After nearly three and a half months of busing around South America, I decided I needed to take a trip back to the States for a while (for family and personal reasons). I’m not done writing about traveling, culture, food and alcohol in South America, but I do have to take a break from actually being there.

Which is how I found myself in need of a bus to Lima from Cusco, one last long bus ride and a few days in the largest city in Perú  before heading to the US. I was warned that there had been a lot of bus drama recently getting to and from Cusco. A Croatian girl who had to come to Cusco from Puno (near the Bolivian border) instead of Arequipa because there were problems along the bus route. An English guy whose 9-hour bus ride from Arequipa to Cusco turned into a 17-hour endeavor when the bus had to be rerouted along another highway, something that isn’t easily found in Perú.

I thought this sounded like the bullshit I was told about crossing the Chile-Perú border only a few weeks ago, so I was surprised when I went the bus station to buy a ticket and was told by several of the large bus companies that they weren’t even running buses to Lima.

There had been news recently about the president skimming money, and people were protesting, in part, by setting up road blocks and throwing things at people who crossed them. In support, many of the bus drivers were striking.

I hadn’t had a problem getting a bus anywhere I wanted to go before. If I had the time, I would have just waited for a bit longer in Cusco, but I had to meet my flight in Lima. The bus companies were telling me they didn’t know when they would be traveling again. So I hopped my first inter-South America flight of the trip, a short 90-minute ride from Cusco to Lima that managed to replace a 21-hour bus trip.

There isn’t much to say about the flying experience. Security was a bit laxer in than within the US i.e. I got to keep my shoes on.

blanquitagringita:

We walked to the Sunday afternoon craft fair, eager to walk around and check out the local crafts after spending the first several hours of the day stuck with nothing to do (most stores, restaurants and services are closed on Sunday, and those that are open do so around 2 p.m. in Buenos Aires and 5 p.m. in Mendoza).

As we wandered, our small group dissolved. After Sarah and I purchased churros - thin doughnuts usually about six inches long with a cinammony-sugar taste, sometimes filled with dulce de leche or chocolate - I crouch down in front of a blanket to talk to two guys with dreds. It was my first time doing this in South America, and I was quickly rewarded. In less than two minutes, I went from asking (in crappy Spanish) if they had anything to put in the pipes they were selling to being the proud owner of about an eighth of weed for 50 pesos. Oh, and they threw in the pipe to go with it - got to sell those artesianal goods, too.

This actually turned out to be one of the easiest street buying experiences I have had in Argentina. No one has totally screwed me, but when I tried out this method a few weeks later in Buenos Aires, I got totally fucked with.

The jewelry and pipe seller told me that he could get weed in a half hour or so, and after an unncessarily long conersation, took half the money to go pick it up. I guess I´m lucky he even came back, but when he did, he wanted an extra 50 pesos because he could only get ´really good´shit. After another insanely conversation in which the seller pretended like the cops were around looking to bust people for buying pot (it´s decriminalized here), I found myself with a 150 peso eighth instead of the 100 pesos five grams I was supposed to get.

It was really good shit, though.

I´ve written quite a bit about couchsurfing, yet have not mentioned hostel life at all. And, like almost all young travelers in South America, I have spent many a night - and quite a few days - in hostels. I´m currently in a Loki Hostel, a mini-chain of four hostels in Perú and Bolivia known for being some of the craziest party hostels.

They serve food all day and cook dinner at night (not included) and generally have hopping bars, so guests often forget to leave. Most hostels are not like this, although diversity is sort of the name of the game in hostels - especially since having four hostels makes Loki the largest hostel chain I´ve heard about in South America. Most hostels operate independently and are run by their owner. There are always dorm-style rooms with bunk beds for anywhere from four to 15 people and usually a few private rooms. Almost all have kitchens for guests, a bar, a separate common area with a television and a communal computer. Outside space, like a rooftop patio or backyard, is common.

Free WiFi is the norm, and more people than ever seem to be traveling with laptops since those cheap, light weight, little netbooks appeared this year. Every week I seem to be seeing more people with them, while only three months ago they were novel.

All hostels employ local people, but many have a few gringo employees, especially as bar workers. Of the 20 or so different hostels I´ve stayed at in South America, only one places has had only Spanish-speaking employees. English is without a doubt the language of hostel-culture in South America. The majority of guests come from Australia (a country that must be empty because all of its citizens are out traveling), Germany, the UK, Ireland, Canada, the US, Scandanavia and New Zealand; as you may have noticed, the citizens of these countries either speak English as their first language or so fluently it might as well be their first language. Most people don´t speak more than 50 words of Spanish, though many people are using part of their time in South America to take courses.

Speaking English is generally a problem for people from Italy, Spain, France and Brazil, who bank on their native language being similar enough (or the same) to Spanish to get around.

Many people are traveling alone, which adds to a culture of constantly meeting new people. The vast majority of people are friendly and social, always looking for someone to hang out with. Other people travel in pairs of friends, almost always of the same sex, and there are generally a few couples hanging around. Every once in a blue moon, a pair of siblings or a group of more than three people traveling together can be found.

Most people are traveling for three or four months in South America, though many travel for nine months or a year on ¨around the world trips.¨At any given time, you can find someone in a hostel that has been traveling for several years almost non-stop.

hmm… consider this entry a work in progress

Arroz con leche (PEN$1) - rice pudding with a sweet blackberry sauce at a local restaurant in Cusco

I´ve already mentioned how tourists overrun the city of Cusco; much of southern and coastal Perú are also heavily touristed, though not to quite the same degree. In these enclaves of largely light-skinned foreigners, two very distinctive types of restaurants can be found: the local and the touristic.

Local restaurants, which tend to serve grilled meat (lomo saltado), rotisserie chicken (pollo a la brasa), soups and, for lunch, cevice, range in price from PEN$2.50 to PEN$8 (about US$.90 and $2.80, respectively) per person per meal; they´re generally cheapest in small towns. Meals are served menú style: a set price for a starter, generally soup; a main plate, usually meat with rice, potatoes or both; a small dessert, often jello; and sometimes a drink like fruit punch. Often the restaurants give you options for the first two courses, but sometimes they actually only serve one thing, especially the rotisserie chicken places.

The best meals I´ve had in Perú have been at these places, unsurprisingly. My first night, Kiwi Friend and I enjoyed a tasty chicken and rice soup called aguadito, salad, a quarter of a really well-cooked rotisserie chicken and fries for PEN$6.80 each in Arequipa, while only a few blocks away restaurants were charging PEN$20 for just the main course.

During our tour of the Colga Canyon, KF and I escaped the group stops at tourist buffets (PEN$20, not including a drink) and enjoyed one meal in Chivay for PEN$2.50. Homemade meat broth with a variety of potatoes and other vegetables, a rich beef and vegetable stew / chicken and rice (here there was an option, so we ordered differently), jello and a kool-aid-like drink.

Courses one, two and three with a drink

Not all these restaurants are good, of course. It´s hit or miss, and we´ve eaten a lot of untasty fried potatoes. Served with basically every meal, these large-cut fries are cooked less than they would be in the US and often have a mealy taste. At one meal, we were actually given whole potatoes deep fried, which sucked all of the flavor out of them.

A few small towns lie in the vecinity of Machu Picchu, but mostly it´s still as isolated as it was 500 years ago. There are a few different (four popular) ways to get there, and Kiwi Friend and I decided to take the fastest one. Almost everyone starts out in the nearby city of Cusco, population 350,000, one of the most touristy places on the planet.

From Cusco, which sits 3,400 meters above sea level, KF and I started out with a 20-minute cab ride to the train station in nearby Puruy. The three-hour train ride at 7:45 a.m. zigzags through the Cusco region and the Sacred Valley to the town of Aguas Calientes. From Aguas Calientes, we took a 20-minute bus ride up to Machu Picchu. (You can also do an hour-plus walk up the mountains.)

On the way back, to save some money - visiting Machu Picchu is really expensive, especially compared to everything else in Perú - we got off the train halfway back to Cusco and took a colectivo (group taxi) the remaining hour and a half. Between the travel and the walking around Machu Picchu, we were exaughsted by the time we got back around 10 that night.

Not that we had anything to complain about. Many people get to Machu Picchu via the Inca Trail or an alternative trek, spending four days hiking (some treks also involve biking) through the forest at over 2,000 meters above sea level.

I mentioned there were four popular options - train, Inca Trail, alternative trek and a crazy daylong bus and hiking route. The last - the cheapest - involves about six hours of mini buses and cabs, followed by a two-hour walk along the train tracks to Agua Calientes, with an overnight or two in that town (depending on whether you take the train back or not).

View of Aguas Calientes

The quintessential view of Machu Picchu from above, with Huayna Picchu (mountain) in the background.

I’m sitting on a short wall in the midst of the remnants of Machu Picchu. 10 feet away, two Peruvian park rangers overlook the area, using a soft whistle to warn visitors of any wrongdoing (generally sitting in an inappropriate place or smoking). There’s no big explanatory billboards, bathrooms, vendors or stray trash.

There is a special sundial rock, orientated by its corners N-S-E-W. It radiates a special energy, that you can only receive if you are open to it. You can’t touch it. Intihuatana - where we can capture the sun. They also used it to tell the time of year by where the sun rose in relation to the mountains. Here, it is believed, the inhabitants of Machu Picchu worshiped the sun god.

Tour groups in Spanish, English and French circle around, and there must be some other languages somewhere. A Peruvian-looking teen is talking on her cell phone. It’s amazing, breathtaking, surrounded by mountains and rockfaces.

Several members of the camelitos family - vicuñas, alpacas and llamas - roam around Machu Picchu, as they likely did during Incan times.

Many of the nearby mountains disappear into the clouds - even though they’re less than 3,000 meters high. I’ve been at higher altitudes than that several times this week, and the clouds seemed as unreachable as at sea level. It only happens here during the rainy season (now and into the southern summer months).You can imagine how this view must have seemed in a culture that worshiped mountains.

Farming plateaus recreated in the style of the Incan and pre-Incan peoples of Perú.

One of the only things more spectacular than the mountains in Perù is thinking about people climbing them, worshipping them, farming on them and sacrificing to them hundreds of years ago.

view of the mountains in the Colga Valley in the Arequipa region of southern Perú

In recent years, archeologists have found several sacrificial Incan sites with clothes, pottery and mummies on or near the top of some of the tallest mountains of the Incan empire (we´re talking over 6,000 meters/20,000 feet high). The remnants are perfect, frozen in time, thawed only by lava flows and the deliberate work of archeologists.

a view of Volcan Misti (5,800 meters/19,000 feet high) in the Arequipa region of Perú

Juanita, who sits on display in a cold case in a university museum in Arequipa, is partially special because she is truly Incan. She lived in the early 15th century, before Europeans arrived here, and shares only the indigenous blood of the almost entirely mixed Peruvian population. (“Él es mixto. Yo también, como todos nosotros.” a guide told me.)

Juanita on display in el Museo Santuario de Altura del Sur Andino de la Universidad Católica de Santa María  in Arequipa

small rock statues found all over the Colga Valley, placed there as an offering to the mountains by believers or as a marker of having visited by others

Today a friend of mine asked me what I spend my days doing. it´s a good question really. I´ve been traveling for about three months, have been to three countries, numerous cities and small towns and yet often I can´t exactly figure out how I´ve filled my time. A few days ago, for example, Kiwi Friend and I spent a whole day walking around Arequipa, the second largest city in Perú at only 600,000, without actually visiting either of the two places we intended to - a former monestary and town unto itself behind giant stone walls in the middle of the city and a frozen mummy of a pre-Spanish Incan woman. By the time it was started getting dark, around 6 p.m. Peru time, we had walked around, eaten lunch, visited a few stores (including the pisco bodega) and been bugged a lot. Yet we hadn´t done nearly enough to fill eight hours. The time just seems to float away, especially as everyone moves a bit slower here…

louise-mankelow:

I needed to get out of Argentina to renew my visa, and as it worked out a friend I met in Buenos Aires was travelling through Peru. We decided to meet up a few days ago in Arica, Chile. The bus to Arica from Jujuy was quite a trip. The bus went through some pretty high altitudes which can make you pretty sick. Luckily for me I had conveniently emptied my intestines completely the previous night, but unfortunately the woman who sat across the isle from me was not so lucky.

Ok, put down your macaroni cheese for a moment…

For a second I thought to myself, is that parmesan I smell? No. Not Parmesan. Then we were all treated to some charming sound affects as the women threw up into a leaky plastic bag, missing a few times of course, and then falling asleep for an hour and a half still holding the dripping bag. The poor guy in front of her hadn’t realised that there was vomit all over the floor and it was seeping through his backpack. Why, why, why would you not go in the bathroom or ask the driver to stop? Or even ask if there is somewhere you could deposit the vomit bag? Ok, sorry about that. I bet you feel like you were there for that.

louise-mankelow:

There is so much laughter at the house, as we try to understand one another and  I love the fact that they tell it how it is.  The fat girl at the gym, “Gordita” – little fatty.  Hilarious.  In fact, anything that is remotely endearing attracts “ita” (meaning little) at the end.  At the comedor, I am Blancita for obvious reasons.  My favourite so far is Sandra requesting a “Cocita light.” [Diet coke.]

On Sunday it was the “dia de la Mardre,” mother’s day and it is a super big deal here.  Naturally, were to have a big BBQ lunch.  I accompanied Claudia to the butcher to buy the lomo. However, after much waiting amidst large meat hooks with various parts of various animals attached for some time, there was no lomo left.  No problem, the butcher had a whole cow on stand-by. Claudia even got to choose which part of the cow she wanted, and I got to watch my lunch being carved straight off the (thankfully) headless cow.

Last week a large shopping mall opened in Jujuy, the first of it type in the province, (which is one of the poorest in Argentina). It is on my way home, so I popped in to have a look. Naturally it was packed full of school kids, but the best thing ever: watching people use the escalator! The first one in Jujuy.  I saw this middle-aged lady almost fall off completely, an another lady was taking a photo of the escalator.