Last time I blogged we were just leaving the (toasty warm and coastal) town of Montañita for Cuenca, city of beautiful colonial churches, Panama hats and anthropological museum.. including shrunken heads. Naturally we gave the churches a once-over, forgot to go to any hat shops, and headed straight for the shrunken heads. Which are weeeird. Grey-green skin, mouths sewn together like that Playstation game Abe's Oddysee (did that scare anyone else as a child?!), long black hair and pained expressions. We spent the rest of the time sitting in the sun with amazing ice creams, watching the Chulitas (indigenous women) walk by with their big pleated skirts, pigtails joined together at the back, and top hats perched on their heads. It's a good look. We took stealth photos of cute babies and Claire told me off for getting broody.
The next day was a typical day of border crossing travel. Bus past ugly town, border stamp in ugly building, women selling digestively challenging meats outside said ugly building, bus to colectivo station where ayudantes (conductors) interrogate you as to which country you're from and how gutted you are that you are no longer in the world cup. We followed the coastline as the sun set, bouncing along in the bus, me sat in the front seat with a bent pole sticking into my bum, Claire stuffed between old ladies, both of us singing along loudly to Puerto Rican songstrels Aventura to the amusement of our fellow passengers. I bonded with our bus driver when he gave me some disgusting pink biscuits, and we got dropped off right outside our hostel. Old men to the rescue again!
We walked through 9ft wooden gates and along a path, and were confronted with something out of a David Guetta video. Bar, pool, big Ibiza-esque hotel complex. Massive cultureshock after dusty little towns and broken down buses! We tried to settle in gently with a beer at the bar, but 3am found us tightly bound in a circle hug to multiple Brits drunkenly swaying to Robbie Williams' 'Angels'. Classy. Shortly afterwards I lost Claire, found her on the other side of the pool, jumped in to get to her (obviously more economical than walking around the perimeter) and was promptly told off and sent to bed.
Andy and Charlotte arrived the next day as I was hungoverly lying by the pool and Claire was throwing up. We ran to each other in slow-motion and spent the next few hours catching up. The next few days were a blur of drinking, dancing and fire-poi, with trips to hot springs and the beach thrown in. I managed to stay up for 40 hours and watch two sunsets and one sunrise before admitting defeat and sleeping. Five days of carnage was eventually ended with a lovely meal for 10 and one (or two) final beers before we poured ourselves into a night bus bound further south. We vogued at the security film taken at the beginning of each journey and watched 'The Blind Side' in subtitles for the millionth time before falling asleep and being turfed out in Trujillo at 6am the next day.
There's nothing particularly exciting in Trujillo so we stayed down the coast in Huanchaco. We spent a morning exploring the Chan Chan ruins (very Labyrinth), an afternoon lying on the beach, and an evening geting our ears talked off by a lonely New Yorker who apparently had no need to breathe or ever stop speaking. Claire's good intentions of surfing were dashed by the grey sea and prospect of a cold shower, so we lazed on the beach and ate cake as the sun set. In case you hadn't noticed, our week with the Tweddles was a holiday from our holiday.
Our next stop was Lima, capital of Peru, and our chosen celebration destination for Claire's birthday. Andy and Charlotte had to organise the next leg of their travels so Claire and I sneaked off to the centre to look at museums and monastaries (shh). We visited the Museum of the Inquisition with its scary mannikins and real torture implements, and met a lovely French-Canadian called Pierre who tagged along with us to the Monastery of San Fransisco. We had an incredible tour through the catacombs (home to an estimated 24,000 bodies), the beautiful library and the gold plated dressing room for monks, complete with secret passageway (insert sarky comment about corrupt, pervy men in religion here). Pierre convinced us to go for a cocktail at lunchtime, so we went to a hotel off the main square famous for making Peru's best Pisco Sours. It's basically a cocktail made from fortified wine, egg white and lime juice, and is surprisingly yummy. And potent. We attempted to sober up with a slice of pizza, then headed back to our hostel for games of Scattegories, drinks on the terrace, and bi-lingual confusions with Pierre's Spanish friend.
The next day was Claire's 23rd birthday, long awaited and very exciting! We celebrated by shopping in the best department stores that Miraflores had to offer (including choosing some heinous purple sequinned outfits for photoshoots). As I have less than 500 pounds left for two months of travelling, I resisted the urge to splurge. Mentioning that it's your birthday gets you a lot of free stuff, as we duly discovered.. Starbucks muffins, Starbucks coffee tasting, taxi journeys, cocktails, discounts on jumpers from hot sales assistants.. it was a good day. We ate in a lovely vegetarian restaurant then indulged in SATC2. Again. It was much worse the second time. Inspired, we hit a kareoke club and proceeded to spend the next two hours screaming our voices hoarse. Andy's breakdown of Tasmin Archer's 'Sleeping Sattelite' into a mishmash of Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' and Beyonce's 'Single Ladies' was particularly crowd pleasing. Pants were thrown. We spent the night club-hopping and ended up meeting some lovely guys from Lima & Barcelona who got us into a huge club for free and tried to teach us how to salsa. Still not any good at salsa.
After an incredible week or so with the Tweddles we had to get moving and sort out our trek to Machu Picchu. We said some tearful goodbyes in the bus station then embarked on a 20 hour journey through some depressing desert/dust landscape, then some stomach-churning s-bend Andean mountains. Lovely.
Arriving in Cuzco early, we found our Tweddle-approved hostel and tried to get some sleep. The beds had duvets! We hadn't seen (or needed) a duvet in four months, but it is cold here unless sunny, which requires some advance planning in terms of layers. We organised our Inca jungle trek and spent a couple of days wandering the city and getting used to the altitude. Indigenous women walk around in traditional dress holding goat babies or llamas on tethers as photo opportunities which is quite cute but apparently also quite illegal, as we found when we watched them scatter as the police approached.
INCA JUNGLE TREK:
A four hour bus journey took us to the top of a mountain range, 4000m above sea level and the clouds, where our bikes and safety gear were unloaded. We freewheeled down the windy mountain roads, through freezing cloud forest into warm jungle, splashing through fjords made by glacier melt on the way down. Yet more Jurassic park comparisons were made, once again lost on me. Once we'd reached our destination, knuckles frozen and bums wet, we climbed back into the bus and drove on to Santa Maria, our home for the night. One of the girls on our tour was a gymnastics instructor back in Israel, so to the delight of the village kids we had a pilates lesson. The kids were all lying on their backs, giggling and trying to copy us, so eventually we disbanded and had a gymnastics display which ended up in a scrambling carnage of wheelbarrow races and cartwheels!
We spent the next day walking through jungle, coca plantations and along the Inca trail itself, a teeny tiny path cut into the side of a mountain with a couple of hundred feet drop to the river below. Everyone was very careful about where they put their feet! We stopped for a rest at a house where they brought out various animals for 'let's amuse the tourists' funsies. Monkeys, parrots, and a huge guinea pig/tapir called a picuro which drank chicha (a disgusting purple drink made from fermented black corn juice) were wheeled out as we sat there vaguely wondering where they'd got their animals from while cooing at how cute they were. That night we were corralled into the village's 'disco' and consequently had a much later start the next day. Dancing to Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga in an empty room has never been so much fun!
Our penultimate day was spent walking along train tracks past huge hydroelectric dams and epic mountain ranges. Our friend Sylvie from New Zealand said there's no point us visiting now.. we've seen all it has to offer already! That night we arrived in Aguas Calientes, a town populated almost entirely by tired tourists, and had our first hot shower in weeks. Cold showers when it's cold are like torture. Our group all had dinner together and received our Machu Picchu 'lunch' of stale bread roll, banana and cookies. Needless to say we ran to the market and bought our weight in fruit, cheese and imported goodies. Our snack pact (to stop eating so much crap) was temporarily on hold. Again.
Waking up at 3.30 to climb up to Machu Picchu was surprisingly easy, we huffed all the way up the huge slabs of rock arrayed in a manner resembling stairs (if your legs were 6ft long) in about an hour and watched the sun and the slowpokes come up. We had a tour of the ruin from a guide who looked like a Peruvian Andy Warhol, then had the rest of the day to ourselves. It was an incredible sight, especially for Claire and me who weren't expecting much and had considered sacking it off because we just. couldn't. do. any. more. treks. (sorry mum) We wandered around making up uses for the various rooms (virgin deflowering chamber, jelly moulding annexe) and had lunch at the watchtower overlooking the whole ruin. At 10am the five of us who were always at the front of the group and had therefore bonded (Leo the hilarious Korean, Sylvia the feisty Kiwi and Dan the sarky American) scaled Wayna Picchu, the mountain overlooking the ruin. The climb was intense but we did it fast and rested at the top stretched out over huge boulders. A burst of naive confidence led me to take the cavern trail down the other side of the mountain, around, and back up. I nearly died. It was fiercely hot, there were 'adventurously slippy' vertical rickety wooden ladders to scale, AND I forgot to actually look in the cavern at the bottom. Halfway through, stopping to breathe and eat an emergency fake snickers, I considered the possibility of making a home on the side of Wayna Picchu as I seriously couldn't muster the energy to climb back up the mountain. An hour and a half later I found Claire and Sylvia lying in the sun with some llamas and collapsed for a nap. We regrouped for the climb back down to Aguas Calientes, moaning about our sore knees and bitching about the lazy people who take the buses back, then headed straight for the hot springs to ease our cramping muscles. The hot water was too good to leave, and we ended up having to run from a restaurant without eating to catch the train back to Cuzco.
Our next destination was Arequipa, where we met our favourite Canadians Dave and Lauren for hilarious sightseeing fun. There's a museum with a terrifying 500 year old girl preserved in ice named Juanita, a 60 year old woman who sits on the street with coca leaves stuck to her face (for preserving the skin, darling), the pet section at the market of guinea pigs (food) and puppies (not food), and lots of unbearably cute children feeding pigeons in the central square. There is an entire section of the central market devoted to dog clothing. It is AWESOME. Dogs wear hats, skirts, tshirts and shoes here. Then, tragedy struck. Claire got a kidney infection and was bedridden for a couple of days, so, being the amazing and supportive friend that I am, I left her in the hotel room with a supply of cereal bars and apples and went on a trip to Canyon del Colca with Dave and Lauren. We went 5000m above sea level where everything is hard, cold and rugged, chewing coca leaves to avoid altitude sickness. We walked to the second biggest canyon in the world (the biggest one is a 6 hour hike away apparently), saw condors with wingspans of 3m and drank cocktails in some hot springs. A tour wouldn't be complete without a hilarious and awkward tourist show, so we watched and joined in with some traditional Andean dancing. One, the 'dance of love', involved simulating cunnilingus and beating up your partner. I didn't partake in that one. The trip was amazing, but it felt as if my right arm was missing. It's actually quite sad, we now think the same things, say things at the same time, and rarely need the company of anyone else. What will we do back home?!
Once reunited in Arequipa I woke up with a throat infection, so we had a day of watching crap American tv and moaning, then manned up and got a bus to Puno. It's cold in Puno. It's on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca and is pretty touristy. We took a boat to see the floating Uros islands and had some more awkward tourist moments.. 'come in my house, wear my clothes, hold my baby.. buy my horrible souveniers'. The islands themselves are amazing, built from interwoven reeds which constantly need to be relaid, but the tourist show is never fun. We watched the world cup final in a restaurant on the side of the lake, ate amazing pizza with a hilarious German guy then got a bus over the border to Copacabana in Bolivia. Entry? Free. For Americans? $135. Win.
Copacabana is a much nicer town on the other side of the lake with an inordinately large cathedral for such a tiny place. We got an early night in the coldest hotel room of all time (three layers, inside sleeping bag, under four blankets, still cold) then got up early for the boat to the Isla del Sol, reputed birthplace of the Inca people. We sat on the boat's roof and were chilled to the bone in minutes, bad plan. Two and a half hours later we unstuck ourselves and wobbled onto the island. We walked from one end to the other via lots of archeological remains and people selling dubious 'compulsory' tickets, and finished four hours later completely exhausted. Walking is much harder when you're 3,800m above sea level and you have ineffectual athsmatic lungs. The island was beautiful; huge cliffs, mirror-flat water, burning sun (still cold though). I have sunglasses-shaped tan lines now. It's not cool.
We headed for La Paz in order to party away our being-cold-blues, and boarded a bus which kicked us out halfway onto a boat, without explanation, without our bags. Somewhat confused and a little nervous, we puttered across the lake to see our bus being tugged along on a little floating platform. Luckily nothing sank. We arrived in La Paz and had a day of wandering around slowly to catch our breath. Everything is harder when you're high up! We went to the witches market selling llama foetuses as sacrificial offerings to Pacha Mama (mother earth), scoped out the various alpaca jumpers, legwarmers and hats that we want to buy, and ate delicious little pasties called salteñas. No one at our hostel was any fun, so we sloped off to the Loki hostel and found our Swedish friend Niclaus. Many condiment-stacking games played and offensive Swedish phrases learned later and we're all thoroughly drunk at altitude and feeling a little woozy. The bargirl must have been drunk too, as every time I bought a drink she gave me twice the amount in change. Winner! Seeing as I have now 300 pounds left for 6 weeks (this blog took two weeks to write, sorry its so long!) every little helps.
Not long left now!
