Advertisement
Published: December 23rd 2008
Well, if the last blog finished off with some trepidation, it was a case of first impressions not being right at all!
Yes, our first couple of days in Peru were not so impressive. We basically came down from the mountains into the scrub and desert. It was like someone had flicked a switch at the border between wealth (relatively speaking) and poverty. The houses were really like little run down shacks. There was litter everywhere (big plastic bag issue in this country) along the side of the road, even well into the desert where it seems there was noone around to litter. Perhaps its their equivalent of a landfill? The first town we came to was pretty grim and we thanked our lucky stars we were not staying there - vultures circling above it. But Piura and Trujillo, where we did spend first two nights, were actually not bad at all closer to the centre. And in fairness, the enormous area that is desert in Northern Peru, by virtue of being desert cannot be a wealthy area, and will never look in any way salubrious Im sure. It was just a bit of a culture shock after Ecuador, which
in hindsight was a gentle intro to South America.
Having said all of that, Peru has stolen my heart in a way that Ecuador didnt (and possibly couldnt, having had New Zealand to live up to - an impossible task). We made our way to up to Huaraz in the Andes and its just beautiful here. Its still pretty poor and very rundown and ramshackly, but that all lends to Peru´s charm. The Andean villages are fantastic. The cottages are made from soft-edged, crumbly looking adobe bricks, hence are the same colour as the earth they stand on. The roofs are uneven red brick and look like they may fall in any second, as do the cottages themselves, you cant tell if they are half built, or half fallen down, or both. There are only tiny windows and generally there is one or all of the following outside - a donkey, a pig/piglets, a few cattle (for the ploughing), sheep & goats, at least three dogs and maybe a skanky cat. They may or may not paint the front of the house bright colours. Or alternatively, the local politician has done the job for them with massive "Alvaraz advances
Cheesy Much?
Me, a llama and a baby lamb. I dont know why either! Peru, NO to Communism" and the like emblazoned across the whitewashed wall. Can you imagine waking up to that at home - ´Sean Haughey ïs good for Ireland´on the front of your gaff!? Clearly the locals here dont mind as some of the slogans date back to the 1997 elections. The women all wear the traditional clothes of full colourful skirts, huge hats and generally have a hand-woven cloth filled with farm produce or a child slung across their backs. At the heart of each village, no matter how small, stands a brightly coloured Church. They´d give the Fillipinos a run for their money in the loving Jesus stakes. I make it sound like all the houses are total wrecks, but in the wealtheir areas around Cuzco and closer to towns, you´ll get two storey houses with bigger windows and even a nice wooden verandah. On some, long poles project from above the front doors with either a plastic bag or a basket hanging from the top. The bag means they sell beer, and the colour of the bag - pink, yellow or blue - denotes the flavour. A basket means its a bakery. There´s some pretty effective local advertising
Chavin carving
Apparently representing the metamorphasis from man to feline creature upon injesting San Pedro for you! And all of this is set among dramatic scenery - high craggy peaks, cultivated as far up as the eye can see with bizarre shaped ´fields´, topped with snow and ice. I just cant explain enough how amazing the mountains are. I could try, but you´d get board. Suffice to say I think I´ll never be underwhelmed by scenery like this!
From Huaraz, we visited the ancient ruins of Chavin which date back to 800 BC, and while the ruins themselves dont look massively impressive, they way that the ruins of Angkor do, its still incredibly impressive do see something still partially standing after so long, that had proper drainage systems that doubled as an acoustic mechanism that gave off a sound akin to the roar of a jaguar, which kept the locals in the valley afraid (and in their place too I imagine). It is the site of ancient religious ceremonies where they ¨transformed¨from human into feline form with the help of mescaline from the San Pedro cactus. Might give that a bash meself! Then we went for a two day ´practice´ hike in the Cordilleras Blancas - incredible mountains, stunning scenery, ah man! Have a
Barrio in Huaraz
One of the less salubrious areas I guess look at the pictures! We did the Laguna 69 Hike and day one was pretty easy, only ascending about 300m over 7km, through a huge chasm between two mountains, through a forest to the beautiful green Laguna Chinachoca (Female Lake in Quechua) and then on to our campsite in a not-to-shabby valley that we share with some cows. The altitude was now 3900m and it was bloody freezing at night. The next day we hiked 10km up to Laguna 69 at 4600m. Well, my jaysus, I thought I was going to die. It was tough, tough work, especially the last 500m up to the lagoon. I even had a wee cry to myself at one stage because I couldnt breathe (I should add I was also dying of a cold), but Edith our local guide, stayed with me, encouraged me and got me all the way to the top. Laguna 69 is this incredibly blue lake that sits in a crater surrounded by light grey scree, under a glaciated peak. It just doesnt look real! I was chuffed with myself for making it all the way up, but worried about my ability to do the Inca Trail.
Next stop
was Cuzco, via one very brief stopover in Lima (3.5 hours sleep) and the scariest bus journey yet. Imagine a crazy bus driver hurtling down switch-back mountain roads at a 100mph on a lovely sunny day. Now imagine there was no sun, just fog, and you couldnt see more than a few feet in front of you. We made the mistake of sitting in the front, to avail of the views you see. This was the view - cliff-face, nothingness, cliff-face, nothingness, cliff-face, nothingness, cliff-face, nothingness. I prefer Vietnamese chicken-driving. Then we descended into the weirdest valley Ive ever seen. It was like a huge but invisible machine in the sky had dumped mountain upon moutain of arid, ugly grey skree, as if from a mine, for miles and miles, and nothing grew on them except hardy solitary cacti. It was very alien. Yet the valley was the lushest, most fertile stretch of vivid green with loads of crops and plantations of all kinds, and little houses had stacks of huge watermelons for sale all along the roadside. Very bizarre. Eventually, even that gave way to general godforsaken nothingness and desert as we headed into the night towards Lima.
Well, Cuzco is just beautiful - a colonial town built on Inca foundations, which are in turn built on another pre-Inca civilisations ruins. Its all cobbled little streets, grand plazas with imposing cathedrals, quaint courtyards, and of course tourist tat as far as the eye can see! Its incredibly touristy and expensive for it, but the beauty well makes up for it. We pretty much took it easy as by now I had infected Simon, so we didnt do a huge amount of sight-seeing apart from one day trip to the Sacred Valley sites, which I loved, but poor Si was a bit too dazed to really get into. We visited Pisac, Ollantaytambo, Chinchero and a few other sites and it was just amazing. The Incas, despite never discovering the benefits of the wheel (I know!) were an amazing civilisation who ran a massive empire in northern South America from Quito to Cuzco, conquered and pillaged with the best of them, worshiped the sun, had incredible plumbing and experimented with crops at different altitudes. Plus they managed to haul tonnes and tonnes of stone from mountain to mountain to build high-altitude strategic military, administrative, religious, educational and agricultural settlements. How
the the altitude sickness didnt scuper the Spanish conquistadores efforts is beyond me. Unfortunately, it didnt stop them and they managed to destroy a lot of the religious symbols of worship pertaining to the Inca triology - the higher world, this world and the underworld, and the carvings of condors, pumas and serpents that represeted these etc. Nevertheless, the remaining ruins are still just incredible to look at and in some the cleansing fountains for purification still work. Of course the highlight has to be Machu Pichu, via the Inca Trail. Thank Inti the Spaniards never found that!
The Inca trail was INCREDIBLE. It was bloody hard work though, no doubt about that, and my legs are in complete flitthers now, but the pain was so worth it and in fact, it wasnt all painful! Check out the route here - http://www.perutreks.com/images/incatrail.spl. Day 1 was pretty easy, a training day they call it, through the lower levels of the Sacred Valley and the scenery is lovely, even though the guides said there wasnt much to see really. Personally, I thought it was pretty damn stunning. The food on the trek was amazing (we went with Peru Treks, cannot recommend
them enough, they were brilliant), and we got so lucky with our group, really nice people including five lads from Sligo who were great craic (and faster than some of the porters too!). We the camping was good, great equipment, nice sites although the toilets were, it has to be said, pretty fucking gank. Why people cant clean up after themselves is a mystery to me. Now I know good aim can be difficult when its just a hole in the ground, but in fairness, some of the loos were sitty-down affairs. No excuses! 500 people a day all using the same facilities - well, you can only imagine the stink! Yum. Thankfully, we were always downwind of the loos!
Day 2 was the killer. Literally, up hill for 4 hours or so from 3200m to 4200m, the highest point of the trail. I think the only way to describe what its like is if you imagine trying to walk up an downwards escalator for hours on end. Its that steep and it seems like the steps are never, ever ending. Ever! Plus it hooped down rain all day until we got to the campsite. We made it up
to Warmiwanusca (Dead Womans Pass - never a more appropriately named place) and then it was just over an hour downhill to the campsite on steep steps that had actually turned into a river - just to add to the excitement! I had managed to fully infect Simo at this stage and he was in a hoop, yet still managed to be faster than me! Im not sure what the story with the Inca´s was - they were only wee little people, but they loved jaysus huge steps! Day 3 was magic - the sun came out again and the route was much more manageable (some find day 3 hardest with lots of downhill steps. For me, uphill bad, downhill good), there were a couple of ruins to visit en route, two more smaller passes and the most incredible scenery of the entire trek, plus two Inca tunnels to go though. That day was 16km in total (the whole trail is 43km) so by the end of the day we were knackered. You´d want to see the porters though - they practically run the entire thing with all sorts of stuff strapped to their backs - camping gear, food, cooking
utensils, cookers, gas cylinders, knackered trekkers (no, not really). They are all of five foot nothing but built like brick shithouses and apparenlty having bigger hearts and lungs than we do. That explains why were were all so bollixed then!
Anyway, we got up at 4am on Day 4 so we could be first group in line at the final checkpoint, and therefore, first group up to the Sun Gate which is the high point over looking Machu Pichu and the first glimps you get of it. Well, my breath was taken away. Not only because we had legged it completely to get there, then to be faced with the steepest bastards steps yet, but because when we got there, the mist lying over the ancient settlement lifted and revealed Machu Pichu in all its glory to us. It was truely incredible! One of those moments you never forget. Its as beautiful as any photos Ive ever seen, which sounds like a weird thing to say, but sometimes you build something up in your head, and it doesnt quite live up to it. I think it might possibly be the highlight of the trip so far... We spent a
good two hours being guided through the ruins by Victor, our local guide (who isnt too fond of the ¨Crazy Spanish¨ - the conquerers that is, not modern day ones - I think!) and then wandered around ourselves for a while, petting llamas and generally being in awe of the the whole place. The ruins were in near perfect condition when discovered, apart from being overgrown, and very little was needed in the way of reconstruction to restore it to its former glory. Really, there are no words so take a gander at the photos instead! I do apologise if you can actually smell us from the photos. It had been four days with no shower, and facial wipes can only do so much!
So, its back to Cuzco for Christmas, where we plan to do the Twelve Pubs of Christmas, Cuzco-style, with the Sligo lads and then on to Puno and Lake Titikaka on the 26th, after which we´ll head into Boliva for the New Year. Bolivia has a lot to live up to, but we hear from other travellers that its their favourite South American country. Bring it on!
Oh, I forgot to mention that we´ve
That orange dot is where our campsite was!
Okay, so I had to use MS Paint to draw the dot, but you get the picture hopefully! officially eaten the worst thing so far on our travels (the Vietnam reststop dinner a very close second)! En route to Huaraz we stopped in Trujillo and went to a popular looking restaurant beside the bus station. We ordered the only thing on the menu which looked like a yummy meat dish. It looked like meat, but tasted like, well, the worst thing Ive ever tasted. And the consistency - chewy, sinewy, grossness. We have no idea what it was - brain, lung, stomach, some other organ. We looked up everything we could think of in the dictionary and could find out what it was, as one the menu it simply said Plata Familiar or something which means ´Popular Plate´. I put all anorexics to shame in my efforts to disguise the fact that we were not eating it - chewing it up, spitting into a tissue and dumping that into a plastic bag in my rucksack for later disposal in the bus station bin. I get shivers every time I think of it...
Anyway, Feliz Navidad everyone, I´ll be missing you all this Christmas!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.074s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 12; qc: 30; dbt: 0.033s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
angela gaughran murphy
non-member comment
Fleas!
that lovely white bright bed with you and the dog, did you itch after that? Merry Christmas and kisses to you both. So its Peru for Christmas then? X Angela