2009 PERU: LIMA

This is one of five blogs about my recent trip to Peru.

Landing at a foreign airport at 11:00 pm is never a good way to begin a trip. For a country to schedule five such arrivals at nearly the same time is just plain stupid. Do they think tourists will be impressed by waiting in line an hour to clear customs? ... that people will think ”Look at all the people trying to get in the country. I'm lucky to be here.“ The only good I got out of the wait was a warning not to drink the water.
My hostel had sent Christian to pick me up from the Lima airport. He was a young professional, not a cab driver. It was the first time that I ever had an English speaking person as my first contact in a Latin country. The wait at customs was soon forgotten as Christian told me about Peru... a good start after all.
When I arrive in a country in the daylight I usually take a local bus from the airport. It pretty much follows a straight line to the city center taking two or three times as long as a cab ride ... for a tenth or a hundredth the cost. When you take a cab you twist and turn so often you often wonder if you are going in circles. Probably you are just avoiding traffic. At night, with no sun as a reference point And no traffic on the streets, you are at a complete loss as to where you are going ... a much bigger worry than the crazy guy who just got on the bus.
The Kokopelli Hostel was a great find on the internet. The rooms were newly furnished and the staff was the friendliest I have ever encountered at a hostel. The actual owners seemed to be available all the time. Every night they presided over activities in the rooftop bar.
It was fairly quiet for a place just a block from a couple of Lima’s busiest streets. Those street were along side of Parque Kennedy in Miraflores which is the upbeat, tourist area of Lima. The park was a great place to be day or night. About a half mile down the street was Lima’s oceanfront parks. I spent a lot of time in those two places doing nothing ... a lot more time doing nothing than I usually do.
Lima sits high up on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It sounds like an ideal setting but it isn’t. Because the city is squeezed between the ocean and the Andes Mountains it is almost always shrouded by a thick cover of clouds. Cool winds off the cold ocean currents collide with the mountains but are unable to flow over their heights. Clear days are rare and didn’t occur while I was there. With no sun and a constant wind even 65-70 degree days are a bit uncomfortable.
The city’s seven million people are spread out for miles along the base of the mountains. Traffic was terrible even though car ownership is still low there. Over half the vehicles on the road were taxis or busses and yet the streets were jammed. No traffic laws are obeyed by anyone. Speed was of the essence. Lane changes required but a car length plus a meter. A horn honk replaced a look at blind corners. At night we never stopped for a single red light or stop sign. A young cab driver ask me if I liked the way he drove ... Sure! Yeah! Right!
The old heart of the city is referred to as Lima as opposed to Miraflores or other named neighborhoods. A busy commercial walking street joins two major plazas. On one, Plaza de Armas, stands the seat of government and the Cathedral. Nearby San Francisco church was the most interesting place I visited in Lima.
Museo de La Nacion, is located nowhere near anything ... unless the cab driver drove in circles to get there. It is one of the worst history museums I have ever been in ... and I visit every one I possibly can. It is a huge modern building of good design with practically no exhibits.
As you may have gathered by now, Lima does rank as a recommend city in my book.
Other than sitting in parks, the only real fun I had was going to a bullfight. It wasn’t fun watching a bull get tormented and killed. Nor was it fun watching 12 year old matador get knocked over five or six times by a bull and finally carried off ... he couldn’t kill the bull because he wasn’t strong enough to drive a sword in deep enough to kill it.
The fun was the drunks I sat with to watch the fights. The liked me just because I bothered to come to the fights. They loudly proclaimed me their amigo. Equally loudly they wondered why I didn’t drink wine with them from their leather pouch. ”Well if you don’t drink, do you like girls?“ ”Yes. I got my ticket from a girl I met here.“ “Way to go man.” And this cycle was repeated between each of six fights as though it had never occurred before. I tried to ask about the fight rituals but lack of my Spanish or their lack of English or their lack of sobriety interfered. Meanwhile their wives sat on their hands wishing they weren’t there.

2009 PERU: AREQUIPA AND THE COLCA CANYON

This is one of five blogs about my recent trip to Peru.

I had never even heard of Colca Canyon before I arrived in Peru. On the way in from the airport my cab driver asked if I was going there. He said it was better than the Grand Canyon. Yeah! Right! I knew it couldn’t be better, but maybe it was worth seeing. When I put together my travel package I Had it included.
The trip began with a seventy minute, evening flight to Arequipa in Southern Peru. After an announcement that my limited Spanish prevented me from understanding, we were served champagne rather than Pepsi. Then we got a Subway-type sandwich ... incredible on a seventy minute flight. Then, when we touched down, the passengers broke out in applause. I thought the previous flight must have crashed and they happy to land alive. Then I saw TV cameras outside. I loudly ask what was going on after finding out my seat-mate didn’t speak English. It turns out that it was Peruvian Airlines first flight into Arequipa. All those suits on the plane were worn by company executives.
I was met at the gate, as I would be at every stop of the tour, by a guide ... this one with limited English. I did find out that Arequipa is Peru’s second largest city with over a million inhabitants. This is a city I had never heard of before. It turned out to be a very nice at least at its core where I stayed. Later Cuzco would prove more interesting, but Arequipa seemed more livable.
Even at ten at night the Central Plaza, called Plaza de Armas in most Peruvian cities, was swarming with people ... even families with kids ... even a high school student needing to interview an English speaker for her language class. It was the same questions you get ask all over Latin America ... “How do you like our country? When did you arrive? How long will you stay? Oh yeah, where are you from.”
There was no time to explore Arequipa. In the morning before I was picked up, I just had time to run over to the Plaza and take pictures of the Cathedral. It was the first church to which I had ever been whose nave ran perpendicular to the front or plaza face. It wasn’t too old ... the whole town having been flatten by earthquakes rather regularly.
As we neared the edge of town we seemed to be entering into another world. There was no longer any trees or even grass. The bare red soil swirled up in clouds of dust. A hillside showed signs of a new barrio’s beginnings The guide said that a plot of slanting land in this government approved barrio was about 100 square meters ... that’s about 32 feet by 32 feet for a house, yard, and anything else it might take to survive.
The further we got from town the more desolate it got. It apparently never rains there. As we climbed out of the city there were quick views back down into the fertile valley in which Arequipa sat ... but no one lived up there in mountain desert. In a whole day there weren’t a dozen farm houses Standing alone. After an hour or so we came onto a dead flat high plateau or alti-plano where the road seemed to run straight to the horizon.
Along the way we stopped twice to look a vicuna grazing in the sand and scrub. Vicuna are the the smaller, wild version of the animals that we think of collectively as llamas. No one owns vicuna; they roam in the wild, but are rounded up to harvest their wool.
Llamas are the largest of these types of animals. They have long faces and multicolored wool. Alpacas are slightly small and either white or brown in color. When young, their shorter faces make them look almost like sheep. While both are domesticated, they are often seen grazing unattended on the alti-plano.
By the time we stopped, a toilet break was needed by all. It would be the first time I would be confronted by a market-like setting of vendors selling wool products, silver jewelry, and carved stone llamas. If a dozen similar stalls didn’t provide enough buying choice, there were a dozen or more individuals milling around with a single product to sell ... and they all had the mornful-eye-look down pat. Also available were little kids hoping you would take a picture of them and their llama.
What I didn’t know then was how often I would see this same scene in the coming days. What I also didn’t know was that the pavement had ended in that parking lot. The road ahead might often have better described as a trail. Motion sickness pills were probably in order as we whipped from one side of road to the other in order to bang through smaller potholes. The pavement would occasionally reappear only to crumple away again. Happily when we got to the final switch back climbs and decents the road was paved ... but didn’t have railings along the edge so you could look straight down a few hundred feet.
As we had driven higher and higher in altitude our guide had extolled us on the virtues of coca leaves, even handing out samples. At the stop she urged us to drink coca tea. Coca would keep us from getting altitude sickness. Even though I wasn’t worried about that, having never suffered any more than shortness of breath at latitudes up to 14,000 feet, I chewed the leaves. It’s much like chewing dirty, foul tasting weeds or grass ... the kind in your yard not the kind in a plastic baggy.
Our guide, Maribelle, constantly told us of native cures that she had learned from her grandmother. Nature had a plant to cure everything ... and coca was a miracle full of vitamins and minerals. She also reminded those who might have sought a coca high that it takes a great deal of processing to change coca leaves into cocaine.
Just after our stop at the highest point of our trip, 15,750 feet, it hit me ... altitude sickness. I had a head ache, was slightly dizzy, and very light headed. Her cure was using rubbing alcohol as a smelling salt ... and it worked ... to a point.
When we dropped down 4000 feet into the Colca Valley and it capital city/village, Chivay, I was forced to take a nap rather than explore the village. When it was time for our group supper in a hall with a hundred or more other tourists, I seemed to be nearly recovered ... that is until the ‘native Peruvian’ band started playing. The ‘native’ music has more like cover music ampped up to the volume of a rock band. The sound was loud enough to be heard miles up the valley. I am surprised that the local people didn’t complain about their peace being disturbed. Maybe they suffered in quiet thinking the crazy tourists who provide our livelihoods must like that noise.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I had a headache. Maybe it was from the band; probably from the altitude ... and I kept looking at my watch worrying about a five o’clock wake up call. Nothing later that day would indicate that we had needed to get up that early ... although I do suspect that the residents of Colca Valley may have wanted a little of the day to themselves without having a tourist snap their pictures or peer into their front door.
After spending the day before in what was essentially a desert, the Colca Canyon was beautiful green paradise. Actually, because of the high altitude, there wasn’t much natural foliage. The green was on the thousands of terraces which lined the mountain sides. The terraces, joined by winding foot paths, reached a thousand feet up above the valley floor. The work that had gone into building them unestimatible ... and this work had been done by the Incas six hundred years ago.
Colca Canyon is not another Grand Canyon. It is a whole different place ... a unique place of it’s own. The mountains rise as much as 4000 feet above the valley floor ... maybe the deepest canyon in the world, or maybe not. Their terraces are incredible. Nature is still at work there. A 1995 earthquake had dropped sections of the road a hundred feet or so reminding us all that the Andes Mountains are an evolving force of nature.
The bus tour of Colca Canyon ends at the Cruz del Condor where watching condor soar on wind currents is the advertised feature. It was a short feature as four different condors took up less than five minutes in over an hour’s time.
Oh ... Now I remember why we had to get up so early. We not only drove back to Chivay where we ate a late lunch, but also on all the way back to Arequipa ... over six hours in a twelve passenger van. Only two of us survived the trip awake. Whether one likes the dirt roads, mountain switch backs, or desert atmosphere, it was a glimpse of another world ... one I hardly knew existed.
I squeezed in a couple miles of running before dark. Arequipa’s 7740 altitude ( the lowest point on my ten day trip ) made the up hill portions very uncomfortable ... two recovery walks were required to make it a half mile up a gentle slope. Maybe here the ”Are you Crazy?“ looks were justified.
Back in Arequipa it was Halloween and the whole town was out to celebrate. Parents tugged their little goblins and princesses thru the streets. Teenagers made themselves onto their favorite movie characters ... many of whom seemed to be teenage hookers. Thousands of orderly, happy people who were occasionally assaulted by irate drivers who apparently had no idea that driving through a throng of revelers would be so time consuming. When left at eleven he crowds had hardly diminished. That day’s five o’clock wake up was to be followed by one at six.

2009 PERU: ON TO PUNO, LAKE TITICACA, AND THEN TO CUZCO

This is one of five blogs about my recent trip to Peru. Each corresponds to an album of pictures on my Picasa Web site:
www.picasaweb.com/hytenjr



The trip from Arequipa to Puno was interesting but in a negative way. Five and a half hours in a bus isn’t something to look forward to even if they do serve you a sandwich and show you two movies along the way. Only great views can save the day. The views on this trip could only be described as depressing ... even if they were educational.
I didn’t realize that the south of Peru is mostly alti-plano, that is a high plateau. By high I mean over 12,000 feet ... so high and dry that practically nothing grows. The area around Arequipa was mountainous and dry. Here for miles and hours it was flat and lifeless ... no people; no vicuna; sometimes no plants; nothing. I knew great areas of Bolivia were like this, but I thought Peru was green like all the pictures of Machuu Picchu that I had seen.
Just as I thought it couldn’t get any worse, we entered Juliaca. The southern approach was the site of a major building boom ... and it looked like a bomb had gone boom. Reinforcing bars stuck out of the roof of every building. Red bricks sat in red dust. The red dirt and rock road had an unfinished divider whose concrete curbs were covered in red dust. There were drooping wires and piles of construction materials ... and not a tree, shrub or blade of grass anywhere. People had scarves over their faces to keep out the blowing dust. This place would make prefect set for a movie set in a time after a nuclear holocaust.
We turned a corner on to a half paved street that led to the horrible future the newer street had to look forward to. The rest of the way into Puno I sat in stunned silence.
Your first view of Puno is from a mountain top high above the city ... and the city sits at 12,600 feet. Too many switch backs later through barrios after barrios you reach the lake front bus station. Only later in your cab do you realize to whole central city is series of one lane, one way streets. It was quaint but not clean.
The trip was made better by talking to Maria a young Peruvian industrial engineer. She was the only non-office female employee working with a thousand men at mine two hours north of Juliaca. She was an incredibly happy girl who had found a few guys who treated her as a little sister in need of protection rather than a female target.
You go to Puno because it sits on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake. Puno will be remembered well because of a great dinner and evening with New Zealander Nick and Germans Mijra, and Hoglar.
The next day was spent on the lake. It was a nice day. The sun was bright and the lake calm. The floating islands ( floating on reed mats ) were interesting even though they could easily be classified as tourist traps.
Two hours further out on the water we docked at Isla Taquile, a tiny dot on the huge lake. We had to climb almost straight up 1500 feet for our lunch ... a then further up for yet another chance to buy souvenirs. Thank goodness the trip down the other side of the island was a long gradual slope ... with beautiful sea views.
On the way back I played trivia with question taken out of a Lonely Planets travel guide with three Brits. I never answered a question right but then neither did anyone else. Much as in horseshoes, close was good enough. I ended up spending the evening with them too. I saw Nick on the street. Everybody is pretty much doing the same trip, just with one of dozens of different tour companies.
The trip over to Cuzco was to take ten and a half hours. Five stops and a luxury bus or not, this surely wasn’t anything to look forward to. Turns out I was wrong. It was one of the most comfortable and interesting bus rides I have ever taken.
The first stop as at Pukara a tiny village with a large church with a dark but impressive interior. The museum next to it contained a few stone remnants of what had been major Inca city which had been swept off the earth by the conquering Spaniards.
The next stop was at the highest point of this day's trip, 14,222 feet ... not too high to discourage vendors to set up selling more of the same stuff. I do have to admit that I never tire of the colorful stacks of wool scarves. They make a beautiful commercial display of which I usually take a picture.
Along the way I sat with Elsbie and Jasper, a Dutch sister and brother who seemed to travel well together. I had both lunch and supper with them.
At Raqchi we saw the ruins of a major Inca temple and distribution center. It was there that the ticket gatekeeper was wearing a hat which said on it ’70 anos’. Do you know why I had to have it? With my limited Spanish I was able to pull off a trade for my Alaska hat. That was fun.
Our last stop was at a third small village, Andahuaylillas. It had an incredible church whose interior was covered in gold leaf and frescos. A major restoration job was underway. We got to see frescos being redone and gold leaf being applied. Unfortunately they didn’t allow picture taking which is something I don’t understand. If you saw pictures of the place I’ll bet you would want to go there.
We arrived in Cuzco just before sunset. By the time I checked into my hotel and hit the streets, it was dark ... but Cuzco is ready for tourists day or night.

2009 PERU: CUZCO

This is one of five blogs about my recent trip to Peru.

Cuzco is the gateway to Machuu Picchu. Every tourist heading for Machuu Picchu spends at least a night there and most spend three. The city is tourist-ready. There are hotels with as many or as few stars as you might like. You can get a meal for $2.50 or $25.00. Street vendors, local markets, ‘official’ Peruvian artisan’s shops, and worldwide brand name shops battle to open your wallet. There is a travel agent and a money exchange ... or two or three .. on every block. And with the exception of the occasional, persistent street vendor, they treat the tourist very well.
The museums aren’t very good. They aren’t very big and they lack English translations of their information signage. I realize that Peru is a Spanish speaking country, but a fairly large percentage of the tourist are English speaking either as their first or second language. The idea of a museum is to showcase your culture and/or teach your history. The non-Spanish speakers are in museums to learn those things more so than the hordes of school children who inhabit every Latin museum.
The churches are locked immediately after 6:00 AM mass so only a few devoted old ladies get to view the incredible gold-leafed altars and wonderful statuary inside the 16th and 17th century masterpieces. Only the main Cathedral is open to the public ... for a $10 entry fee. I suppose it is worth it. It is full of paintings ... a Peruvian twist on church decoration. Practically all the walls are covered with pictures done in the “Peruvian school” fashion which is quite like that of the Renaissance masters.
All the standard tour packages include a half day city tour and a full day Sacred Valley tour. Both are well worth the time ... if you can ignore all the stops at roadside ‘markets’. I sure hope the guides are getting a huge kickback from the vendors because they lose a lot of tip money forcing the bus load of aggravated passengers look at still another stack of alpaca wool scarves and silver necklaces.
Ninety percent of the Peruvian guides speak heavily accented English made even more difficult to understand by the names of places usually being in an ancient, unpronounceable Inca dialect. I am not sure that I have identified my pictures correctly because I often just could not understand fully what was being said.
If you are only traveling to Cuzco and Machuu Picchu, the Cuzco city tour is a warm-up for what is to follow. Qorikancha in the Santo Domingo church in the city, Tambomachay, and a couple places I can’t identify are interesting. Saqsayhuaman ... or sexy human as the guides like to jokingly call it ... is a great introduction to the enormity of Inca construction projects. Probably built as a fortification near the end of the Inca era, it has a commanding view over the city of Cuzco.

The Sacred Valley trip winds through the mountains with many a spectacular view all day long. Pukapukara introduces you to agricultural terrace construction, while Ollantaytambo’s terraces were a spectacular climb up to temples dominating the valley below.
Chinchero is a nice little village which is basically in the middle of nowhere. The town and its gold-leaf and fresco-covered church are built over the ruins of an Inca city. That’s what the Spanish conquistadors did ... they used the stones of Inca cities to bury the Inca culture and build new Catholic cities. Many of the places we visited had just been found and excavated in the past century.
By the end of those two days my legs were weak, my knees collapsing, and my lungs hungering for oxygen ... and I run every day at home so I am in pretty good condition.
My new friend in Cuzco was Jung Shin, a Korean woman on her dream vacation. I met her on her first day of her two month around-the-world trip. She was on the city tour ... at least she was until the bus began to pull away from our first stop without her. I got the bus to stop and we became friends. That night we met in front of the Cathedral.
While out to dinner I ask where she was staying ... and she couldn’t remember. She hadn’t taken a card from the front desk like all travelers should do. She was pretty sure it was behind the Cathedral ... or maybe some other big church. As we set out to find the hotel she remembered that the name might be the Cuzco Plaza. A policeman said there were two of them, but he didn’t know where either was. Luckily a street vendor overheard the conversation and said he could lead us to it. In front of the hotel he put on a full court press trying to sell ‘his’ paintings which looked surprisingly similar to those of very other kid selling paintings on the street. Jung bought two at a price too high and then gave me one ... the one I had told her was the best in his portfolio.

2009 PERU: MACHUU PICCHU

This is one of five blogs about my recent trip to Peru. Each corresponds to an album of pictures on my Picasa Web site.
www.picasaweb.com/hytenjr


Machuu Picchu is the reason you go to Peru. Peruvian people are nice; Colca Canyon’s terraces are interesting: the Inca sites around Cuzco are great; but Machuu Picchu is why you go to Peru. Sometimes your destination lets you down ... it’s not what you had envisioned. Machuu Picchu, on the other hand, is all you could ever hope for. It is beautiful, complex, historical, and downright unbelievable.
The Machuu Picchu experience begins one of two ways. You can hike the Inca Trail for two or four days ... If you are very fit and like rough adventure ... or you can take the train out from Cuzco. I chose the latter. Starting in the wide and fertile Cuzco valley ... a thirty minute bus ride outside of town ... you wind through the ever narrowing canyon whose vertical side seem to tower over the narrow gauge tracks. At one point you actually back down a siding to continue on a track lower in the canyon. The three hour trip to Agua Calientes, which is just outside Machuu Picchu park, is an ever changing panorama of the Peruvian mountains.
Agua Calientes may be the world’s largest tourist trap. Actually it isn’t very big but well over 50% of the village is devoted to gathering the tourist dollar. While things may be fairly cheap by American standards, it does get any more expensive in Peru. I arrived there at 11:00 AM and found very little to do the rest of the day. The up side was that I would get maximum time ... over six hours ... at the Park the next day. The usual trip is arriving on that train and going immediately to Machuu Picchu for a three or four hour stay. I would recommend taking a later train out from Cuzco ... A couple hours more sleep in Cuzco is more of a vacation than a few hours wandering around Agua Calientes.
It takes about an hour from the time you board a bus in Agua, travel up the mountain, go thru the ticket line, and hike up to the first view of the ruins. And what a view it is. Even with clouds below obscuring some of the view, it was breathtaking. (Don’t worry about the clouds ... they come and go all day long as my picture show.)

I am really at a loss for using words to describe Machuu Picchu. It is art and beauty with almost unbelievable architecture and history. Almost every view can be composed into a great picture. As an architect, I am amazed at every aspect of the construction. Even a huge computer program attached to the most modern stone grinding machines would have difficulty matching the precision of of the stone walls of Machuu Picchu’s temples. The short history (1400-1550)of the Inca civilization makes it all that more improbable.
Our group of ten or so English speakers had a great guide for a two hour tour of the site. I then spent the next four plus ours with a really nice girl, Olivia, soaking in the whole site from higher altitudes. We climbed upwards in altitude a thousand feet or so to the Sun Gate which is the last pass on the Inca Trail prior to reaching Machuu Picchu. We sat on a ledge over a two hundred foot drop and pondered the sight and the world. What a memorable time.
People often ask me if I get lonely living by myself. I always say I am only lonely when I stand looking at a great view of the world around me and have no one to turn to and say ‘Would you look at that!’. I am thankful that on that day I had someone to share the experience with.
You have to take this trip ... the Cuzco-Machuu Picchu part. Do it while you are strong enough to survive the climbs. You will not regret a breath lost.