South America Explorations: Week 3 & 4 - Learning Spanish & the Peruvian Amazon

Saturday, October 26^th, 2013

After Roberto and I got back to Cusco, we returned to the hotel and met up with his parents who were joining him for the remainder of his 5 week vacation. Since Roberto’s family speaks Spanish at home, this gave me an added opportunity to practice my listening/understanding/speaking skills for a few more days before I was on my own.

After unpacking, showering, and briefly relaxing, we went out for a nice meal at a place Roberto’s friend had recommended called Fallen Angel, which was a restaurant attached to a boutique hotel of the same name. We settled in for what we quickly knew would likely be our most expensive meal on the trip. The décor was fantastic – several of the tables were old clawfoot tubs with aquariums inside and covered with glass tops. Unfortunately, the food was about average and really left a lot to be desired. I suppose it’s a bit hit and miss with this sort of thing – I’ve been to a number of boutique places elsewhere with spectacular food.

Sunday, October 27^th, 2013

I woke up feeling a bit under the weather, so I took my time getting ready and having breakfast. Roberto and his parents went out for a walk around town, and I scoped out a bit of the town. I didn’t have a ton I could do because it was Sunday and I didn’t have a tour booked. In retrospect, I guess I should have planned it out a little better but after the long hike, perhaps a day of nothingness was precisely what the doctor ordered.

By the evening time, we were all feeling a bit under the weather. We walked a few blocks to a restaurant where Roberto’s mom had made friends with the owner. I don’t think they were very happy with us because we just ordered three bowls of soup and one sandwich between the four of us. It was more of an upscale place, so this was a very small check for the table we were occupying. Strangely enough though, this meant that they ignored us more instead of trying to rush us through.

Monday - Thursday, October 28^th – 31^st, 2013

I’m grouping these days together because there was a bit of repetition through the week. My first task Monday morning was to find a new place to stay – Roberto and his family were headed to Machu Picchu this morning and it was about time that I get on with staying at hostels, as I’ll likely be doing for the majority of the remainder of the trip. My plan is to go with hostels because I’m much more likely to meet other travelers that way since many hostels have common areas and some even have bars/restaurants. Additionally, from a cost standpoint, I think the best area to trim is with lodging – I’d rather save the money for experiences/tours, better food, and more reliable transportation. So, this morning I schlepped across town to a hostel called Mama Simona, a name I frequently butchered to others as Mama Semana, Mama Samina, or Mama Samarra.

The next task for the day was to decide on a Spanish school. Since I’ll be spending the next 4 months in Spanish-speaking countries, it was pretty clear that I needed a refresher. So I found a school called Amauta. As an added bonus, the school was located uphill a few blocks so I’d get a good workout in as well – even a short uphill walk at this altitude left me out of breath each day.

The plan was to get 20 hours of private instruction in over the next four days, starting this Monday afternoon. My 3.5 years of high school Spanish surprisingly gave me a decent base, and I really just needed help with vocabulary, past tense, and present tense. On more than one occasion in the past, I know I had surprised Julia (who is completely fluent in Spanish) with just how much I recalled.

I had two different teachers: Mijhaell and Alfredo. This helped break up the monotony of 20 hours of instruction over four days, especially since their teaching methods were very different. Mijhaell was a more traditional instructor – he’s in his mid-20s and has been doing this for a few years, but he’s working on getting a post on a cruise line in the US for 6 months to a year. Alfredo used a lot of multimedia in our sessions – from using flashcards to watching instructional videos to watching the opening sequence to the movie Up and then making me describe what’s going on in Spanish (after wiping my tears away, of course). Alfredo also had a frustrating habit of ending each lesson with a magic trick. I suppose most would think this is kinda neat, but my engineer side comes out whenever I see “magic” and I spend an unnecessary amount of time trying to figure out what just happened.

The school setup is kinda neat. I was a bit of an oddball here – not only because I’m normally an oddball, but also because most of the students were taking classes for at minimum a month. Some stayed in the rooms at the school and others had homestays with local families to better immerse themselves. And others were involved with a long-term volunteer activity in the area as well. At the end of the day, a lot of the students congregated together and developed long-term friendships with one another, so I felt a bit like an imposter for the week I was there.

My days were pretty simple – I generally had class in the morning and afternoon, and would then grab dinner and go to bed. I know that sounds really lame, but all week I was quite a bit under the weather as well. I was freezing non-stop, to the point that at night I was shivering and went to bed with woolen socks and my thermals. The thing is, it wasn’t that cold. The school had a doctor on staff, so she was helping me try to find a drug combination that would work, but she was getting extremely concerned that I wasn’t kicking my fever after three days. So on Thursday, she told me that I needed to get some blood tests on Friday from a lab and check the results. I guess I have my Friday planned out for me after all.

Thursday evening was Halloween, and the city celebrates in full force. The main square was chock full of kids in costume with their parents. Apparently, businesses give out candy as well, so kids generally got a better bang for the buck to come into the city center and go from store to store versus canvas their neighborhoods. Since all the parents were downtown anyway, I’m guessing the neighborhood route would be a bad idea anyway. The funniest thing about all these kids is that didn’t go in and say “Trick or Treat”, they just went in and yelled “HALLOWEEN!”

What was strange about this whole phenomenon is that apparently Halloween is a very new celebration in Peru – 5 years ago it was virtually non-existent. Something tells me that the candy companies were heavily involved in getting the holiday promoted.

Friday, November 1^st, 2013

I woke up this morning still feeling quite crappy, so I figured out how to install VOIP on my cell phone and call my dad using an app called cSipSimple with a callcentric.com account (thanks for the tip, Roberto). My dad confirmed that I should go to get the blood tests, so off I went this morning across town to the clinic. I figured I should get a second opinion before getting a needle stuck in my arm in a developing country.

After getting the initial paperwork squared away, I met with the doctor at the clinic who agreed with the recommended blood tests from the doctor at the school. So the lab tech whisked me away to an overcrowded examination room and proceeded to draw blood… in the most interesting way possible. In the states, the test tubes that they draw blood into are vacuum sealed, and this vacuum assists in drawing the blood more quickly. The needle is placed into a syringe, which has a second needle that pierces through the rubber stopper of the vacuum test tube.

Well here in Peru, it’s a wee bit different. There’s a needle (which is removed from sterile packaging) and there’s a test tube with a plastic cap. The needle is inserted into the vein, without the syringe-like device and the plastic cap is removed from the test tube. Then, the lab tech positions the open test tube under the needle so that the blood just drips straight in. No vacuum necessary. In reality, this is probably more than sufficient and perhaps the extra pieces in place in the US exist out of an abundance of caution. My guess is that all of these “just in case” aspects (combined with our legal system) make practicing medicine a heck of a lot more complicated in the US than in developing nations, and for basic procedures, I wouldn’t be surprised if the efficacy is dead even.

After grabbing lunch back in town, I returned two hours later to get the test results. The good news – nothing stood out except a high level of a specific antibody that indicates that I am indeed sick. So the doctor prescribed a broad-scale antibiotic Cipro… which I already brought an abundance of from home. So, at end of the day, I spent a day and $100 to be told to take some medicine that I already had on me (but had not been taking yet). I suppose I at least had some peace of mind that I wasn’t dying from some rare tropical disease. Then again, they didn’t really test me for a rare tropical disease either.

I didn’t really want to spend another day in Cusco, so I went back in town and booked a 4-day/3-night jungle trek into Manu (Peruvian Amazon) that will leave in the morning.

Saturday, November 2^nd, 2013

I was picked up by a minivan early this morning – there were 7 tourists in total, and it took all of 30 seconds before we realized that one among us was going to be a royal pain-in-the-ass. “With all the money I’m paying, you’d think they could afford a van without sticky doors.” “No, my bag can’t go up top because my camera is in there.” And later, this gem: “My guidebook said that it’s not the rainy season yet, so I want a refund because it’s raining.” Who was this nutjob? Some crazy old Arizonian lady who seriously had no business joining a backpacker group to the rainforest. I never caught her name, nor did I want to, so I’m just going to call her Arizona. It didn’t take long to be utterly embarrassed to call her my countryperson. People like that need to have their passports revoked.

I actually didn’t get the names of most of the rest of the group somehow either, though we enjoyed each other’s company quite well. There was a young French couple who have been traveling for about a year. There was a couple from Vancouver – actually, they just lived in Vancouver. She’s Peruvian and he’s from Northern Ireland. They met in Toronto many years ago and both decided to up and move to Vancouver (roughly equal distance from home for both) about 4 years ago so that they could be together. Finally, there was Monica from Ecuador who had been traveling for about two months and was essentially doing much of trip I am planning to do but in the opposite direction.

The rainforest is a long drive from Cusco – after a few hours, our tour guide Jose lets us out to see some ancient pre-Incan burial tombs. These tombs resemble small cylindrical huts where the bodies were generally buried in the fetal position. Unfortunately, almost all of the tombs had been plundered by either the Spaniards or other treasure seekers because some of the bodies were buried with some valuables as well.

Soon afterwards, we were driving on a two-lane highway that was effectively a one-lane highway because of all the landslides that were blocking the lane nearest the mountain. Apparently, when the rainy season starts, these landslides occur frequently and the government doesn’t bother to clean it up until the end of the rainy season, unless it’s blocking both lanes. You would think that such a road would be bad for tires – and you’d be correct. Before long, we all hopped out of the van (except the completely oblivious Arizona) so that the driver could change a flat tire.

This road continued for a few more hours until suddenly the landscape changed and it was clear that we were beginning to enter the jungle. In retrospect, I wish I had commandeered the radio and played some Guns ‘n’ Roses to commemorate the occasion. Unfortunately, we were stuck with Jose’s extremely random selection of music – from Peruvian pan-flute classics to Andean music to 80’s music to random Australian disco hits. At times, the music selection was very amusing, but at other times it was near unbearable.

When there was a light pause in the rain, Jose asked us if anyone wanted to walk for the last few kilometers – most everyone seemed content to stay in the dry van. I told Jose that I’d be up for a walk, and Monica and the French couple decided to join us. It’s a good thing we hopped out – we ended up seeing a few of the rare Cock-of-the-Rock birds, these are Peru’s national bird and in addition to a mildly humorous name, also sports an abnormally large and misshapen red head. And now that I’ve set you up perfectly to make your own crude joke, I’ll pause for a moment.

After a few kilometers walking in the light rain, we arrived at Manu Adventures’ private jungle lodge. This wasn’t as fancy as it sounds – since this is the jungle, there were no accommodations open to the public so the tour companies basically had to build their own lodges. Manu Adventures is on the budget end given that they cater to the backpacker crowd, so this lodge was quite basic but more than adequate for what I was looking for. Actually, it was even better than I had anticipated – I especially loved that we had to walk 10 minutes from the main road to get to the lodge.

Sunday, November 3^rd, 2013

Jose woke us up pretty early this morning to go on another brief walk along the road to try and find wildlife. Before long, a light rain started again. Arizona saw it fit to start complaining again that it’s not supposed to be raining and walked back to the lodge in protest. We were happy to be rid of her. We ended up seeing a school of monkeys high up in the trees and 3 or 4 more Cock-of-the-Rocks. Jose told us that the monkeys were Capuchin monkeys – I think these are the same ones that Starbucks hires to make cappuccinos.

After breakfast and packing up, we loaded back into the minivan for the drive to the town of Pilcopata where we would go rafting down the river. Unfortunately, the rafting guide deemed the water level too high for safe rafting – apparently, the high water level causes a couple of whirlpools where this river meets another a few kilometers. My response? Whirlpool, schmirlpool. That’s why we have life vests. (I’m sure it was the right choice.)

So we hopped back in the van to drive another 45 minutes to Atalaya, which is the last town on a road in the jungle – after this point, all transportation is by boat. Once we got to Atalaya, as luck would have it, it started heavily downpouring – the weather was gorgeous while we were in the van unfortunately. Arizona made sure we all understood how this was part of Jose’s incompetence, of course. After an hour of rain, we were able to board the boat, which was really more of a really long covered canoe with an outboard motor. It was actually almost identical to the type of craft used in Malaysia when I was there more than a decade ago.

The river was moving along quite swiftly because of the heavier than expected rainfall the past few weeks. When we got to Erika Lodge, where we’d spend the next two nights, Jose pointed out that the river had been changing direction and was eroding the bank where the Erika Lodge was situated. Only a few days before, the dining room, a small 4-room lodge, and a storage room had collapsed into the swiftly moving river. You could see the sadness on Jose’s face to not see major parts of the lodge that had been there for the past 15+ years. Under the circumstances, he was actually dealing with it quite well, as were the folks who work at the lodge year-round. They know first-hand that the jungle is unpredictable. In fact, they were already working on building a new dining room back a bit from the main lodge. Jose shared later that the river used to be more than 200 meters away from its current location, and they used to even have a makeshift soccer field on the lowlands before the river claimed that a few years back.

In the afternoon, we left for a jungle hike, but not before more Arizona drama. She didn’t want to join us, but didn’t really want to tell us that she didn’t want to join either. After ignoring Jose multiple times, I went to her window and asked and finally she nodded a faint “no”, which was enough for me. The rest of the group was thrilled that we wouldn’t have to deal with her.

Owing to the waterlogged ground, the tour company outfitted us with mud boots so that we could slosh around happily – these were pretty darn essential. Because of the rain, we didn’t really see all that many animals, and even without the rain, the jungle is so thick that the animals would generally be able to hide from view anyway. Instead, Jose showed us a lot of the insect and plant biodiversity of the region. I enjoyed hiking in the jungle tremendously, just to see all of the lush green vegetation and mosses and fungi and trees and you name it. It was splendid and I was sad when it was time to walk back. It was starting to get dark though, so it was probably a good idea. 

Monday, November 4^th, 2013

After breakfast this morning, Jose prepped us for our hike. It had been raining all night and so we would undoubtedly be walking through high water levels along the way, so he told us to be prepared for thigh high water. But since they provided us with rain boots, there wasn’t any risk of our shoes getting soaked, which is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. The hike was nice – we were headed to an oxbow, which is apparently a fancy term for “lake”. I forget the significance of the name oxbow though. If you are interested, I’m sure Mr. Google has the answer for you.

Arizona surprisingly joined us today, and after finally swallowing her pride, she started accepting our help on the difficult sections, including the use of an extra walking stick that the French guy had brought with him. There were also multiple sections where a particularly industrious previous tour guide had built makeshift walking bridges from small logs.

At the oxbow lake, Jose paid our entrance fee and we boarded two small rafts. Because of the size of our group, Jose asked me to captain one and gave me a quick lesson on moving a raft with only a very long stick – it’s kinda like Venice except the stick doesn’t have a paddle on the end. And I’m not allowed to sing because it scares the birds away (I learned this tidbit only after Jose shushed me). That’s too bad, because the singing was half the reason I accepted the raft-steering position.

Lesson or not, I wasn’t very good. The channels were narrow and it wasn’t as easy as it looked to maneuver the raft. I was constantly moving the pole from one side to another to push off the marshy ground below in opposite directions, which got the raft moving forward in a zig zag motion. An experienced guide like Jose was able to move the raft perfectly straight without ever needing to switch the pole to the other side. I still had a lot to learn. We saw a few birds around the oxbow a little more up front and personal than we had been able to prior. I was pretty busy concentrating on not getting the raft stuck, so I didn’t pay much attention. That was fine by me – I liked my job better than purely birdwatching anyway.

After a quick jaunt to the top of the hill for a nice vista, we made our way back to the lodge where our cook had the most amazing lunch waiting for us. As an example, the main was a pan-fried pounded chicken with ham, cheese, and maybe onions inside of it – it was quite gourmet for being in the middle of the jungle and not having a proper kitchen to cook from. Their normal kitchen was washed away with the dining room.

Speaking of washing away, during our post-lunch relaxing, we heard an ominous sound. All of us looked up in time to see a huge tree on the new edge of their property succumb and fall into the river. It was a sad moment – that tree had lived many many years with the crew and the sadness was clear from the faces of the workers, particularly the cook. Even still, they watched, reminisced, and went back to their business in a very quick fashion.

The afternoon activity was ziplining, which Arizona thankfully passed on. We had about a 45 minute walk with our zipline gear before getting to the first platform. I’ve ziplined once before in Costa Rica, but I didn’t enjoy it so much because that company was focused on getting people through the ziplines as fast as possible and you couldn’t really enjoy the scenery much. With this one, Manu Adventures owned these ziplines and therefore we would be the only ones here. Our zipline guides took their time too, and allowed me to try and video a few with my camera. It didn’t work so well. I had initially purchased a GoPro for this trip, but I returned it after thinking that I wouldn’t have enough reasons to use it instead of my camera to warrant the extra space in my bag.

We had about 5 lines of varying steepness (i.e. speed) and ended with a quick rappel down to the jungle floor. Monica has a bit of fear of heights and did great on the ziplines by focusing forward instead of looking down. The rappel was giving her problems though since looking down is an essential requirement. Once she realized how much the Figure 8 + ropes were able to support her, she relaxed a bit and got down in one piece. The instructor followed by rappelling upside down, which made me very jealous. I asked if I could climb back up and do the same, but he wasn’t so keen on it. Oh well.

When we got back, we learned that Arizona and Jose had gone on their own walk and she seemed quite happy with it. We had been quite fortunate with the weather all day today, and this lifted her spirits, which spared us from hearing her complain non-stop. That didn’t stop her from taking another shot though – at some point, she asked Jose how long Manu Adventures had been in business. After he shared that they’ve been in business for 20 years, she remarked that she was shocked they had survived this long. I wanted to gut punch her.

I was triply ashamed because she was my countryman – you may think this doesn’t matter, but it’s very important to understand that when you travel abroad, you are representing your country and others from your country to the locals and the tourist agencies. This absolutely does have a direct impact on other travelers as the tourist agencies know that travelers from certain countries have a habit of being more problematic than others. Fortunately, Jose had enough experience to know that Arizona was an anomaly and told me that he generally finds Americans to be very easy to get along with – this is common from my other travels as well. I don’t think this holds true for all American travelers by any means – I think what happens is that the ones who demand a lot aren’t the type who travel where I travel, and I’m thankful for that. This is another reason I avoid cruises as much as I can – I think that’s where a lot of the travelers I want to avoid tend to hang out. And yes - I totally get why many opt for cruises, my own sister counts herself among those numbers.

We had a night walk this evening where Jose pointed out all sorts of insects to us (sans Arizona). Since I generally am creeped out by insects, I don’t tend to pay attention so much to night walks. The leaf-cutter ants were the exception though, they had massive highways of ants coming from various trees to their massive ant mound. But generally instead, I just like the calm and quiet atmosphere of the jungle at night. It’s nice. On more than one occasion, I turned my light off and hung back for a few minutes to better soak all the nature in.

 

Tuesday, November 5^th, 2013

We got lucky this morning – it wasn’t raining. This meant that we could get up very early and head over to a viewing point near a clay lick where lots of macaws and parrots go to eat some clay that gives them some of minerals that the rest of their diet does not provide. You see, there is no macaw version of the Flintstone Kids vitamins that we all took to ensure that we grew up nice and tall and with a full head of hair. Clearly my Flintstone Kids were faulty.

It was however cloudy, which Jose put at 50% chance to see the birds. Fortunately, we lucky and see lots of the birds from afar. Unfortunately, we’re so far away that most of our cameras can’t zoom in far enough to get any great pictures. I end up getting a few reasonably not-too-fuzzy ones by combining my camera with Jose’s binoculars. Arizona tries to do the same, but she has a full size SLR so it’s a bit. Not a digital SLR, mind you – an SLR that uses film. This isn’t because she’s a borderline hipster who thinks film is cool, this is because she hasn’t gotten around to investing in a $90 point-and-shoot from Wal-Mart that would run circles around what she has. When not snapping judiciously few pictures with her film SLR, she took photos using an old Blackberry. I have an old Blackberry, and the picture quality is almost better when you don’t take a picture.

This was the last day of our adventures, so after watching the birds for a bit, we went back to the lodge for breakfast and to pack up. The rest of the day was essentially traveling back to Cusco, with a quick stop at an animal sanctuary run by a farmer. He was rehabilitating a number of animals – a macaw, a baby monkey, a pig, a sloth, an anteater, a cayman… you name it. And true to evil monkey form, the youngster stole part of my camera’s eyepiece after I dropped it. Fortunately Jose was able to get it back for me. Monica later made a good point – it’s hard to determine if the farmer’s story was truth about where these animals came from… there’s a clear risk that he was doing it only to gather donations. Hopefully Jose steered us correctly though.

When we arrived back at Cusco, I decided to move closer to town and try out The Point, a party hostel that Monica was staying at and was recommending I try. It seemed okay enough, so I booked a room and moved my stored bag over from Mama Simona. That night, I went to bed a bit early and got a good night’s rest. Perhaps a party hostel during the off-season is doable after all.

Wednesday, November 6^th, 2013

I got up bright and early this morning, ready to partake of the awesome breakfast that would no doubt be awaiting me. Unfortunately, the awesome breakfast consisted of bread + butter and some coffee. All the more reason to go walk around I suppose.

There was a small travel agency connected to the hostel, so I went there and got some prices for day trips that could be interesting. It looks like the Cusco government has conveniently lumped the entrance fee for many of the prime attractions together into a single tourist ticket, you know – for our convenience… not as a con to try and get us to pay more in ticket fees than we would have done normally. So I walked over to the Cusco government office to pick this tourist trap ticket up, and then hopped into a few museums that use the ticket to try and get my money’s worth.

I also booked a city tour in the afternoon. Normally, I would think that a city tour would take you around the city, but apparently this city tour (which was extremely common) took us to sights near the city that you need transportation to get to. In retrospect, I was happy that this is what it did, since Cusco itself is a very walkable city. I just think they could have named it a bit more aptly.

It wasn’t long before the sites started all looking the same. We learned how the Incas shaped the stones for their important buildings perfectly so that they were mortarless – in fact, the Inca structures generally withstood the earthquakes whereas the Spanish mortarful structures would crumble. Because of this, the Spaniards reused as many Incan walls as possible as they “converted” the existing buildings into their own churches and government facilities.

We learned that at each of the Incan sites, there were trapezoidal openings created that would house the mummies of previous rulers and other important figures when a particularly important ceremony was to be performed there. Often, there would be three openings in a wall where religious functions were held - these three holes were for the Incan trilogy of the puma, the condor, and the serpent, which represented the three levels of existence or something like that. And we learned about the Inca Trails and the defense locations that the Incas built. The Inca Trails were roadways built of flagstones that the Incans had built all around their empire – some of these roadways are still in existence or have been rebuilt. It seems that many were destroyed as locals started walking horses and mules on them, which essentially destroyed them just like the large coal trucks used to quickly make mincemeat of all freshly paved roads in Eastern Kentucky where I grew up.

There were only a few other English-speakers on this tour, the rest were all Peruvians who came to Cusco on their own vacations. The other two English-speakers were also both American and we started to hang out a bit together for most of the trip. One of them was Akash, a slightly older Indian psychiatrist from Los Angeles who has a bit of a travel bug. His wife graciously allows him to travel a few weeks a year on his own to various countries and he picks up some CME credits along the way – that’s some nice multi-tasking. After the trip, Akash and I grabbed a coffee and dessert to pass an hour by and just talk – it was a wonderful conversation, and I hope I’m fortunate enough to bump into others and bounce ideas and thoughts during the rest of my trip.

When I got back to the hostel, it was happy hour so I ordered a few pisco sours. I still hadn’t had a proper meal yet, and nothing on the hostel’s menu was appetizing. Unfortunately, the pisco sours gave me quite the stomach ache, so I figured I’d better get to bed.

Unfortunately, the party hostel lived up to its billing this evening and there was loud dance music until 4am. I ended up getting up numerous times to throw up and or use the toilet in the more normal capacity. It was a very rough night and I was ready for it to be over.

Thursday, November 7^th, 2013

I was obviously feeling pretty crappy this morning, but I had already booked and paid for a full day tour of the Sacred Valley. I had heard from others that this was not to be missed. At the end of the day, I disagreed. We went to a couple of ruins that were a few hours away from Cusco – Pisac and Ollantaytambo. They were neat, but I didn’t feel like I walked away knowing any more than I already did, so it was a bit of a bust in my book. I left disappointed that I had delayed the rest of my trip two more days. On the plus side, the tour guide was really cute. On the minus side, I still felt sick the entire day, but fortunately this did not require frequent bathroom breaks. This was especially a good thing, since the toilets at Ollantaytambo were full hole-in-the-ground squatter style, the first I had encompassed in my trip, amazingly enough.

When I got back to Cusco at about 7:30pm, I asked the tour agency about taking an overnight trip to Arequipa. Suddenly they gave me different prices than they had the night before and couldn’t confirm if there were any buses still left this evening. This ticked me off, so I got my bags and grabbed a taxi to go straight to the bus station myself. I got lucky. The last bus was supposed to depart 5 minutes after I got there, so I booked a full-recline seat and got settled in. Of course, the bus didn’t end up leaving for another 45 minutes, but that’s kinda par for the course at this point.

I had an interesting conversation with the taxi driver who took me from the hostel to the bus station – apparently, he spent a month last year in the US with some friends and a cousin. He flew into Laramie, Wyoming and spent a week or so there and absolutely loved how friendly everyone was. Then it took him 7 days of bus travel to get to Newark, New Jersey where his cousin lives. 7 days. Golly gee, our public transportation system really sucks. He didn’t like the east coast as much, even though there were tons of people everywhere who spoke Spanish. People just weren’t nearly as friendly.

Friday, November 8^th, 2013

The night in the bus wasn’t as horrible as with previous overnight bus rides, so I wasn’t too groggy when we pulled into the bus station early this morning. I had spent some time on hostelworld.com prior and decided to give a hostel called Marlon’s Place a shot, so a quick cab ride later and I was there.

Since the sleep wasn’t the greatest either, I went ahead and went to sleep for a few hours. Somewhere around noon, I gathered a small bag together and went wandering around the city. It turned out that Marlon’s Place wasn’t exactly near the city centre, so it was a bit of a hike, but nothing too unsafe.

This city surprised me with how beautiful it is. A lot of the buildings are built from a local white volcanic rock called sillar, and this gives it a very vibrant look and feel. Even so, the architecture around the town square (Plaza de Armas) could have come straight from Seville. It was really quite charming. I also walked by a KFC and Pizza Hut and almost caved. But wandering was a nice brainless task to do today.

Tidbits

1.       There are four races within Peru: European, Indigenous, Afro-Peruvian, and Asian. And then there are the mixes. Not surprisingly, there is a massive educational and economic gap between European and Indigenous. I heard from one person that racism is still very strong, and I heard from another that it has more or less gone away in the past 10 years.

2.       It occurs to me that we would basically have the same split within the US as well, except that our Indigenous population is shockingly small compared to in Latin America. So as I’ve learned about the atrocities that the Spaniards committed against the Indigenous populations (raping, pillaging, stealing, befriending and deceiving, you name it), I think it goes without saying that our forefathers in the US must have done far worse to almost eradicate the indigenous population.

3.       Weather in altitudes is a funny thing. It’s hot when the sun is out, but as soon as clouds show up, it gets really cold. It’s strange seeing someone wear a tank top + shorts walking side-by-side with someone in a sweatshirt and winter hat.

4.       I mentioned to Alfredo that in the US, when we don’t know a word in Spanish, our habit is to add an “-o” to the end of the English word and hope it works out. He shared that they do the same for English by adding a “-tion”.

5.       High altitude makes me have to pee a lot. I just thought you might want to know that.