We have now completed our 21 day whistle stop tour of Peru and crossed the frontier into Bolivia!! Though its hardly noticeable that we´ve changed countries cos ts all very similiar, apart from a change in currency and even cheaper!
We were struck by the amount of poverty in peru though we could have missed it as we were shuttled from one three-star hotel to the next, all with comfy beds, hot showers and wireless internet. Eating in tourist restaurants and drinking in bars much too pricey for locals. While we had wireless internet the average person on the street takes their work to a man in the town square who sits on a bench with a typewriter and charges a few pesos to type work for people!! Everyone is selling something or offering some service, its a country full of entrepreneurs - Alan Sugar would be impressed!! So we´ve felt very privileged and rich, as you can expect.
But the real eye opener came whe we stayed with a family on an island on Lake Titicaca. Our bedroom was a seperate building with stone floor, en-suite, curtains, comfy beds, while the family slept in one room with mud walls and floor and all in one bed (2 adults and 5 kids)! We were terrified about the homestay, still not having learnt much spanish and not needing to use any since the trip started cos our argentinian guide has sorted everything for us. Kirsty started frantically reading the spanish phrase book while i resigned myself to the fact that dinner with the family would be a silent affair with the odd bit of charades thrown in! The meal was a wonderful veg, quinoa and potato soup which filled me up and i was hoping that was the entire meal but then came main course!!! A steaming mountain of rice served with pasta and potato, OMG, carb overload or what!!! Bearing in mind I´m the no-carbs queen, my eyes virtually popped out of my head and I turned to kirst and asked "Can you die from eating too many carbs?"!!!
So as expected we ate in total silence with the 5 kids in the family whispering amongst themselves, the mum sitting on the floor next to the wood-burning stove she was cooking on (she never really gave us eye contact, and dad didn´t make an appearance. After the tense silence seemed to have lasted an eternity, I exclaimed "Wow, I´m full!!!" bur rather too loudly!!! The kids virtually jumped out of their skins and turned to look at me by which point I was blowing out my belly and rubbing it to gesture fullness and smileing with a huge grin!! Kirst just started laughing and told me later that I looked like an over-enthusiastic Father Christmas!!! Needless to say the rest of the meal was conducted in complete silence!
The following day we left the homestay (humbled but relieved that the experience was over!!) and visited another island. Where the islanders live a very traditional lifestyle, sustaining themselves with a couple of cows and chickens and living a very simple lifestyle with few possessions, probably not far from life in the UK 500 years ago! All the women wear traditional peruvian dress, layered colourful skirts and black shawls with wide brimmed hats. We were told the siza of the pom pom on a womans shawl denotes whether or not she is single - the bigger the pom pom the more you know she is single. Kirst and I plan to start to work on outfits made entirely of pom poms as soon as we get back!!
We have certainly acquired a reputation as party girls amongst our group on our Gap Adventures tour! Each time we have arrived in a new town the others ask, wheres the cathedral or the museum? From Kirst and I its always, is there a nightclub? If so, where? and where can you get a decent cappucino? Not exactly culture vultures!! But hey we´ve got 7 mths to soak up galleries, museums and ancient inca ruins, we need to pace ourselves!!! Anyway we´ve embraced Peruvian culture in one sense and thats through our love of the national drink Pisco and in particular the cocktail Pisco Sour, made with Pisco ( a nice healthy measure, egg white (essential protein which we are lacking!!), lemon juice and sugar!) Its the perfect combination between sweet and sour and very alcoholic - love it!! Its been responsible for breaking down barriers amongst the members of our group and after a few pisco sours even the most quiet and unlikely members of the group have been persuaded (by us) into a club and onto the dancefloor!! Our tour guide told us on the final night he´s never had a group thats partied as much as ours!! and Kirst and I take full credit for this!! I´m also responsible for getting everyone into a karaoke bar, much to most of their initial dismay!!! But mine and the tour guide´s enthusiasm for it overrode their protests! Theirs 12 in our group and between us 7 different nationalities and i can tell you I´ve discovered nothing cuts across language barriers or cultural differences like a good old rendition of Whitney - I wana dance with somebody!!!! Its a classic no matter where you come from!!
However the partying was temporarily interrupted for the Inca Trail!! 4 days, 3 nights camping, 40km (26 miles), well over 1200 metres of climbing, and all done at over 3000m above sea level. I must confess the walking was much harder than I´d anticipated. At that altitude even a bit of uphill walking gets your heart racing and makes you very out of breath, let alone five hours of very steep uphill walking on the second day to reach 4200m, and just to add to the experience it ws driving rain and very cold!!! We´d planned to celebrate when we reached the top but instead took a quick picture and started our decent to the camp, which meant 2 hours of downhill. walking down treacherous slippy uneven rocky steps in the rain!! To ay we were relieved to get to camp that night would be a bit of an understatement!! The third day involved ten hours of walking but was much better weather and a more pleasant walk through the rainforest, and less uphill!! Then on day 4 it was up at 4am and stat walking at 5am to reach the sun gate for 7am, and wow it was worth it!!! the skies were clear and the views down to Maccu Pichu were fantastic, we got the all important photo of me and Kirst with ruins in the background, yippee!! By the time we walked a further hour to the ruins i was so tired and hungry I didn´t take in any of the actual tour, which was a shame. We were like the walking dead, struggling to keep our eyes open. the minute the tour finished we found a patch of grass and fell fast asleep! So proud we acheived it and definitely planning to do a lot more hiking before the trip is finished!!
