South America Explorations: Week 2 - Mountain Climbing Redemption

Saturday, October 19^th, 2013

Parting is such sweet sorrow – Roberto and I left our 17 new best friends early this morning to catch the first of two buses to Nazca to see the famed Nazca Lines. Our ultimate destination is Cusco, where we’ll start a 5-day hike on Tuesday morning. Flights from Lima certainly would have gotten us to Cusco quicker, but we figured we could take a few buses and get in a flight over the Nazca Lines for about the same price.

When we got to the bus terminal at 5am, we learned that the website is full of lies and the first direct bus to Ica (about 70% of the trip to Nazca) leaves at 6am and not 5:30am as we were led to believe. This additional 30 minutes of sleep may not seem like much, but to us it would have been a whopping 50% increase. Nevertheless, we were counting on catching up on some zzz’s on the buses.

Bus #1 to Ica was a nicer luxury-ish bus. What qualifies a bus to be luxury-ish verses standard run-of-the-mill you may ask? Well, luxury-ish adds an additional doorway between the bus driver and the passengers. After all, who wants to share airspace with the bus driver – what are we, animals? Unfortunately, this additional door had the added feature of hitting my knee in our prime position no-legroom front row seats. This is important because luxury-ish also comes with an attendant whose undocumented sole purpose is to open the door into my knee right at that point when I’m about to fall asleep. So glad we upgraded.

Bus #2 was run-of-the-mill, and as such it stopped every 15 seconds on the off-chance that there was a random Peruvian wanting to go in the direction of Nazca. Our seats this time were not in the front row, but somehow we managed to get an aisle that had the least legroom possible. Seriously – my knees were pushed up against the seat in front of us and you all know how short I am. Roberto checked some of the other seats for comparison using the oh-so-accurate “hand-lengths” method and found that we were shorted approximately 28.57%. I’m still waiting for my refund.

Finally, we arrived to the Nazca bus station early in the afternoon and immediately went in search of two things: an overnight bus to Cusco and a flight to see the Nazca Lines. Within 20 minutes, Roberto had this sorted out for us. Next up: food, since we had frighteningly little all day. Unfortunately, the flights over the Nazca Lines take a lot of hard banks and fly at pretty low levels, so the dude told us not to eat until we got back. They ferried us over to the Nazca local airport where we played the hurry-up-and-wait game again for another hour or so.

The flight was, well… underwhelming. Roberto summed up our experience perfectly: “Reality doesn’t do the pictures justice.” We both would have just preferred to save our $90 and fall asleep during the National Geographic TV documentary again. Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t that either of us thought that the Nazca Lines aren’t a neat part of history… it’s just that seeing it in a plane didn’t really add much to the experience for us. We would have preferred to go on the bus and see a few of them in person from a raised platform. But hey, at least I got to tick off one more box on my way to see all 981 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, so that’s gotta count for something, right? They should make a passport for that.

After dinner, we walked around the town of Nazca and quickly realized how fortunate we were to not be spending a full day here. There’s really nothing to do… so we were quite happy to board our bus when it showed up an hour late at 10:30pm.

Sunday, October 20^th, 2013

The bus ride to Cusco was not fun. We upgraded to the full-recline leatherette seats on the first floor of the bus at my urging, given that I didn’t want to go two days without sleep. Unfortunately, this upgrade also included full heat all night (with no method to regulate) plus Fast and Furious 6 in unnecessarily loud Spanish with Spanish subtitles for those unable to hear the aforementioned unnecessarily loud Spanish.

Fortunately, we had a stop this morning at some random little café off the side of the road. By the time we realized that the other passengers were ordering breakfast, we learned that they were completely out of food. But they did manage to scrounge together two pieces of bread for us. I considered going back for seconds. After about 30 minutes, we noticed a gathering of people at the back of the bus staring at the engine. The solution to the problem was several bucketloads of water, so I can only assume that the engine was overheating, but when we got back on the bus – they immediately put the A/C on full blast, which seems to me to be the opposite of what you’d want to do with an overheating vehicle.

When we finally arrived at Cusco, we were thrilled to be able to check into our room and get a nap in after an unrestful few days. The only benefit we had by taking the bus instead of flying from Lima is that we had a chance to acclimatize to the high altitude gradually vs all-in when you step off the plane.

Of course, as luck would have it, when we arrived to the hotel, they told us that the hot water heater for our room was not working so they moved us to a sister hotel a block or two away – our new room was more of an attic than anything else, but it was large and spacious and had the most important element: beds. There was still noise though: a random parade or demonstration of sorts a few blocks away and then the most random explosion of fireworks several times an hour, presumably to commemorate every time a local 4 year old puts his/her shoes on the correct feet.

After a quick nap, we headed out for a very brief walk around town and grabbed an early dinner before heading back to the hotel to conk out. During the brief walks, the impact of the altitude was readily apparent to me, particularly after walking up steps. That’s a really quick and easy way to feel old. 

Monday, October 21^st, 2013

I was awoken this morning to the sound of church bells. It seems that the bellringers were having a ring-off and trying to outduel one another on most progressive usage of church bells. I think the guy who rang the bells in an A-A-A-B pattern was much better than the one who was extoling the virtues of A-A-A-A-B. My mere wish is that their duel did not take 4 hours to fully play out from 3:30am to after 7am. Roberto was fairly oblivious to this duel, so I got to recount the intense action to him whence he awoke.

The city of Cusco itself is at 3310m (almost 11,000 ft) and was the capital of the Inca empire. Once the evil Spaniards descended upon the area and wrestled control, they systematically went about destroying everything they could – sending anything of value back to the motherland and building churches atop existing Incan religious sites to push Catholicism. Even so, Incan architecture was much more stable (due to degree of difficulty) than colonial architecture – the Spaniards realized this and left many of the building foundations in place. Walking around the city is a neat adventure in itself – the streets are very narrow despite two lanes of traffic, the building architecture varies from ancient Incan to colonial to modern, and the streets aren’t always laid out in a nice grid-like fashion which led us to getting lost on more than one occasion. Beyond that, I always felt like there was just this indescribable glow about the place that made you just want to sit and stare.

Roberto and I did very little of tourist value today – we took a quick and relatively cheap tour of the smaller of the two churches on the main square of town. It was called La Compania de Jesus, which I think translates roughly to The Jesus Company, which immediately makes my mind wander to the commercial aspect of religion and I figure I should stop writing my thoughts right about now before I inadvertently offend people. Perhaps I’ll write an essay on religion later in my travels.

What I did learn on the tour sums up to a few things: 1) no, you really are NOT allowed to take pictures regardless of flash/no flash; 2) all of the paintings/sculptures of Jesus tend to have him bowing his head down; 3) Jesus tends to be depicted in darker skin tones versus what we’re accustomed to seeing in the US and 4) there seems to be some strange fascination of showing the Virgin Mary feeding Jesus with a full boob exposed along with milk driplets.

That evening, we went to the office of our tour operator, Q’ente, to get a briefing on the 5-day expedition to the ruins of Choquequirao that we had signed up for a few months prior and would start in the morning. We learned that no one else had signed up and that it would just be us (I expected this). We also got a glimpse that our guide, Raul, was not that much of a guide… and by that, I just mean that he didn’t tell us much.

Why Choquequirao? Well, some of you astute readers may remember that I did a 7-day hike 9 years ago in Peru that culminated in Machu Picchu. I found Machu Picchu to be fascinating, but just overrun with throngs of tourists by the time we got there. And I’m sure that 9 years later, the government and industry has only found even more ways to conveniently pack in more tourists. Choquequirao, on the other hand, is almost a sister-site to Machu Picchu that isn’t frequented very much at all due to the difficulty of getting there. This hike is widely considered the most challenging of the standard hikes offered by tour guides in the area. In fact, most people we mentioned our trip to would generally respond how much they wanted to go there as well, but that it was too difficult (including Zenon from last week).

After re-packing our belongings into a bag that we would leave at the hotel and a bag that we would take on the hike with us, Roberto and I went out for a later than anticipated dinner and unfortunately picked a crappy restaurant. I had nachos & guacamole for an appetizer and it was so unappetizing that I barely finished the guac – under normal circumstances, this would be grounds for suspension. My main of spaghetti Bolognese was even more inedible. Our plan to have a nice large final supper before 5 days of hiking food was unfortunately not to be.

Tuesday, October 22^nd, 2013

Roberto and I got up bright and early this morning to freshen up and meet Raul on the pre-determined street corner at 5am. We had about a 4-5 hour drive ahead of us prior to lunch and starting our hike, and I guess they wanted to get a jump on traffic.

Along the way, we picked up our cook Aurelio, and some random lady looking for a ride to transport groceries from the market to her house. As most locals don’t own cars and the area is obviously very hilly, hitching for a ride is very common in exchange for a handful of Peruvian soles (local currency).

After dropping our hitchhiker, we stopped by a local marketplace for breakfast… which for us would be a small pitcher of mixto jugo (mixed fruit juice). We thought we were just getting a glass of juice each, so we were a bit surprised when the lady handed us a full pitcher – and it was oh so good, too. Outside of the market, Raul treated us to a local favorite called chicha, which I believe is a pureed purple maize (or maybe it’s a purple potato?) with some evaporated milk. It tasted great as well.

When we arrived in the small town of Cachora, we sat around for a bit while Aurelio made lunch. We were basically on the property of the horseman’s family – the horseman owns and manages the horses that will carry our gear for us to Choquequirao. Well, that’s only half true… there’s a river that isn’t really crossable by horses, so there will be another horseman on the other side of the river to handle that part of the trip for us. But anyway, after watching chickens peck around the yard for about an hour, we went inside and had our lunch and before long, we were on our way for the afternoon’s hike.

Today’s hike was pretty straightforward and simple – the first half was alternately on an unpaved road and a scenic woodsy trail with an overall slight uphill grade, though nothing too strenuous. The second half quickly changed to a steeper downhill grade of switchbacks – we were essentially descending to try and get down to the river so that we could cross over to the mountain where the Choquequirao ruins were. The destination for this afternoon was a lodge of sorts set up and maintained by a local family that was a few kilometers away from the river crossing.

I suppose before I get into the thick of the hike, I ought to break this down into smart and dumb choices – for those of you who haven’t read my recap of my Kilimanjaro hike, you might want scan through real quick for this to make perfect sense.

Dumb Choices:

1.       My training regimen for this hike consisted of leisurely evening walks with my dogs, 5 or 6 quick 2-4 mile jogs in the past month, playing pick-up ultimate Frisbee twice, lugging around concrete last Friday morning, and carrying Venita piggy-back for four blocks.

2.       My daypack of choice for this trip is kinda small and not exactly comfortable. I wish I had brought something a bit more versatile and with a hydration bladder (Camelbak).

Smart choices:

1.       I left all my cotton clothing at home and only brought synthetics. In fact, very few of the clothes that I brought were in my wardrobe 3 months ago.

2.       I remembered to bring my walking sticks too. Love those.

3.       I avoided the Diamox completely, and fortunately malaria pills were not necessary.

4.       I brought my own sleeping bag. It’s a bit bigger than I hoped, since I bought a 0-degree bag.

5.       I packed earplugs (plus a spare set) and Zzzquil in case I have insomnia.

6.       I brought a very lightweight filter for water – it’s made by Sawyer and is both cheaper and lighter than most of the offerings on the market.

7.       I researched and bought a real camera for this trip – it’s mirrorless, which makes it much more lightweight and compact than standard dSLRs. If you’re in the market for a camera, I highly suggest taking a hard look at the mirrorless offerings. Mine’s an Olympus OM-D EM-5. Unfortunately, the kit zoom lens that came with it wasn’t as compact as I had hoped and rendered the camera far less accessible than Roberto’s point & shoot which hung on his backpack straps. As they say, the best camera is the one you have on you.

Since the smart choices outnumber the dumb ones, I’m guessing you can figure out already how this hike went. That, my friends, is a trick I learned from Shakespeare called foreshadowing or some crap like that.

Early on in the hike today close to the town, a small dog began following us and stayed with us all night. Her tail was trimmed a bit, so I named her “Nubbie”. I gave her a bit of my food that evening at dinner, and I believe the cook gave her some scraps as well. Nubbie also stood guard and slept right outside our tent that night.

We passed by a number of hikers today – either on the trail or at the campsite – and every single one of them was carrying their own gear. Roberto quickly started to feel like a bit of a wuss, since he frequently backpacks for multiple days without assistance. Me? Not so much. I don’t know that I could handle my own pack plus food & tent and all that good stuff, so I was fine wussing out a bit. I also had been under the impression that it was a requirement to have a guide, but clearly my assumption was wrong here.

Wednesday, October 23^rd, 2013



Happy fun skull guy says
"Don't Use Headphones!"

We got up early this morning because we wanted to get an early start for the long climb ahead. Our destination today was the actual campgrounds at Choquequirao, but this would require a ridiculous number of very steep switchbacks. It was best to get as much done before the full sun came out. After a quick breakfast, we were on our way by 6:30am or 7am. We still had a few downhill kilometers left to get to the river. There used to be a bridge here, but it got washed out a few years back during a heavy storm in the rainy season. There were workers there building a new bridge a bit higher up, but in the meantime we had to use a manual cable trolley system that they had set up. Horses definitely could not pass on this small cable car, and dogs weren’t so keen on it either. So, after less than a day, we bid adieu to Nubbie. She didn’t notice anyway since she was quite happily busy wrestling with another local dog.

The climb uphill was, well, it really sucked. Roberto was timing how long it would take us to hike each successive kilometer and our times kept getting longer and longer and longer… from 22 minutes up to 35 minutes. There were a couple of nice spots along the way where we stopped to catch our breath, but for the most part, I just tried to keep my head down and go up slow and steady with small steps. This was a technique that worked well for me on Kilimanjaro, so I figured I should stick with it.

On the one hand, switchbacks are great since you can see a defined endpoint at the turns, and those feel like mini-victories. On the other hand, it doesn’t take long before you feel like the damn switchbacks will never ever ever end, and it’s hard to keep despair from setting in. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about quitting at least once or twice.

Even so, we got up to the small village of Marampata by lunchtime. Marampata was more than just a campsite, since multiple families lived there and though their income was supplemented by the hikers, they were still farmers at their core. Sitting down in the shade was a mini-dream come true – the sun had been really beating down on us and I was pretty soaked through with sweat.

Our new horseman for this side of the river was from Marampata, so we ended up just staying the night here instead on his property. I was so exhausted that I was fine with not hiking an hour after lunch anyway. Roberto seemed fine with that idea as well. The best thing about this decision was that I could hop in the cold shower immediately – I don’t know if it’s possible for water to feel more refreshing than this. Roberto took a long nap in the sun instead, and I caught up on my journal from the week before.

A little snot-nosed kid named Alex was hanging around us as well. Apparently, his understanding of personal boundaries is a bit different than in our culture, because with no provocation he wound up and smacked the heck out of Roberto’s junk. Roberto keeled over and little Alex was just laughing. He got a good talking to for that. I had unfortunately missed this spectacle as I was enjoying the most glorious cold shower known to mankind.

By some point today or yesterday, I had decided that Raul’s little cackle laugh that he gave rather frequently sounded something like JonStewart’s GWB laugh impersonation… and I began to give a little laugh in the Jon Stewart fashion every time Raul did – and definitely way too obviously so. Roberto, for his part, was unable to keep a straight face and I generally had him in stitches. This only made it all the more necessary for me to continue, and by the end of the trip it was completely involuntary and I couldn’t control myself. Poor Raul didn’t know what was going on.

Dinner was better today. Our cook Aurelio… well, let’s just say that he’s never encountered a salt crystal that he didn’t like. It was killing me, but tonight he toned it down some after I requested a change as gently as possible in my rudimentary Spanish. One thing I do know is that you should never be mean to the people who make your food.

The stars came out in full force tonight. There were no clouds in the sky and we were far away enough from civilization and we were high enough on the mountain that we had a crystal clear view of everything. In fact, there were so many stars that we had a very difficult time finding any constellations – granted, most of the ones we were familiar with may not be as visible in the Southern hemisphere, but even Google sky maps on our smartphone didn’t work. Wifi isn’t needed for that app to work. And there was no wifi available; I had made it a habit to ask Raul about that each day as well.

The cloudless sky didn’t last long though, by 10pm the rainclouds started moving in and we hopped into the tents. It rained all night, but I was so exhausted that I didn’t have much trouble falling asleep.

Thursday, October 24^th, 2013

Today’s itinerary was solely dedicated to the exploration of Choquequirao – most other guided treks do this trip in 4D/3N, but ours adds a day so that you have an entire day to explore the site versus just the main parts in a few hours. When we arrived to the site after a brief 1-hr hike from Marampata, we were so early that we beat the park ranger to his entrance station. So we continued on the trail into the park and we saw him along the way. The ranger had us sign in, and we could see that in previous days there were at most 10 tourists signed in on any given day. In this particular instance, we ended up being the only 2 tourists there all day – imagine having such a massive set of ruins all to yourself!

What I haven’t told you is that we have yet to see a single stone of ruins by this point. With the rains last night, there was a thick fog covering the mountain. As Roberto best put it, “Wow, I can see for inches!”

Raul led us down the mountain first – there were massive terraces that he wanted us to see first along with an old temple. So we essentially descended half the mountain to go do this. I figured since we’d be exploring the ruins all day and not “hiking”, this would be our easy day. In fact, it ended up being our hardest! When we got down to the terraces, it was clear that not all of it had been reconstructed yet. Raul shared that about 40% of the total site has been rebuilt, and that the government will be recommencing efforts next year to clear away overgrowth and reconstruct the rest. This nice little archaeological paradise that we have to ourselves right now will be overrun with tourists in a few years, as the government has plans to build a cable car system in the coming years to cross the steep valley. So if you have dreams of having a mountainful of ruins to yourself, skip Machu Picchu and hurry up and come to this place!

Oh right… some of you may not know what terraces are – these are flat steppes carved into the mountainside which creates space for farming even on the steepest of mountains. At other times, these terraces were created to manage erosion to keep the ground up above stable as well. It seems that some local farmers had used these terraces not so long ago, but the government kicked them out with the new plans for development.

After climbing back up the mountain, we found Aurelio who had brought us food from our campsite in Marampata, and had lunch at a rather random spot on the trails. The poor fellow had been wandering around for a full 45 minutes until he found us – he and Raul had miscommunicated on both the time and location for lunch.

Our next stop was to a large flat space atop the left side of the ruins – it was large enough to be a soccer field, but apparently was used by Incan astronomers. From this spot, we looked out onto the ruins of Choquequirao for the first time. The clouds were still rolling through and after a while, we realized that there was an entire upper section that we did not even see yet. The special effects drummed up for this reveal could not have been better choreographed. We sat in awe for a few minutes before descending to the main level of the ruins.

When we got to the ruins, Raul was strangely short on details on what the different structures were for. Rather, he led us to the backside of the mountain where we started descending again, presumably to go see some llamas. I was a bit confused – why would we leave a magical set of ruins to go see some animals that are quite common in this region? As it turns out, the “llamas” were in fact white stone llamas inserted in the terrace rock on that side of the mountain. These terraces pre-date the total Choquequirao site built by the Incas and were built by the Chachapoyos, a name which interestingly enough means “chicken dance” in Spanish. (Waiting for it… a little longer… annnnnnd, there’s the eye roll.)

This side of the mountain was ridiculously steep – so much so that the pictures we took look altered. After re-ascending from those terraces back to the main level, Raul told us roughly how to go to the upper level of the ruins and told us we had about an hour. He stayed back to “guard our bags”.

By this point, both Roberto and I were getting a little annoyed with Raul. We had easily wasted an hour around lunchtime just waiting around for no good reason, and there was still an entire section of the site that we hadn’t really seen. And then he doesn’t even come up to the top of the hill with us? Beyond that, I slipped a bit when we went to see the stone llamas and my hand was bleeding pretty badly – Raul didn’t think to bring any first aid with him (seems like a basic tour guide rule to me), so I was lucky that Roberto had his with him. I’m guessing Raul’s knowledge of Choquequirao itself might be cursory and limited to where things are vs what things are.

Something hadn’t been sitting with my stomach so well, so rather than doing my business in the weeds as I had done after lunch, I figured I would focus on getting back to the campsite as quickly as possible. I’m generally not the fastest of hikers, but Roberto and Raul were struggling to keep up with me and I ended up making it to the campsite almost 6-8 minutes faster.

I’m not positive what exactly had my stomach in a lurch, but it could have been some dulce de leche topping on the pancakes served this morning, and I had neglected to take a Lactaid pill. I actually had thought about it, but I hadn’t deemed it Lactaid-worthy. It’s similar to the system employed by Elaine Benes to determine if a guy was sponge-worthy. Okay, it’s not similar at all. Scratch that.

All in all, despite our annoyances with Raul, this was a very long and taxing day that was totally worth it. I think right around now Roberto was thinking he was very glad that I dragged him along on this hike.

Friday, October 25^th, 2013

Today’s hike was more or less the opposite of Wednesday – we had to descend the big mountain and all of those terrible switchbacks, cross the river and then go up a few kilometers to the campsite. If we made good time, we would continue on to the second campsite so as to minimize the amount of hiking on the final day.

I generally don’t like going downhill – the basic exertion is not so bad of course, since it’s more or less coordinated falling. The hard part is the toll that it takes on your knees. After some trial and error yesterday, I quickly learned that you could jog down and semi-steep slopes much faster and with much less pressure on your knees than walking down slowly – the difference is in how flexible your legs remain during the motion. When you move slowly, you essentially tend to lock your knees which is where all the pain comes from. But if you take short quick jogging steps, your momentum flows smoothly from one step to the next, minimizing any pressure on your knees. And if the trail is too steep, slalom down to make mini-switchbacks midst the larger switchbacks – trekking poles are especially helpful at facilitating all of this, of course. The only bad part was that your toes take a little larger beating, especially if you had not trimmed your toenails as I had not, owing to a lack of a big toenail clipper. I chose my knees over my toenails.

Long story short, what Raul figured should have been about a 4-5 hour descent was over in about 2.5 hours for us. I ended up making it to the bottom about 15 minutes before Raul. He was fairly impressed with us and had not expected this. In fact, towards the end of the trip he told us that we were without a doubt the best hikers he had guided to Choquequirao before.

I think I learned a few things about myself and hiking and what works best for me:

1.       Newton is your friend. Or more specifically, Newton’s Laws regarding inertia. If you’re

moving, you should really try to keep moving – the jogging downhill example above illustrates this fairly well.

2.       Lean into the mountain. When going uphill, lean forward. When going downhill, lean back. The effect of this for me was that I felt less risk in falling and being off-balance. I’m guessing that this has more to do with the distance of your center of gravity from the ground.

3.       Take small steps. I figured out a few months ago when I was trying to take up running a bit that my knees felt great when I took smaller faster steps than longer strides – here again, I believe this method is better at conserving inertia and minimizing wear on your knees. Shortly after I figured this out, a friend went to a runner’s physiology conference and shared back the exact same thing.

4.       Keep your head down and focus only on the next few steps. For me, this helps me not worry about how much longer there is to go, and instead facilitates me into thinking about something totally unrelated which makes the time pass by much faster.

5.       Trekking poles are not for sissies – they help you distribute the workload to your upper body, as well as provide additional stability, both of which are excellent things.

After crossing the river again, we hiked up to the site we were supposed to have lunch at and were waiting around a bit. As I mentioned, we made it there a bit earlier than Raul had anticipated. We were also being swarmed by mosquitoes and it was getting really annoying. The mosquitoes were worst closer to the river – up at the top of the mountain, it’s not too bad… and they also tend to stay out of site when the weather is not great. But this being a sunny day, they were loving it and we were hating it.

Before too long, Raul suggested that we go ahead and hike up to the next campsite where he was planning for us to stay that evening. Within a few hours, Roberto and I had made it up there as well. It was about 1pm by this point but Aurelio needed to set up and cook lunch. He has a tough job – he essentially needs to feed us breakfast, clean up, pack up, beat us to the next spot and cook lunch for us. For most tourists, this isn’t much of a problem at all, but as I mentioned Roberto and I had been moving these past few days a lot faster than they had expected. As a result, we didn’t end up having lunch until about 2pm and then dinner was shortly afterwards at 6pm.

Passing the time at this particular campsite was very tough. Calling the site “lacking” is generous compared to the others. But the sun was out in full effect so I wanted to find shade. The problem was that this is where the mosquitoes were – I think they were trying to hide from the sun as well. Repellent didn’t seem to be deterring them either. Roberto figured out a way to hang out in the tent pseudo-naked without baking in the sauna by just not moving. He told me that there was space in there for me to join, but I guess it felt a bit too homo-erotic and maybe I just wasn’t feeling confident enough in my own sexuality or something like that. Needless to say, I paced around between the shade and the sunlight with absolutely zero to do for about four hours. I would have suggested hiking to the next campsite uphill, but there were no more campsites before the end of the trail. And it was too late anyway – the poor horses had already been relieved of their wares and were up the side of the mountain finding interesting grasses to munch on.

Saturday, October 26^th, 2013

This morning’s hike was not too terrible, but we still had a pretty long uphill stretch to go. Fortunately for us, the weather mostly cooperated during these first few hours and we had a light cool mist covering the mountain which kept both the sun and the bugs at bay. The problem with the mist is that Roberto and I had zero idea how much further we had to go before the endless switchbacks would end.

Once we were through the uphill climb, we had about two hours alternating between an unpaved

road and a woodsy trail. There were lots of detours on this path and it was frequently unclear which way we should go. We would have asked Raul, but as was the case with most of yesterday, he had elected to hang out with Aurelio and just have us go on our own. Fortunately, the horseman had just passed us and often we were able to see where they were and go in that direction. At other times, we were trying to remember landmarks we had seen 4 days prior when we began the trek.

The highlight of our walk today came towards the end when a drunk 80-year old Peruvian began waxing poetically on who-knows-what. Even with Roberto’s full fluency, he could barely make out a word and we had no idea how to politely excuse ourselves from the conversation. When we finally escaped 10 minutes later, we decided that the horseman planted the old man there to delay us because we were catching up to him too much and his pride was at stake.

When we got back to the horseman’s home, there was a new group there having lunch and about to depart on their own trek to Choquequirao. As much as I really loved the full day at the site with no one else around, I was more than happy that our hike was done. I was exhausted and ready to take a ridiculously long nap when we got back to Cusco.

All in all, the trek was better than I expected. Owing to the descriptions of the hike from countless others, I would be lying if I said I didn’t have any concerns on whether or not I would be able to do it. But in the end, I think I passed with flying colors – but only because of our dear horse friends carrying our crap for us. Roberto may disagree, but I seriously don’t think I could have handled carrying 30 more pounds on my back (or more?). Regardless, I did leave with a feeling that I had at least partially avenged my Kilimanjaro failure and I got some of my I-can-do-anything mojo back. And yes, that’s probably a little more important to me than it should be. This probably scares my dear old mom too, since I’m sure she’s wondering if this will result in me biting off more than I should in some of the coming months. I guess that remains to be seen!

Tidbits:

1.     Peruvian music is terribly bad. They seem to have two distinct archetypes for their music: either a high pitched whiny off-key falsetto with a Zamfir-style pan-flute and accordion accompaniment, or an Incan marchy chanty style with a primary singer plus backup chorus that repeats what the primary just said. Both get very annoying quickly.

2.     Best line uttered this week: “Como se dice motorboating?” Offered without context.

3.     After a waiter (or the horseman, as was our case this week) gives you food, it’s common for them to say “servido”, which I believe loosely translates to “you’ve been served.” Of course, I’m guessing their interpretation of this phrase is very different than ours.

4.     The people in the countryside appear to have a way to make alcohol from absolutely everything – potatoes, corn, miscellaneous fruits, you name it. Raul and Aurelio offered us a sip of at least 4 different concoctions, all of which were terrible, which completely reminded me of moonshine back in eastern Kentucky. Come to think of it, I think Aurelio may have been drunk the entire trip.

5.     Numbers for this hike: 134,774 steps; 1548 floors; 57.49 miles
 

South America Explorations: Week 1 - Give Back Beyond Peru

Similar to eleven years ago, I’m taking a sabbatical from work for 3 months (+ some vacation time) to travel – this time in South America. Nineteen weeks in total, spanning from mid-October 2013 to late-February 2014. At this point, the only things that are set is my flight to Lima and from Buenos Aires, and the itinerary for Weeks 1 and 2.

A question one might have is “why?” regarding this sabbatical. The more apt question is actually “why not?” A ton of friends and co-workers have told me that they are envious and wish they could take such a trip… in the end, I suppose it comes down to the “barriers of entry” for ditching everything for a period of time. Though it initially felt quite daunting, in reality my barriers to entry were quite small – my house and my two dear dogs; all I needed was enough savings and someone to watch over my house & dogs (thank you Mary). Since I’m traveling in South America and my style of travel is far from high-end, the savings required is not so substantial. At least I think it’s not so substantial – I guess we’ll see if I’m hitting you all up for spare change by the end of this thing.

At this point, all I know is that there are lots of countries I’d like to explore further: from Colombia to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and the “Guays” (Uru and Para). And if I’m lucky, I’ll manage to make my way down to Antarctica as well.

But for now, let’s get on to Week 1: October 12^th through October 18^th.

Prior to arranging my leave of absence at work, I already had a trip planned to Peru with Give Back Cincinnati, a local volunteer organization in Cincinnati that coordinates a variety of volunteer events for anyone who wants to join. They also plan a few trips away from Cincinnati each year – in New Orleans and abroad – in coordination with either Habitat for Humanity or Fuller Center for Housing. So this particular week, I was already planning to join 18 other volunteers from GBC for a week in a small village called La Florida in Canete, Peru. The build here is with Fuller and the group leader, Zenon Colque, has plans to build over 500 homes for the locals. What’s different about these home building efforts abroad is that the goal is often to build an entire community, versus a one-off home. You can read more about it here: http://www.fullercenter.org/peru.

Saturday, October 12^th, 2013

I spent an extra long time this morning bidding adieu to my dear dogs, Arthur and River. I didn’t get the sense that Arthur had any idea what was in store for the coming months, since he’s just a big ol’ happy goofball. But River had already started to get moodier than normal this past week. She definitely knows what’s coming up… many people say that border collies are very intelligent and perceptive, and I think that’s definitely true of my super-moody little girl. Fortunately, Mary had already been living at the house for over a month, which will help ease the transition for her.

My friend Dale picked me and another fellow traveler Robert Alonso up from our abodes in Hyde Park and dropped us at the airport a few hours before take-off. Robert and I knew each other from a previous home-building trip in April to Haiti, which was initially coordinated by GBC until the trip fell through due to lack of interest, so Robert and I joined another group as free agents since each of us had already secured vacation time and still wanted to go.

At the airport in Cincinnati, we met up with another fellow volunteer Tracy, and then with 4-5 more in Atlanta where our international flight to Lima was scheduled to depart from. We arrived in Lima at about 10pm, but then spent the next 3 hours waiting in a wide variety of immigration & customs lines.

Once we finally made it out of the customs/immigration mess, we were greeted at the exit by Zenon, our host for the week, and Monica, his assistant. Because we were so late, it took 20-30 minutes for Zenon to get a minivan coordinated to take us to our hotel that evening. When the minivan arrived, it was the proverbial 10 lbs in a 5 lb sack issue that is all too common in developing countries, but can freak us Americans out until we get used to it. We got a quick refresher on the need to bend our concept of “personal space” and how it’s best to NOT pay attention to what the driver is doing in order to maintain our sanity.

When we arrived to the hotel at 2am, we found that we would be staying across the street from an entire row of late-night seedy dance clubs. A large group of our volunteer team had arrived in Peru several days in advance to tour Machu Picchu and some of the other ruins, and most of these folks had already been at a club called Tequila Rock for 5 hours when we strolled in and brought a second wind along with us. We probably stayed another 3 hours – for many, this was a chance to get see old friends they had gone on previous GBC trips with, and for others like me, it was a chance to meet the friendly people I’d be spending much of the next 144 hours with. At the very end, a dancing robot on stilts with neon lights came out and I think several of us figured that might be our cue to go get some sleep.

Sunday, October 13^th, 2013

We lumbered out of bed this morning after a late night out – initially, the plan was to have breakfast at the hotel and then get on the road to Canete where we’d be staying the rest of the week. Once our crew found out that the hotel breakfast was, in fact, continental in all senses of the word, Zenon and our group leaders (Vince and AG) called an audible and we walked several blocks away to a traditional Peruvian restaurant for an excellent belly-filling buffet of some stuff that I wanted to eat (like chicken and beef and quinoa and rice) and some stuff that I didn’t want to eat (like chicken feet, mushrooms, and tripe = and yes, I equate the nastiness of mushrooms with tripe).

Interestingly enough, there were lots of Western chains that we walked by on the way to the restaurant – McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC… but no Taco Bell. I wonder if Peruvians would take offense to a Taco Bell or something? No Chipotle in sight either.

Since 19 of us can’t fit in Zenon’s car, three of us joined him and the rest went on a public bus for the 2 hour ride down to Canete. We quickly learned on this bus ride that Peruvians have an exceedingly strange taste in bus movies. We saw some crazy bloody violent movie called “Drive” starring Ryan Gosling – this must have been before he became big (i.e. he was truly a “gosling”). I don’t think any of us suspected anything afoul until a female character got a shotgun blast to the head in close range and the camera didn’t pan away. Guts everywhere. A couple scenes later? Nudity. While the guys on the bus no doubt appreciated this, most were a bit surprised that this was shown on a public bus. I think the collective thought by many in our group was “Oh my gosh, what about the children!” But I found myself wondering about the societal differences – clearly Peru isn’t sanitizing life for their kids and are not worried about many of the things we build up massive walls/laws to protect our kids from. In other words, maybe naked boobies are only such a big deal in the US because we learn early on that we’re not supposed to see naked boobies. If anyone is thinking of testing out this particular theory, I know a number of willing male participants (though they may all be too old).

When we arrived at the bus station, Zenon greeted us and secured a massive Truckmobile 3000 to take us & our luggage to the village of Nuevo Imperial, where we would be staying at a hotel for the week. I’m not sure if it was really a hotel, since it seemed that we were the only people there, in addition to a few renters downstairs. We split up into logical groupings for bunking – Robert and I shared an abnormally small triple with Andrew, who used to live in Cincinnati but is now in Columbus. I was lucky enough to win our paper/rock/scissors game and got to sleep in the full-sized bed, while Andrew and Robert had to deal with the bunks.

After briefly settling in, we loaded into a minibus to go to La Florida, the neighboring village we would be working at. Along the way, the minibus stopped. Apparently, they had forgotten to put gas in the thing – minor oversight. Almost an hour later, we all loaded up in a minivan and went to a school in La Florida where the students were putting on traditional dance performance. I’ve been to traditional dance performances in many countries before, but generally the audience is full of tourists which leaves me wondering how truly authentic it really is. In this case, we were the only non-locals there and most had no idea we were coming.

After a brief introduction in the Fuller Centre office in La Florida, we got back on the bus (or van? I can’t remember now) and went into the main downtown area of Canete for a nice chicken dinner. I don’t know what they feed their chickens in Peru, but wow – these broiled chickens were incredibly succulent and amazing. And the volume of food they dropped on the table was astounding as well. Fortunately, we had some meat eaters (not all were large men, either) who brought along some extra stomachs in their luggage for just such an occasion. The group of us also put down a fair amount of beer as well.

When we returned to the hotel, our fearless leaders Vince and AG went out for a beer run and we gathered in one of the normal-sized triples to imbibe & socialize.

Monday, October 14^th, 2013

Today was our first workday! After breakfast, we piled into a bus for the 15 minute drive to La Florida. Apparently, a portion of the main road doubles as the primary marketplace, with barely enough space for traffic to pass through without hitting the vendor stalls. Each morning, we would drive past fresh fish being gutted and what initially appeared to some as rubber chicken vendors (hint: they weren’t rubber).

At the Fuller Centre office, we split up into two teams because we were such a large group. The A team headed up to a set of three homes where they would assist the homeowners with framing & laying the roof during the week. The B team, who quickly changed their name to Team Condor (ca-caw!), stayed at the office and worked on rebar. Andrew and I had not joined a team, instead opting to ride with Zenon and little Grace to the hardware store to fetch some supplies.

Who is little Grace? She’s a little 5 year old with a smile and laugh that melts – when her mother more or less abandoned her, Zenon and the community in La Florida took over to raise her. Through the week, every last person in our group would succumb to the sheer cuteness powers of this little girl. I was first. Grace and I shared the backseat of Zenon’s car and played a game that transcends language – I just kept tickling her, and then allowed her to tickle me too from time to time for good measure. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have more than one thought about whether I could/wanted to adopt her. I’m guessing a few others had the same reaction.

The hardware store was amazing and familiar at the same time – it looked just like a Home Depot we might see back home – shopping carts, price tags, bar codes, end displays…  there was an item that we couldn’t find there, so we went to a small mom-and-pop shop to get it. This was neat to me because we saw two very different ends of commerce in one short trip. In many developing nations (note that this is my theory based on what I’ve seen), there are commerce centers where lots of small shops congregate together and sell their wares: a hardware district, a clothing district, a grocery district… you get the idea. These shops started selling unbranded goods supplied by local mom-and-pop manufacturers, and have increasingly been moving to branded goods from larger centralized manufacturers (less so for perishable grocery). In the States, the closest parallel is probably a farmer’s market. Historically, these mom-and-pop shops would be put out of business by a larger store, like your neighborhood hardware store, before the Home Depots’ & Lowes’ came and put those neighborhood stores out of business. So basically, this town of Canete (and many others like it) are leap-frogging to current Western methods vs toiling through the “natural” progression of things. The telephone industry shows this even clearer – very few towns in developing nations have the infrastructure in place to support wired telephones, so when cell phone technology came out, it boomed and took off since the infrastructure was much simpler. Someone a long time ago commented to me that when she was in India, she saw a guy riding an ox-cart while talking on his cell phone.

When we got back to the office, Team Condor was working on rebar and absolutely loved that we brought fresh hacksaw blades for them. Apparently cutting rebar with the equivalent of a butter knife gets a bit tiring. All of the work stations appeared to be busy, so Andrew stayed behind while I wandered up to the house where the A Team was working. There were a few people standing around trying to find something to do there as well, so I just hopped up on the scaffolding and hoped for the best. Before too long, I got a task to trim the excess rebar from the vertical columns – I got me a hacksaw and began hacking. Or sawing. Cassie joined me after a bit – she was more adventurous than I and was sitting somewhat awkwardly on the tops of the walls versus the comfort of the rickety scaffolding. As I was sawing off and bending the last piece of rebar to set the remnant free, my forearm caught another piece of cut rebar and provided a quick look into the white goodness inside of muscle fibers and other epidermi. That it wasn’t bleeding profusely showed how deep it was. I hopped down and Emily patched me up like a pro, while yelling out that we were now zero seconds since our last recordable injury.

One-handed people are not so useful on an actual work site, so I headed back to the office in defeat. Kelly showed me how to bend rebar squares, so I thankfully had something to do. Doug, Beth, Kelly and I did this for the rest of the afternoon, constantly in search of the perfect square. It seemed that any time any of us beamed with pride from making a perfect one, the next five were doomed to be crappy.

My bandages didn’t hold up so well, so I did what any red-blooded Kentuckian would do. I duct-taped the bandage to my forearm. The redneck’s guide to fixing things: if it moves and shouldn’t, use duct tape; if it doesn’t move and should, use WD-40.

That night, we gathered again in one of the rooms to drink some beer and socialize. Emily and I had decided at some early point in the evening to be drinking buddies, so we shared the large 1L beer bottles. My thought was that this would keep me from consuming two full bottles as I had the night before. Instead, it had the opposite effect – I think we went through seven 1L bottles between the two of us. I blame her – she’s clearly a bad influence. J

Tuesday, October 15^th, 2013

I woke up this morning with a small hangover, though I’m not sure exactly why. What I do know is that one of the local beers Cusquena comes in 4 different types, and I had been successful in trying all four.

After our breakfast of bread, eggs, and oatmeal at Zenon’s garage, we got back to La Florida and started working again, trying to see if a good night’s sleep aided or hindered in our rebar making skillz. Before too long, Ricardo (the 19-yr-old lead contractor for our group) told us it was time to take the completed rebar forms that the group in total had been making up to the ½ completed house these belonged too. It turns out that our house was much farther away than the A Team’s house, so we definitely got a little extra exercise. The house we were working on had a foundation and brick walls up – we had made the rebar forms that would sit atop the brick walls and then we would pour concrete to finish the top of the walls. The work after this is putting up the roofing frame and laying the fiberglass roof sheeting, which is what A Team was doing on their homes.

I don’t know that we ever got fully situated to where everyone was doing something productive, since Ricardo didn’t speak a lick of English and he clearly had never led a group of people on a worksite before. Fortunately, we had Mariela on our team – she grew up in Puerto Rico and served to translate for us. She spent most of the afternoon as the site foreman of sorts – translating for Ricardo and Richard (the other local guy; I think he was one of the homeowner’s) and ensuring that everyone had something to do. I’m guessing that she may have felt like she was doing more talking than doing, which can be frustrating since she flew all the way to Peru to get down and dirty. In reality, she was a tremendously huge help, more than she probably realizes.

At some point in the afternoon, the homeowner of the house we were working on (I forgot his name) showed us his current home. The home was a small 10x10 room of thatched walls and tarps – looking at the current living quarters makes it abundantly obvious why getting one of these homes (with sweat equity) is truly transformational… more so than in the US, I think. In the US, the new homeowners for Habitat or Fuller homes currently live in something that is inhabitable by our Western standards – the benefit is often with being able to “own” the house and call it yours along with the pride and upkeep that comes along with it. In developing nations, there’s a whole added level because the new homeowners are generally living in what we would call squalor. A full home for them, even though tiny by our standards, is such a massive upgrade that it has ramifications beyond just shelter, but also in hope, pride, and attitude. We saw this time and time again as previous home recipients wanted to show us where their homes and they beamed with pride. The outside showed it as well – the homes were generally immaculately clean and you often could find flowers and other plants out front, even though this part of the country was more or less a desert.

Oh yeah, the new homeowner also had a fairly sizable guinea pig farm on his property. In Peru, guinea pigs are not pets – they are a delicacy, generally fetching higher prices than alpaca or beef tenderloin. A few others had tried guinea pig meat (called cuy in Peru) while in Cusco before this build and only had positive things to say. I don’t know that I’m going to try it though… I generally have a repulsion to eating meat that shows up on your plate looking like the animal it came from. That’s one of the major reasons I don’t like crab or lobster. I also think that’s completely hypocritical of me because I truly believe it would be better for us all to know exactly what we were eating as I think it would give a stronger sense of respect for the animal who died to be on our plates. But I guess this is one of my exceedingly few known weaknesses.

As we walked back to the office to wait for the bus to take us back to the hotel, a massive long parade of kids starting walking by in costume – it seems that La Florida must celebrate Halloween a good 2 ½ weeks early or something. Given that this was a poor community, very few kids could afford to buy a costume. Instead, they had to be creative… and creative were they ever. Using cardboard boxes, empty bottles, scrap pieces of plastic, and who knows what else, these kids were able to create the most interesting costumes… many of which seemed nicer than what we would have bought back home.

When we got back to the hotel, we engaged in another round of hot water roulette. We found out yesterday that if more than 5 people are trying to use hot water at a time, the electrical system can’t handle it and the breaker is tripped. Trying to convince 19 people to wait their turn is no easy logistical solution either, so many often ended up with a nice brisk ball-shrinking cold shower.

After dinner that evening, one of our groupmates had arranged with the hotel attendant to set up a card table in one of the common areas. A few rounds of Uno and Speed Uno later, I was pooped and headed off to bed. Many of us had started to come down with sneezes and coughs and I was no exception. I figured I should play it safer than the night before and try to get a good night’s rest. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen – I came down with a fever that night and tried to sweat it out, and the rest of the building wasn’t exactly conducive to sleep for anyone either. From the crazy loud birthday party downstairs to the smoking fumes that crept into some rooms to the obnoxiously loud alarm clock that seemed to go off every 5 minutes from 3:30am to 7:00am… lots of people didn’t get the rest they wanted.

Wednesday, October 16^th, 2013

We had a day off scheduled today to see some local Peruvian sites, including what Zenon calls the “mini-Galapagos” of Peru. I was kinda iffy on the idea of taking a day off to go sight-seeing since we’re only here for five days and I think a few others may have felt the same way, but I figured Zenon knows what he’s doing.

By this point in the week, enough people had spent 1:1 time with Zenon that we started calling him “the most interesting man in the world” – truly his vision and dedication to what he’s trying to do in La Florida is nothing short of inspiring. We took it the next level, of course, by imparting completely nonsensical facts to add to Zenon’s legend as well – such as, the only reason there is water in La Florida is that Zenon willed it to be, and the ancient Inca Road was built by hand by Zenon before he turned 15, and… well, you get the drift. None of this was done in mockery – it was quite the opposite. No one left the week with anything less than the utmost respect for this amazing man.

After breakfast, we loaded up on the bus for the 2 hour drive down to the coastal town of Paracas. When we arrived, we played a 45-minute game of “hurry up and wait”, shuffling from one place to another. It seems that most of the speedboats to the Balletes Islands (mini Galapagos) had already left full of other tourists. I thought this was fantastic since we would be fighting with 30 other boats to see the sights.

The basic gist of the 2 hour tour was as follows: get on an unnecessarily powerful speedboat with more people than any self-respecting US Fire Marshall would deem acceptable, bounce our way over the waves to the mini-Nazca Lines site, and then bounce our way to the mini-Galapagos and cruise around a bit before returning back to land, safe and sound.

To begin the trip, the lead guide went on a 5-minute schpiel in Spanish explaining where we were going and what we would see. At the end, he asked “comprende?” I think we startled him with our collective rapid response “NO!”… after which he smiled and repeated himself in English. Then the boat started and the driver got to have fun with the excessively powerful boat and high waves in his very successful attempts to soak the poor folks who sat in the back of the boat.

The mini-Nazca Line was a singular massive structure that the ancient peoples dug into the side of the mountain – this one was called the “candelabra”, interestingly enough because it looked like a candelabra. The main shaft of the candelabra apparently points in perfect North-South direction. I think the tour people purposefully left out the first few attempts on the other side of the mountain where the ancients messed up the alignment and didn’t have a large enough jar of Wite-Out.

The main attraction of the Balletes Islands was next, where we saw lots of sea lions somehow perched on tall craggy rocks to bask in the sun – I can’t imagine that those would be comfortable in the least, but I suppose if my body were 55% body fat evenly distributed from head to toe, any position on anything would probably be comfortable to me as well.

We also saw lots of boobies. Not the type that we got to see on the public bus, but the bird type. And then a ton of seagulls. I suppose it wouldn’t be all that incorrect to say it was a shit ton of seagulls – after all, there are so many seagulls that there’s an entire seagull shit gathering operation all around these islands. Apparently, that shit is good fertilizer. This whole operation caused me to wonder aloud, what would the birdshit collectors call their profession on a resume? I’m guessing “Avian Fecal Fertilizer Engineer”. Let me know if you have a better title.

After returning to dry land and a quick lunch including our bus driver taking us the wrong way on a one-way street in the nearby town of Pisco, we headed back north to the coastal town of Cerro Azul to hang on the beach and watch the sunset.

At the beach, a handful of brave souls got in the very cold waters, a few others played sports and lost Vince’s son’s Aerobie in the ocean water (sorry about that!), and others wandered in search of some trinket shopping. An hour or so later, we were all at the end of a long pier watching the sun set in perfect picturesque fashion. There were also surfers catching some late evening waves and a few dolphins playing with them to boot.

We showered up back at the hotel and were offered some options for dinner: go back to the chicken place, get Chinese food, or get Kenyan pizza (to be fair, Zenon said “Canete” pizza, but I heard “Kenya” and thought it was funnier). We voted and went back to the chicken place – but fortunately, this time they ordered a variety of foods for us to fill up on.

After stuffing our faces, we walked across the town square to huddle in an unnecessarily cramped corner of the Pisco Zapata bar to partake in what Zenon claims to be “the best Pisco Sour in Peru”. I wasn’t so sure of that claim, so I had three just to make sure. I don’t always drink pisco sours, but when I do, I crowd into the tiny Pisco Zapata bar and order a few.

We were having a great time, but we knew it was time to come to an end when a wild-eyed man with an almost-scary level of control over his facial expressions came into the bar with a wooden box that he sat on. It turns out that this wooden box is a musical instrument called a “cahon”. He kinda stunned us all by screaming out a few tunes without warning while hammering away on the cahon. Finally, he stopped and me and a few others made sure to tip him hoping that he would go away. That’s not what happened though.

Next, he made me sit on the cahon and attempt to play it. A few others said I was doing quite well actually, and come to think of it, I guess I did enjoy playing with a large piece of wood between my legs. And I would have been quite happy to continue playing with my cahon-es, but I’m guessing he made me get off of it because I was showing him up. Mad skillz.

Thursday, October 17^th, 2013

This morning, we got to the house and found that in our day off, Ricardo and Richard had gotten a lot of the concrete prep work done. Late on Tuesday, we had begun fashioning wooden panels above the walls on either side of the rebar into which concrete could be poured. We struggled to get even one wall complete. We returned to find that many (but not all) of the wood panels had been assembled using a far simpler technique.

Ricardo had taken somewhat of a liking towards me and decided that he could communicate effectively with me, despite the fact that he spoke much too quickly for my rudimentary Spanish and that he didn’t understand the concept of using simple phrases. Every other word out of his mouth was “Prag” – it had gotten annoying quickly. He blurted out a quick set of instructions to me and left with half of our team to the office to finish up some rebar for the interior walls.

So Andrew, Keith, Doug and I had all morning with peace and quiet – and we felt like we were cranking too. I think this was the first time all week that any of us had felt truly productive. By lunchtime, we were more or less at a stopping point as we were either waiting for the interior wall rebar or we needed clearer instruction on how to proceed.

After lunch, Ricardo joined us and got little frantic. Their hope was to pour the concrete this afternoon but there were too many loose ends. For example, Ricardo seemed to have forgotten that the electrical pipes needed to be assembled and inserted and he seemed to not realize the criticality of the interior wall rebar. He drove me a bit insane the next 4 hours between barking out my name, giving us unintelligible instructions, giving us completely irrelevant instructions, and interrupting the busiest person to do something rather trivial. By 4pm, the work wasn’t complete and we had to go. Zenon had scheduled another field trip for the group and the whole group was waiting for us back at the office. I know the other three would have been more than happy to forego the field trip and finish up the work, but that didn’t seem an option.

The bus took us to the town of Lunahuana, a picturesque little town where apparently adventure sports are very common. There were a number of outfits offering 4x4s, rafting, and other activities that I would generally be all over… but our purpose there was to sample another pisco sour. I’m not exactly positive why, but it was good nonetheless. Next, we got back into the bus and stopped by the Pisco Zapata factory where we were given little to no explanation of the production process. Instead, I fathomed how the process worked based on the location of tanks, coils, heating elements, and cooling pools. Then Zenon passed around shots for sampling a few of the different types of pisco – many of us left with sampler packs. (Judy – thanks for carrying mine back to the States for me!)

After shower roulette, we went back to the garage for Zenon’s special 3-way chili recipe. For those of you who haven’t been to Cincinnati, chili is kind of a thing in Cincinnati, and we generally order a 3-way, 4-way, or 5-way from Skyline, Goldstar, or my personal favorite Camp Washington Chili. What I forgot to share earlier is that Zenon lives in Cincinnati as well and considers it to be his second home (or maybe his first). His chili truly put any of the restaurants to absolute shame. He loaded up everyone’s plates with a seemingly impossible mound of spaghetti and chili, yet most managed to finish every last noodle. Just spectacular. I don’t always eat chili, but when I do, I’m making my own damn chili.

Friday, October 18^th, 2013

We got to the house this morning and had a little bit of touch-up work to complete before we could get started on pouring concrete. Fortunately, they had a concrete mixer on site. Apparently in many other builds that our group has been on, concrete mixing was done by hand with shovels. Here, the formula was rather simple – fire up the mixer, toss in two full buckets of water, a bag of concrete mix, and then shovel gravel/dirt into the mixer until Richard told us the consistency was right. Then we formed a bucket brigade to get buckets of concrete up to Ricardo on the scaffolding, and he poured the concrete into the wooden forms.

During this process, the homeowner’s wife also went up on the scaffolding – turns out that she was doing two things: 1) putting a small bottle of pisco in each corner of the house for good luck, and 2) sprinkling quinoa in the concrete around the periphery so that the family may never go hungry.

By lunchtime, we were done and there wasn’t much else we could do since the concrete would need to set. The A team had also hit a stopping point, having finished roofs on two of the houses and a frame up on the third. In the late afternoon, we had a closing ceremony, where each of us was presented with a thank-you certificate from one of the neighborhood kids. And Doug summed up our sentiments perfectly (with help from Mariela for translation) back to the community expressing our thanks for opening their homes and hearts to us.

That evening, we got cleaned up and drove in the bus back to Lima where Zenon took us to a dance hall. They had a live band on hand and professional dancers who performed a variety of traditional dances in full costume. My personal favorite was one where they had a bull & bullfighter, and the bullfighter got too arrogant and the bull took him out. From time to time, they opened up the floor to the audience and we’d invariably hop out there and attempt to dance without looking too silly. But none of us cared – we were just happy to be enjoying one last evening as a group.

If it weren’t obvious already, I really really really enjoyed this week. From the very beginning, you could tell that all of us were kindred spirits of sorts. I remember a few people were talking about how they had to explain to friends or family why they would choose to spend their vacation going to a poor neighborhood of a developing country to build houses. In fact, many of you reading this may have the same question floating in your head. To a T, the thought process for every one of us was “why wouldn’t you?” To me, there’s almost nothing more obvious. I’m just disappointed that I didn’t learn about Give Back Cincinnati’s Give Back Beyond program 5-6 years ago. I would have almost certainly joined them on trips to Guatemala, Romania, Ghana, among other places.

I left impressed with our team: Roberto and Mariela took on the burden of translating for 17 others; Vince & AG coordinated the week in a cool, calm, and collected fashion; Andrew for our 45 minute debate on pure vs managed capitalism and still left as friends (man up Andrew, you know I won…); Emily for taking a stronger interest in a snot-nosed brat of a kid to find out the boy’s father is in jail for 30 years; Kelly for somehow packing two weeks of clothes into two small backpacks and for lending me her sunglasses to make sure I didn’t get concrete in my eyes; first time international traveler Samie for so quickly drawing the conclusion (which takes many others years & multiple trips to figure out) that no matter which country you’re from, we’re all the same; Judy for giving me hope by staying awesome and active though a decade+ my senior; Cassie & Danielle for climbing atop any wall with zero fear; Nazly for her passion on social justice causes; Beth for our awesome conversations and for enjoying my random ipod music collection almost as much as me; Keith for somehow managing to fit his tall frame on vehicles clearly not meant for his height; newbies Venita & Miranda for taking a complete leap of faith with this trip; Tracy for managing to stick with the trip despite a minor crisis at work; and Doug for his incredible heartfelt speech & the rebar Fuller plaque he toiled over himself and presented on behalf of the team to Zenon.

So, to the lot of you – thanks a ton for making this week so memorable, and I hope to see you all again when I get home… either for a reunion at my place or during the next GBB trip.

Random Tidbits

1.       Pitchers of beer are not so big. Bottles of beer are quite big (probably the same size as the smallish pitchers). I tended to drink straight out of both, versus pouring into a smaller glass. This wasn’t always smart, given my excessively rapid liquid consumption rate.

2.       The word for mushrooms in Spanish is champinones. This was quite possibly the most important word I’ve learned so far. (I already knew “bano”.)

3.       Greatest line uttered this week: “Como se dice Bitch, I’ll fucking kill you!”

4.       There are a lot of stray dogs in Peru. In La Florida at least, Zenon told us that every dog does have an “owner” who feeds them and makes sure they are ok. The dogs were extremely friendly, and surprisingly of a very wide variety: big dogs, little dogs, long hair, short hair, you name it. I guess I’m used to seeing stray dogs in developing countries eventually meld into a singular “mixed mutt” breed.

5.       I saw lots of signs on restaurants in Lima and in Canete that said “Chifa”. It took a little bit but I finally figured out that this meant “Chinese food”. There’s actually a fairly large Asian population in Peru (my Peruvian-Chinese friend Jorge Tan can attest to that). Some of you may recall that one of the recent presidents of Peru was of Japanese descent, Alberto Fujimori. Of course, you may also recall that he was quite corrupt.

6.       I have yet to see a full squatter. Most of the nicer restaurants and our own hotel has full sit-down toilets. Other places have an actual porcelain toilet but without a toilet seat, which forces an awkward brace-your-arm-against-a-clean-wall half squat position. I suppose there was a toilet seat shortage, or maybe toilet seats are controlled by the mafia who charges such exorbitant prices that only hotels & nice restaurants can afford them. I’ll try to get to the bottom of this for you.

And finally, it’s story time. This one is called “Vince Eats a Bar of Soap” (as told to me from Andrew)

Andrew and Emily went on a snacks run for one evening’s festivities and bought all sorts of goodies. One of the items that Andrew picked up was a larger rectangle with a lemon graphic on it – he stared at it and it took a while before he realized it was in fact, a bar of soap, despite the letters on the packaging explicitly saying “soap” in English no less. Andrew wondered aloud to Emily whether or not someone would fall for it – Emily quickly shared that she would never be so mean as to try, but Andrew has some evil in him. So they bought the bar of soap mixed in with the other snacks.

When Emily and Andrew got back to the hotel, a group had gathered in one of the rooms to drink some beers, snack on food, and socialize. The contents of the bag were scattered on the floor and people munched on chips and cookies and the like. Someone grabbed the bar of soap, and astutely noted “what the hell is a bar of soap doing in here?”, temporarily sending Andrew into a crest-fallen state as he explained his trick to those present. The bar was returned to the “pot” and socializing continued.

Some minutes later, Vince grabbed the bar of soap and peeled it open. He either had not been in the room when the joke was revealed or he was not paying attention or he was in the restroom – this is unclear to me. But Vince opened it just like you would an ice cream sandwich, and proceeded to almost take a bit for what seemed an eternity, as he continued in conversation. Everyone else was busy looking away trying not to give the gig up… except dear sweet Judy, who yells out “Vince, that’s a bar of soap!” The room gave their best death glare to Judy, but fortunately, Vince hadn’t heard her as he proceeded to take a big bite from the bar… followed by a quizzical look… and then some minor gagging.

The room erupted, including Vince, who could not have been a better sport.