Cuzco? ´Cooco´? Cusco? or Q´osqo?

Oh man. I just got to Trujillo, and all I want to do is write about Trujillo. I love Trujillo! I´ve liked every city (and pueblo) that I´ve visited in Peru so far, but Trujillo is already easily my favorite. Trujillo is so classy, so old. The men are so stylish. The women are beautiful. And everyone is so tall! I love Trujillo, Love it, Love it!
But before I got to Trujillo, I was in Cuzco, and then in Lima for another day, so I think I´d better write about that or else I´ll lose track of whats going on and that would be really unfortunate.
So... Cuzco. I think my plane ride there sums it up pretty well. I sat in the front row of the plane, with nice leg room, by two girls, one from Australia and the other from Canada, who I didn´t talk to much. As we came close to landing, as soon as we went beneath the cloud layer and could see mountains, the girls started snapping pictures of each other. With the aerial view of Cuzco as their backdrop. They snapped away and snapped away, of each other, even though their background was barely visible to them, or to me. ¨We´re about to land in Cuzco,¨ the Australian girl told her Canadian friend. ¨We´ll never have a better time.¨
¨What does that mean?¨the Canadian asked. ´
Öh, I don´t know,¨ the Australian said. ¨But it´s Cuzco. We´ll hardly have a better time. Ever.¨
I liked Cuzco, or Qósqo, or whatever you choose to call it. I really did. The first night that I was there, I met a different Canadian girl, named Laura, who gave me her travel guide and took me around to show me the city. We wandered past the plaza de armas, a few late night markets, and through Cuzcos shadier parts (to which I´m naturally attracted, as usual; Lord help me but I don´t know why) and then made our way back up the steep walk through the neighborhood of San Blas to the hostel. From the hostel balcony, it´s a beautiful view of the city. From up there, I became aware of just how special of a place Cuzco is. I have some good photos from up there to prove it.
Of course, I spent the whole next day getting screwed over by Cuzcos tourist sharks. First there was the business of getting a ticket for Inti Raymi. 90 dollars is the going price...if youre silly enough to pay it. And guess who was? What I found out, just as I left my money at the Banco de Credito, is that the steep ninety dollar fee is only for a seat, headphones, radio guide, commemorative book, and DVD. You can sit up on the hill at Sacsayhuaman for free. Of course, you don´t find that out waiting in four lengthy lines for tickets. But I got my Inti Raymi ticket by noon and then went to Sacsayhuaman. Again, I became aware of jus how special Cuzco is. From atop the hill where the site is located, Cuzco the city is so impressive. And the inca walls are so well crafted, alongside which sit the older preInca constructions. As I sat in this older part of the ruins, particularly in an Inca cemetary, a man who claimed to be a curandero using native practices walked by me and explained that the Inca first studied these older walls still exist because the Inca wanted to first study humility before building their own constructions. Sounds like a bunch of sentimental hogwash to me, but it looks like I still remember it anyway.
Um...the next day I went to Pisac. In some ways, the day was really frustrating. I took the bus there and we spent two hours getting to the town. And from there it was either another bus, walking, or cab, to get to the ruins, and this line of cabbies totally conspired to rip potential tourists off on cab fare, as each of them insisted that it would cost 15 soles (US five bucks) to get there...and then it was right around the corner. I was pretty grumpy about this, but I wasnt walking 6 km or getting on another bus. And what was worse was that on the way there and back, the cab driver kept picking up HITCHHIKERS (ie random village people) and letting them ride on my tab wherever they needed to go. He would pick up some random person, and they would get on and start talking to the cab driver in Quechua, and meanwhile I would be sitting there just hoping to get to the ruins while they got a lift at my expense. One of these people, though, at least talked to me, and explained the process of making adobe. She was an old lady, so I naturally was happier to give her a lift, say, than I was to pick up some of the scarier looking middle aged men.
Um. Well, anyway, that made for an interesting adventure, and then Pisac was quite nice as well. Actually, its beginning to look like Cuzco was a constant vacillation between pleasure and strife. At Pisac, I was again shocked by amazing beauty. The site is huge, beautifullly sited on a mountainside, and there´s lots of cool was to interact with the land. Theres a cemetary to scramble through, a tight tunnel through through mountain to reach a sun temple called the Inti Huatna, and then a series of storage vessels hidden from the main path along a steep downward trail that I explored (until I had a nearly perilous fall and then turned chicken...haha).
Anyway Pisac was really wonderful, and exhausting, and after eating cream of asparragus soup in the little pueblo, I left the seemingly haunted pueblo in a colectivo where I talked to the driver the whole time about what the US was like. He was shocked to learn that men in the US don´t usually marry until thirty years old, which was how I answered his question when he asked whether I have a wife. He wanted to know also what beer was made from in the US and whether Id had really chicha yet. I hadn´t. But I convinced him to teach me a few words in Quechua and before getting off the collectivo in Cuzco, much happier with my ride back than with the way there.
Then at night there was a huge parade for Inti Raymi, which was the next day. So packed! Almost rivaled San Antonio Fiesta in terms of civic festivities. It was really a cool thing to see. The native dress of Cuzco is not necesarilly atractive, as they wear these knit vests and hats with a billion ribbons, and all the ladies go dancing down the streets with this on while the men where some crazy textiles ted randomly on their bodies. Also, every single group in the parade danced to the same song, which is apparently called ¨todos bailan,¨ honked out on trumpet instead of being played sweetly on the qena. All this is to say that Im not really sure that I aesthetically loved what was happening as the content of this festival. But nevermind that, because it was so cool to see what was going on, especially all the people in the audience (even the fat little lady with a tophat and a baby tied to her back who kept shoving me really hard to get through a long line on the sidewalk).
Okay. Inti Raymi! Huge festival, lots of standing around. Music and dance, a la indigena. I liked watching, because it was really beautiful. But at the part principal in the Sacsaywaman I got really sad, because I realized just how much I wanted to be sitting up on the hill with all the other, normal people, how it wasnt fair that it was supposed to be a festival for indigenous people and yet none of them were getting the VIP service, none of them were sitting in the bleachers because they were all either up on the hill because they couldn´t pay for a seat that expensive or were down the street selling grilled Cuy or chicha from a plastic bucket because they had to work instead of taking the day off to watch the celebration of the sun. I don´t know..it made me really sad, so much so that I had a hard time enjoying it.
Time to wrap this up, I think. So my second to last day in Cuzco I went to Tipon, with a cab driver who I hired for a few hours to take me, wait for me, and bring me back, since Tipon is probably the hardest of the sites to get to by yourself. Turns out my cabbie was (of course) a native Quechua speaker and happened to know quite abit about archaeology, which seems to be true of a lot of cusqueños, so he took me, got off of the car with me, and walked around, showing me a lot of interesting stuff. This was the least crowded of any site on the boleto turistico, probably because its so hard to reach. But it was also my favorite. Beautiful canals, highly symmetrical fountains. The only other people there were some american tourists doing healing rituals. Me and the cabbie kind of laughed at them, because it seemed so silly to see all these middle aged white people dressed in all white clothing doing witchery at a site that they probably didn´t know much about (there was one guy there who decided it would be cleansing to stick his bald head under the ancient fountain and let the water run on his exposed scalp'''''so weird). Anyway, we walked around, and the cabbie showed me how to use a series of ancient steps that I probably wouldn´t have noticed otherwise, and it was a lovely time. On the way back to Cuzco, we drove by his village, just outside of San Jeronimo, and he showed me the school his daughters attended. All in all it was pretty sweet, and I lucked out to have such a good guide.
Oh, the same day, I also spent the morning hiking to qénqo. It was gross, because I had to walk along the highway, and scary for the same reason considering that peruvians are not exactly magnificent drivers. And once I got to Qenqo it wasn´t that exciting. I almost busted a lung getting there though.
Alrighty, almost at the end. So the last day I took an organized tour, beause I realized that it was the only way that I would ever get to all of the sites that I was still missing on the boleto turistico. So I went with the tour group to Ollantaytambo and Chincheros, and back to Pisac. The coolest part was watching weavers in Chincheros. The weirdest part is that I got hit on by this weird lady from Ecuador who was 33 and on the tour with her son, who was FOUR YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME. She kept showing me her pictures and making me tell her how good she looked, and she kept telling me I was good looking and dropping hints that she wanted an American boyfriend because she was tired of Latino machistas. I kept hanging out with her though because she and her son were actually really funny (when she wasn´t making me feel uncomfortable that is) and because it was better than spending the whole tour by myself.
I ended my tour in Cuzco by learning a new card game, Hearts, with four new British friends on the hostel.
This post has gone REAALLLY long. I think I´ll have to write about my night in Lima (which deserves a post) with the Trujillo batch. It´s time for me to get out and see more of Trujillo now, anyway. YAY! I love Trujillo!!!!

Arequipa

On the bus that I took from Lima to Arequipa, I was shocked to see just how luxuriously I would be treated. The seats on the bus Cruz del Sur are upholstered in leather, with plenty of leg room and they recline to a position in which it is actually conceivable that you could sleep. I was so impressed! As if just sitting in this beautiful bus seat wasnt fun enough, the Cruz del Sur buses had plenty of other surprises up their sleeves. Movies I actually like... like Sweet Home Alabama! And not even dubbed in Spanish! And in between movies, they made the experience truly interactive by holding a BINGO game on the bus, with a prize of one free ride home on this glorious bus! I was so pleased...but I should have listened closer to the instructions, because I thought you only had to cover one line of the bingo card. I was so excited to think that I had won that I shouted out Bingo! in an obnoxiously excited voice, and help up my card and waved it around. The Peruvian man behind me looked at my card, shook his head, and said, No, falta mucho. And he was right....we were supposed to cover the whole card first.
Oops, I announced to the bus. I messed up.
I didnt win the Bingo game even following the correct rules, by the way.
So we arrived at Arequipa. After paying 50 centimos to use an extremely clean bus station bathroom, I went to the ticket counter and got a nasty surprise. Bus routes to Cuzco have been cut off! There is a protest going on where the highway connects the two cities, and because of this huelga, buses cannot pass. I would have been more anxious about fixing the problem right away (Kirsty, I hope youre reading this, though Im pretty sure you dont even know I have it), but taking a page from the Motul trip of Spring Break I decided to play it by ear and see what I could do before freaking out.
Apparently, the only option to get me to Cuzco is to take the bus to Lima and then to fly from Lima to Cuzco. It was not extremely expensive, thankfully, even though it was more than I originally thought that I would pay. But I was glad to get all of that drama behind me. And with it behind me, I finally got to take a look at Arequipa, which is a really special city.
Arequipa is nestled among three mountain volcanoes, Misti (which I learned is Quechua for white, thanks to reading Arguedas), Picchu Picchu, and one more whose name Ive unfortunately forgotten at the moment (it might be something like Chalki?). At any rate, Arequipa is SO beautiful, similar, I think, to cities in Mexico like San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato. Its hard to breathe up here, because the altitude really is quite shocking, and sometimes I feel that altitude when Im walking around, in the form of a weird tingling all over my body. Arequipa has a beautiful square, where Ariquipenos and the hugest concentration of pigeons Ive ever seen share public space, and lots of historical buildings, like the Cathedral and the Convent (apparently, in Peru monks live in convents and monjas live in monasteries). Anyway, Arequipa is best enjoyed, I think, by strolling. Thats how Ive found it, at least. Though besides strolling, I have also enjoyed some of the citys cultural activities. I was the ONLY visitor the whole day at the Museum of Archaeology by the Catholic UNiversity, for instance, and the security guard had to turn on all the lights so that I could see the exhibit. I also visited the Museum of Andean Sanctuaries today, where Juanita, one of the oldest corpses found well preserved in situ, is housed. I dont usually find that kind of think creepy, but seeing that mummified little girl actually kind of freaked me out. Shes kept under really low lighting, in a really cold room, inside three glass boxes. The whole effect is really quite chilling. Add to this, in fact, that before we even got to the room where Juanita is housed, a girl on the tour actually FAINTED, collapsed in front of us onto the floor. The guide, a very well composed lady who, I must mention, was wearing nothing but Under Armour for a shirt, ran for security, and the rest of us followed the French girl out to the plaza where the guard promptly elevated her legs to get the blood back to her head. (For those who are concerned, she was fine afterwards, and was able to continue the tour and see Juanita through her own two yeux.)
Ive really enjoyed my time in Arequipa. At the hostel, Ive been one of only a few americans to pass through. The three Californians from Lima were there, and I also ran into Rose and Scott from Australia again. During the days, Im still mostly by myself, touring these cities on my own, but at nights its nice to have the hostel people around. I actually met a girl from Philly there, who has been living in Chile for the past 8 months. We went to see a classical music concert together, a free show put on by the Orquesta Sinfonica de Arequipa, (just lost my train of thought, a little boy came in asking me for money) and the concert was wild. The second act was a guitar solo played with orchestra, and the soloists children, who were in the audience, suddenly decided in the middle of the act that they missed their dad and started jumping up and down in the middle of the aisle (the concert was held in a cathedral) calling out for him. The conductor, a really tall woman named Zoila, turned around angrily and scowled at the audience as she conducted, and the now very loud children were soon scooped up and hauled out. Of my two nights in Arequipa, that was the more classy entertainment. Last night, I played cards with two Swiss girls, a Dutch girl, and a boy from the UK who is working at the hostel and studying Spanish. We played this weird game that I know exists in the US, but none of the Europeans knew what to call it, so I cant say. It was quite fun though, and we had some really sour wine to add to the rollicking ambience.
My bus back to Lima leaves in about two hours, but Im a real stickler for getting everywhere early. I suppose, then, that I should go. But Arequipa needs more description! Ill close by saying that I really amused myself writing a letter to Monica that I think sums everything up pretty well. Also, I forgot to mention that a cab driver made a gun sign with his hand and made shooting noises directed at his head in order to convince me to stay somewhere else. Bam, bam, boom. Oh, Peru.

even MORE about Lima

I wouldn´t want to short the people staying in the hostel some attention in my blog. But... I don´t know, there have been so many people here that it makes it really hard to give each person I´ve gotten to know a fair treatment. I guess I´ll just have to be brief, then.
The first night that I was here I hung out in the living room with two girls from Kansas, this guy named Jacques who quit his job substitute teaching in order to travel, and a guy named Matt who is a former US military man from Kentucky. Um...we just watched some TV for a couple of hours and drank Pisco sours (I like those drinks because they really shock your mouth with the SWEETNESS....SO much sugar.) The next night, we played drinking game style Jenga on the patio until it felt like time to go to the club. We went with a pair of American girls who I really liked, named Evie and Emily (they really WERE a pair) because they were really amiable and because Evie called me my love and Im a sucker for that sort of unwarranted familiarity.
There´s also a guy from Colombia who is some kind of philsophy grad student. He keeps to himself a lot, but he ocassionally joins us on the patio when we are hanging out at night. He doesn´t talk much and when he does, he thinks through every single word so carefully...and we all just make fun of the fact that he´s a philosopher. There was also a woman named Kaley who works for Europol, who loves sex jokes and talks about her hot swiss boyfriend´s bum. Then there was Jonathan, a filipino lawyer from New York, who loves talking about New York. Last night a teacher from San Antonio, who (at first) I thought was about my age, and a Finnish hippy who found some Peruvians God Knows Where in Lima and brought them back to hang out last night. It´s great fun really, especially because the people here are really different from the kind of people I usually socialize with. Almost everyone that I have hung out with here is much older than I am. Many of them are married, like Diane, the archaeology grad student who will be working at Morro at the end of the month. Lots of people in their thirties. Lots of people who teach middle school.
Anyway, that´s probably not all THAT important.
I´m trying to figure out where to go after Cusco still. Arequipa may not actually have been the best choice (I guess I´ll have to see when I get there tomorrow) because I feel obliged to visit as many archaeological SITES as possible and Arequipa seems to have a greater abundance of museums, along with some natural wonders I suppose, but that´s okay because it´s only a stopover for two nights. Cusco is obvious. I can´t wait for Inti Raymi at Sacsayhuaman. But after that? I think it would be fun to go to Bolivia, to see Tiwanaku, but I don´t actually know whether that is feasible. That is to say, I´m happy to pay for a visa, but I´m not really sure that they would give me one. If I somehow make it to La Paz it would be really fun to visit the witches´market, but like I said, I´m wondering whether that´s feasible.
Within Peru, here are some of the possibilities. I would like to visit Cajamarca because I´ve heard that it´s beautiful, and also because one of the authors on my self designed reading list is from Cajamarca, but again, I don´t know what Cajamarca has to offer in terms of archaeology. Even further out, I would like to go to Chachapoyas, because there´s this amazonian site called Kuelap that looks SO COOL, but the guidebook says that it is dangerous to get there because buses often wreck due to extremely poor roads, especially during this season. Oh...what´s a boy to do?
Finally, I think I should talk about the challenges involved in travelling alone. I can´t yet say that I´m lonely in the way that I expected to be, but what I can say is that its a real challenge to travel alone because responsibility for your safety and the success of your trip falls on your own shoulders. If, for instance, I decided that I didn´t want to see Lima or any of Peru anymore, whos to stop me? I could just lay in bed all day, and there might not actually be anyone to tell me to do otherwise. Also, when I go somewhere or do something, there often isn´t anyone around to help me be sure that I´m doing things right. How am I supposed to know if I´m forgetting some essential detail, or who can help me see that some aspect of the landscape is not right if my intuition isn´t enough? Who´s supposed to help me choose what city to see, what sites not to miss, and how can I possibly be in charge of thinking through EVERYTHING on my own?
For real. Travelling by yourself is hard.

Lima de Peru (part 2)

Pachacamac is in the town of Lurin, about forty'five minutes from the city. I consulted with the hostel owners and they promised me that it would be super easy to get to on public transport. WRONG! First I had to take a bus to the highway. Buses in Lima, though, are not really like buses anywhere else that I´ve been. You shove yourself onto this crowded little van where a young guy walks around and takes your money, and maybe you go where you think you´re headed and maybe you don´t, because the buses aren´t labelled so well and the drivers are prone to following their own whims. So I got on this bus and asked the kid who was taking up the money, (are we going to Puente Primavera? And he assured me that we were...until I asked him ten minutes later and he was like, well, we´re going somewhere else, but it´s practically the same thing. And I could barely understand him because he was speaking a kind of Spanish that didn´t sound anything like the beautiful singsong of the Limenos, but instead sounded like a lot of grunting, so I had no idea what he was saying, but no, wé weren´t going where I needed to go, and I got mad and got of the bus and caught a cab to the Puente.
At the Puente, though, I was suppposed to transfer. What do you know, but the bus to which I transferred was yet another small van, crowded with a bunch of people from Lima´s outskirts. The whole way there I sat next to a lady with a crowded baby on her lap, and yet again, I was not even sure that I was going to get to the ruins because I´d already come to doubt what bus drivers told me from the other ride. When we at last arrived, I was so grateful...
Pachacamac, unfortunately, just looked like a pile of rocks. The sky was perfectly, abysmally gray. And there were a bunch of kids on field trips that apparently weren´t used to seeing an American and kept trying to talk to me, saying ¨What is your name¨ a hundred thousand times. Charming.
Then I rode the bus back, which was a whole other affair. Same crowded state, same confusion. This time, though, there was a robbery in the aisle. Three guys took the backpack of another guy, and they started FIGHTING. ON THE BUS. RIGHT BEHIND ME. Literally scrapping, throwing punches. Not immediately realizing what was happening, I got hit upside the head. The lady next to me screamed (this one had a baby too). And the driver and the money collecting kid didn´t do anything. Just let it go on until the next stop, where the three thieves tumbled off the van and the kid who got robbed stayed on nursing his bloody nose.
Holy shit. On my first venture out.
Anyway, I took a cab back to my general area and walked a mile back to the hostel. A lady was walking her dog (without a leash), and when he merilly jumped onto the curb and nipped at my legs she laughed. Which made me laugh too. But then the dog ran into the empty street and she started screaming. AY, CARAJO, NO TE METES EN LA CALLE SIN PERMISO!!! And the poor little dog jumped back on to the curb and I couldn´t help but thinking that all of Lima is insane.
Sunday I went out into the city with two friends I met here at the hostel. What fun!
I´ve been out clubbing a couple of times with other hostel people. Lima may be wacky, but they do know how to party.
Um...I need to write more, but there´s a little line for the compu, so I´d better go!!!

Lima de Peru (part 1)

Oh. My. God.
This place is crazy!!!
Tonight is my last night in Lima before I head south to Arequipa, Peru´s second largest city. I would have blogged sooner, talking about things as they happened instead of trying to remember everything that´s gone on in the past four days, but I feel that that would have been literally impossible. I´m so tired by the end of each day here that I have absolutely no strength left for writing, let alone remembering.
Anyway...so I got to Lima on Wednesday after a really long flight, where the little old lady sitting in the aisle across from me kept dropping all of her important immigration documents without noticing (en DONDE estaba? en DONDE??) and spilling her sodas on the floor and on my shoes. Good talker, though.
Anyway, afterwards I took the pick up service and was made so much less nervous about being in a new place by the driver, who was chatty (like most Peruvians seem to be) and assured me that I would feel right at home at the hostel. Which is interesting, considering its pretty hard to feel comfortable on the highways in Lima. At night, teenagers literally hang out ON the highways on the way here from the airport. There were kids standing in the middle of the freeway, tugging on their girlfriend´s arms and laughing and just STANDING around! And everyone was doing it, too... strange, really.
Anyway, Thursday I spent the whole day walking, pretty much. Saw some pre Inka ruins in the neighborhood of Miraflores, and took a stroll down the Malecon, a cliffside park overlooking Lima´s lovely beaches. What a sight! And What do you know...I found Havana! The Dulce de Leche place from Argentina apparently has an outpost in Lima... what a nice surprise! The same day, I ate Chifa, a sort of blend of Chinese and Peruvian food.
I don´t remember what I did on Friday. I think (actually, now I´m sure) that I went to two museums, the Larco and the Arqueology museums. Larco was so cool! The national museum, not so much...
Saturday was where my real adventures began. I decided it was time to really get out there and adventure, so I planned a trip to Pachacamac. (con´t above)