Adventures in the Interior: July 2010

Sorry for the delay… I’m not used to blogging and I actually just forgot about it. Ha ha.

Before I go on to part 2 of our trip I need to show a picture or two of the central plaza in Cusco. It was the main section of town that had all the restaurants, hotels, churches etc. For being winter time it was surprisingly green:

After 4 days in Cusco we decided it was time to move on to another city. We heard of this nice little beach town, Arica, just over the border in Chile. We found out it was an 18 hour bus ride but this didn’t deter us (me). Even though Sarah is the world traveler this was my first trip out of the country so I wanted to get as many stamps on my passport as possible. We had some time to kill before we left so we did some last minute shopping. We ended up getting a cool hand painted plate by the guy below. He wanted 20 soles… I told him 15 soles… he came back with 18 soles… I agreed but told him we were going to take his photo… he agreed.

We also got a cool battle horn. It was a real horn but when someone blew into it a sound came out as if you were calling your buddies into battle. It looked something like this:

The bus left Cusco at 2:30PM and we started driving south. Overall the bus ride was uneventful. We passed through Puno, Peru which is on the shores of Lake Titicaca. However we didn’t get there until about 11PM though so we didn’t see anything. About an hour before we got to Puno the bus pulls over and the attendant announces that we have “no more than 10 minutes to go to the bathroom”. Obviously everything is in Spanish so the whole trip I was pretty clue less. I would just look at Sarah and wait for her to translate. Anyways, we get off the bus and we are at an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere. There was a shack looking building that had the women’s bathroom so Sarah went off to use it. I didn’t really have to go but thought I would make use of the time relieving myself anyways so I looked around for the Men’s Restroom. I couldn’t see one but noticed all the guys were just lined up facing this concrete wall taking a leak… so I did the same. When we got back to the bus Sarah informed me there was no toilet in the Women’s Restroom – only a hole in the ground. She wasn’t even sure if she aimed correctly because there were no lights. Needless to say the infrastructure in Peru is in need of a little help.

This was typical country side we drove through, at least what we saw until the sun went down:

We finally get to Tacna, Peru the next morning and took a cab across the border into Chile. On the way the cab driver had us fill out the typical immigration forms. We couldn’t bring in any artifacts, animal products (the picture showed eggs and cuts of meat), etc. So we thought we were fine. We passed our bag through the machine and the Immigration Officer asked me something in Spanish. I could tell he was angry but I didn't understand anything so I looked to Sarah with a “please help me” expression. ‘He wants to see what is in the top of your bag’ She told me.

He opened my pack and grabbed the battle horn (note the photo above), then held it up and said “Cuerno” and proceeded to talk to me even more excitedly. It still hadn’t dawned on Sarah or I that this was an ‘animal product’ so we were quite confused. Sarah talked to him a little more and he ran back and got the immigration form I filled out. He told us he was going to fine us $300 dollars US for giving false information. Sarah batted her big beautiful eyes at him and asked if we had to pay it… he gave us a new form and said, “Let’s pretend this never happened.” I can’t blame him.. I’ve fallen for those batting eyes of hers on more than one occasion. Just kidding.. well all that happened but the batting of Sarah's eyes. The officer ended up being nice to us but he took the horn and made me sign this form:

We get to the bus station in Arica and Sarah needed to use the bathroom. We go to the bathrooms and realize we don’t have any money to pay for it (most of the public bathrooms in Peru and Chile charged about 30 cents). Then it hits… we have no chilean pesos… we don’t know where we are staying.. and we have no guidebook. We decided to exchange some US dollars for Chileans. We had just enough to get a taxi. The taxi cab driver took us to the main shopping area and we walked around until we found a hostel. Sarah remembered one that was recommended on wiki travel so we went there… “The Hotel Plaza Colon”. The lobby looked pretty nice so I felt okay about it. When we got to the room it was a different story. Here is a photo.. I'll list the issues too:

We found a fingernail in the bed sheets
We found cracker crumbs in the bed sheets
There was make up on my pillow case
There was ample short curly hair on the tile floor
The shower was nasty A
The sewer line for the bathroom below us was vented through our bathroom floor

I think that’s it… We were both grossed out. When we slept that night we put our own sheets on the bed and just left them in the morning. The town itself wasn’t that great either. We were expecting a beach town but we got a port town. It’s a main naval base for Chile as well. Needless to say we were pretty excited to get out of town the next morning. We crossed the border back into Peru uneventfully and headed on our way to Arequipa, Peru. That’s it for now. I’ll finish up the last few days of the trip on the next round.

Sarah and I returned home from Peru a few days ago. It was my first time out of the country… as far as international travel goes I was definitely baptized by fire but it was incredibly awesome! I left with a deeper gratitude for having been born and raised in the United States.

We had to fit 12 days of gear into one carry on backpack each… needless to say we packed pretty light.

We left from Las Vegas on June 26 at 6AM. From there we flew to Miami and then to Lima. We got to Lima around midnight but our flight to Cusco didn’t leave Lima until 7AM so we made make shift beds out of the benches. Sarah has this great ability to sleep pretty much anywhere, I myself wasn’t as comfortable.

Flying into Cusco I got pretty excited because I could see the peaks of the Andes Mountains. I always thought the mountains in Utah were big but they look like ant hills compared to these suckers. The peaks are 20,000 to 23,000 feet.

We were picked up from the airport by our hostel. Our hostel in Cusco was nice and relatively cheap. For $30.00/night we got a private room with a private bath. Nothing fancy but it was clean… which is more than we can say about our experience in the next city (you will have to wait for that story). According to my GPS the hostel was at an elevation of 11,359 feet. That’s higher than a lot of mountain peaks in the lower 48. The elevation was hard to get used to. It took as about 2 days to climatize. We had a prescription to Diamox – a drug that helps climatization. It has a weird side effect that made it so we couldn’t taste carbonation. Any soda tasted as flat as could be even if it was straight from a freshly opened bottle.

This is the courtyard in our hostel...

After we got settled we decided to make our way to a neighboring town to check out the Sunday markets. The lady at the hostel told us we could get a private taxi for around 30 soles (the Peruvian Currency) or take a mini bus for just a few soles. We elected to do the cheaper so we had a taxi take us to the nearest bus station. The bus system in Cusco is interesting. There aren’t official buses only private ones that drive by and shout out where they are going. It’s up to the bus riders to flag them down. When we got to the bus stop we had just missed the most recent bus. There was a private taxi driver who came over to us and told us he would take us for 40 soles. The conversation went something like this (note that Sarah speaks Spanish but I don’t, so I would usually do the negotiating through Sarah):

Peruvian Taxi Driver: “I’ll take you to Pisac for 40 soles”.
Levi through Sarah: “How much would it cost for you to wait for an hour”?
Peruvian Taxi Driver: “80 soles”
Levi through Sarah: “Will you do it for 50 soles”?
Peruvian Taxi Driver: “I’ll do it for 70 but I’m not going to wait”.
Sarah: “How long till the next bus shows up”?
Peruvian Taxi Driver: “About an hour”.

At this point I was pretty angry that this guy had raised his price so I was pretty much done with him. Luckily right after he said ‘about an hour’ another bus showed up and the guy yelled “Pisac” which is where we were headed. We jumped on the bus and it cost 3 soles each. FYI… one US dollar is equal to about 3 soles. So it cost us 30 cents for a ride to a town about an hour away… not too shabby.

The bus was full of natives. There was no room so we had to stand. It smelled. Not necessarily a bad smell but Peru has an odor to itself. The driver drove crazy and jerky. The road went over a winding mountain pass that was around 15,000 feet. I should’ve known all this was a recipe for me to blow chunks (I have a history of doing so from car sickness). The ride takes about an hour and I made it 45 minutes into the trip. The bus started slowing down to stop so I turned around to Sarah who was sleeping (she had found a seat in the back - also refer to my comment about her ability to sleep anywhere), woke her up and said:

Levi : “We have to get off”.
Sarah: “Are we there”?
Levi: “No but we have to get off, I’m going to barf”.

I then turned around and started to hastily make my way to the front. I threw one quick glance behind me to make sure Sarah was coming and then got off. I spewed chunks and never felt better in my life. The down side was that we were in the middle of nowhere and didn’t know if or when another bus was coming. The up side is that we were at a spot with some amazing views.

We just waited another 20 minutes and flagged down another bus. After a little confusion of missing the town we were going to (we went too far and had to back track on a third bus) we ended up in the right town. The market there was impressive. It had a lot of tourist stuff but was also the main market at which locals buy there food for the day. There were also several places that baked ‘cuy’… a favorite local meal of grilled guinea pig. They even have mini hotels to raise the guinea pig in before they kill them.

a clay oven for baking cuy...

the final product...

Avocadoes and mini bananas were our favorite... they tasted much better than what we have in the US.

Sarah got to hold a local lady's 'bambino'...

The next day we spent around cusco eating and visiting the local churches and museums. We visited several cathedrals and a textile museum. The remaining Inca stone work is all over the city and incredibly impressive. The Inca didn’t use mortar. They precisely cut every piece of stone. When the Spaniards came to Peru to conquer the Inca, they destroyed all the buildings expect for the foundations and built their buildings (mostly churches) right on top of the existing foundations. I also tried cuy… twice. It tastes pretty much how you imagine a rodent would taste like. Not very good. But they did serve it to me with its full body intact. It even had a little tomato helmet.

My last attempt at eating cuy... still didn't taste very good. Sarah had some Alpaca (a cousin to the Llama) that tasted good though.

Some of the Inca stonework...

A photo of the traditional clothing...

A view of Cusco from a church.

Our last full day in Cusco we took the train to Aguas Caliente, which is the town just below Machu Picchu. The town is reachable by train only – it is at the bottom of a deep canyon and no roads go to it. Machu Picchu itself sits at the top of a mountain above the town. You can take a fifteen minute bus ride to the top or hike it. Sarah wanted to hike it so I went along. Big mistake… its 2 hours of hiking on nothing but huge stone stairs. By the time we got to the top we were exhausted. The ruins are amazing. The pictures I saw of it didn’t do it justice. The ruins are massively huge and intact. No one really knows what the city’s purpose was, but the most widely accepted theory is that it was a resort town for upper class Inca. The city had about 800 people living in it.

A photo of the river we followed from the train. The train started up in the Andes and descended into the jungle.