Viruses and Motorbikes in The City of the Incas

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Lima looks like the sort of place you have to spend some time in to appreciate. Once you get past the dirt, noise, permafog and general disorder there are probably some charms, but they aren't immediately obvious. Especially not when you're hungover after a 12 hour nightbus journey, during which for some reason the film Titanic had been played on repeat. I couldn't sleep for the sounds of people drowning, and Celiene Dion. I don't know which was worse.

We didn´t really give Lima much of a chance, to be fair, since we were there less than a day before we left for Cusco. We arrived stupidly early in the morning when it was still dark and got a taxi to the part of town where we were least likely to get mugged. Absolutely nowhere was open except a McDonnalds, so I swallowed my pride and went in for a coffee, which we managed to drag out for about two hours. We had time to kill before heading to the airport but we couldn't really face doing anything so we mostly hid out on the internet and ate sandwiches in a place called the "Beirut Cafe". The flight to Cusco was scary, and scarily expensive by the standards of our budget (50 quid), but it saved us 24 hours on a bus. The landing was fairly terrifying, Cuzco being just a little flattened spot surrounded on all sides by jaggedy mountains. The plane did some weird things on the way down. As soon as we set foot in the airport we could tell it was a lot more touristy than everywhere else we'd been. We were accosted by 'tourist information' people. There were posters advertising oxygen in a can for the altitude sick. The taxi drivers at the airport refused to haggle so we dragged our stuff outside and flagged one down off the road.

I was quite prepared to dislike Cusco. It is many of the things I feared it would be. Expensive for one thing, and swarming with American tourgroups and small Peruvian children who thrust baby llamas at you in the street, demanding money for photographs. There is a reason it's so popular however, and despite the drawbacks it won me over with it's beauty and charm.

It is a city hopelessly unsuited to modern life, all stone steps and impossible angles, with 45 degree cobbled streets just wide enough for one car to squeeze down. The Spanish built directly on top of the original Inca stonework and the result is quite surreal, with buildings crammed into every little gap.

Unfortunately, the first day we were there I got sick. This was probably going to happen sooner or later, but why did it have to happen somewhere so expensive? I was really pissed off. I'd been feeling weird all day but I'd attributed it to hangover, Lima and lack of sleep. By the time we got to the hostel in Cusco I'd developed a standard flu-like set of symptoms... fever, headache, shivering, aching limbs etc. I tell you, I felt ROUGH. It was only a 48 hour thing and I did manage to listlessly drag myself around Cusco the next day anyway, but inevitably Kit caught it off me and it developed into MAN FLU, meaning he had to spend the next two days in bed, complaining constantly and making me apologise over and over for having infected him with my diseases. So I didn't do much for a while, except listen to Kit's list of reasons why Man Flu is worse than childbirth and make plans for Kit Memorial Day, to be executed in the inevitable event of his tragic man flu related death. And no, it was not altitude sickness, as people kept helpfully suggesting. We'd just spent nearly 2 weeks in the Cordillera Blanca at a higher altitude and only been at sea level for 24 hours. It was just a virus. I wouldn't have minded so much had it been altitude sickness. That sounds exotic.

Weird fever dreams I had when I was ill -

I dreamt that I was being forced to do an OSCE Run. This is a cross between an Otley Run, and an OSCE.

For those not in the know, an OTLEY RUN is a famous Leeds pub crawl involving dressing up as something stupid and having a pint at every pub along Otley road, totaling something like 14 pubs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otley_Run

An OSCE is an Objective Structured Clinical Examination, a practical test for medical students, where you are given 6 minutes to perform a clinical task like a cardiovascular examination, taking a medical history, catheterising a fake penis, something like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_Structured_Clinical_Examination

So my brain cleverly combined the two to create the OSCE RUN... a pub crawl exam where you dress in scrubs and make your way down Otley road, downing a pint before performing a clinical skills task at each pub.

Personally I think it is genius, and will be suggesting it to the medical school at the first available opportunity. Realistically, the sooner we learn to work whilst pissed the better.

In the second dream I was on a ward at the hospital, trying to cannulate an unconcious patient. I had everything I needed except the saline to flush the cannula. I went to ask someone, who turned out to be the mean doctor who failed me on my elderly medicine placement. She told me I don't need saline and I could just flush it with INCA COLA, a tasty banana flavoured carbonated beverage popular throughout Peru. Even in a fever dream I knew this was a stupid idea, but she told me to just shut up and do it, so I did. The Inca Cola seemed to revive the patient, and they woke up right away. Future research project maybe?

I don't usually have medical dreams and I have no idea why being ill makes me more inclined to do so.

Kit cheered up at lot when he realised he could rent motorbikes. I wasn't so sure I should be allowed to do this, since my only previous experience involved crashing a scooter when I was 15, however the good people of Cuzco did not see this as a problem. The first company we tried gave me a massive bike on which my feet nowhere near touched the ground, and an instructor who spoke no English. I have a fairly underdeveloped sense of self preservation, but at some point my 'fuck this' alarm started going off. We tried another company who had a bike that had been lowered, still a big 250cc that weighted many times more than I did but at least my toes just touched the ground. They also provided a helpful Canadian man to explain how to use the thing. So I had a motorbike lesson. Cuzco is not a good place to learn to ride a motorbike. Well, it is in that you can get a bike and an instructor for $10 an hour. In terms of road surface, traffic and suicidal stray dog population, not so much. Motorbikes are AWESOME though. That is definitely going to be the first stupid, extravagant purchase I make when I'm a rich doctor. After I pay my parents back all the money I owe them, obviously. Hi Dad!

So I sort of got the hang of it, I could start, stop, turn and change up through the gears but somehow not down.... so I could go faster, faster, faster, faster, STOP... and start again. I don't know if this was the bike I was on, or me being stupid. Much as I loved it, and I really did, I decided not to rent one because there would be an unacceptably high risk of injury or death (like about 50%), or hurting the bike, which I would have to pay for. So I reluctantly gave back my bike and got on the back of Kit's, which if anything was even more terrifying. He assures me he has done some sort of basic motorcycle proficiency test thing. I choose to believe him, and off we go.

So we did a slightly unconventional tour of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, by motorbike. We didn't actually enter many of the archeological sites since Kit refused to pay for a multi-site entry pass on the basis that it costs 'almost as much as a ticket to Alton Towers'. I was aghast at his lack of interest in Peru's rich cultural heritage, so I paid to go into a few of them, until I am forced to concede Kit's point that they mostly look better from a distance, where you can't see all the other tourists.

The sacred valley was busy with busses. I felt smug that we had the bike so we could stop where ever we wanted instead of only at designated spots on the tourgroups itinaries. I am very taken with the motorbike concept. I decided that when we graduate we are going to buy motorbikes and come back, two young doctors touring South America, like Che Guevara and his fat mate whose name I can't remember.

Anyway the valley was very beautiful. The mountains all looked fake and strangely textured, like they'd been painted on a backdrop, because it's impossible to get a sense of perspective. It's easy to see why the Incas worshipped the sun. The light around here has a strange quality to it, maybe because of the altitude or the weather, I'm not sure. We were caught in a heavy hail storm on the way back and we could see it advancing slowly towards us across the fields, like a waterfall moving closer and closer.

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