An Unexpected Peruvian Experience

Mishaps Abound

It started the first day I arrived in Peru. Tracie and I had a joyful reunion at the airport where we promptly got ripped off by our overly aggressive taxi driver. After some confusion as to when Pam was supposed to meet us, we decided she would be arriving at midnight to our hotel, and we would have a long awaited reunion and go gallavanting into piranha and anaconda infested waters the next day in the Amazon to commence our Peruvian adventure.

Alas, it's about 2am, and we hear the elevator door open onto our floor. Tracie jumps out of bed and runs to the door to greet Pam, but unfortunately the footsteps go right past our door. Now it's 3am, and we are extremely worried. Our hotel is not in such a great area of town, and aside from wondering why it's taking her this long to get here, our imaginations run wild with multiple disastrous scenarios. Finally, after a slew of messaging to different concerned parties, we find out that Pam has completely gotten the dates wrong and will not be arriving into Lima until the next day! This is quite hilarious, with Pam being the total Type-A banker girl who was in fact the one who called the airline to reconfirm our flights! This started off our wacky journey, as our dear friend Pam then missed the next flight out of the Amazon to Cusco (but to her credit it was the fault of our tour agency). From there, we missed our tour to the Sacred Valley because there was a strike in Cusco, and we dodged roadblocks, bonfires, and rock-wielding locals on the way to the airport in Puno while trying to avoid the start of yet another strike. Finally, I almost missed my flight home as the afternoon flight from Arequipa was cancelled and I had to finagle my way onto a fully booked flight to Lima, where a 3 hour long line awaited me at the check-in counter for a flight I had to catch in 90 minutes. Whew! After all that I am sure glad to be home!!!

Peru: A Panoramic Paradise

One of my favorite lines from the movie Clueless was when Cher describes someone as "Full of Monet" - all nice from afar but when you get too close it's not all that. Apply that to a lot of Peru - the ruins of Machu Picchu, the Colca Canyon, even the great Peruvian condor - from afar it's all very beautiful, but once you head closer, and you see brick by brick, it's what it is - just a bunch of bricks. Ho hum. Perhaps I am ungrateful for all the amazing science and technology credited to the Incas, of aligning things in such a perfect way with the summer and winter solstices, of creating places that could withstand centuries of earthquakes. But I just see it as appreciating a Monet from the non-artist's perspective - the use of brush strokes and oils and all that jazz is really beyond me, but looking at it from afar, it's so pretty I could look at it all day. So with this mentality, instead of climbing all over the ruins, Tracie Pam and I just sat at the top of Machu Picchu and just fixed our gaze to the ruins, chatted, bonded, took catnaps, and headed back to a lower altitude. Although Machu Picchu may be the top tourist destination in Peru, our visit to Arequipa and the Colca Canyon ranked at the top of our list of favorite places and sights. The weather was beautiful, and for once I wasn't suffering bouts of altitude sickness, the people were so friendly, and the village (Chivay) was absolutely quaint and pleasant. If you are headed to Peru, I recommend you put Arequipa at the end of your visit, it makes for the perfect ending!

Freaky Jesus Statues

One thing that pervaded our entire trip was the numerous freaky religious statues and shrines everywhere. They were made of this porcelain material, and they were dressed in blood-red velvet costumes with these gold crowns (I guess they were supposed to be like halos or something?) coming out of their heads. SO FREAKY! The scariest out of all of them was the statue we saw in Cusco's main cathedral, it was a shrine to what they call something like "Jesus of the Earthquake" and most Peruvians pray to this Jesus because apparently when there were all these earthquakes, the Peruvians took that Jesus into the local square and the earthquakes stopped. Regardless of the accuracy of that legend, one thing is certain: this Jesus is FREAKY. It's a porcelain-type of Jesus nailed to the cross, but his whole body is charred and his mouth is gaping wide open, as if he had been burned alive! It's like one of those images in a horror movie that gets embedded into your brain and never leaves, and reappears in your nightmares over and over again! Even at the religious parades, people dress up in really freaky looking costumes. I have no idea what they mean, but one of these scary guys was on our train from Machu Picchu to Cusco, and he had a dead baby llama with him and was making this dead baby llama give kisses to women on the train! GROSS.

Cute Kids, Bad Tourism

Another thing covers the streets of Peru's cities - kids. And lots of them. This posed a potentially dangerous situation for our friend Tracie, who for some reason happened to be a kid magnet. Kids would come up crying to her, throw balls at her, and just do anything to ruin her day. But wouldn't you know, a change came over her towards the end of the trip? She actually mentioned that some kids were cute! Despite being completely adorable, sadly enough, kids were being exploited as tourist traps, dressed up in traditional clothes and asking tourists for money to take a picture of them. It was really sad seeing these kids being dragged along to these tourist markets, when they should have been in school. A classic picture of this exploitation was in a postcard I found in Arequipa promoting Lake Titicaca. It was such a classic - so funny yet so poignant. Take a look for yourself!

Back Home

It feels good to be back home in New York. I am still getting used to life back home, heck it's only been a few days, and I'm eagerly looking forward to when my stomache does not react violently to the richness of the food here. I have a week here to study for upcoming grad school exams and to sufficiently deplete my savings account by paying for my first semester, and then it's off for my final trip on this whirlwind tour: a road trip with my college roommate through the West Coast and the Rocky Mountains. I'll be reporting back in a few weeks! In the meantime to my buddies in New York, give me a holler so we can meet up!

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