Relaxing in Corrico, Lima, Home.

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We've been back for around two months now and it seems as if less has happened here than happened in the average week in South America. We're in Ians' top room with a few beers, ready to engage in our final semi productive nostalgia trip. The last week and a bit was planned as a chance to relax, after the stressful 2 and a half month holiday we'd been on.

The stresses that travellers usually moan about - catching busses, missing busses, making checkout times etc were still with us, but we gave sightseeing and company stuff a miss.

We would be going down the worlds most dangerous road for the third time, but the first time in the dark, and for the first time with chickens on the bus with us. We persuaded the driver to let David fix up his ipod to the archaic speaker system, giving the other passengers a taste of Western (Real) music, as well as some western dance routines - responses were mixed. Our dancing was interrupted only to assume the safety position whenever another bus was approaching - since we were in the front two seats of the mini bus David unhooked the door but held it closed and Ian held onto David, ready to make our bid for safety in the bus got too close to the edge.

We arrived and headed for the same hotel we’d stayed in last time with spectacular views up the valley to Huyana Potosi 5000m above us. We were greeted by the large hen pecked German proprietor and is slightly less large Bolivian wife with serious small person syndrome originally wanted to charge us twice the amount we’d paid the time before (On the grounds the hotel was practically full) and after bit of haggling we settled on paying the same for a bigger room with en suite and cable TV.

Starting as we meant to go on we headed for dinner and ate until we couldn’t move, waited until we could move, and headed for a few rounds of pool with a pleasant Irish couple. We quickly built up a routine - All you can eat breakfast (Waffles and pancakes inc.) followed by move to Hammocks to read, interrupted by the odd dip in the pool, until 4 when the Sauna opened. Move to the Sauna. Move to the pool. Cool Down. Shower off, all you can eat dinner (In which David was able to hone his recently acquired chopstick skills), veranda for drinks or the lounge to sample the delights of a 1970’s media archive, mainly Monty Python.

Several times we planned to visit some local waterfalls/ swimming holes, but it always seemed like a better idea for tomorrow.

On day three a girl walked in on the beautifully acted film, the Odessa File, and, surprisingly still being there 10 minutes later when it finished we got chatting and pretty much spent the rest of the week as a three.

One evening we had a power cut and headed into town to have a fondue. Amongst Leahs’ other skills - being half Spanish - her Spanish was even better than ours, allowing us to leave it to her to explain to the already slightly peeved proprietor (We kept demanding more food) that our fondue had set his table on fire, and that it wasn’t our fault.

A local legend told of a Swiss couple in self imposed exile wo made fantastic ice cream, so having set fire to one restaurant we decided to find them for pudding. We eventually found their little chalet down an obscure jungle track on the mountainside, but the Swiss were fast asleep and in no mood to give us ice cream so we turned around and trekked back to the hotel to have a few bottles of wine for afters instead.

On Leahs’ last day we decided to have a barbeque. We had decided it was inefficient to have separate rooms so the day before Leah had checked out and spent the night in our room. The proprietors wife was suspicious and spent most of the day rather unsubtly following us around and hiding behind bushes trying to overhear some incriminating evidence. Given that she didn’t speak Spanish this was never likely to be a particularly successful strategy and David took to trying to follow her as she followed Ian and Leah, from which David got a lot of amusement, she rather less. Our week long attempts to make her laugh redoubled but to little effect.

Leah and David headed into town to pick up the food for Barbie while Ian adopted his man with fire posture and attempted to kick-start the beast into life. We picked the butchers with what seemed like the least flies and told him to cut us up a cow, and via the Swiss ice cream refuge headed back up to the hotel for our final lunch with Leah before she headed north, with plans to rendezvous in Lima.

We checked out the next morning having spent around £30 on our week in luxury, and finaly raised a chuckle from the Bolivian wife with our attempt to teach her to dance like Michael Jackson in the hotel foyer. For our trip back up “The Road” we managed to time it to coincide with our first electrical storm of the trip. It started about halfway up leaving the driver to jump out and pull a tarpaulin over the bus as a sort of waterproof cover. Again the sight of lightning as you ascend a 6000m valley is something hard to describe - suffice to say we were suitably impressed to the extent we stopped dancing and just stared. The weather cleared for the second half but the mud cutaway into the hillside was still sodden and vehicles passing acquired an even greater intensity. In any case we made it alive and spent a couple of nights in La Paz doing a final business round up and buying masses of souvenirs and a sack which we labelled Swag to hold it all.

The bus trip to Lima was the longest yet (Pausing in Cococabana and failing for the final time to find the fisherman who owed us 200 Bolivianos) and we shared it with a group of Argentine missionaries on their way to Ecuador. At about 7 in the morning, two days before we were due to fly out I woke up with a painfully dry throat to my first view of the Pacific Ocean over an endless sandy beach.

A mere 9 hours later and we were in Lima and set ourselves up in the same hostel Ian had stayed in during his Summer trip to Peru the year before (They had a photo of him on the wall which he was particularly pleased with). On our first day we took a fairly comprehensive tour of Lima, repeating the Mendoza routine of picnicking with coke and cake in public parks and eventually returned to Pizza Hut in repetition of our final meal before leaving the U.K. We spent the evening on the cliffs above Miraflores - the upmarket part of Lima where we were staying, took a walk along the beach at the base where the last determined surfers had just finished their sport and sat for a while looking out at the Pacific.

On our final day we returned to Ians’ favourite restaurant from his last visit to Lima, had our last conversation in Spanish and caught a taxi to the airport. Leah had been ill in La Paz, delaying her arrival in Lima, and our rendevous until we were queing up for passport control. We sat around catching up for a while, boarded the plane, renegotiated our tickets so the three of us could sit together and began to sample the airline wine list, until they said we’d sampled enough. (I’d managed to get an eye infection which had caused my eyes to go extremely bloodshot - they seemed to attribute this to alcholol consumption)

We were seperated at Madrid where we’d missed our connection to the U.K. and were put on different forwarding flights. Ian and I being left behind pursuaded Iberia to give us free beer and sandwiches, sat the wait out with the business crowd returning from meetings in Madrid and arrived back after a fairly eventless flight. Ians' girlfriend and Mother were there to meet us, we had a pub and real beer to welcome us back and sperated for the first time in three months to get on with our lives. - David and Ian

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Photos

Ian readng
On the edge of the world.

Wha?
David Provides Riveting Company

Comments

[David's Dad]

Well done for completing the blog