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Published: November 14th 2012
Greetings from Cusco, Peru, the former capital of the Inca empire and the place where I did my TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) course.
The quick update for those who prefer 😊 I finished my TEFL course at the end of October, then went
wwoofing in the jungle for a while, yesterday I got back from hiking the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu and tomorrow I´m off to Trujillo in northern Peru to teach English - it´s all happening!
The loooong version... So a bit about life in Cusco… while doing my course I homestayed with Ana Maria, her son Jose, her dad Alexo, and Jess (from The States) one of my TEFL classmates, and Laura and Jaunita from Ottawa - Ottawatians 😊 Ana Maria is a Spanish teacher at Maximo Nivel (the place where I studied) which was a result as she’s helped me to improve my Spanish. She’s a great lady and loves to chisme (gossip) about everything.
Cusco is a city but has the feel of a town to me, particularly as you frequently bump into people that you know. It’s pretty with winding cobbled streets; and if you have ever been
to Florence it has that same sort of earthy colour scheme. It’s in The Andes and at first I really felt the altitude (3,300m), walking around town or up stairs makes you short of breath and I was so tired in the evenings, but now after more than a month I think I´m cured.
Cusco centre is very touristy, basically because it’s the nearest city to one of the seven wonders of the world - Macchu Picchu. The centre is modern and shiny and some streets off of the Plaza del Armas are ridiculously upmarket and westernised with spas, boutique hotels and cordon blue restaurants. As a treat, Jess and I went to one such posh eatery
Limo which overlooks the plaza. The highlight for me was an artistically presented desert called King Kong – dulce de leche (they love that here) biscuits, quince, honey sauce and rum soaked pineapple. This was one of only a few rice free meals that I have eaten since being in Peru… I’m going off rice rapidly.
It’s nice to try out all the different food here, especially the fruit as there are lots of types we don’t get in the
UK much like cactus fruit, pepitas (mini single serve melons) and custard apples, and Peruvians love ice cream, which suits me just fine :P Apparently Peru is the best country in South America for good food and in Cusco you can get a meal from £1 up to big bucks – but the expensive places are really for the tourists. And there’s a lot of street food, antichuchos (beef heart with potatoes on skewers), big slices of fresh pineapple, fruit granites, multi coloured jellies and egg stew for breakfast, though there is always the risk that it will come served with a free helping of er Peru-belly.
Houses in Peru don’t have heating, but it’s fine as it rarely gets very cold here. At night you just bundle up in blankets. The one thing that does stand out is the electric shower which looks like a death trap. In most places the showers are like this and you can feel the current buzzing through the taps – yikes! We can only have short showers for fear of the whole thing collapsing.
There are markets everywhere in Cusco, it’s how people like to shop and it’s so much more
fun than Sainsbury’s. There’s a huge crafts market where I’ve bought my souvenirs so far. Each little shop within the market is crammed full and the shop keepers squeeze in amongst the woollen wares. It’s the same at the main food market San Pedro where you can buy anything from a frog smoothie to a cow head. It’s usually the women who staff the stalls, you catch them sleeping on planks of wood between the produce. And in Cusco there’s a Del Boy on every corner selling anything and everything. I was thinking to myself that I needed to get some insoles, I turned the corner and hey presto a lady selling them!
The night life here is pretty lively. There are lots of restaurants, bars and nightclubs; you can stay out all night if you want, and I have. In the clubs dancing on the bar is popular especially at my favourite club
Mythology, so when in Rome! Salsa is big here and the standard can be impressive, but you have to watch your feet especially from high heels – ouch!
Cusco is proud of its Inca architecture. I’ve visited
Qoricancha what was the main
Inca temple and Inca ruins at Inti Punku (the sun door). Qoricancha is said to have the best preserved Inca architecture in Peru. When the Spanish invaded they kept a lot of the Inca foundations and built their own buildings on top as they knew that the Inca’s built earthquake proof structures.The most prized part of Qoricancha was the golden sun symbol, it’s said that when the Spanish came they sacked everything but this as the Inca’s hid it so well, it hasn’t been found to this day. There is also a 14 sided stone here which purports to be the height of Inca architecture because it fits so tightly with its neighbouring stones. You are not allowed to touch the stone, and the stone police will get you if you try! Inti Punku is not a touristy spot, and it was nice to get some peace. The temple was just for the women and as a women only posse we felt that we were following on the Inca womens’ footsteps, and had fun doing a photo shoot of sitting on the Inca thrones.
We also went out to the salinas at the edge of the sacred valley where
salt is collected from the water there. A friend, Ernesto who is also a guide, took some of us there and showed us around. We wobbled along narrow ridges between the salt pools looking at the salt crystals and tasting the water. No way would you be able to do this in the UK.
There are so many dogs in Cusco, actually in Peru generally, sometimes with owners but often without. The street dogs are sweet natured, they just walk the streets with the rest of us. The dogs with owners tend to wear clothes – I’ve seen one dressed as superman, and another in a pink dress and diamonds – natty!
Cusco has grown on me, at first I thought it’s too westernised and polluted, but now I know the city better I can see the links between the country and city and the mix of the old and new. And it’s really vibrant and fun and people are always up for a fiesta or a protest!
As for the TEFL course, it was pretty intense but we all passed and we had a graduation party which coincided with Halloween so we graduated wearing strange outfits.
Teaching the students was the highlight for me; they were fun and called me Teacher which I found amusing.
During the course we had a Quechua lesson (the most commonly spoken ethnic language in Peru), it was interesting to learn a snippet, but also if gave us an insight into how beginner English students feel – i.e. they know nothing. In our class I felt like an English nerd – everyone else was American and about 25 or younger. They were a good group though, very positive and enthusiastic, though they did spend far too much time taking the mickey out of my accent and is it really so wrong to pronounce your t´s!
After we had finished our TEFL course some of my classmates got jobs teaching English at the school where we did our course, but I decided to get out of the city and take a trip into the countryside for some wwoofing (working worldwide on organic farms). The farm was in Chilkachaka (which is a village so small you can’t find it on Google maps) and is in the jungle. I wasn’t completely sure where it was but I got on a bus
and headed off. The journey was amazing; we were driving through cloud forest up and down through the Andes. The Andes change so much depending on which bit you are in. I hadn’t arranged the trip very well with the farm owner but thought oh it will be fine I’ll just turn up. When I did turn up no one was there, just a couple of wild turkeys to greet me and plenty of biting insects. At this point I thought hmm yes probably should have organised this better. But happily two guys from the farm turned up after a while!
The farm or chakra (smallholding in Spanish) had not been worked for 10 years, and the owner Emiliano has been bringing it back into management for the past year, there is a lot of work to be done. The main crop is tea, but they also grow coffee and lemons and have a large vegetable garden where they grow yucca, avocados and potatoes. The area’s biggest crop is tea, it used to be a much bigger industry with a huge coop, but unfortunately the people managing the coop ran off with all the money! Today, the tea industry
in the area centres around one big commercial tea company.
The area is quiet! I don’t know what it used to be like when all the tea plantations were being farmed, I imagine that it was much livelier. The nearest village Huamanmarca consists of about 15 adobe houses (made of mud bricks) along the road and there´s one restaurant and two shops. There is also a big road construction project and an irrigation project underway in the area. The irrigation project will help to stop the landslides, and the road construction will make the journey between Cusco and Quillabamba (a jungle town) much easier by turning the dirt road into a wider tarmacked road. But the construction projects mean that the road is closed at certain points in the day which makes getting anywhere tricky.
So there wasn’t exactly much happening in the way of entertainment. No bars, no shopping. People make their own entertainment, you would regularly see people dancing in their front yards to their local music while having a beer or ten – apparently alcoholism is a problem in the area.
For us at the farm, our entertainment was a local football tournament, followed
by much beer drinking under tarpaulins while the rain beat down, swimming in the river, playing with the local children (a game called Ninja Crack which I will export to the UK), cards at the farm, the occasional guitar session and just chatting around the kitchen table.
To use the web you had to travel two villages away, but unfortunately while I was there a storm had brought down some of the infrastructure, so the nearest internet was an hour away and there was no mobile phone reception. Public transportation was limited so to get to the other villages you either had to walk or hitch a ride, and we had some fun journeys in the back of tea trucks, with the irrigation workers and five of us squashed into the cab of a lorry.
The work at the farm was hard. I was working with the men, moving logs, digging holes with a pick axe to plant trees in and making compost. And some days it was really hot. The insects were rife and on day two I was going near crazy with bites even though I was embalmed in insect repellent. One of the guys at
the farm lent me his long sleeved top which saved my arms from more attacks.
Three of us spent one day making a big log pile along road for the tea company to collect and use for power at the plant. The pile would cost 250 soles, or £60. I think with the chainsaw work that went into the logs too it was probably 6 days hard work for one person. The tea pickers make about 26 soles per day (the price for one big sack) equivalent to £7 per day. These people are working really hard for not much. And don’t think the work stops just because you’re old. Old ladies and men are still working carrying firewood on their backs and they are bent over double because of the weights they’ve been carrying all their lives. The retirement age in Peru is 70, but because so many people work outside of the official economy they don’t retire.
On the other hand, the people in the area seemed happy and relaxed. Always laughing and joking and just living in the moment. Everyone knows each other and many are related. And people help each other out. There is
a word in Quechua ayni, which basically means to help each other out. I think ayni had been dying out in Chilkachaka but Emiliano was keen to get it going more. In terms of the chakras it means that if at one chakra a lot of work needed to be done, for instance harvesting the bananas, then the workforce from many farms would go to that farm and get it done more quickly.
After a short while we had five wwoof volunteers and Rosso working together. The wwoofers were good guys who liked to live outside of the mainstream economy, meaning that they were hitching from place to place and busking or working on farms here and there. Karin would do most of the cooking with Amayru at her side.
Life generally revolved around meal times in the kitchen/dining building. We’d eat massive breakfasts and lunches and then have a smaller dinner. This is the way in Peru generally, but at the farm because the work is hard you need to eat a lot. For breakfast we’d have bread, eggs, fried bananas and porridge and for lunch a huge soup or rice and stew. I actually lost weight
while I was there despite eating so much. For All Saints Day they made a stew with guineapig and chicken. The day before I got into the car to get a lift back from town and saw that the shopping bags were moving – they contained a live chicken and guinea pig. It did make me sad to see them ringing the necks of the animals but that’s just what happens here. Also Rosso killed a giant guinea pig type beast for dinner one day with a stone – he’s a jungle man! Though I have maintained my veggie ways 😊
While cleaning our bedroom I came across three scorpions. Karina said I should kill them but I didn’t I relocated them. The outside light attracted all sorts of bugs at night, and some mornings there were praying mantis, I think they had come to find stunned insects to eat. In the palm trees there were some lovely birds (
yellow rumped caciques) with long nests that looked like stretched coconuts hanging down. One day there was a storm and some of the nests were blown out of the trees. They were like bombs flying around the chakra. It was the biggest
storm I’ve seen and inside the kitchen building with its corrugated tin roof the rain was deafening, the locals said it was just a regular storm though and laughed at my fear – how rude!
So it was a good experience at the farm in terms of getting an insight into rural life in Peru and learning a bit more about sustainable farming, when I drink my next cup of tea I will think of how much work goes into it.
Then I walked the four day Inca Trail trek to Macchu Picchu. We were a small group of four with our lovely
United Mice team - our guide Victor, a chef and five porters. The trek was more difficult than we had anticipated and I am sitting here with sore legs now; however, it was very beautiful too with many micro climates along the way which made for some great nature spots such as alpine strawberry plants to hummingbirds and orchids. The team were amazing running with our tents and food on their backs and having everything set up when we reached camp each night. The food was mega! big breakfasts and three course meals for lunch and
dinner, but hopefully we walked it all off. When we finally reached Macchu Picchu we were tired but happy and spent the day looking around and finding out more about the industrious Incas. I also discovered the panorama function on my phone camera which was timely!
So tomorrow I leave Cusco for Trujillo, I´m sad to leave as it´s been brilliant here but hopefully Trujillo will be equally amazing!
To my friends and family reading this, I hope you are all well. And congrats to those who are getting engaged, got married or having babies, I am keeping a good eye on you via Facebook 😉
Muchas bessos Jennie xxx
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dad
non-member comment
update
sounds like your having some adventure and enjoying yourself long way to go to go on a diet. wish i was 40 years younger. love dad