again, this time pounding the pavement back-and-forth between the many tourist booths that existed solely to book flights over the world-famous Nazca Lines (and bus tickets to get you out of the otherwise featureless, desolate desert town as soon as you’ve seen them).

And can you believe that I booked myself a spot in a 4-seat Cessna the following morning for just $30US?  Nobody else I talked to on the rest of my vacation could, so I guess I did pretty good.

I kept the savings going by ordering the “menu” at a small hole-in-the-wall eatery (it had taken several days of confusion and shoulder shrugging for me to discover that “menu” meant “special of the day”, which was invariably a meaty stew laden with potatoes and other tubers that was repeatedly put in front of me whenever I’d asked to see the…ahem…list of dishes on offer).  Not my favourite thing on the menu (!) but it was a cheap way to fill my stomach with hearty food, and as you may have gleaned: “cheap” is my favourite price.

The cheapest way to fill my stomach with beer was to buy a couple at a small store next to the restaurant and take them back to my large and gaudy hotel room for a light nightcap that easily came early.  Good thing too, as the following day’s adventures would commence shortly after my alarm started ringing at 7am.

Which is early at the best of times.  (And this was shaping up to be among the best of times.)

*This is foreshadowing.

012105 Jesus of Nazca

A quick shower, a snack bar breakfast, and a final twist up of pre-flight anti-nauseant had me outside my hotel waiting for my ride well before 8am.  Soon enough an old beat-up Dodge Coronet pulled up and my tour dude jumped out with a smile and a wave, beckoning me into the car and introducing me to Jesus, our stocky, middle-aged driver.

Jesus drove us to a nearby hotel to pick up a couple of fellow tourists but clearly they weren’t using the same alarm clock as I was and we ended up waiting a good twenty minutes for them to come down and join us.  And a good twenty minutes it was too, for the moment I expressed an interest in the old Coronet Jesus smiled from ear to ear and asked if I’d like to see under the hood.  I did.

By most metrics I’m not a car guy but I come from a car family, so while I might not be able to pinpoint the precise year of a Plymouth Barracuda at a glance or argue the merits of dropping a 454 big-block engine into an otherwise all-original 1968 Corvette due to nature or nurture I can still take great pleasure in the beauty of design and the quality of craftsmanship in automobiles of a certain vintage, and moreover I find it easy to share the love of cars when I find it in others.

Almost all of the automobiles I had seen in Peru had been small Asian models, tiny Daewoo’s and similar cookie-cutter gas misers.  The only recognizable car I was seeing with any regularity were Volkswagen Beetles, which were very common, though American models were pretty much nonexistent.  But with gas priced around twelve soles per litre it’s no surprise that people would favour fuel efficient minis.  A sole is about thirty cents US so that’s $3.60 per litre in a country where the average hotel room cost around twenty soles a night (though I was usually getting rooms for ten).  

Jesus was studying to be an official tour guide (I mean he was literally studying his beautifully handwritten notebook for an exam scheduled later in the day) and he wanted to shuttle tourists around in a nice big American car so not only did he drop a Japanese diesel engine into the Dodge but he also converted it from automatic to standard, effectively doubling his kilometrage to eight per litre.  He had done all the work himself and I was dutifully impressed.  He was overjoyed that I showed such an interest and after exploring the engine he took me through the trunk and then we got down on all fours to check out the exhaust system and the undercarriage.  By the time the tour dude finally returned with the two guys I’d had a better tour of that car than I was about to get of the Nazca lines.  

Once Jesus delivered us to Nazca’s small, desolate airport we three tourists were ushered into a viewing room and were shown a video on the lines – a British documentary actually – and next thing you know we were out on the tarmac ready to clamber into a four-seater Cessna.  

The ensuing forty minutes was much akin to leafing through a live, actual-size issue of National Geographic magazine.  Vast, timeless, and endlessly curious, the Nazca lines have captured the world’s imagination since aviation made them rediscoverable.  That is, it wasn’t until planes started flying over the area that the ancient geoglyphs could be seen and deciphered for what they were, which only made the whole thing that much more mysterious.  Mysterious enough to have quickly joined the likes of the Egyptian pyramids, Easter Island, and Roswell, New Mexico as one of the world’s biggest head-scratchers.

And of course the lines are manna for UFOlogists.

We’ve all seen them, the monkey with its spiraling tail, the spaceman carved into the mountain, the hummingbird, the spider, and I saw them all from that little plane, just not as close up or as clear as one sees them in pictures.  Don’t get me wrong, even though it was more of a real-life review than an exhilerating discovery – like seeing The Rolling Stones in concert, say – it was an amazing experience to see them with my own eyes.

The animal pictographs were cool but I was particularly struck by the hundreds upon hundreds of straight lines.  They are impossibly long and remarkably straight, and they run so extraordinarily willy-nilly that the alien conspiracy theorists can’t decide whether they are landing pads or star charts or a dozen other (im)possibilites.  The lines don’t seem affected at all by the geography they encounter, as they run over hills and through valleys without altering whatsoever from their razor-sharp straightness.  It was just a crazy thing to witness, especially with a pilot who eagerly zigged back and forth tipping his tiny aircraft this way and that so we wide-eyed and shutter-happy passengers could get the best views possible.

Still better in the magazines though.

Just when I worried I might have just as easily saved the $30US that I’d shelled out for the experience and instead taken a cab to the public viewing platform where one could see several straight lines and the famous eagle pictograph for free we flew over it.  Man, that would have been a disappointment.

After the flight the three of us waited an easy hour for our ride back to town, and when the car came I was overjoyed to see that once again it was Jesus and his Coronet.  My favourite thing about Jesus turned out not to be his car, but his whistle.  Peruvians can whistle, that’s for sure.  As a culture, they have it down to a science.  People are constantly busting out a loud tweet-tweet to get attention or as a warning or what-have-you, but Jesus had a grand, loud, melodious whistle that was his audio calling card.  He had a five-note phrase (B F# E G# B) that was instantly recognizable and (as my memory would come to prove) quite unforgettable, and it turned out that all of his friends did the same whistle.

A dozen times as we drove along he would turn his head and blast his melody out the window and invariably the friend that he’d just spotted on the sidewalk would echo back the same five-note phrase.  I can whistle well enough by Canadian standards, but when Jesus offered to teach me his little tune, try as I might I just couldn’t hit the notes.  When I gave up and lowered it to a more comfortable key he was pleased enough, but what really turned his crank was the short video I took of him doing the whistle.  When I played it back for him Jesus almost exploded with pride, and from that point forward I had to show the clip to every friend that he could whistle down.

Dropping me at my hotel, Jesus asked if I’d like to take a sight-seeing tour after lunch and I jumped at the chance, but somehow we ended up missing each other.  I did, however, get one more smile when I went to the tour office to ask where Jesus was.  With such a common name the clerk didn’t know who I was referring to so I did the whistle and without batting an eye the guy told me that Jesus had already left for the day to write his exam.

With an afternoon to kill I decided to walk to the bus station to buy my ongoing ticket.  It was about two kilometres each way (once I found the correct bus station) through the blazing hot desert sun (Nazca is one of the driest places on Earth, averaging a single inch of rain per decade), but at least I saved four soles on taxi fare.  As an added bonus the beer I ordered when I got back to my hotel tasted that much sweeter.

With little to fill my time I set off walking back to the depot once the sun had started to wane, but still well ahead of my 6pm departure for Cuzco.  Along the way I passed a music store.  They mostly sold bootleg CD’s but through the window I could see a guitar hanging on the wall.  I’d been itching to play so I popped my head inside and asked if I could sit and pick at it for a while.  The guy readily agreed and soon he grabbed a second guitar for himself.  He started pointing to CD’s asking me to play songs from them.  First it was Eric Clapton, then the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then The Cars, and luckily years of teaching allowed me to have a song ready for every artist he pointed to.  Then he asked me to show him the twelve bar blues and a few other things and I happily obliged.  In the end I passed a really fun hour in his shop, and I still got to the bus station with plenty of time to stock up on supplies for my overnight journey.

And so with a handful of beers, a tube of off-brand Pringles, and a large bag of coca leaves I boarded the bus and settled into a Jackie Chan movie dubbed in Spanish with no subtitles (at two soles per pound, coca leaves are not only dirt cheap in Peru but they are legal too, and chewing on them is a common and effective way of acclimatizing to the huge and potentially dangerous elevation changes that one experiences when travelling through the Andes Mountains).

Nazca is about 400m above sea level while Cuzco’s elevation is around 3,400m, so as the winding road to Cuzco takes us approximately 700 kilometres forward – though as the condor flies it’s more like 250 kilometres – we would also be going three kilometres straight up.  It would be the equivalent of driving a bus about a third of the way up Mount Everest, and at times it felt like exactly that.  Driving doesn’t make me nervous but fifteen hours of constant mountain switchbacks on a narrow road with no railing is enough to get my nerves on end. 

The Central Cross Highway in Taiwan is at least as treacherous and I had travelled that a half-dozen times, but always by motorcycle.  Careening precariously through the dizzying mountain turns in a full-sized Greyhound is a whole different story.  Sometimes it seemed literally impossible for the huge bus to make it around the 180+º turns, and yet the driver kept on.  I swear there were times that the back of the bus (where I was sitting) was extended over the edge, so much that I began praying for night, which soon came. 

With the shroud of darkness came an ignorance blissful enough to partner up with my body’s exhaustion and offer me nearly a dozen hours of fitful sleep, despite a depleting pound-bag of coca leaves.

So you know I was tired.

012205 The High Way to Cuzco

Plaza de Armas, Cuzco

I made a point to be awake for the sunrise, a pretty easy trick when you’re sleeping upright in a crowded bus that is bouncing along unkept roads on a milk run through the Andes.  And I tell you, what the ride lacked in comfort was well made up for with the glorious beauty of the sun cresting the lush, jungly mountain range.  I mean, wow.

By the time the sun rose we were supposed to be just an hour out of Cusco but the flexibility of linear time in Peru was working against us, as we still had four treacherous hours to go.  Here, though, was a wholly different Peru to distract me, a world away from the low-lying ocean-hugging desert flatlands that I had thus far experienced.  Towering above a sea of clouds from a winding road barely hanging on to mountains slick with greenery offered a boundless beauty that made the trickling lack of speed emotionally bearable, if not altogether welcome.  “Majestic” is probably the best word I can muster.  Cramped, uncomfortable, sluggish, wanna get my butt off of the damn bus as soon as is humanly possible at nearly any cost…and majestic. 

The bus stopped at any number of tiny villages – anywhere someone flagged us down – and the people getting on and off were the real tamale; ladies in bright handmade sweaters with funny little hats perched on their heads, farmers with livestock heading to market…it was great.  Meanwhile all around me tourists and Peruvians alike were vomiting into paper bags due to the drastic changes in altitude.  The sack of coca leaves I had purchased back in Nazca boosted my resilient demeanour and rendered me immune from any real symptoms, which was a blessing.  Altitude sickness can be fatal at elevations as low as 3,000m, and the bus must have peaked at 4,000m or more before we finally arrived at the depot in Cuzco (elevation: 3399m).

And while I arrived feeling a-okay with my trusty sack o’ leaves at the ready, I had resolved to take my first day at high-altitude nice and easy, and no alcohol!  That lasted until shortly after dinner, when a boring afternoon sitting around my hotel forced my hand and I bought myself one, single bottle of beer.  Okay, it was a 1.2 litre bottle, but still.

I decided to nurse my big beer out on the street in front of my hotel, which people seemed to think was crazy, and I suppose it was considering the area was littered with bars full of people drinking.  It was good though, I met several interesting parties during my 1.2 litre sidewalk sojourn.  People like Marco, a young local who worked in a restaurant down the street.  We chatted for an hour or more and before parting he invited me to join him for the opening match of the soccer…err…football season the following day, an exhibition game between the top-rated Cuzco team and their rivals from Santiago.  Of course I heartily agreed and plans were made.

And then – too soon – the fifteen-hour bus ride, the dramatic elevation change, and probably about 1.2 litres more beer than I should have drunk forced me to bid the bustling streets of Cuzco good night.

012305 A Sporting Day in the Clouds

The Plaza de Armas is the square park near the bottom of this photo, while the Estadio Inca Garcilaso de la Vega is the round maroon and white stadium on the left.

I spent the morning bouncing between tourist offices in search of bargain-basement pricing on a trek to Machu Picchu and my legwork seemed to pay off rather handsomely, if I do say so myself.  I managed to bundle a three-day trek along the Inca Trail with a white-water rafting adventure for a total of $360.  And just when you think that is a crazy good deal (and you’d be right) get this: once the arrangements were finalized and I had paid in full the guy offered to take me around on a private tour to see the local Inca ruins for free.  “I am just starting in the tourism business and I would like to practise my English,” he said to me.  “Deal of the century,” I thought in reply as I heartily agreed to join him the following day.    

It wasn’t long after lunch that my new friend Marco met me at the hotel and we set off to the Estadio Inca Garcilaso de la Vega stadium for the opening day of football season, which would pit the top Cuzco team (called Cienciano) against Unión Española from Santiago, Chile.  It was a long, eye-opening stroll of perhaps two kilometres or so, during which our progress was pleasantly impeded by a steadily growing throng of football fans that thickened the sidewalks.

Clearly the season opener was a pretty big deal ’round these parts.

There were thousands of people all streaming in the same direction, many wearing the team colours or sporting any array of donkey symbols, the donkey being the Peruvian team’s mascot-in-absentia.  Once we arrived at the stadium Marco and I didn’t linger long.  After taking in the swelling scene for twenty minutes or so Marco directed me to the ticketing “window”, which was nothing but a sign advertising ticket prices next to a small hole in the stadium wall.  Literally a single brick was missing from the wall and someone in there was selling admission tickets for absurdly low prices.

There were three ticket levels priced at eight, ten, or twelve soles (so around $2.50/$3.00/$3.50US per ticket).  A top-tier ticket got you an actual seat in a small section on the 50-yard line (I counted around two hundred of them in the 42,000-seat stadium).  The rest of the stadium seating was nothing but concrete benches, with the cheapest tickets granting access to one of the end zones and the ten sole tickets allowing you to sit anywhere else.

I treated Marco to a ticket and twenty soles later we were on our way inside early enough to have our pick of the place.  Marco led me to a great spot and we sat down to wait in the blisteringly hot sun.  I’d thought to bring a light jacket with me to help ward off the sun’s rays, though of course wearing it increased my chances of heatstroke dramatically.  I bounced back and forth as best I could and managed a balance that kept me within the bounds of safety whilst mired in bearable discomfort.  

Eventually the teams emerged onto the field and began their warmups while several soccer…sorry, football officials flanked by scantily-clad models/cheerleaders made speeches that I couldn’t understand.  After came the player introductions and while some players received an extra-enthusiastic cheer there was a clear favourite on the Cuzco team and that was #15, a cool-looking dude with long dreads who happened to be my host’s cousin.

Once the game got underway an entire section in one of the end zones started making noise and singing songs and they never stopped.  One drum, one trumpet, and a few hundred people played and cheered and danced around rooting on the home team.  After they kept it up for ten solid minutes I was impressed, and by halftime I was shaking my head in disbelief.  Peruvians are known to love football more than anyone on Earth, but this was ridiculous; the booster club simply never let up.  Their stamina was almost as impressive as the game itself.

Which, I suppose, is partly the point.

The game itself was really quite entertaining.  I will readily admit that I have never been a fan of the sport, not even a little bit, but I had a really good time, especially because Marco and I had someone to root for.  #15 definitely deserved his fans; he seemed to have his foot on the ball all the time and he got in several solid shots on goal.

A curious difference between North American audiences and the rest of the world is the whole whistling thing.  Of course we North Americans whistle when we want to cheer a goal or a great play, but everywhere else whistling is used as a form of booing.  Harsh, loud, aggressive booing.  And really, once you experience it there’s little question that the rest of the world has it right; a large crowd of whistlers can be very abrasive.  And like I’ve mentioned before, Peruvians on the whole are very skilled whistlers.

But habits die hard, so when the Cuzco team opened up the scoring with a goal early in the second half and everyone on my side of the stadium cheered, I whistled.  I’m a pretty loud whistler too.  I was so embarrassed I would have crawled under my seat if I’d had one. 

Another notable difference: When a ball goes over the fence and lands in the stands all the kids scramble for it just like kids do back home with hockey pucks or baseballs, except that in this case keeping the ball as a souvenir didn’t seem to be an option.  Instead, the kids chased the ball for the honour of kicking it back over the fence.  It happened three times during the game and all three times some happy kid was thrilled to kick the ball back onto the field.

The game ended tied at one goal apiece and the moment the game was over dozens of police in riot gear leapt up from where they had been sitting on the sidelines and took crowd-control positions ringing the field.  After a quick wave to the fans the local team left the field when the people on the entire other side of the stadium suddenly rushed the fences.  Here we go, I thought, anticipating one of those notorious soccer riots one always hears about but no, it turned out the Chilean players were simply throwing their game-played jerseys into the stands and their supporters were clamouring to get their hands on one.

Pouring back out into the streets after the game, Marco and I followed the crowd back towards the Plaza Des Armas.  Our route took us through a busy park when Marco suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me sideways.  ¨There’s my band,¨ he cried, magically pulling a pan flute from somewhere in his clothing.  He’d mentioned that he played the pan flute (a very popular instrument in Peru) and he soon joined in with the others, rounding out the group to twelve flutists with four percussionists banging enormous drums.  I stuck around for two or three of songs – all of which sounded pretty much identical to me, though I amused myself by attempting to figure out the time signatures – and then I waved my friend farewell and continued towards my hotel.  I passed another pan flute group on the other side of the park and they seemed to be playing exactly the same material.

I arrived at my room completely spent from spending the afternoon in the hot sun and in a dizzying blur of weakness I decided it was time for a splurge.  I’d noticed an Irish pub on a nearby corner and figured if there was anywhere that I could find the Steelers game it would be there.  I walked in, asked for the remote and clicked it over to the game, ordered myself a Guinness and a Philly cheese steak and nestled into heavenly bliss.  The Guinness cost as much as my hotel room charged for a night, but it was unquestionably worth it, even for a miser like me.  After a pair of cheaper beers to sustain me to the end of the exciting yet frustrating game I quit the place and hit the streets.

Back at the hotel I pondered turning in for the night but figured – rightly or wrongly – that a big beer nightcap enjoyed outside on the sidewalk wouldn’t hurt.  Right and/or wrong I’m glad I did – even if my one big beer turned into three big beers – because I had a good time out on the sidewalk meeting interesting people.  

The last person I met was a girl who joined me for a slight stagger over to the nearby Cathedral for a final beer on the wide stone steps.  In no time we were joined by three children who were out trying to sell finger puppets.  You would be astounded at the quantity and variety of hand-woven finger puppets that get offered to a tourist in the run of a day in Peru.  Walk to a store and back and at least ten different people will try and sell you some finger puppets.  It’s nutty.  

These kids were aged just seven, ten, and twelve years old and here they were plying their trade at 2am, with nary a parent in sight.  They told us about having regular run-ins with police and other late-night vagrant-style hassles and I couldn’t shake how odd it was that they should be out on their own at such an hour.  I didn’t know what to think about it – maybe there’s nothing to think about it – but I tend to think that supporting such a situation is supporting such a situation.  Despite my regular insistence that there was absolutely no way we were going to buy any finger puppets one of the kids went so far as to follow us back to the hotel.  When we went inside without buying anything she shouted that we were bad tourists, and perhaps we were.  

But yeah, come morning those extra beers hurt.  Elevation elevates hangovers and when my alarm went off at 3,400m I was immediately and acutely – violently even – given the choice of regretting any or all of those beers.  But I didn’t.  Hell, I didn’t have time for regret, for I was staring down a day of ruin.

Okay, ruins.  I was staring down a day of ruins.  But it felt like ruin.

012405 Though the Ruins on a Horse with No Name

Sleeping in the clouds can be hard on a drinker.  But I make my own bed (metaphorically, of course.  I don’t in fact make beds.)  But hurtin’ or not hurtin’ I still get up on time, and in this case on time was early enough to be out in front of my hostel when José pulled up at 9:30am.

After wheeling my deals with José the day before he’d offered to take me on a free tour of the local ruins so he could practise his tourism English and adventuring cheapskate that I am, I leapt at the opportunity.  And here he was, right on time.  José greeted me with some well-rehearsed morning pleasantries and soon we were off, driving his rickety car up one of the mountains that tower over the already heftily-elevated city of Cusco. 

As we pulled off the mountain road José asked if I had much experience riding a horse.  “Of course,” I replied, only half-lying.  Much to my surprise José led me to a small pasture behind his friend’s house where a pair of horses stood waiting for us.  We each hopped in a saddle and spent the next four hours riding throughout the area visiting a number of astounding Inca ruins.

I can’t really describe just how amazing the day was, and I’ll hardly try:  José and I and our two unnamed steeds moseyed slow and relaxed from one incredible ancient site to another, and what sights they were!  We visited Tambomachay and marvelled at the immaculate doorways and staircases, then we rode along quiet forest pathways until we dismounted at Saqsaywaman, where we were almost alone with the miraculously precise serpentine walls and mysterious stone circle.  We rode to a couple of other remarkable ruins as well (I believe one was Puka Pukara), and all of them were within easy view of the overtly picturesque mountaintop city of Cusco.  My goodness it was all so beautiful and so blatantly interesting, and doing the whole thing on horseback just pushed it over the edge of cool.  I can’t believe the excursion cost me exactly zero dollars.  Unfortunately for José I think the only English I taught him was “wow”, but at least he go to hear it a lot.

Tambomachay
Not my horse

By the time José returned me to my guest house I was exhausted and starving (I hadn’t had time for breakfast) and I couldn’t resist another trip back to the Irish pub for a heaping serving of shepherd’s pie.  Though I enjoyed my meal to the point of delirium when I paid the bill I told myself that I just could not go there again.  Not only were the prices too high for my budget mind, the place was simply not “Peru” enough.  

When I visit Ireland I’ll go to Irish pubs.  Sure I might go to one or two of Dublin’s finer Peruvian steakhouses while I’m there, but I’ll mostly try to stick to the Irish places when I’m in Ireland.  And so.

After the pub I killed some time in an internet cafe until my friend Steve arrived in town.  We’d had some formidable times in a variety of oasis-side bars after meeting in Huacachina a week earlier, and while we had ostensibly agreed to meet up to go white water rafting together, the moment he stepped off the bus we were ready to do a number on a number of bars that line the cobbled streets of Cusco.  

By some coincidence Steve ended up buying me a few pints of Guinness back at that same Irish pub I was so weakly trying to avoid.  Though he shook off my warnings about the dangers of altitude drinking so  I tricked him into taking a break for a walkabout that brought us to José’s shop, where we added Steve’s name to the rafting trip that I’d already booked for the following morning.

Afterwards we found another bar – a Peruvian one this time – for a few more nightcaps than either of us should have had, but especially Steve.

Though ironically it was I who went to bed a dozen hours before damn near dying.

012505 The Mighty Urubamba River

Another early morning came quick in the wake of another long evening as my 7am alarm went head-to-head against a late-night hard rollick through several of the neighbourhood’s bars with my new buddy Steve.  We’d been having a somewhat rip-roaring yet sensible good time getting to know each other but when we stumbled upon the amazing coincidence that we had both experienced devastating house fires in the previous year it called for round after round of grief-sharing until it got too late to tell time.    

But a little breakfast and a couple of quick cups of coffee set us both straight enough, and we were soon out the door for a pleasant-enough stroll through the beautiful cobblestone streets.  Steve and I arrived at our tour guide’s office well in time to meet our group of fellow whitewater rafters.  We were seventeen strong when we boarded the waiting bus for a two hour drive through the gorgeous green-felt mountains.  On our way out of Cusco the bus stopped to pick up some equipment.  Steve and I got off to stretch our legs, as did a Spanish fellow armed with a small dry-bag packed with Jamaican cannons.  He set one alit right then and there and Steve and I did our best to help put it out.  When we finally succeeded we were positively dizzy from the effort.

Which only made the stunning drive that much more beautiful. 

Unlike the harrowing and crowded bus ride that had scared the bezeesus out of me as it climbed two kilometres from the seaside town of Ica up to the cloud-city of Cusco, this ride skirting along the pointy top of the Andes Mountain range was as fearless as it was amazing.  This felt more like a drive through British Columbia, except the trees were substituted for a lush green fuzz and these mountains towered over tiny mudbrick homes that looked in the distance like tiny birdhouses.  As we approached the mountain towns we would invariably see everyone running around trying to splash each other with buckets of water which – we were told – is a national tradition during the week leading up to Carnival.

We were safe on the bus but no matter, we’d all be soaked soon enough.

When we arrived at base camp our new Spanish buddy hit us up again and then we joined the others getting fitted for wetsuits.  Let me tell you, wetsuits are designed to be tight.  When I finally peeled one on I looked like a walrus in spandex but I didn’t care; nobody was looking at me anyways because all the girls looked like girls in wetsuits.  Once we were all suited up and in our helmets and lifejackets we were each handed a paddle and marched off to the training session, which consisted of ninety seconds of paddling instructions and twenty minutes of what you should do if GOD FORBID!!! the boat should capsize or for any reason you should end up in the water, but don’t worry (we were assured); you wouldn’t.  Then they split us up into three groups; half a dozen per raft.

It being the rainy season the Rio Urubamba was high and fast – though what did I know about it? –  and moments after shoving off from shore we were all soaked and navigating through rapid after rapid after rapid.

I guess it makes sense that rapids come fast.  That’s probably why they called them that.  

We six struggled to maneuveur our raft as best we could at the behest of our team leader, together cresting our pliable rubber boat over bubbling liquid hills and folding our craft betwixt and around ominous rocky outcrops that came at us nearly nonstop.  “Backbackbackbackback!” and “Forrwardforwardforwardforward!” were the primary onboard talking points – always shouted – while our sudden and infrequent lulls in river excitement were punctuated with only gasps for breath and the occasional whispered “Wow…”, though we were mostly struck silent in awe.

And no wonder.  The section of the Urubamba River we were traversing ran through a deep valley that was bordered on both sides with steep mountainous walls that towered above us with a stunning and surreal Disney-esque beauty.  I can’t tell you what was more breathtaking, the paddling or the view.

Okay, it was the paddling, but the view (when we had time to admire it) was pretty darn nice.

Water is a curious thing.  Sometimes we’d be trucking along and all of a sudden my paddle would be swinging through air instead of water because the river was suddenly five feet below me.  I was enthralled by the many huge holes in the river we came across; cavernous vacuums of nothingness where the path of the rapids created a concave of space like a surfer’s tunnel.  Freaky!  

In one of the more treacherous areas we were paddling backbackbackbackback and forwardforwardforwardforward trying to navigate a particularly mean gap in the river rocks when the side I was on dipped well below the surface.  In an instant we took on a massive amount of water and the next thing you know our raft was flipping over!  With virtually no warning at all we six tourists and our team captain were catapulted into the frothing water and thrust careening through the thunderous rapids like so many rubber ducks being cast over Niagara Falls.  I managed to grasp the nylon rope that strung along the outer edge of our upturned raft and assumed the position we’d been instructed to take if we fell overboard; laying flat on my back with my feet pointing downriver. 

I’m glad I did because I immediately slid over a rock.  It notched a hefty cut into my left foot but if I had been facing the other way the damage probably would have been much, much worse.  Just then our team leader made it to the raft and I guess he didn’t see me clinging to it because he righted the raft right on top of me.  So I’m still heading downriver through treacherous rapids, only now I was underneath our raft, fully submerged and fighting to hold my already panting breath.  I had one hand pressing my half-askew glasses to my face and the other still gripping the side of the raft, but the direction we were going kept me from pulling myself free.  It was pretty scary for a moment or two, but I finally got myself out and was the first person to be pulled back into the raft by our team leader.  

This had been included in our training: first one back in the raft lifts the others back into the raft while the captain steers the boat.  It is basically power-lifting; you grasp the person in the water by the shoulders of their lifejacket and lift them straight out of the water and back into the boat.  It’s worthy to note that rafts generally get dumped in the most active part of the river, and trying to get people back in the boat while careening through furious, tumultuous water was no picnic.  I tell you, my lungs were on fire as I pulled one person then another and another out of the water while our leader kept us steady amongst the unrelenting rapids.

When all was said and done we were down to five tourists, the sixth having been saved by another raft.  Just seconds after everyone made it out of the water we found ourselves in calmer waters and were able to reunite our team.  My breath was still coming hard trying to make up for lost oxygen, but as soon as we completed our reunion we were right back into the thick of the rapids again, with little chance for rest.  It was wincingly painful on my lungs and my foot was bleeding up a storm.  

Finally we landed the thing for a break and while most of the rafters went diving off a nearby bridge I busied myself inspecting the gash on my foot.  It didn’t need stitches but it was certainly going to leave a permanent scar.  But then, scars are cheaper than tattoos, and the two are not without their similarities.  I noticed that the cut was kind of in the shape of a condor too, which made it very Peruvian. 

Despite a lengthy break my beleaguered lungs were still aching as we lined up to re-board our raft, scrambling single-file over a mound of rocks that formed a pocket of calm-ish water along the otherwise rushing riverside.  The moment our loaded boat started to move the front end hit the current and was sucked straight down.  The raft was obviously going underwater again so I jumped ship, barely making the leap back to the rocky outcrop that we’d just stepped over.  One other rafter bailed as well and the raft didn’t end up going down – arguably because we had jumped out – but two of us were left to scramble along the stony shore for several hundred metres to catch up with our waiting team (and our scowling captain). 

Fortunately the rest of the journey was significantly less eventful while remaining just as as picturesque, and after continuing downriver for another three hours it was over.  The entire crew was exhausted but happy to be alive as we trudged back to base camp, where we all stripped off our sopping wetsuits and hit the sauna to warm our bones.  

In between the changeroom and the sauna I was given the shock of my life while undressing.  And no, it had nothing to do with the cut on my foot.  Rather, it had to do with the, shall we say ninja-like withdrawal of one’s body bits that came as the result of a half-day submerged in water whilst wearing a shrink-wrap bodysuit.  I actually let out a little yelp when I didn’t see it.  And to think that I’d been afraid of losing my glasses.  

Anyway, after the sauna we were served a nice warm meal which we enjoyed as the beautiful day turned to cold wind and rain.  After a couple more tête-à-têtes with my new Spanish bestie we were all back on the bus and creeping slowly along the winding mountain roads with the windshield wipers flapping a steady, staggering beat.

It was in this Impressionistic reverie, with the buzz, the exhaustion, and the thrill of being alive settling into my head while the stunning scenery floated by outside that the bus driver slid a CD into the player.  Out of the speakers came Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison, and for some reason the late-’80’s hair-metal ballad was perfect for the moment.  When the middle eighth came around I couldn’t help myself; I closed my eyes, threw my rock and roll hands in the air and sang like I was the only person on Earth:

Though it’s been a while now, I could still feel so much pain

And I could too.  The throbbing in my foot only made my sing louder, if that was even possible:

Like the knife that cuts you the wound heals…

I didn’t care who heard me or what they thought, this was my moment dammit!

But the scar, that scar remains!

When we arrived back in Cusco we parted company with hugs and handshakes all around.  Back at the hostel I borrowed a guitar from someone and plunged myself into the meditative ignorance of musical bliss for the rest of the evening.

The following day I would begin my Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu.  And while I was unquestionably excited, embarking on a four-day climb through the mountains from my already-elevated perch was giving me no shortage of anxiety.  

First, there had been some political rioting down in Arequipa.  There was an election coming and a former President named Alan Garcia was running on the platform that his successor Alberto Fujimori was more corrupt than he was*, and it seemed that pretty much everyone in the country had something to be upset about.  This smattering of news afforded me little confidence that the rioting wouldn’t spread while I was severed from the rest of the world.  

But truthfully, the main concern had to do with my still burning lungs.  After half a lifetime of abuse I questioned whether the old airbags and especially the heart that pumped them wouldn’t burst as I lumbered my overweight, over-drinking, over-everything physical being up up and further up into the clouds to an artery-popping elevation of 4,500 metres, more than a kilometre above where we would begin our journey.  And if the climb were to inspire a heart attack or worse, well, it would hit me when I was miles and miles away from a hospital or any other significant medical help. 

If anything, I could (and did) take solace in the knowledge that if I didn’t make it back, well, I’d had a hell of a time these past thirty-seven years, and I wasn’t going to keep enjoying myself by sitting around and worrying about dying.

And so I strummed my worries away until I could keep my eyes awake no more.

*It’s frankly a bit of a toss up: Fujimori was eventually sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment for embezzlement and bribery while the successfully re-elected Garcia ultimately committed suicide amid a flurry of scandal.  

012605 First Steps on the Inca Trail

I suppose it’s not every day that one sets out to begin a four-day hike along the world-famous Inca Trail to the even world-famouser Machu Picchu, but today it is.

By 7am I was showered, brushed, packed up, checked out, and waiting outside of my hostel like an eager little Canadian beaver ready to make tracks.  Soon a van pulls up and I slide the side door open with a cheery “Good morning, team!” only to be met with reluctant glances and a few muttered murmurs of hello from the five touristos huddled in the back.

I jumped in and added my small shoulder bag to the mass of luggage piled in the back seat.  The van drove around the corner where three more hikers were waiting with their backpacks.  There was no room at all left for them in the van so I suggested we’d have to put some of the bags on the roof to make space for the newcomers.

“Ees naht possibell!  Ees naht possibell!!!”  The quartet of French tourists beside me were suddenly beside themselves.  “Deese peeple wheel ‘alf to fine zum other way,” said the eldest one, gesticulating grandly before settling back into his seat with his arms crossed in a huff.  Well, that wasn’t very friendly. 

Turns out the four of them (three men and a woman, ranging in age from twenty-eight to fifty-four; the fifth tourist was a fellah from Hungary who was a bit younger than me) had flown straight from France specifically to do the trail, and while their disgruntled demeanour exuded nary a wisp of amity towards their fellow adventurers on this unique and exciting morning, I must say I sorta get it.  They had booked their trip through a sit-down travel agent back in Nice (“Oh, isn’t that nice?!?” I implored, discovering instantly that they had no sense of humour whatsoever) and had paid through the nose for a private group trek along the Inca trail, and here the van was picking up more and more people.  

But while I understood their position, my stuff was already in the van so it didn’t seem to be my problem.  I sat quietly and watched as the ultra-cliche French tourists argued with the driver and the tour operator and anyone else who would hear their heavily accented complaints.  I was not among them.

Amazingly, the tour guide eventually relented and put the three newcomers on different bus altogether.  I was surprised but even more disappointed, as the young British couple and the Canadian girl had seemed very cool, even in the face of such an awkward situation.

Somehow the Hungarian kid and I survived the bickering and bargaining session and finally the six of us, along with our guide Al and our driver, were off.  After two hours of splendid driving we stopped for supplies.  Al insisted that the Hungarian and I both purchase walking sticks (the Frenchies were utterly laden with gear, a pile from which poked four ultra-light high-impact ergonomic titanium walking sticks, still brand-new and wrapped in plastic), and while we bargained with one of several walking-stick merchants he and the driver hoisted packs of food and fuel onto the roof of the van.  A half-hour down the road we reached the starting point of our hike.

Here we were introduced to our porters, of which there were many.  Recent regulations stated that there had to be at least one porter on the trail per tourist, and the maximum load any porter was allowed to carry was twenty kilos.  As this was being explained I glanced at the growing amount of luggage that was being offloaded from our van and realized with a start that our collective supplies – tents, stoves, food, etcetera – was all still on the roof!  I swear, the Nice people each had a large backpack plus a huge green army surplus bag per person (and then some), and the Hungarian guy had literally the biggest backpack I’d ever seen.  All I had (for my whole trip to Peru) was the sort of shoulder bag a teenager might take to school every day.  It didn’t weigh ten kilos fully stuffed, so I was good.  The French folks carried their backpacks and employed a small army of porters to carry their extra bags, while the Hungarian hired a porter to carry his massive backpack so he would be free to hike laden with only his camera and a small bottle of water.  

Al told us that we were Team Puma, so we had to be strong.  I felt dumb having no idea what a puma was and when Al showed us our small team flag I could only assume “puma” was Spanish for “sneakers”.  I decided to be shoe-strong and ask no questions.  We checked in with the trail patrol and after our porters had their packs weighed we crossed a short bridge over the mighty Rio Urubamba – the very gushing mistress that had nearly taken me just one day earlier – and were off on yet another adventure of a lifetime.

Urubamba River

Day one of the Inca Trail was by far the easiest with regard to the actual climbing, though there were a few major hills to endure.  The scenery was simply awesome and the trail was continually dotted with incredible Incan ruin sites along the way.  It was basically a leisurely, if highly-exaggerated stroll along trails littered with ancient ruins whilst enveloped in a continuous panorama of jaw-dropping views. 

In an effort to get to know everyone, I made a point of falling in step with each member of our small team of pumas at least once during the day, and our guide Al proved to be an easy favourite (I’m not counting the porters.  There was no catching the porters, who would rush past us in a run a half-hour after we left camp every morning).  Though I was pulling liberally from my paper sack of coca leaves the hills were still leaving me quite winded, so Al offered me something called llipta that all the porters use to help with climbing at altitude.  Llipta is a gooey black paste that is concentrated from the coca plant.  For an extra energy boost the porters pinch a bit of llipta into the middle of a coca leaf and not long after tucking this into your cheek badda-bing, your face begins to freeze and you start running up the hills.  Al could see that I responded well to the llipta so he gave me a big wad to put in my pocket, no charge.

The Inca Trail…the Inca Trail

After six hours of glorious hiking we stopped for the night.  Our porters had run ahead and set up our camp in the yard of what seemed to be some family’s farmstead.  The little plot of land nestled in the crook of the steep mountains had room for a small house, a barn and not much else.  There were cats, dogs, chickens, roosters, cows, bulls, and all manner of critters wandering around completely unfenced and untethered, with absolutely nowhere to go.  

Al gathered us around a pair of folding tables and announced “Tea-time-happy-hour”, unveiling a treat of hot drinks and crackers/toast/cookies that we would enjoy every day at the end of our walk.  The elder French gentleman muttered something about an “aperitif” and started rummaging through his bag, soon emerging with a bottle of something clearly quite fancy that tasted like Sambuca.  

Okay, I thought, maybe these Frenchies won’t be so bad after all.

We sat together sipping our drinks, munching on cookies and quietly taking in the majestic beauty of the place for a few moments before the Hungarian kid asks for a washroom.  He is pointed to an Asian-style hole in the ground behind the barn but he quickly returns asking where he could find the “tourist” washroom, and also the shower?

I said he could probably find both those things at the internet cafe and he quite honestly asked me where that was.  When it was explained that he wouldn’t see a shower or a proper bathroom until the final night of the hike he was clearly shaken.  Later, during dinner, he quite nearly freaked out about the moths that fluttered around the lanterns, insisting that he just can’t stand bugs.  Geez, how did the guy get this far? 

Of course the two of us had been paired up to be tent-mates.  As we turned in I could hear the porters murmuring to each other from their tent on the fringe of our camp and I swear I heard one of them finish a sentence with the phrase “…not yet heaven,” to the grunting approval of the others.  I knew that I must have misheard; the porters weren’t even speaking English.  They would have been speaking Spanish, or more likely Quechua.    

But still, as I lay there enveloped in the quiet, darkened shadows of the misty Andes mountains waiting for the silky shudder of sleep to overcome me, I couldn’t help but to smile at the prophetic mondegreen:  Not yet heaven.

Not yet, but soon.

012705 It’s a Long Way to the Top

With a large and varied assortment of critters wandering loose around our encampment it’s no surprise that I was awakened early.  It had rained in the night and though the small pup tent had leaked a little, the inconvenience proved inconsequential.  To me at least; the young Hungarian fellow I was sharing the tent with seemed rather sullen.  

I, on the other hand, was anything but!  Outside the tent I found the sun basking down upon the mountainside with a radiant morning glory that had me nearly running around like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.  But the poor Hungarian didn’t even eat breakfast; said he hadn’t slept well.  

While the rest of us ate, our guide Al warned us that we were in for an extreme day of climbing.  This will be the most difficult day of the Inca Trail, he said, explaining that in the next six hours we would be ascending from our current altitude of 2,700 metres to a peak of 4,200 metres.  At this the four French tourists – who were outfitted well enough to summit Mount Everest, or perhaps hike through the Sea of Tranquility – all simultaneously looked down and poked numbers into their fancy-pants wristwatch altimeters.  I reached for an extra piece of toast.  

Soon enough we are off, walking steadily up up up through stunning scenery on a sublimely beautiful day.  It was really and truly breathtaking in every conceivable way.  And every step made it even moreso, until we finally climbed up through the clouds and into thin air.  

The disgruntled Hungarian

All of us except the Hungarian, that is.  It wasn’t long into the morning when our guide Al fell in step with me and mentioned that our youngest puma had turned around and was headed back to Cusco.  Crazy.  I couldn’t help thinking that my abundant personality and strong snoring must have played a part in his decision, but I assured myself that I could only have played a supporting role at best.  Dude had plenty working against him.  By the end of the day Al would report that two other hikers from other groups had also packed it in and gone home.  

That amounts to a 1.5% quit rate, which isn’t too bad.  New tourism rules were limiting the amount of tourists allowed to embark on the Inca Trail to 200 per day; I guess there used to be a lot more*.  Still, with 800 people spread out along the four-day hike it was a somewhat rare treat to find one’s self alone on the trail and out-of-earshot of others.  At one point in the afternoon I happened upon the British couple and Canadian girl that had almost been a part of our team and confirmed that yes, they were indeed very cool. 

I wouldn’t necessarily say the same about my fellow pumas.  They were fine, but not much more.  We mostly stayed out of each other’s way and got on fine enough when we didn’t, and in the end I actually ended up being quite friendly with the lady and her husband.  But I knew I was a fifth wheel stuck to their little group even though it was quickly obvious that the other trekking parties contained at least dozen if not twenty to thirty people, and now that we were down to just five, well, we had a pretty private hiking party.  

And a pretty, relatively private hike it was too!  I kept my sack of coca leaves and wad of llipta at the ready and tried my best to concentrate as much on the stunning scenery as I did on my plodding feet, my aching body, and my ever-straining lungs.  When I did I invariably found that everything around me was continually astounding and constantly beautiful.  

Including my encounter with a curiously large hummingbird, whom I met during one of my brief solo stretches along the path.  I had been trucking along with my eyes on the trail when I heard the purr of little engine-wings and looked up find a bird hovering just a couple of feet away from my chest.  He was by far the largest hummingbird I had ever seen and he was very colourful, and though he flitted slightly to and fro he mostly remained still, flying-in-place directly in front of me.  After ten long seconds I thought to myself, “I should dig the camera out of my bag.”  But of course I waffled, thinking, “Nah, he’ll fly away any second now, just enjoy it.”   And yet he remained.  “I should really get my camera though.”

“No way, he’ll fly away as soon as I set my bag down.”  The hummingbird hummed, unmoving.

“But my camera takes videos.  Maybe I could get a little video of the guy…:  Still, he hovered.  

Can you see the hummingbird in this picture?

In a burst of confidence or perhaps boredom I finally did fish out my camera and managed a quick, out-of-focus picture before the little dude succumbed to his own boredom and disappeared in a flash.

Let me tell you, hour after hour of climbing up through the clouds can really grind a guy down.  By the time I had the day’s pinnacle in sight I was drenched in sweat from aching head to blistered toe.  And even then I was still at least an hour from reaching the peak, as close as it was.  Of course, the ever-thinning air slowed things down tremendously; once you reach the 3,500 metre mark you officially enter the “Very High Altitude” realm, a zone characterized by significantly lower oxygen levels which can lead the altitude sickness.  At these elevations, rapid ascent can lead to serious, potentially fatal conditions like High-Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) or High-Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE), but I tell you, I wasn’t anywhere near “rapid ascent”.  Even though we were continually waiting for the elder Frenchman, who was forever taking extended breaks punctuated with heavily-orchestrated photo ops, whereby he would pose confidently with his chest puffed out only to collapse gasping for breath the moment the picture was taken, the lack of breathable air kept me down to no more than five paces in a stretch before I would be forced to stop to catch my breath.  At one point I asked Al about the canister of emergency oxygen he was required by law to have on hand at all times, maybe I could get a hit or two off of that?  He simply asked me if I wanted to turn back like the Hungarian did and spent the rest of the day out of earshot. 

When at long last I made it to the uppermost ledge of the highest point of the Inca Trail, staggering impaired with the dizziness and headache that come with the onset of altitude sickness, I barely had to time to enjoy the feat.  Sweating prodigiously and clamouring for breath, I joined a smattering of other hikers sitting along the rim and gaped at the struggling hikers below.  Wow, 4,200 metres…amazing!  The peak of Mount Everest is just over 8,800 metres; I had just hiked halfway up Everest!  The easy half, okay, but still.  

Unfortunately my fatigued reverie was short, as Al had directed one of the porters to wait at the top and make sure that none of the pumas stayed at the peak longer than five minutes.  Any longer and the health risks for the uninitiated begin to increase exponentially.  The air was so depleted that my chest was still struggling for breath when the small smiling man tapped me on the shoulder and waved a Team Puma banner in my face, bidding me to begin the ninety-minute descent towards camp. 

Though my soul is strong my knees are not.  I’ve had surgery on both for different reasons, and by the time I started down from the pinnacle my right knee was starting to get pretty tender.  I started leaning into my walking stick hard enough that it became a cane, and still the relentless gravity yanked my hulking torso down onto my fragile joints with little mercy.  I had become exhausted to the point of collapse, and while the long slog up up up all day had been a genuine trial of endurance, the down down down encore turned out to be no picnic either.  Frankly, I don’t think I’d ever voluntarily experienced a more difficult physical trial.  

I tell you, at the end of it all Camp Puma was one hell of a beautiful sight.  On night one Team Puma had camped alone but here all 200 hikers along with their porters and guides were crammed together in a sea of tents.  Again, Al had installed one of our porters at the entrance of the encampment to watch for his pumas, and as I was led hobbling through the labyrinth of camps my body was literally raked with fatigue.  The blisters I had acquired walking back and forth through Nazca had really come to the fore, and my rafting gashes were on the brink of infection.  But oh my, everything was all so mind-bendingly beautiful.  The whole way down from the peak I’d walked through clouds, only to emerge above our valley encampment enshrouded with an ever-shifting ceiling of mist.  Everything was extraordinary.

After Tea-time-happy-hour I fell into my tent and slept like a dead man for two hours.  I was awoken so I could eat supper and shortly after I went back down for another eleven solid hours.  

Drifting coma-like between the dinner table and my sleeping bag I stopped for a moment and turned my head from side to side, struck dumb at the sheer wonder of the place I happened to find myself.  Then I looked up and gasped.  The clouds had dissipated somewhat and a break in the cover opened before my eyes, revealing the most impressive array of stars I’ve ever seen.  The lack of light or even a sliver of moon combined with the thin air to create a shocking depth and breadth of stars, the likes of which I think I shall never see again.  I gazed mesmerized, staring into the infinite eyes of an endless galaxy of gods; surely we were in heaven now. 

Then the Frenchies came ’round and tried to convince me that Orion was the Big Dipper so I went to bed.

*In fact, I was amazingly lucky to have booked the final departure day before the Inca Trail officially closed for the rainy season.  An embarrassing lack of research had me this close to missing the chance to hike the Inca Trail – something I left Canada fully intending to do – and it was pure happenstance that I’d caught the last possible departure day.

012805 Ruined Again

After throwing more than a dozen hours of intense sleep at a body reeling from protracted exertion at extreme altitudes I managed to greet the day with the eager anticipation that bursts from the adventurous soul of a young man awakening in the mountains with a bag of coca leaves at the ready.

After a happy brushing of teeth (at least thirty-two parts of me were clean) and a small but nutritious breakfast Team Puma set off for our third day hiking the world-famous Inca Trail.  The day started with two hours of up, but after the trial of Day Two this felt like a walk in the park.  And what a park!  No less stunning than the previous two days and equally dotted with amazing ruins.

It would be a lie to say that we’d been constantly walking past nifty Incan ruins during our daily hikes, but it wouldn’t be a very big lie, ‘cuz every day we walked by a whole lot of nifty Incan ruins.  So many that I began to worry that they would ruin me for Machu Picchu, pardon the pun.  Round ones, crooked ones, straight ones, curved ones, tall ones, wide one, you name a type of ruin and we walked by it.  One thing that they all had in common were those stylistically perfect and industrially precise stone walls that the Inca were so mysteriously good at.  After four days visiting ruin after ruin I didn’t see two stones that I could’ve fit a slice of paper between.  They were all – to a ruin – incredible.  No two sites were alike and each one had a story; some of which were known (or at least agreed upon) while most could only live in one’s imagination.

Which at times came easy.  Ascending from one of these notable sites only to almost immediately happen upon another, it wasn’t hard to project back a half a millennium and imagine the hustle and bustle of foot traffic along the misty, mountainous forest paths that ran between these eye-popping architectural wonders.  Back when Gutenberg was still working out the bugs of his printing press and young Christopher Columbus was just a stock boy working in his father’s cheese shop the Inca could boast a vast network of freshly constructed temples, bathhouses, abbeys, sacrificial sites, priestly dwellings and who knows what else?  But they didn’t.  Boast about these things, that is.  Or at least they probably tried not to.  

For if not for incursions by Spanish invaders these sites might be no more “ruin”ed than the still-inhabited castles of Germany that date as far back as the 13th century or the functioning cathedrals in France that are upwards of 800 years old.

¡Maldita sea!

Once again, after a long day of hiking upward through all of this wonder we finally reached camp.  But this time we were staying at an actual lodge, with showers, legit toilets, a rec hall and everything!  The porters even had real stoves to cook on.  

After three long, hard days of trekking through the sweltering, steamy Peruvian mountains with nothing more than a small washbasin at my disposal, I don’t think I had ever needed a shower more, and it was glorious.  Of course this was our last night with the porters and it proved to be their last opportunity to lobby up their trek-ending tips, and they did it through food.

Just like the night before, all 200 hikers were staying together, and we five pumas huddled around a picnic table sipping on our aperitifs and watching as the other tables in the dining hall were presented with mounds of chef-prepared food served on heaping silver trays, until finally it was our turn.  It was with obvious pride that our small, humble group of porters surrounded our table, each of them holding a large, domed serving tray.  At the head chef’s nod they all leaned down as one and, after a pause to ensure unity, lifted the covers off to reveal the wonders that awaited us.   

And I must say, everything was quite impressive.  And I don’t just mean because the food looked good and because there was a whole lot of it, though it did and there was.  But everything also came with a flash of pizzazz that could only have been learned in culinary school.  There were roosters made out of melons, anatomically correct llamas made from carrots and potatoes, the ruins of Puyupatamarca carved out of Spanish rice, and so much more.  As we oohed and aahed over each delicious art piece the porters snuck in more and more trays heavily laden with overly articulate food.  Eventually there was so much on the table there was hardly any room left for our appetites, and while it would have been humanly impossible for the five of us to eat even a fraction of all that food we did our hearty best, I promise you that. 

Though I gotta say, discovering how blatantly talented our cook was after three days of eating highly-pedestrian, mediocre-to-okay food didn’t inspire me to tip extra.  But tip we did – the French folks quite strongly – after giving our chef and the entire crew an enthusiastic round of applause.

Team Puma.
That’s me next to our guide Al in the back row, along with the four Nice people from France. At least one of our porters is not pictured, probably more.

After dinner I bought myself four or five frosty cold beers in fairly quick succession and man oh man, did I enjoy them.  But before things got too hairy I forced myself to hit the tent as soon as my unquenching thirst would allow for even after a day such as this, even after surviving three days hiking one of the planet’s most enviable trails, the wide-eyed wonder of a 4am pre-sunrise hike to the lost city of Machu Picchu still loomed.

The days are just packed.

012905 It’s All Downhill After Machu Picchu

For the third straight evening it rained in the night, but for the first time on this Inca Trail trek it was still raining when we got up. 

Time and time again during the previous three days, usually when he felt that one of his pumas needed a moral boost, our relentless guide Al would tell us of the wondrous sight that lay ahead of us.  Again and again he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a worn postcard featuring a photo of Machu Picchu taken from above.  “When you stand in this place and see the sun rise over the lost city of Machu Picchu,” he would say with a touch of awe in his voice, “you will know true beauty.”  He showed us that postcard twenty, perhaps thirty times over the course of our journey and when – following a brief, almost non-breakfast in the dining hall – we set out for the very same perch from which the picture on the postcard was taken I realized it had all been a long con to pre-whet our appetites for an otherwise wholly unreasonable 4am hike through the dark, in the rain, over slick, narrow stone paths.


Slippery rocks with a thousand-foot drop.

I almost lost my footing a few times, missteps that could have plunged me hundreds of metres down the side of a mountain.  These close calls elevated my ever-present walking stick from a cane to a trusted friend. 

After an hour of clamouring through the damp and the dark we reached our mystical, magical destination.  Days of heart-thumping struggle enduring thousands of arduous steps up mountain after mountain had finally delivered us to the point above Machu Picchu where we would join the envied few lucky enough to bear witness as the sun crested over one of the most remarkable and picturesque creations in the history of mankind.

Only it was cloudy.  Or foggy, take your pick.  And just to rub it in it was still a bit rainy too.  In fact it was so cloudy that we couldn’t see a damn thing.  Nothing, nada, zippo.  Machu Picchu was down there somewhere but we’d have to take our guide’s word for it because all we could see was dense fog.  Mute with disappointment, Team Puma shuffled around the small plateau shrugging our shoulders at each other and dripping a blend of rain and sweat, when suddenly an idea struck me.

“Hey Al,” I blurted. “You still got that postcard?”  

“Of course,” our guide answered, patting the outside of his inside pocket.

“Pull it out, would you?”  

When Al produced the postcard I asked him to hold it where it would exactly mimic the view were weren’t seeing.  “I got up at four o’clock in the stupid morning and risked my freakin’ life walking up here in the rain,” I mock-grumbled.  “I’m getting my damn picture.”  Laughing, Al held out the postcard while I and the others each snapped a shot.  And you know, it’s probably my favourite picture from the whole trip.

Somewhat buoyed, we pumas began our descent and before long, despite our “mist” opportunity on the plateau, we were treated to a remarkable sight when the lost city of Machu Picchu began to emerge out of the foggy murk before our very eyes.  To watch something so extensive and so outrageously picturesque gradually come into focus like that was really quite incredible.  It was like peeling layers off of a Monet until it became a Rembrandt.  

As I’d mentioned before, after all the amazing ruins we’d experienced along the Inca Trail these past few days I had grown concerned that I wouldn’t find Machu Picchu that big of a deal, but I was pretty wrong about that.  Machu Picchu is a very big deal.  

You’ve seen pictures of Machu Picchu and you’re about to see some more, so I think you’ll believe me when I say that mere words simply cannot distill the awe of wandering freely through the lost city.  Whether close up or from a distance, every angle, every sight, and every view takes your breath away.  Especially when the whole place is shrouded in an ominous mist, and most especially when the site is almost entirely devoid of other people.  Entrance to Machu Picchu was restricted to only Inca Trail hikers before a certain time in the morning, and even then only a small fraction of those 200 souls were foolish enough get up extra early for the sunrise hike (probably even less so when it’s raining), so we were among literally fifteen or twenty people sharing the entire site, and the site is rather extensive.  I wandered and wondered and wandered some more until I simply couldn’t bear the beauty any longer.  My jaw was sore from hanging agape when, after a couple of astounding hours exploring one of the very pinnacles of art and architecture, I bid the other pumas goodbye and started down the mountain.

Al

I was now very close to the end of my vacation and even closer to the bottom of my very limited funds.  Things were getting so dire that rather than paying the bus fare for a ride from Machu Picchu down to the town of Aguas Calientes I opted to travel by foot instead.  I think it’s pretty rare for people to walk but that’s a shame because the path was smooth and well-marked, it went solely downward, and it did so at a reasonable grade.  So all in all it made for an easy stroll.  And best of all, because the walking path was straight, every twenty or thirty metres it crossed the switchback road that the buses used, so there was simply no getting lost.

I was about ninety minutes getting down to Aguas Calientes but I didn’t care; after four days of hiking I felt like I could walk damn near anywhere and like I say, it was all downhill.  As I strolled into the small town I found my French pumas on the patio of a fancy-pants restaurant.  They invited me to join them for lunch but I knew the place was well above my budget so I begged off and did a bit of exploring.  In no time at all I found myself a meal, a small soapstone Inca ruin (my only non-utilitarian souvenir of the trip), a shower and a sauna for less than what a single beer cost at their restaurant.  

The only photo I took in Aguas Calientes

Well fed and significantly refreshed I was inspired to get a move on and in a stunning feat of rearrangement I managed to swap my train ticket for an earlier one, setting off a cavalcade of travel that ultimately allowed me an extra day in my favourite little oasis town of Huacachina.  But I had some trials to endure first.

The two-hour train journey out of Aguas Calientes was no trial at all; in fact it was spectacular.  The car had windows that curved at the top, offering unobstructed views of the incredible mountains that constantly drifted by.  Definitely one of the most memorable train rides in a lifetime blessed with amazing train rides.

And so I was still in pretty high spirits for the taxi ride to Cusco – which took another two hours and was also not much of a trial – where I bought a ticket for the next bus to Ica, which departed at 6pm.

I booked the cheap bus which meant no bathroom and no limit to the amount of people, luggage, or critters they would pick up on a milk run through every mountain town in the Andes.  An hour into the trip a family got on – mom, dad, and three kids – and I guess children must ride for free because they only had two tickets between them.  Of course the entire quintet took the two seats directly next to where I was sitting in the back row.  

Before we went anywhere the bus driver came back and started yelling at them, waving his arms around and pointing towards other seats, which boded well for me.  The mother started straight into a high-pitched whine, identical to the droning, drawn-out whining the finger-puppet kids used whenever I didn’t buy their finger puppets (which was always), and personally this didn’t bring me over to her cause at all.  In the end the dad and son were moved to a different seat while the mother and her two daughters remained in the seat next to mine.

Guess what?  Three people don’t fit in one bus seat, even if the youngest is only about seven years old.  And so it was the four of us sharing two seats, but as I squished and squeezed and tried to make way for two squirming kids the lady eventually rolled and stretched her way into having her seat all to herself, leaving the two kids and me juggling for mine.  By the powers of Grayskull, I swear the ensuing fifteen hours was hands-down the most trying physical ordeal of my life*.  It was much, much harder than any stretch of the Inca Trail had been, and more uncomfortable than getting forced through the rapids of the Urubamba River underneath an inverted raft.  Crowded and cramped in that seat with them for more than a full half-day was nothing less than torture, and one that I endured in complete, defiant silence.  No standing, no stretching, no toilet, no food, no sleeping…It was sheer hell.  The sustained discomfort made my body ache and my mind swirl; more than once I had to hold myself from having a serious freak out.  

Well I suppose that’s not entirely true.  Even twisted like a pretzel in the back seat of a bus that was forever making hairpin turns on bad roads over sheer cliffs, I did manage to fall to sleep at least once.  I can say that with certainty because I awoke to find one of the kids sitting on the floor with her head poking up between my knees, staring at my pained, squinting face with a bored non-curiosity that suggested that none of this was out of the ordinary for her.  

Clearly, the whole situation was more routine for her than it was for me so I suspect she wasn’t at all surprised when our scheduled twelve-hour bus trip ran four excruciating hours late, but I sure was.  Every tardy minute was another torturous surprise for me, until the bus finally and mercifully pulled into the Ica bus terminal at 10am.  With only the briefest exception or two I’d been awake since 4am the day before, when I’d started dragging a body already more worn down than it had ever been up and down the Andes mountains in the rain, and literally half of the ensuing thirty hours had been spent in cruel and involuntary bus-seat yoga.

And all of this just so I could spend the last day of my Peruvian vacation at an oasis.  Ah, here comes a taxi now.

*Curiously, the only thing that comes close was a slightly longer, much drunker bus ride I’d taken in Vietnam under similar financial conditions seven years earlier.  That trip damn near killed me.  Come to think of it, both experiences could have been avoided with a $2 upgrade.

013005 Oasis Reprise

Arriving at the Ica bus depot after a thirty-hour marathon that began with surreal magnificence before segueing into prolonged discomfort on a Medieval level, I stumbled into a nearby internet cafe dizzy and giddy with fatigue and freedom and in this altered state I struggled to type out memories of the unforgettable five days I’d just lived.  

So pardon me if the writing has felt a little forced.  Can you taste the hunger, sense the fatigue, feel the relief that was gushing through my bent and shuttered capillaries?  I sure hope not.

After I quit the internet cafe I changed the last of my money, booked my bus ticket to Lima for eleven soles and flagged down a three-wheelie taxi, which took me on a beautiful wind-swept ten-minute drive over the sand dunes to the gorgeous town of Huacachina for a paltry three soles.  I was positively drunk with glee when the dreamlike oasis appeared before my bloodshot eyes.  I booked myself into a waterside room for fifteen soles and ordered lunch, but as it was not yet 11am I had to wait an hour for both.

No matter, I took a chew on some llipta-stuffed coca leaves and went out back to the pool area to wait.  I plopped my sorry butt on an empty barstool, ordered a cerveza grande and ended up drinking the afternoon away with a trio from Alaska: Will, Michelle, and umm, the other guy.  The two fellas worked the railroad up there and she was a bartender, and they were a hoot.  They had a buggy/sandboarding expedition booked for 4:30 that afternoon and by four-twenty I had managed three objectives: I’d arranged the delivery of some burnable offerings for the four of us later that day, I found somebody who rolled us up a few while we waited for our ship to come in, and I had gotten pretty damn drunk.  

In my spectacularly exhausted, now triple-barrelled state of intoxication I ran around the tourist strip until I found one of the dune buggy go-between dudes that I knew.  Me and my buddy Steve had helped him push a broken-down buggy to a garage when I was in Huacachina about ten days earlier.  It had been no easy task and to return the favour the guy promised to take us up into the desert for a quick ride the next day so we could take some pictures (neither of us had taken our cameras when we went on our dune buggy trip).  Of course when push came to shove he was nowhere to be found, and when I bumped into him later by complete fluke at the Ica bus station he was all apologies and more empty promises.  

But now, loaded to the gills and pumped up on the excited adrenaline of day-drinking with new friends, I found the guy out on the street and in a state of fatigue-induced dementia I managed to convince him to convince the Alaskan trio’s driver to let me tag along on their excursion for just twenty-five soles.

Can you believe Michelle and Will didn’t even want to bring sandboards?  I wasn’t having any of it!  I grabbed a couple of extra boards and threw them in the back of the dune buggy, assuring my fresh friends that they didn’t have to go sandboarding and at the same time promising them that they’d be very happy they had the option.  

The buggy wasn’t quite as big or as powerful as the one I had been in the last time, but it was still super-fun.  The other buggy caught air as it crested the dunes while this one groaned to a crawl on the bigger hills.  We weren’t ten minutes into our trek when a particularly steep dune brought our buggy to a full stop, and some quick back-and-forthing quickly sank our tires like we were in quicksand.  When it was clear we weren’t going anywhere without some sort of help the driver shut off the motor, turned to us with a sheepish smile and did his best to no-problem the situation:


The beautiful desert

“The desert ees beautiful, non?” he says, waving his arms at the expanse.  “Maybe ees a good time to get out and take some peek-chores?”  We shrugged and dug out our cameras while he radio-ed another driver to come pull us out.  


An uninhabited oasis nestled in a dune valley outside of Huacachina

We boogied around the desert for an hour or so and finally stopped at the top of a minor dune.  The guides tend to start off small, working up to bigger and bigger hills until the tourists stop asking them to, but of course for everybody’s first time any hill looks massive.  So while the three of them were oohing and umming I just jumped on my board and slid headfirst on my belly down the thirty-metre grade.  At the bottom I leapt up and yelled, “It’s easy!  Just try it!”  A few moments later here comes Michelle – the most nervous of them all – and I could hear her screaming laughter the whole way down.  One by one they all came down, they all loved it and just like that we’re off to another hill.

Soon we are all screaming for bigger dunes and our driver does his best to find us some good ones.

When we got to the third hill of the day I asked one of the guys to film the run on my little digital camera.  I guess I jinxed myself because it proved to be my only wipeout.  I was near the bottom of the hill and going fast when I hit a divot in the sand – likely caused by a previous boarder – and immediately started to tumble.  For the first second-and-a-half it was a laugh, but about two seconds in I realized that I might be in trouble.  I was tumbling out of control, head over heels and arms over legs like that poor polar bear in that horrible Disney clip, and I got scared in a hurry.  The feeling of helplessness and the fear that came with it was highly reminiscent of my experience tumbling at the mercy of the Urubamba River when our white-water raft had flipped over.  Although I was able to breathe this time, the sand dune (along with a combination of gravity and momentum) had me in it’s grasp just as strongly as that river had, and it had equal power to toss me around at will.

I guess I tumbled four or five times before I came to a stop.  I wanted to let everyone know that I had landed unharmed, so I quickly jumped to my feet and did my best Rocky-reaching-the-top-of-the-library-steps-at-the-end-of-the-movie dance, but it ended up much closer to the Rocky-reaching-the-top-of-the-library-steps-at-the-beginning-of-the-movie dance because despite my eager bravado I was too shaken with vertigo to remain standing for more than a second, and I immediately fell into a heap was left staring at the sky through blurry eyes.  I laid there thinking that I had surely lost my glasses – I had felt them fly off at a thousand miles an hour as I tumbled – but when I tried to stand for the second time it occurred to me that those had been my safety goggles, and even though I still couldn’t see straight my glasses were indeed intact and in place on my face.  In fact everything about me seemed to be pretty much intact and in place, though my left arm was a bit bunged up for the rest of the afternoon.

Like I say, it’s all on film.  If you have sixteen seconds you’re not using you can watch it here:

By the end of the day Michelle was over the moon, insisting that the afternoon of sandboarding had made up for the week-long illness she had just gotten over.  Told ya so.

Back at the hostel I picked up my clean laundry* and tried in vain to shower all the sand out of my crevices, eventually convening back at the pool for more drinks with my new besties while we waited for happy hour and gigglestick to arrive.  Both hit right around eight o’clock, after I had pounded eight piña colada’s in forty minutes.

In a move so clever it must have been suggested by someone more sober than I, we all went out for dinner together.  We ate ourselves nearly sober for ridiculously little money and went back to the hotel where we partied away on the Alaskan’s huge balcony overlooking the pool. 

By eleven o’clock Michelle was asleep.  Shortly after she went to bed I peered over the balcony wall and noted that the pool area below us was actually pretty rockin’, with a dozen people partying with the staff behind the bar and girls dancing on tables and such.  “Guys,” I said, taking a final pull on my beer.  “I think we’re at the wrong party.” 

I grabbed a fresh bottle and a pre-roll and headed down there with those two drunks hot on my heels.  After a couple of hours of cd-skipping dance music I finally got fed up and decided to do something about it.  Drunk and sloppy, I lumbered through at least two hundred badly scratched burned discs and could only find only one that offered any real hope.  It was simply marked “beatle”.  I put it on and saved the party. 

Just as things seemed to be winding down suddenly Paul started singing Let It Be and every white backpacker at the bar started singing their hearts out like they were in the final round of a drunken karaoke championship.  We were all forgetting and remembering the lyrics together, screwing up loudly and proudly, singing arm-in-arm in blissful unison like a slovenly version of the Tiny Dancer singalong scene in Almost Famous, but different.  And then, when the song ended and it felt surely like the night was definitely over, the riff to Day Tripper leaps out of the speakers and Bam! it’s back to dancing on the tables. 

It was around 4am when my head finally hit the pillow, affording me my first real sleep since I’d awoken to begin the hike up to Machu Picchu forty-eight long, crazy hours earlier.  

So my last full day in Peru was actually two days.  Sounds about right.

*Due to my upcoming flight through the US I deliberately left three pairs of sweat-drenched socks and a filthy t-shirt unwashed in an effort to discourage/sabotage curious customs officers and their sniffer dogs.

013105 Adios, Abuelo

Though I could have slept for miles, I forced myself out of bed at 9am to give me a little extra time to Custom-ise my baggage and make myself all tickety-boo for my flight home, which had two connections through the US.  I won’t say I used a fine-toothed comb but I did the best I could under the circumstances.  I gave away what remained of my hiking llipta and my paper sack of coca leaves and, well, I burned the rest.  Two of them actually, with coffee. 

After a shower found my new Alaskan friends and said goodbye, paid my bill for the previous night of partying (at ninety-five soles – around $35CDN –  it was by far the most expensive night of the trip), and bid farewell to my favourite little oasis town of Huacachina by way of a three-sole three-wheeled taxi to Ica.

I bought a cheap bag of Ritz crackers con queso at a supermarket stand and sat on a bench at the bus depot, munching on my budget breakfast and taking stock of my situation.  I had a Canadian ten dollar bill (which was useless here, as none of the banks or exchange places dealt with Canadian currency), I had $10US, and I had 12.8 soles.  I already had a bus ticket to Lima but I still had to eat – the crackers were almost gone already – I’d need water, and I had to make my way to the airport ahead of my 1am flight.

When I boarded the bus to Lima there were only two other tourists on board and whattya know, they were sitting in my spot.  They were a French couple and the girl and I had been assigned to the very same seat.  While this might have proved bothersome it turned out being quite fortuitous.  Her boyfriend was fluent in Spanish and he got things straightened out with the driver, who seated me in the row behind them.  When a gentleman later pointed out that I was in his seat the boyfriend did some translating and got that straightened too, and when I got up to move the man insisted I stay and sit next to him.  Soon he and the French guy were lost in a lively conversation, snippets of which were translated into French and sometimes into English too, though infrequency.  

Spending two weeks in Peru had brushed up the Spanish I’d gleaned in the introductory course I’d taken back in my university days, and though my comprehension was getting pretty good it still took a lot of effort to follow a conversation.  Before too long I lulled out of trying to follow along and concentrated instead on my financial dilemma. 

I didn’t have enough money to take a taxi to the airport, and I sure didn’t know how to get there by bus.  Lima was a big, traffic-y city, and I didn’t even know where in the vast metropolis the airport even was, let alone how to get there.  Eventually the old man, who reminded me very much of my late grandfather, let the conversation lag and settled back into his seat.  He offered me an apple and I stumbled through the little conversational Spanish I could muster.  I attempted to ask him if he could tell me how to get to the airport by bus and how much it would cost.  He said it would be just one-and-a-half soles – which was great – but I couldn’t understand enough to confidently get to the airport, that was for certain.

Spanish grandpa leaned forward to speak with the French guy again and it was only then that he discovered that the three of us weren’t travelling together.  He must have thought I was quite rude!  He assumed that I was French also, and there I had been staring out the window, not reacting at all when their earlier conversation was being translated back and forth in French. 

Through interpretation I was able to tell him that I couldn’t afford a taxi to the airport and that I needed to figure out how to get there by bus.  He laughed, explaining that years before he had experienced the same difficulty at the end of a trip to Barcelona.  Turns out his house was near the airport.  He said that we could go to his place where we could have a coffee and he could drop off his bags, and afterwards he would take me to the airport himself.  And that’s just what we did.

And so instead of being rife with worry, the remainder of the bus ride to Lima was quite enjoyable.  As we pulled into the city my newly relaxed state made it was easy to convince myself that I could have found my way to the airport on my own after all, but even still I was relieved that I didn’t have to be the worried tourist who asks a million times, “¿El aeropuerto, si?” and was constantly looking around half-panicked.  

When we arrived at Victor’s modest home he proudly showed me around, pointing out each piece of furniture and (I believe) explaining where he got it and explaining in detail the occupants of the family portraits that hung alongside several gaudy pictures of the Virgin Mary.  At 70, Victor is an avid gardener, and he seemed proudest when we toured the impressive garden in his tiny concrete-fenced backyard.  Then we sat at his kitchen table and had coffee and smoked cigarettes as we worked our way through enormous pieces of the dry, dense cake Victor had just bought in Nazca.

After an a couple of hours of slight but enlightening communication we were ready to head to the bus stop.  Along the way we zig-zagged through Victor’s neighbourhood, the highlight of which was a brand new park.  It was little more than clump of grass surrounding a rather garish fountain, but Victor seemed very excited about the fountain.  He slowly walked me around it, pointing out every single feature, ornament, and pained motif that decorated it.  Curiously, the fountain’s centrepiece was a ballerina who had her knickers blatantly showing, and despite our basic linguistic common ground when Victor concluded his detailed description of the references and meanings held within his proud little fountain I remained utterly clueless about pretty much all of it, especially that ballerina.

Next we walked through the market, where every vendor was Victor’s friend.  After introducing me to every shopkeep in the neighbourhood we eventually made it to the bus stop, and rather than merely putting me on the bus and pointing me in the right direction Victor escorted me all the way to the airport, right up to the “passengers only” gate, where he hugged me like he was seeing off an old friend, or perhaps a grandson.

I can’t tell you what a great surprise it was to have had a genuine interaction with a real Peruvian just as I was departing the country, and a great interaction it was, too.  One of the disadvantages to spending such a short time in a country is you tend to pack in the activities and don’t necessarily end up spending a lot of time with the people that make the country what it is.  Thanks, Victor.

Good thing I drank all my taxi money away.  Lesson learned.

And so it was that with a mere five hours of sleep under my belt since I’d woken in a soggy tent near the end of a punishing four-day mountain trek I plunked my happy butt in that airplane seat and drank my way to Houston – where an extremely surly security official got a stern talking to from his supervisor after he tried to tell me that my walking stick/cane/trusted friend was actually a weapon (“I BEG your pardon!?!?”) – and then on to Newark (“Is it too early to order a rye and coke?” No sir, right away sir…).  By the time I boarded my final connection to Ottawa the llipta had finally worked its way through my body so I gave up on the drinking and instead slept like the snoring dead.

All in all Peru made for a fantastic destination for a short-ish, low-budget/high-fun vacation, and I would recommend it to anybody.  Astoundingly, I spent just $600US over the eighteen days (not counting airfare), which is pretty astounding when you consider that includes flying over the Nazca lines in a private plane over the Nazca lines and the fee for doing the Inca Trail.  I hit every highlight I wanted to see while constantly riding the line between partying like a drunken sailor and slum-touring.  I spent a lot of time and effort finding the cheapest rooms possible, always rode the economy bus, usually ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, and spent basically nothing on souvenirs, but I took every tour I wanted to take (plus a few I wasn’t expecting), I saw the inside of a lot of bars, and I even splurged for a few yummy meals here and there. 

Overall, I think I saw the hell out of Peru, and I really dug it.  I think you would probably have a good time too.

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