Peru to Bolivia and enter the A dogg.

The previous post saw me being pretty damn harsh on Peru after a series of misfortunes cast us into a bit of a funk. Luckily, Jesus/Allah/L Ron Hubbard took pity on us with one of the assorted deities casting their benevolent gaze upon us ensuring the past few weeks have gone as smoothly as a George Clooney one liner. Things started to take a turn for the better after we left Arequipa for a 2 day tour of the Colca Canyon, a place billed as the deepest canyon in the world. Indeed this canyon is so deep it apparently makes the ‘Grand Canyon’ appear more like a ‘mediocre crevice’ when compared.

Waking up at ridiculous O’clock we hopped onto our tour bus and were quickly whisked away from the city towards a series of stunning locations. Much of this stunning scenery was somewhat lost on me, however, as the repeated sight of alpacas and llamas in their native climbs sent me into an apoplexy of photo taking. Ignoring much of the dramatic landscape I instead chose to harass the huge numbers of these ridiculously cute animals that dotted our route. Aside from this, our journey also involved a stopover at the chilly heights of 4800m where we observed a multitude of small rock stacks, created by locals as good luck charms. The first day thus concluded, with ended up hitting up yet another thermal bath, bathing in the hot water whilst watching over yet another stunning sunset.

Pretty darn cute.

The next day, again arising at what seemed like the witching hour, we set off for the canyon proper and a viewpoint known as ‘cruz del condor,’ a point in the canyon which, as the name suggests, condors can be viewed. Paul and I were initially a bit skeptical about condor spotting as we have no interest in our feathered friends whatsoever, but arriving at the canyon itself it was hard not to get excited about glimpsing them as in flight they are undeniably majestic, and ridiculously huge, creatures. The canyon itself was also ridiculously big, so big in fact that my limited adjectival grasp is insufficient to properly encapsulate it. It was just fucking big.

Stunning terracing in the Colca Canyon.

Leaving the canyon, after a brief detour where we had eagles stand on our heads, we grabbed a night bus to the most touristy place we’ve visited so far: Cusco. Arriving knackered on a fairly dismal day at around 6am we were initially unimpressed with the city, luckily, after a few hours nap in our lovely hostel this unfavourable impression was quickly banished, with us finding Cusco to be a beautiful place with excellent food and history seemingly dripping from every Inca stone lined street.

Incan brickwork in Cusco.

This was good news indeed as we were due to stay in the city for 6 days, the longest time we have spent anywhere besides Quito. These days we crammed in a hell of a lot, stuffing history during the day and alcohol during the night. We were also lucky in that our hostel seemed to be mostly peopled by nice aussies with whom we partaked in our previously mentioned activities. Amongst the historic highlights was a plethora of Inca sites liberally sprinkled inside and outside the city, with the stunning, jagged walls of Sachsaywaman and the dramatic terracing of Ollyantambo being particularly impressive testament to their craftsmanship.

Incan ruins of Ollytaytambo.

Unfortunately my enthusiasm was slightly dampened after i developed a bad cold, caught off Paul, on the third day. All would have been ok had I not made the major error of taking some San Pedro, a legal, natural cactus extract that is supposed to give a mild, day long high. After mixing the green powder with some orange juice and downing the vile concoction Paul, Vinnie (one of the Aussies) and I set off for the Temple of the Moon, not actually a temple but essentially a large rock set amidst a wonderfully idyllic valley outside of Cusco.

Whilst Vinnie and Paul were having a lovely time wondering around admiring nature I spent much of the next 4 hours seeing dinosaurs in clouds whilst feeling queasy, eventually curling up into the foetal position and falling asleep. Waking up sunburnt (we were at about 4000m) we walked back into Cusco where I was to greet my uni buddy Arthur. What was to be a wonderful reunion was spoilt slightly by the fact I felt rough as, with me wanting to get as horizontal and asleep as quickly as possible.

Our reunion with Arthur was related to the fact we were due to go on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu together, a plan sadly derailed by the mass flooding that hit the area in January leaving access to the site impossible. Unfortunately for us we’d already paid a non refundable deposit for our trip and so we were given the stark option of either losing $175 or paying an extra $175 to go on an alternative trek. Not wanting to lose money we chose the latter option and a couple of days later we were clambered onto another bus bound for the Lares Valley, a site deep in the Andes. Thankfully, unspecified deity once again took pity on us and the trek was actually pretty good, with our all anglo-phonic group (the first one we’ve encountered) and the scenery both being lovely. Amongst the landscapes snow-capped peaks and mountain lakes were particularly impressive, seemingly jostling each other in our vision in a contest to be the most photogenic.

4,500m in the Lares Valley.

After four days of trekking we finished the hike in yet another thermal bath before returning to Cusco, a journey made slightly irritating by the driver’s decision to show the abysmal film 2012 in Spanish. Paul and I have now seen this celluloid lobotomy about six times on various buses, it being a particular favourite amongst South Americans due to the fact that the flimsy plot is predicated on the Mayan calendar.

In Cusco Paul and I immediately jumped on a bus bound for Bolivia and Lake Titicaca. We had to leave Arthur behind as he had his camera pick-pocketed just before we set off for Lares and he had to sort out his insurance claim. A process made ridiculous by Peruvian bureaucracy, with Arthur yo-yoing between tourist police and bank, with the Peruvian government enforcing a bizarre rule where you have to pay tax at the (closed) bank for any report to be made.

Whilst Arthur was dealing with his kafka nightmare Paul and I arrived in Bolivia with no hassle at all. Our first stop was Copacabana, a pleasant town which overlooks Lake Titicaca. First impressions were very favourable when we discovered just how nuts cheap Bolivia can be, with our hotel costing $2 each and decent food even less. The day after arrival we set off into the vast expanse of Lake Titicaca on the slowest boat in the world bound for the Isla del Sol, an island used extensively by the Incans as the site played an important part in their cosmology. Arriving at the Isla del Sol we spent four hours trekking the length of the island amongst scenery reminiscent of Greek trips. Only unlike Greece it was fairly tiring due to the fact we were above 4000m, also, unlike in Greece, our voyage back was made more spectacular by first sailing into a thunder/hail storm at what seemed like 1mph.

High above Copacabana and Lake Titicaca.

Spending another night in Copacabana we met up again with Arthur the next morning, a not entirely happy meeting as Arthur had another tale of woe featuring Peruvian beauracracy. Arthur had been doing earthquake relief in Peru for 6 weeks but it turned out the authorities had only stamped his visa for 15(!) days, meaning he had to borrow $50 from another traveller in order to get out the country.

Sympathising away we immediately hustled the poor guy onto a bus bound for the highest capital in the world, La Paz. La Paz lies at over 3800m and is dramatically nestled at the base of a bowl, with houses ascending vertiginously all around the surrounding area. Expecting a bit of a shit city we were again pleasantly surprised to find a compact, colourful and bustling city, the entire centre of which is seemingly devoted to a mad cheap market where anything and everything is for sale, often at the same store. Wondering round the market we picked up loads of bargains, including some dope Bolivian football shirts, before retiring to the various excellent restaurants which are silly cheap. I got so excited to see curry on the menu that I proceeded to eat it three days in a row at three different places, heady times indeed.

La Paz is buzzing.

We were also lucky enough to be in La Paz during St Patrick’s Day, a day which was unsurprisingly messy, involving copious amounts of drinking at an infamous Irish run hostel called the Wild Rover. Whilst in la Paz Paul also had an enjoyable day mountain biking down the ‘world’s most dangerous road,’ an experience that Arthur and I couldn’t afford, with my finances in particular running perilously close to that of ‘Dickensian pauper.’

World´s most dangerous road innit.

From La Paz we continued on to the mining town of Potosi, the highest, and perhaps most tragic, city in the world. At almost 4100m the town is dominated by the towering form of Cerro Rico, a mountain that once possessed so much silver that in the 17th century the inhospitable are became a boom town, with Potosi quickly becoming the largest city in South America, with the town at its peak supporting a population of 160,000 people and a number of impressive colonial buildings. The tragedy relates to the fact that the indigenous miners who ensured Potosi’s splendour worked in near slave conditions, with Cerro Rico having had up to 8 million deaths attributed to it. The tragedy still continues today with workers as young as 12 still toiling away inside Cerro Rico’s bowels.

Partly due to its tragic history Cerro Rico has today also become somewhat of a tourist attraction, with numerous tour companies offering tours inside its depths. We decided to take the plunge into the mines, though not without some reservations on my part regarding potential exploitation related to my conception of poverty tourism.
Nevertheless we booked a tour and ventured into the mine after buying coca leaves, foul cigarettes and drinks as gifts for the miners. Scrabbling around inside was unsurprisingly unpleasant if interesting and half way through we bumped into some ridiculously young-looking miners, their eyes glazed and unfocused, no doubt due to the fact they each had a large wad of coca leaf inside their mouths.

Exiting the mine after occasionally having to crawl through small gaps our guide proceeded prepare and set off dynamite which we had bought at the miner’s market. This was pretty jokes with us each holding the dynamite next to our wangs before the guide scurried off to place it a safe distance away from us. Unsurprisingly what followed was a large bang that sounded a lot like dynamite going off.

Leaving Potosi we arrived in our current destination the lovely, whitewashed city of Sucre, a Unesco world heritage site since 1991. Here we have eaten loads more delicious food and visited a bunch of well preserved dinosaur footprints accompanied by guide who kept walking backwards slowly, holding a tiny umbrella and repeating to us the words ‘Imagine every step we go back 68 million years in history’ in an English accent. He was brilliant. Tomorrow we’re off to the salt flats before moving on to Chile. Fingers crossed that the flying spaghetti monster continues to look favourably on us.

Dinosaur park, Sucre. RAWR!

Peru

If I were to write this post a week or so a go I would likely have written a harsh diatribe against Peru, undoubtably describing it as one of the worst countries I have ever visited. Such an attitude stemmed from the fact that, within the first 5 days of us being in Peru, more things conspired to go wrong than the combined prior 6 weeks of our trip. The difficulties began before we’d even received our immigration stamp, with us immediately being accosted by a dodgy taxi driver the moment we took our first steps over the Peru/Ecuador border. This driver was the only one about and seemed pleasant enough as he led us to his unmarked piece of crap taxi. Taking our seats in the back we were joined by another peruvian guy who jumped into the front seat, claiming that his role was to sort out all the security checks and immigration hassles. The Peru – Ecuador border is actually a total bastard, with disputes today ensuring that the two immigration offices are about 8 km apart. We thought this a little dodgy but left anyway for the Peruvian office, whereupon the drivers immediately asked for a $5 dollar bribe so we could skip to the front of the queue. This formality over we also found we had to pay another $2 bribe, our drivers having thoughtfully managed to illegally park for the 5 minutes it required to sort our transaction. Pulling off again the two douchebags suddenly decided that it was going to cost us $20 dollars to take us to the nearby city of Tumbes, a journey that should have cost half that amount. After a huge amount of arguing Paul managed to barter it down to $15, an argument that had to be repeated when they asked for petrol money when they pulled into a petrol station.

Arriving in Tumbes, a blisteringly hot and architecturally gaudy city with nothing to recommend it, we got into one final argument as our drivers refusing to accept dollars, despite an earlier agreement. Eventually the stand-off resulting in me having to go to a flashpoint to get out some Peruvian currency. This was not the start to Peru we were hoping for.

 

Leaving Tumbes early next morning we travelled to the beach resort and surfing destination of Mancora. Hoping for a relaxed small town like Taganga in Colombia we were instead dumped in a sprawling, tacky place whose huge amounts of building work made it resemble more a bombed out Kosovo than a tranquil haven. Luckily our hostel was a kilometer up the road from the town in a relatively secluded location by the beach, with us pulling up in our shanky rickshaw to a sign which stated ‘welcome to paradise’ (there’s that phrase again). The people in our hostel were all pretty much surfer/ traveller clichés, with Bob Marley and Jack Johnson on constant repeat, but were on the whole pretty nice. The beach itself was also pretty spectacular, though not quite as nice as the ones I’ve visited in Asia it did have some of the best sunsets I have ever encountered. The couple of days we spent in Mancora we didn’t do a huge amount, just splashing around in the ocean, reading, eating and drinking, all fairly nice but almost undermined by the multitudes of mosquitoes determined to become obese on our tender western flesh. 

One flat beach - Mancora

Taking our leave after a morning body boarding on the worlds most scratchy body boards we left for Piura, four or so hours South. This town was pretty much nothing but a stop off point and, apart from playing chess against some locals in one of the parks (I got stomped), nothing of note really happened. Jumping on another four-hour bus the following morning we headed to perhaps the shittest place in the world: Chiclayo. We came not for the town but for the nearby pre Inca site of Tucumbe, also known as the valley of the pyramids.

Valley of the Pyramids, Túcume

Arriving in Chiclayo we hopped in a cab to be told by our taxi driver that the hostel we wanted had closed (probably a lie) and he took us to different one that was overpriced. Baulking at the price we got him to take us to another, cheaper one, our room coming with the added bonus of dozens of insects buzzing around. Steeled by our cheapness we each armed ourselves with one of my flip-flops and commenced committing insect genocide before sleeping.

 

The following morning we set off to get to Tucume, a process which proved tricky as no one seemed to know where the collectivos (basically rammed, sketchy vans) to the site went from. Eventually we hailed a cab in order to get to the collectivo area, a rather stupid procedure as the driver didn’t know where they went either. Whilst we were trying to solve this conundrum a passing local decided to add to the good times by reaching through my open window and snatching my wallet from my lap. I reacted as any sane person would be shouting ”cheeky fucker” before getting out the cab to run after him. Unfortunately for me he had a 30m lead and after a chase which wasn’t quite up to Jason Bourne’s standards he turned a corner and disappeared, taking my wallet with him. Luckily it only had $30 in it and no cards but I was pretty pissed off as we finally managed to find the place for the collectivos to Tucume. Boarding one I spent the next forty minutes feeling pissed off whilst being sandwiched between two ridiculously fat Peruvians until we finally polled up to the site.

 

The site itself was actually pretty interesting and beautiful, the centre point being a mountain called “purgatory mountain.” Around this a number of huge adobe brick temples set in desert were clustered and in turn countless acres of lush green rice fields in surrounding them. Walking round the site followed by an ascent of the mountain saw my black mood being lifted, with the view from near the peak being pretty special. This brief high proved, however, to be a cruel trick played by fate as at the exit of the site I discovered that I had dropped my treasured mp3 player somewhere on purgatory mountain. This was a worse disaster than losing my wallet as my mp3 player is the thing which has shielded my ears against the aural crimes of the repetitive South American music blasted out in every bus and the banality of Jack Johnson, Coldplay etc blasted out in various hostels.

 

Returning to our insect infested hole of a room we went to sleep only to wake the next morning with stomach cramps, probably caused by eating some dodgy ceviche the day before. Ceviche itself is the national dish, supposedly consisting of it does of mostly raw seafood flavoured with lime and red onion. I say supposedly as in reality it normally tastes of lime flavoured food poisoning.

 

The final kick in the balls Shitlayo gave us was when we thought we were home and dry, trying to leave. The bus system in Peru us pretty stupid due to the fact that instead of having a central bus terminal where all companies go from Peru’s system sees every company run their own, meaning checking bus times involves mini hikes between terminals. Consequently this meant we had to trudge around for ages trying to find a bus which went to Trujillo, our next destination. After a couple of hours of looking and waiting we finally found one and left the city, vowing never to return.

 

Although nominally headed for Trujillo our guidebook informed us that most people stay in the quiet ex fishing village of Huanchaco, 15 minutes by cab from the city. Once again hoping for a quiet, tranquil stop, Huanchacho actually turned out to be another sprawling and charmless town which Peru tends to specialise in, this time with the added feature of a decent beach. Thankfully our hostel was actually very nice with a number of cool people in it and decent restaurants nearby. Thus again our mood began to improve and thankfully this time stayed fairly buoyant.

 

Ornate windows, Trujillo.

Our reason for visiting the area was due mainly to the historic sites in the vicinity and we set off for the first of these, Chan Chan, the following morning with a couple of nice Americans we met during breakfast. Chan Chan was the capital city of the pre-inca Chimu culture who began building work on the city around AD 700, with the remains of the huge site today scattered around the area between Trujillo and Huanchaco in varying states repair. Starting off at the large main complex we found an evocative place in the midst of the desert that had a number of beautiful reliefs and a small but picturesque lake in its centre. Following this we grabbed taxis to two other temples, (known as huacas) that were interesting though somewhat underwhelming compared to the grand splendour of the main complex.

 

Chan Chan city complex of the indigenous Chumi.

The following day we hit up another couple of huacas, the huaca del sol and huaca de la luna on the far side of Trujillo. Though it took us an obscenely long time to travel the 25k to get there (about two and a half hours) they were thankfully worth it, with the huaca del sol in particular being wonderfully preserved. Having had our fill of the area’s history we spent the following day lazing on the beach before exploring Trujillo, another average town raised from mediocrity by its attractive colonial centre. At Trujillo I also picked up a new mp3 player, a piece of crap ipod mini ripoff called simply the ‘reproductor mp3.’

 

Huaca de la Luna, Huanchaco.

Huaca Pullaca, down town Lima.

Leaving Trujillo on a night bus we ventured to Lima, arriving early hours at our plush hostel in the Miraflores suburb of the city. Many other travellers are pretty harsh on the city, describing it in no uncertain terms as a hectic, polluted dive which they could not wait to leave. Our own view is that this description is a little harsh, sure, plenty of the city matches this description but there are a few nice nooks and crannies and points of interest. During the 3 days we spent there we hit up another huaca, had a tour of the world’s most boring house, went round the world’s most boring museum but were thankfully saved from complete boredom by an interesting Italian art gallery. Frustratingly, the other major museums were either closed or we weren`t allowed in due to not carrying any ID,  we spent our spare time buying pirate DVDs and a racist chess set. The nights we spent drinking at our hostel with some guys we met in Mancora and getting too plastered to leave. Go us. To complete the excitement one night our sleep was also rudely interrupted by one of our dorm mates who was too hammered to find the toilet and decided to just take a piss on the floor, lovely stuff.

 

La Iglesia de San Francisco, Lima - complete with riot van.

Leaving Lima on a plush bus, replete with hot meals and waiter service, we continued to Nasca, home of the famous lines. Nasca was a fairly pleasant town and the lines themselves were extremely interesting despite us only being able to view a couple from a metal tower (to see them all you need to fly over them, we are too cheap for that.) After viewing the lines we whiled away the rest of the day waiting for our night bus walking around the outskirts, viewing more ruins, a football game and some impressively built Inca aqueducts.

Nazca Lines, Peru - Pictured: Figure of a Tree.

What would have been a pretty good day though was almost ruined by the worst meal I have eaten since pig knuckle soup in the Philippines: fried seafood. What I thought was going to be like calamari actually turned out to be overpriced sadness on a plate, rubbish.

Boarding another night bus, this time the cheapest we could find, coming as it did with the added benefit of constant shit smells, we left for our current destination, Arequipa. Here we have had a nice time spending a couple of good days touring the colca canyon, the deepest canyon in the world. I’ll write about this on the next post as writing so much is making me lose to the will to live. Adios.