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Published: October 17th 2010
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Cuzco
Bird's eye view October 3rd - 10th
We moved in to our apartment on the Sunday morning. It was a single bedroom with a small divider splitting the bedroom from the sitting area. There was a kitchenette with a gas burner and fridge, a table and a small bathroom where one could have a cold shower with plenty of pressure or a hot one with next to none. Perhaps luckiest of all was that it came with cable television - 100 odd channels of which a good 10 or so were in English. Though this sounds like a terrible waste whilst in an exotic, foreign country, it was during this week that some form of parasite decided to take up residence in my guts.
The Boss had been unwell on the Sunday we moved in. She spent the day, and night, in bed. I had met up with Kyle and Tahlei, who had arrived in Cuzco a few days earlier and were off to do Machu Picchu from Monday through Wednesday. We had had a few drinks at their hostel and in town.
I woke up the next day feeling fine but half way through our first day at Spanish school I started shivering.
Me in Cuzco
Everyone got photos in front of this wall, so I jumped on the bandwagon. Notice the "Inca" in the background I went home, emptied my bowels with a tremendous splatter and pulled on a hoody before going back to school. At the day’s end I went straight home, climbed in to bed and stayed there until the following morning.
That was essentially to be my week - get up, go to school and go back to bed. The only other movements I made were of the bowel description. And boy, did I move my bowels! I was averaging six or seven times a day. I would eat, have a sharp, stabbing pain in my lower stomach and then rush to the bathroom. I honest to god didn’t piss standing up that whole week, simply because I never needed to piss more than I needed to crap.
An avid toilet reader, I almost read an entire book just sitting on the can. The blurb for “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill promised me a murder mystery set in New York with a cast of characters from all over the world who shared a passion for cricket. The front and back covers, as well as the first page, were covered in rave reviews from authors, respectable newspapers and also made mention of the fact
My Leg
Bites from the MaPi hike the book had been listed for the Man Booker prize. It sucked. Like a Peruvian chicken soup, the meat contained within turned out to be a couple of pieces of foot and the rest was watery crap.
As the week wore on I started to feel better and we managed a few afternoons doing more than watching Spiderman (both One and Two were shown frequently that week). Our main activity was shopping for food - the appeal of staying in an apartment being that we could cook for ourselves and save some money on food, which had been the thing we were spending most of our money on.
There was a small grower’s market up the road where we bought our veggies for a steal. An onion, a kilo of tomatoes, half a kilo of beans, two carrots and a broccoli came in at less than s/10 (about $3!) We intended to buy meat from the supermarket in town but the rancid smell emanating from the butchery meant that we pretty well went veggie for the whole week. I did splash out on the hamburgers they sold from out the front of the supermarket because I felt I needed the
protein to help beat the disease and, perhaps more importantly, they were only s/2 (and before anyone gets clever, I was sick
before eating the hamburgers.
I also came a little closer to understanding why famers in the region were so poor. We bought an avocado the size of my head for s/3, a kilo of mangoes for s/3 and four freshly baked ciabatta rolls cost s/1. Basically, lunch and breakfast each day was costing us around s/1 each.
Kyle and Tahlei had dinner with us on the Wednesday night and told us about an Indian restaurant in town that did an all you can eat special for s/15. So on our last day in Cuzco, with my stomach feeling considerably more settled, we went there for a late lunch.
It wasn’t Darby Raj or even Tahmana’s Newtown but curried meat on rice is pretty hard to get wrong and I enjoyed my first plate. As I was cleaning off the last of the rice, I looked up at the waiter who had told us what was what in the bains-marie to see him with his finger in his nose.
Now I’ll admit to being a bit of a picker
myself, I think everyone is from time to time, so I wasn’t about to get on my high horse about a bloke who wasn’t touching the food going for a little digital exploration of his nasal cavity. But a brief exploration it was not - this was Magellan discovering and documenting China. He was two knuckles deep, digging away, pulling out his finger to inspect and then ramming it right back up there. It went on for perhaps a minute or so before he got a tissue. But rather than use it to blow his nose, he simply used it as an outer coating for his finger and continued scratching the back of his eyeball.
Like a car accident I couldn’t look away from, I eventually saw one of his co-workers catch him at it. She was another waitress who had been standing by the coffee machine the whole time we had been there. Based on her age and the fact that she was actually of Indian descent, I assumed that she was either the owner or at least a manager. I waited for her to chip him - tell him to take it outside at the very least. But
she asked him some innocuous question and they had a conversation (in a language I didn’t understand, so I can’t say what it was about) whilst he continued picking. It didn’t bother her in the slightest, which was perhaps the most upsetting part of the whole incident.
I admit I went back for a second plate - my first one had been predominantly veggies and I wasn’t going to pay s/15 for a plate of rice and veggies - but I couldn’t finish it. Though I’ve long since left Cusco, that particular incident continues to haunt me.
We were lucky to check out on a Sunday because the building's supervisors didn’t work weekends. We checked out of the apartment at 8PM that night by throwing the keys through the supervisor’s door and headed to the bus station. Our 8:30PM bus for Arequipa was largely uneventful, although I lived to regret attempting to eat the dinner served on the bus as my stomach cramped, grumbled and gassed all the way to town.
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Tahlei
non-member comment
poor sick thing
Go to a pharmacy and get some ciprox - sometimes called cipron or something similar. It'll kill anything nasty lurking in your guts - worked wonders for me. I hope you're better by now! I'll keep reading and find out...