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.

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

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.

I couldn´t find one plant growing in the desert between Arica and the Chilean border. Just sand, flat sand and mountains of sand - oh, and some trash people have chucked out their windows over the years.

In the past week, I have been told at least 10 different stories about the drama of crossing the Chile-Peru border. Everyone claimed that everyone else´s advice on how to cross was wrong.

¨Just buy a bus ticket from Iquique to Arequipa.¨ (They don´t sell them.)

¨Just go to Arica and buy a bus ticket to Arequipa.¨

¨Go to Arica and take a taxi across the border to Tacna. It´s only $1000 Chilean pesos.¨ ¨It´s only $2000 Chilean pesos.¨ (US$2 or US$4 respectively, but it´s actually $3000 Chilean / US$6.)

¨There´s a train, but it´s not running today.¨

¨The border check personnel are on strike. Don´t go today; stay another day in Arica, and you won´t have any problems. Today´s you´ll have to take a taxi to the Chilean side, walk two kilometers with you bags (through the desert) and get another taxi on the Peruvian side. If there are any. Oh, and I talked to people who had to wait five hours to cross today.

What actually happened: Kiwi Friend, who I met in BsAs and reunited with in Arica, got up early in the morning and walked to the international bus ´station´ in Arica - actually a parking lot with a few stands selling passages in five-passanger cars to Tacna. There was some border issue, so they were only willing to take us as far as the Chile check point for $1500 Chilean. When we got to the check point and had our passports processed, which took less than five minutes, there were cars waiting to take us to Tacna for $2000 Chilean. The two kilometer walk turned out to be about 50 meters.

The most interesting part of the border crossing turned out to be the surpisingly new, modern building at the Peruvian checkpoint. Oh, Chile, how you always lie.

I was thinking about writing about the buses - the long ones that make up the main form of non-personal transportation around South America. Not trains, not planes. Buses. 10-hour buses from Buenos Aires to Cordoba, 18-hour buses from Salta to Mendoza, 24-hour buses from Santiago to the north of Chile.

Even the cheapest long-distance buses in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay are nicer than any bus I’ve seen in the US - but I’ve also never been on a bus for longer than seven hours in the US. Here there’s moreleg room, the chairs lean back farther and there’s food (and sometimes even free alcohol). At stations passengers get off to buy drinks and food or use the bathroom while vendors get on to hawk packaged or homemade foods. Sometimes the vendors actually just hop on from the side of the road, sell while the bus is moving, and get off when they’re done.

I wrote the start to this post in my notebook during what was supposed to be a 28-hour busride from Valparaiso to Arica, the most northern (small) city in Chile on the border with Peru. After 26 1/2 hours, we pulled into a small bus station in a mountains-meet-desert-meets-ocean town (these are bountiful in Chile), and everyone stood up to get off. This was the first total exodus from the bus I had seen, so I asked my Chilean seatmate where we were. I thought he said Inica, which sounded like Arica to me (I attributed the discrepancy to the name being Quechua, an indigenous tongue, not Spanish).

Cue to me 15 minutes later, wandering down the street, wondering why the hostel was not where it claimed to be. I looked around a bit, still carrying my giant green backpack and an ever heavier shoulder bag, and began to realize that this town appeared to be called Iquique. That actually sounded more like what my seatmate had said, once I thought about it.

But what can you do? A quick trip to a kiosk with internet access, and I found out Arica was five more hours north - a busride I had aboslutely no interest in getting on at 11 a.m. on a sunny, warm day. I had even already spotted the long, sandy beach…

Fuck plans.

I should preempt this post by saying that buses are the main form of travel within Argentina. There are almost no trains, and planes are rather expensive and infrequent. That being said, it is not unusual to take a 12 to 20 hour busride between cities. When I went from Buenos Aires to Salta, for example, I was on the bus for about 18-hours straight. It’s not as bad as it sounds; even the cheapest long-distance trip in Argentina is on luxury buses nicer than any I have ever seen in the US.

So, about to leave the farm for a quick two-and-a-half hour busride from the nearby city of Giles to the federal capital city of Buenos Aires, I was more than ready for this short gaunt. I knew when there was a bus from Giles, so I just needed to make it on the local bus (colectivo) from the farm to Giles. Plenty of time. Until I got distracted for no apparent reason and realized that the bus should be driving by the farm at any second and I was still in my room. The bus doesn’t actually make scheduled stops between towns; it just picks up and drops off people on the side of the road.

So now worried about missing the last bus for two hours to town, I grabbed Ewok (my giant green camping backpack that’s filled to the brim) and my blue shoulder bag and ran to the road. Thinking I didn’t have time to go on the main path, I took the most direct route and ran through an empty field where the cows graze. I had to step over three waist-high wires, one of which is electric to keep the animals from eating from the garden, and climb over a rickety wire fence that tore my hands and pants. When I reached the road, I walked breathlessly in the direction of town (5 miles away), worried that I had missed the bus. Just as I was debating how dangerous hitchhiking could really be in a farm community in broad daylight, the bus came by and picked me up.

In town, I found out that the bus I was planning on taking wasn’t going to run that day, so I waited for two hours for the next one passing by. This is the same town with no real busstation, so I had to wait for the bus on the side of the highway.

I was the only person waiting, and the bus didn’t stop.

Now slightly convinced that the bus companies hate this town, I took the first bus out of town to anywhere - a AR$3.50, half-hour ride to the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, Lujan.

From there - where there is a busstation and a few more people - I just took the first available option to Buenos Aires, now set to arrive about five hours later than intended. And that is how I ended up on a slow, semi-public - there were at least 10 people standing and my bags were on my lap/where my feet should be - three-hour, AR$10 bus to a secondary busstation in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. (For some reason there are no buses from Lujan to the main busstation in Retiro.) I did save a combined AR$21, about US$5.50, from the nicer, faster, direct bus I was supposed to take.