Peru

Mid October to mid November 2006

The Peruvian capital Lima didn't seem to have too much to recommend itself to me, so I spent an unavoidable night at a slightly run-down hostel there then headed south the next day. That one night, however, was long enough to learn one or two things about my new host country.

The electricity inexplicably disappeared from half the hostel and the grumpy caretaker woman, who thought she might stumble across a solution simply by operating the switch to my "suicide shower" over and over, informed me (in Spanish) that, "we were in Peru, not Europe" as if that explained the situation. I replied, (in Spanish), that I was aware of where we were. Then the woman at the hostel travel desk, when advising me to take one bus company out of Lima rather than another, told me that her advice was based on the opinion that I was less likely to get chloroformed and robbed in my seat with her choice of bus company. Nice!

As it turned out, both of these experiences, (garnered before I had even set foot outside the haven of my first Peruvian hostel!), unfairly foreshadowed my actual experience of Peru. I did wonder if I should have invested in one of the ex-military gas masks on sale in London after the July 7th attacks, but in the event the most exciting part of the journey to Huacachina was when the conductor led the bus in a game of bingo! The winner, (sadly not me), got a one-way bus ticket to the destination of their choice.

Huacachina is a tiny resort built around a lagoon in the middle of some huge sand dunes. The reason it exists is to enable you to take trips out into the dunes in dune buggies to go sand boarding. This is like snow boarding, except slower, not as cold and not as hard on your hands when you fall over. In fact, most people in the group stopped standing up when they realised that it was faster and more fun to just lie down on the thing and shoot down the dune on your belly....

However, just as much fun as the boarding itself was the riding around in the buggies. They were driven by maniacs around the dunes at high speed, and going up one side of a steep dune, cresting the top then going almost vertically down the other side was, literally, a roller-coaster ride! Although you were strapped in there was still a good deal of opportunity to bash various parts of your body against the steel frame of the vehicle. Consequently I came away from the experience bruised and with sand in orifices I didn't know that I had, but very happy.

The next bus journey, (same company, more bingo!), took me further south in Nasca, to have a look at the geoglyphs in the surrounding plains. These are amazing figures and geometrical shapes carved into the ground over a period of about a thousand years starting around 500 B.C, for reasons that are still something of a mystery.

I attended an interesting talk on the subject at the town's tiny Maria Reiche Planetarium, where I learned that currently offered explanations include that the geoglyphs are astronomical maps, indications of terrestrial water sources, religious devotions or even all these things at once. Disappointingly, no one there now seems to be suggesting that the lines are landing strips for alien spacecraft, and the figures are the giant doodlings of extraterrestrials...

One particular suggestion was that the Nazca spider figure was, in fact, a representation of the constellation we know as Orion. The lecturer superimposed the spider onto that group of stars to show that it can indeed be shown to make a sensible fit. That just served to reinforce my idea that the figures we ascribe to the constellations are really quite arbitrary. Drawing lines between stars in the sky, one lot of ancient astronomers in Greece would say "See, look! A bloke with a belt and a club whacking a bull on the head!", while another lot in South America would say, "See, look! A big spider!". You could probably make Orion resemble a kitchen blender if you chose your interconnecting lines carefully and made up a myth to go with it.

The only way really to see the lines is to fly over them, which for me involved a 40 minute flight over the area in a little six-seater Cessner. The flight was fun, but looking at the figures tended to involve the pilot saying "There's the monkey, look!" then banking the aircraft steeply and quickly to the left and then to the right so that people sitting on both sides could have a gawp through their windows. The figures were quite hard to see as it all happened so quickly, and taking decent photos was next to impossible, (see my hummingbird above and waving man to the right... the spider isn't mine!), but it was still a worthwhile morning.

Next stop was Arequipa, a very nice little town in which to spend a few days. It has a beautiful convent which I spent an afternoon wandering around, and a museum which houses "Juanita", the preserved body of a young girl sacrificed and frozen in an Inca ceremony on a nearby mountain top centuries ago. Not only was the convent still populated by nuns, but also by guinea pigs being raised for roasting! Guinea pig, (or "cuy" en Espanol), is a traditional Peruvian dish.

The place I stayed in Arequipa was called Casa de Sillar, and was the nicest place I have stayed in so far in Latin America. The building was a 400 year-old colonial house constructed of sillar, the local volcanic rock from which the convent was also constructed. The rooms were beautifully furnished, and they served an excellent breakfast on the roof with a view of the mountains.

From Arequipa I made a trip into the beautiful Colca valley, with an overnight in Chivay. Amongst seeing various mountain and valley landscapes, herds of llamas, alpacas etc, the most breathtaking vista was that at Condor Cross Mirador where you are 3287m above sea level, and can look down into the river valley 1200m below. The place lived up to its name as well; after a few hours we saw a distant spot in the sky which I am reliably informed was a condor.

To combat altitude sickness and fatigue, people throughout Peru chew cocoa leaves and drink cocoa tea. Since the trip to Colca involved being quite high up, I bought a bag and gave chewing the things a try. Sure enough it does alleviate tiredness; but it also turns your teeth green, tastes like munching grass clippings and, as I was later to be told, makes your breath smell like that of a Swedish cow, (thanks Ida!). It also turns your mouth and gums numb. Hmmm, curious...

From Arequipa I took another overnight bus, (with more bingo!), to Cusco, Peru's "tourist central". On the bus I met Linda from Berlin, and we spent the next morning looking around the town and its Inca Museum. It was all a little wasted on me though. I never sleep well on overnight buses and found myself staring at Inca artifacts in a red-eyed daze, thinking about the bed that I was definitely headed for that afternoon. The one thing that kept me awake was the somewhat inexplicable temporary exhibit of modern photos of Peruvian women bizarrely photoshopped onto religiously iconic paintings. A good example is the above Peruvian woman with helmet, musket, wings and Nora Batty-style wrinkled stockings...

Cusco is a nice place to spend a few days, and it was good to meet up there again with Mike, Ida and Kristian with whom I had been in Ecuador. One evening Kristian and I split half a roasted cuy; since the only pet I ever had as a child was a guinea pig, I had a kind of warped attraction to the idea of eating one, (sorry Fred). I think I got the front right-hand quarter, and Kristian got the front left-hand quarter. It was disappointing; very small amounts of dark gamey flesh that you had to work hard for.

Cusco is mainly known as the starting point for the Inca Trail, a 4-day, 45km hike to the formerly lost Inca city of Machu Picchu. However, it is also a jumping off point for trips into the Amazon basin jungle of nearby Manu National Park, and before doing the Inca Trail I wanted to see a little of that. I booked a trip of six days camping in the jungle, but that was cancelled and all I could then get was a trip for four days, staying in jungle lodges rather than camping.

The trip was good, the park is beautiful and we did some fun activities such as river rafting, (and some not so fun such as riding a completely shafted mountain bike for 30 km along rocky roads). However, the slim possibilities of seeing animals such as the caiman, tapir, ocelot etc. did not amount to anything; in all our jungle walks the only mammal we ever saw was a squirrel! I realised that you need to go very deep into the jungle, for a long time, and keep well away from the lodge complexes to have any chance of seeing big wildlife. I was glad that I had already seen that kind of thing in Costa Rica!

However, we did meet a supposed "shaman" who lived in the jungle, and the jungle itself was very impressive. On one day we took a punt out onto a lagoon, and moving very slowly and almost silently across the water we saw some remarkable birds. The quiet on the lake, interrupted only by bird calls and the gentle splashing of the punt, was beautiful. The next day we saw a dawn clay lick, a phenomenon where huge flocks of parrots, parakeets and macaws all converge at dawn to lick a big tasty clay cliff.

So then the famous Inca Trail. This is part of the ancient communication corridor linking the northern part of the Inca empire in what is now Ecuador, to the southern part in modern northern Chile, along which runners would relay messages. Ida, Kristian and I were part of a group of 16 hikers who took it at a more sedate pace, camping the three nights along the way.

The Trail was a great experience, with some magnificent scenery to try to see through the mist, fog and rain which seemed to follow us around. Some of the walking was a challenge, especially the second day which was pretty much relentlessly uphill. I had hired a porter to carry my backpack, (hey I had been travelling for 10 months! I was tired! Plus it kept a little Peruvian man in gainful employment for four days!), so I can only imagine what it was like to have to hump your stuff around as well. However, it was US$40 well spent as I know I enjoyed the trail so much more not having to carry everything.

For the group of 16 hikers there were about the same number of porters. Apart from carrying the backpacks of lazy tourists, their main job was to transport all the tents for sleeping, eating and cooking from one camp to the next. This they did with amazing stamina and energy, as they had to break down the camp after we had left it in the morning, then overtake us on the trail to have it set up again by the time we reached the next camp! This meant that as you were huffing and puffing along thinking how tough it all was, diminutive Peruvian men humping backpacks the size and weight of a small refrigerator would, often literally, run past you and put you to shame. They got well-tipped by the group at the end of the trek.

When you finally enter Machu Picchu on the fourth morning, the view down into the site is supposed to be stunning. However, in keeping with the rest of the hike, the site was clouded in mist when we arrived. It did burn off a little later on though, to allow us a look around the site, (along with hoardes of other tourists).

After returning to Cusco I then took a train, (very rare in this part of the world), down to Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca. Lake Titicaca, in the Andes Altiplano at 3810m above sea level, is "The World's Highest Navigable Lake", and "The Biggest Lake In South America" as you are constantly reminded. It really is a very beautiful blue colour, due apparently to the nature of the light at this altitude.

Puno itself isn't up to much, but it is from there that you can take trips to the lake islands of Islas Uros, Isla Amantani and Isla Taquila. Puno did however have M.S. Yavari, an iron boat pre-fabricated at an English foundry in Birmingham for the Peruvian navy in the 1860s, and transported by mule across the Andes piece by piece! It is currently being restored by some obsessive jolly-hockey-sticks type English woman, and has therefore (of course!) been visited by Michael Palin for one of his travel programmes.

So I took a boat trip to see the islands, on which I met Danish Lina and Sina. We visited the floating islands of the Uros people, which are artificial islands made entirely of the reeds which grow on Lake Titicaca. Consequently the islands are strangely spongy underfoot. The submerged reeds on the bottom of the islands rot, and so the islands are constantly replaced from the top with fresh reeds. After a short trip in a reed boat, we then visited Isla Amantani where locals meet boats at the jetty to offer home stays.

I stayed with a family who were also housing a Peruvian-Irish couple. The buildings were all adobe brick, (made of mud and straw), and all the cooking and eating was done in a central room with an open fire. It was interesting to see how these people lived, and despite language difficulties, (Granny spoke only Quechuan, and my Spanish is still in the "development stage"), the family were very friendly and interested in us. When we left, we had the inevitable formally posed photos, and I promised to send them prints when I got back to the UK.

After a short visit to Isla Taquila we set off back for Puno, and a night of eating and drinking whatever we wanted after the slightly spartan surroundings of the lake islands! Then it was time for me to head further south by bus into Bolivia....