Spoiling ourselves in Arequipa...

Talor: Arrived in Arequipa early in the morning after a nine-hour overnight bus ride. After two consecutive night buses, we were exhausted! Found a decent room at Hostal Tumi de Oro, with a nice rooftop lounge area. Got ourselves cleaned up, then spent the day walking around and doing a whole lotta nothing. I was happy to find Arequipa warmer than Cuzco, and Erik was happy to put on shorts and sandals, which he hadn't worn since Nicaragua!

The second largest city in Peru with all of the amenities we needed to spoil ourselves, we decided to stay for a couple of days to do just that. The next day, we checked into the Hotel Santa Teresa... three stars! It's actually a fairly new hotel that is trying to get clients in so we bargained hard and got a room for a third of their published price. Here are some of the luxuries: a firm bed AND a firm pillow, fitted sheets that stays on the mattress when you roll over, a flat-screen TV with a remote that actually works, a shower with great water pressure, a toilet seat, and even hot water coming out of the sink! There's also wi-fi and a telephone, not that we have anybody to call, but we could if we wanted to without leaving the room! And did I mention it includes breakfast with eggs? But strangely, I find myself missing the old, run-down, characterful rooms we've been staying in...

With our visa about to run out in just a few days and ready to leave Peru, we decided to splurge away... treated ourselves to an expensive, but absolutely yummy, square pan-pizza that could compete with any thin-crust pizza shop in New York, indulged in a delicious mixed seafood ceviche with fresh sea urchin (wow, haven't had sea urchin since we left home), and even had French, German and Turkish food too. Then we visited a very cool, very lovely convent/museum/mini-city with a $10 entry fee, without batting an eye! We are living large!

But after seven weeks in Peru, we were ready to move on and head to Chile for warmer climes and something different. Unfortunately, Peru wasn't quite ready to let us go... yet another strike on the road to Tacna, the border to Chile! Damn, what luck! Our two-day stay has turned into five and now we're having to resort to Plan B, which was our original Plan A when we were in Cusco, head to Puno and cross over into Bolivia...

Erik: Talor forgot sipping French wine while watching a performance of “Carmen” in an old monastery. (Having lived in Paris, New York and San Francisco for so many years, I'm quite embarrassed that my first opera is a free show in Arequipa, Peru!) Our Halloween plans didn't quite pan out – the street party we'd been told about was too popular. We couldn't move, couldn't get into bars to have a drink, and definitely couldn't enjoy ourselves. Found a nice quiet bar on a sidestreet and laughed at the fact that we were celebrating Halloween in Peru by sipping Cuba Libres (rum & cokes) at a French Bistro – so it was an early evening. It is peculiar just how popular Halloween is here – earlier in the evening the streets were filled with kids in costume trick-or-treating. It was fun to see, but odd at the same time.

It's comically aggravating, or perhaps sadly comic how these Peruvian strikes are seemingly following us around, preventing our exiting the country while the days left on our visa tick away (only 2 more, now.) So we close the circle of our escape route by heading to Puno tomorrow, where we can hopefully catch another bus directly to the frontier, then on to Copacabana, Bolivia on Lake Titicaca. Wish us luck!

To see more...

Arequipa, Peru

Nazca - It's all about the lines...

Talor: After spending the week in Cusco waiting for a strike that didn't end, we decided to change our direction and head to Nazca, a 14-hour bus ride away... OY! Opted for a night bus (better to spend most of the time sleeping, right?), then we spent the day killing time til we boarded and left at 5:00pm.

Arrived into Nazca, disoriented and bleary-eyed from a way-too-long and uncomfortable bus ride, and we were met by the welcoming committee of persistent touts trying to sell us flights, tours and hotel rooms at 6:00 in the morning! Drank Nescafe in the street and played with a friendly dog, that kept trying to eat our shoes, for about an hour until Juan from Nazca Trails arrived. We had reserved on-line a flight with his company the day before. We walked five blocks to their office on Plaza de Armas. Not surprising that the walk on the main avenue was lined with touristy shops, restaurants and hotels.... and lines... Nazca lines... from the bus stop to the sidewalks to the parks... there were lines everywhere!

After paying, we were driven to the airport where we had to pay an airport tax (what a rip!) then off we went in a 4-seat Cessna. The pilot pointed out everything and circled around the lines so we could get a good look and take photos. It was pretty damned cool seeing these crazy lines in the middle of the desert, but still feeling a bit nauseous from our long bus ride, I was glad when we touched down a half-hour later.

From what we had seen so far of Nazca, we decided not to spend the night in another ugly, dusty, touristy town. Like Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu, the city clearly spent a lot of money beautifying the touristy areas for the gringos, their primary source of income. But so sad that they let the rest of the outlying areas go to crap, including a municipal pool where the locals could go to cool off from the desert heat. So we booked yet another evening bus for further south to Arequipa, nine hours away... what were we thinking??? Back-to-back night buses... OY again! Feeling grungy and tired, we had a good 12 hours to kill in a town that had nothing to do or see, except for the lines of course, but we had already done that. Somehow we managed... went to a nice, but overpriced little archaeological museum, then to a series of touristy cafes, just to kill time. Spent the last couple of hours in the bus terminal watching really bad movies on TV then FINALLY... we were off...

Erik: When we decided to make the very long side trip to Nazca, all I could think of were my childhood memories of watching Leonard Nimoy's “In Search of...” TV show – exploring unexplained mysteries of the world, and always emphasizing the paranormal, extra-terrestrial theories for such things. I recall them hypothesizing that the Nazca lines, including the strange, waving spaceman drawing, were some sort of alien landing pad, where benevolent ET's came to help build the world's wonders, such as Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza, the pyramids, etc. Thinking about my childhood wonder at such mysteries, and then noting that I really wasn't so excited about actually seeing the lines, I suddenly realized that I'd lost a good deal of my childhood imagination and wonder (this despite my still acting like a child whenever possible!) I wouldn't call it an epiphany, more of a simple acknowledgment of my own world-weary, travel-weary ennui, and this made me a bit sad.

Still, that being said, the flight was fun and interesting. The lines are quite amazing – monkeys, whales, pooping dogs, spacemen, hummingbirds and huge, many-mile-long perfectly straight lines and trapezoids. Even to the somewhat jaded, it does make one wonder how and why.

Our photos don't do the lines justice (you try shooting clear shots on a monochrome desert landscape through the window of a tiny cesna many 100's of feet in the air!).

I heartily agree with Talor that we'll never again waste 12 hours of our lives just to save a few bucks on a bus and hotel fare – in my very sleep-deprived state, it was verging on self-inflicted torture.

Anyway, here are our fuzzy photos of the lines as well as the oh-so-enchanting town of Nazca:

Nazca, Peru

Pisco is evil...

... as we wait out the strike, ain't nothing going on. Bored, we decided to go to Flaherty's for happy hour and game 2 of the world series... well, all i can say (can remember) is crawling into bed dreaming of the morning... scrambled eggs with diced tomatoes and spicy beef jerky (which turns out to be the best hangover remedy)... sweet dreams...

(7:46pm) Fully recovered now but still no change with the strike... by now serious boredom has set in. It's not helping that it's been cold and raining on and off the last two days making it unpleasant to go out. Even a walk to the mercado isn't fun anymore. Erik has knocked out a whole module of his TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) assignments, and I'm sore from walking up and down the stairs too many times. We've even re-invented ourselves... I am now Picanta (spicy) and Erik is Rocoto (Peruvian chili pepper). Now we've clearly run out of things to do so I sit here writing about our boring day.

Think we're going to have to go to Plan B... head to Nazca and check out the crazy mysterious lines. But we'll make that a game time decision. We'll head to the bus terminal for the umpteenth time tomorrow and find out where the buses are going... wish us luck!

Erik: Yeah, we're bored. Poor us, huh? Stuck in Peru on a year-long trip. Life is rough. Maybe I should go get a beer...but no more pisco!

The return to Cusco...

Talor: After MP, we had no desire to spend anymore time in Ollantaytambo or Pisac (another small village between Aguas Calientes and Cusco) cause by then, we were pretty burnt out on these small, touristy villages. In fact, we couldn't get back to Cusco fast enough! Made for a long day, but when we rang the doorbell at Hostal Qorichaska at 8:00pm, it felt like coming home. We exhaled, took a hot shower then went out for a celebratory pisco and a beer... or two... or three...

Badly hung over the next morning, went to Flaherty's Pub for some comfort food: a full Irish breakfast stuffed into a baguette (why?) and a slice(?) of shepherd's pie. Both were big, hearty and hit the spot. Energized, we decided to settle in and study Spanish for a week. Signed up for two hours of one-on-one instructions in the mornings then spent the week getting to know the city.

Couldn't have asked for better weather... although it is the beginning of the rainy season, we woke up to the sun coming in through the skylight of our room most mornings. Went to visit some of the cheaper sights in town forgoing the churches and museums where they charge $10 just to step in the door. Even hiked up to Christo Blanco (a big white statue of Christ on a hill) and Saqsawaman (more ruins). Checked out some of the nightlife, which left something to be desired... the music venues were kinda hokey with either a guy doing Beatles covers or a band's curious rendition of reggae. So we hit Flaherty's several times for happy hour and left it at that.

The nicest part was that we had settled into a comfortable place for awhile and even got ourselves into somewhat of a routine. Cooked several meals (including a disastrous pasta that was way too pasty, and made Erik yell, “No more pasta!”) in the Hostal's kitchen and exercised on a regular basis (by climbing the steps up a hill just a block away). We were happy to discover a cute little eatery in our 'hood that served up nice menus for lunch and yummy thin-crust pizzas for dinner.

But after a week we were ready to move on. Packed our bags, and said, "Adios!" to our friends at Qorichaska. Set our sights on going further south to Puno, Lake Titicaca then onto Bolivia, but as will happen with best laid plans, life happened... another strike. With our route to Puno blocked with protesting Campesinos, we've unpacked once again and have settled in to wait it out. Stay tuned...

Cusco photos part 2:

Cusco, Peru (2)

Machu Picchu – high altitude, higher expectations and highest prices

Erik: Ever since we began planning this trip years ago – when all we had were pins on huge world map on our wall, Machu Picchu had been on our “must do” list, and since arriving in South America, we'd been thinking about it and looking forward to it. Along our travels we'd run into other travelers coming from there, and their enthusiasm and lack of vocabulary for the beauty of the mountain-top Inca ruins only served to flame our expectations higher. This is the part where I'm supposed to say how let down we were, but I can't – MP really is that jaw-droppingly beautiful and impressive. This despite the innumeral things seemingly devised to put you off it, from overpriced everything (trains, trails, buses, bathrooms), to the sheer difficulty of getting there (which in the end is surely a good thing, given the hoards that go there every day despite the inconvenience...) Don't get me wrong, we're very happy we went, but just about everything involved in getting there left a bad taste in our mouths, and we're happy now that we've been there and can move on.

There are only two ways to get to Machu Picchu – treking or training. Treking involves anywhere from 3 to 7 days hiking up-and-down through the Andes, usually needs to be booked months in advance, and costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars (quite a drain on a daily budget as small as ours.) Still, I was interested in doing it, and probably could have found a last-minute cancellation at one of the hundreds of tour agencies in Cusco. The stomach bug and several days of solid rain put me off that idea, though. We opted for the lazy-man's way up, via the train.

The train isn't cheap, either. The 1 ½ hour ride from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes (at the base of MP) cost us $68 each in lowly “backpacker class.” To put that in perspective, a 12 hour bus ride in first class costs around $20 in Peru. The train ride was beautiful, though, with high-andes jungle terrain that reminded us of the beginning of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, with ultra-steep rock cliffs draped with huge vines overhanging a rushing mountain river.

Aguas Calientes was not so beautiful – really nothing more than rapidly-built, ugly tourist way-station on the way to MP. We did manage to find cheap, if very basic, accommodations after a bit of hunting (we paid about $13 instead of the $60 most places were charging.) We then bought our hugely over-priced bus tickets up for the next morning ($7 for a 20-minute drive) and were all set. You can hike up from Aguas Calientes, but it takes hours up a sheer staircase, and we hoped to get the first bus up and beat the swarms of tourists. Unfortunately, many of them had the same idea as us, and at 5:15am the next morning, we took our place in the bus line behind a hundred or so others...

Once up top at the entrance, the fun continued. The “free” baggage storage we'd been told about cost $3, and the bathrooms $1 (more if you wanted paper to take in with you.) The biggest surprise of all was the entrance fee. We'd read that it was a bit over $20, which seemed expensive, but that information was obviously a few years old – it cost $42 to get in. $42 goes a long way in Peru – usually.

OK, now that the griping is over with, Machu Picchu is truly amazing. We were there on a beautiful, clear, morning as the sun rose over the mountains, whose peaks were still swathed in clouds. The seeming hoards of early arrivals dispersed easily throughout the large ruins, and we had moments in the first hour or so where we were alone to take in the dramatic landscape, or snap postcard-perfect photos (see link below...) Even after all the hype, the expectations, and frustrations of getting there, it was awe-inspiring. After all the rain earlier in the week, we couldn't have asked for a more perfect day, with its beautiful, early-morning light. And in the end it was well worth the money and hassle of getting there.

Now I've written way more than enough, so I'll let Talor and the photos speak for themselves...

Talor: It's true all of that leading up to MP was one annoyance after another, but once we got in and huffed and puffed our way to the top for a global view, it was awesome! (How happy we were to be already acclimated to the altitude.) There is no other word I can think of that would be more apt to describe it... it was simply AWESOME!! And tho we took a million photos, they don't begin to describe what we saw and how we felt... ahhh, all is forgiven...

And as unforgettable as it was, it was also a relief to be done. Now, we can go on our merry way and continue our journey...

Machu Picchu photos:

Machu Picchu, Peru

Ollantaytambo, half-way to Machu Picchu (MP)...

Talor: With Erik all healed up, and feeling the adrenaline from the white-water rafting, we were finally ready to tackle MP ... well, almost. We heard Ollantaytambo is a pretty, quaint, little village half-way to MP, with impressive ruins of their own well worth a visit. And we can take a train from there to MP for a cheaper fare than from Cusco. Being the cheapies that we are, we decided to try it. Purchased our round-trip train tickets online, and then the next day, headed out. A one-and-a-half hour bus ride (where we were packed in like sardines) later we arrived into Urubamba. Shared a taxi with a nice Belgian couple for a 15-minute ride to Ollantaytambo.

It was raining when we arrived so we followed the Belgian couple to Hostal Home Sweet Home, where they had a reservation. It seemed like a nice place so we bargained with the owner and got a room with a view of the surrounding mountains for 50 soles. Turns out the whole town had no electricity or water until 3:00pm... oy!

Took a walk to Plaza de Armas and found it super-touristy... so not like the chill villages we had been to prior. It was not our scene, but we just needed to get through the day, and we would hop on a train for MP. Well, it was not as easy as you think... reasonably priced food was hard to find, and the prices at the stores were crazy inflated. The price of the water was clearly marked on the bottle, but they tried to charge two or three times the price... it was as if they see a foreigner coming and peg him as an easy mark. When I complained, they lowered the price, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth. Back at the Hostal, once power and water was restored, we tried to shower, but it was crap! With one of those electric shower heads, the water was barely a dribble and never got anywhere near hot... argh! Then later in the evening, we went in search of food and found a couple of “local” eateries with cheap set menus for dinner, but apparently, they shut down around 8:00pm, so we ended eating in an overpriced restaurant, paying New York prices... damn! O well, tomorrow is another day...

Erik: At first glance, Ollantaytambo seemed nice, with narrow, cobblestone streets, quaint village architecture, and a large Inca fortress looming on the hill above town. It probably was a nice little town 10 years ago, but now has been totally taken over by the massive influx of tourism. Every restaurant in town served pizza (the omni-pleasing tourist fare), and every shop sold tourist trinkets such as pseudo-hand-woven, supposedly alpaca caps and sweaters. Even the ruins had been hijacked by tourism, and charged a whopping $10 entry fee, as opposed to the $1 or so we'd paid to visit most other ruins. (A bad omen for MP, which was to provide the superlative sticker shock!) In the end, we were quite happy to be catching the over-priced train the next morning.

Photos of Ollantaytambo:

Ollantaytambo, Peru

Could be worse than Cusco...

Talor: Yet another 10-hour bus ride, but at least this time it was a night bus. Slept through most of it and woke up to the bus arriving into Cusco. The first thing I noticed was that we were on a paved road. After over a week of traveling on bumpy roads, had no idea how luxurious that would feel.

Got really lucky and found the very first Hostal we went to, the Qorichaska, friendly and comfortable. Spent the next five days exploring the city, which is very touristy and expensive, but it was also nice to take a break from all the stares. We were just another gringo/china couple walking around the city. At the impressive Plaza de Armas, where most of the tourists tend to congregate, you can find just about any luxury you can imagine. We were constantly accosted by folks trying to sell us tours, paintings, sweaters, massages and even photo ops with children and women walking around with traditional clothes and carrying lambs or walking llamas. Little did they know, we'd seen plenty of that and had already taken tons of photos, for free!

Walked up and down the hills visiting the different neighborhoods, and found pretty colonial houses with brightly painted windows and doorways. It seemed a cross between Antigua (Guatemala) and Valparaiso (Chile). You can understand why the tourists would flock there. And despite the fact that there were tons of tourists, we found everybody pretty friendly and well-mannered, that is, except the drivers. Throughout Peru, we have found the rudest drivers in the world!

We went into sticker shock when we found the whole city was a lot pricier than what we had been used to in the small mountain villages, but we did manage to find some good cheap eateries with set menus, and the mercado (market), which is the best organized mercado I had ever seen. It had clearly marked signs hanging from the ceiling telling you where to find fruit, vegetables, bread or eateries. But we decided to splurge a little and even had pretty decent trucha (trout) sashimi one night.

Although I'm not much for outdoor activities (trekking, hiking, mountain climbing, etc.), which are all very popular here due to the terrain, thought I should at least try something so we booked a half-day white water rafting trip for the next day. Unfortunately Erik came down with one of those nasty stomach bugs. He spent the day in bed and we postponed the trip for two days later, which turned out to be perfect because it ended up raining on and off for most of the those days anyway. The rafting was fun, but it would have been better if it'd been warmer... oh well, at least there was a sauna we could warm up in afterwards. Sure felt like heaven when I could feel my hands and toes again. And they fed us well afterwards.

Overall, we thought we'd hate Cusco, but it turned out to be not so bad. The next day, we were on our way to Ollantaytambo where we would board a train for Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu... finally!

Erik: I'm glad that Talor slept so well on the bus ride - i have trouble sleeping on buses, especially bumpy ones, and that nice, paved road didn't start until far into the ride to Cusco. It was so nice to check into the hostal with firm beds and hot showers!

It was a bit odd at first being treated as rich tourists rather than curiosities as we'd become accustomed to in all the smaller villages we'd been to, but we got used to it and learned to enjoy the things Cusco had to offer, such as nice restaurants and bars. The cobblestone streets and Inka walls were beautiful, even if crowded with hordes of other tourists. Even the stomach bug didn't bother me that much as it rained those days, and I had plenty of sleep to catch up on - and we had a comfortable place to do that.

The rafting was good fun, if not too challenging. Poor Talor was shivering and numb by the time we'd finished, but still seemed upbeat on the experience.

After that we had on our eyes on Machu Picchu...

Our Cusco photos can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/erikandtalor/CuscoPeru1#