Miss Maps Goes Solo

Peru´s been a real eye opener. I think it may have just knocked Guatemala off the top spot for favourite countries so far. The landscape is awesome and full of surprises. I´ve never seen mountains or desert like it. The culture is everywhere and seems much more well preserved than Guatemala where indigenous people are seriously repressed. That´s not to say there isn´t poverty here. There´s heaps of it. So many people have such low standards of living, in mud huts with no electricity or water, seemingly just a few animals and potato plants. Often a young kid or student will stand at the front of a bus and perform magic tricks to get a few soles. Speaking of buses, we once got taped on a camcorder when boarding a bus, apparently for safety reasons!

The animal cruelty has been a shock too, I try to remember that in England we treat dogs as well as we treat our kids. Here they´re just dumb animals and besides, the kids often aren´t treated that well either.

I think Peru contained one of my best weeks, just after new years when we saw the sacred valley, Machu Picchu and of course the slightly life changing white water rafting. I still look at white water and want to be on it.

I´ve reached a point here with my Spanish where I don´t get anxious anymore. That´s not to say I´m brilliant, far from it, but I suprised myself with a torrent of decently formed sentences when I got into a shouting match with yet another lying bus company. Seemingly anger helps, alcohol definitely does.

I´ve decided whilst in Peru that I´m going to embrace my Englishness, because I really am bloody English. On the Titicaca trip were a couple of Brazilian families. Lovely people, so un-English. Two of the adolescent girls stripped off to very skimpy bikinis and jumped into the lake, followed by about 10 pairs of male Peruvian eyes. Their dad was right there and he didn´t care! One bikini clad girl sat back down with everyone and proceeded to bash a tambourine and sing in a shrill voice. Myself and another English girl stared on as we sat there, cross legged, very covered up and quietly reading our books. Next an Argentinian guy got up and started crazily waving a Peruvian flag around, then the super gay Belgians got up and started dancing topless in the style of party boy from Jackass. This was all too much for me to handle so I shuffled off below deck muttering about sunburm. I´m a prude and I don´t care!

I think Brazil might be a bit of a challenge for me. I might ditch my idea of dressing up and dancing in the carnival parade. I would probably be incredibly awkward and uncomfortable with all those g-strings and nipple tassles. I think watching will have to do.

Sorry, two updates this time so please read below first!

I planned this trip so loosely that all I knew I wanted to do in Peru/Bolivia was Lake Titicaca. It´s the highest navigable lake in the world at 3800m. The lake spans the Peru and Bolivia border so we started on the Peruvian side. We visited as part of a tour that would include an overnight stay with a family, all very touristy but very cool.

As well as regular islands, there are 38 floating islands, created in pre-Inca times, they´re made of reeds, piled 3 metres deep and as the reeds at the bottom rot away they pile more on top. It feels really squishy to walk on. The people fish trout and catfish from the lake and trade them on the mainland. I don´t think their lives have changed much over the last few hundred years.

It took 4 hours on the boat to reach the natural island of Amantani. I spent the whole time lying down in the boat, the altitude was making me feel seriously nauseous. On the island we were assigned a family for the 3 of us, this was the closest I´d been to really traditional Peruvian life. The house was a few rooms off a muddy courtyard with a seperate kitchen in a mud hut, a non-flushing toilet also in a mud hut and a few sheep milling around. The matresses were made of something crunchy and underneath them was a layer of reeds. There was no shower, no running water and no electricity. From what we could tell 3 generations lived in the house and the girls all wore the traditional brightly coloured full skirt, white embroidered blouse and long black embroidered scarf worn over the head. Lunch consisted of soup followed by potatoes, a fried egg and tomato, washed down with coca tea. Potato is a big part of the diet here, they grow black, purple and yellow ones.

After lunch we climbed a further 650m (can´t believe I hit 4100m) to the summit of the island for a fiesta celebrating mother earth. This only happens once a year so we were pretty lucky although our altitude was so bad that we took forever to climb and missed most of it. Still we saw one community dancing along the top of the mountain waving flags and playing flutes, all very Andean. Our tour guide had abandoned us and we ended up being shown around by the 7 year old son of our host mum. Although we missed the main fiesta we had a fantastic walk back down the house.

Dinner was the same soup followed by rice and potates washed down with coca tea. We were starting to struggle with the stodge. Then things got really weird, Libia (our host mum) brought us all traditional clothes to wear up to the community hall for a spot of dancing. It was pretty cool getting dressed up and trekking up the terraced fields in the dark (I had a torch this time, see previous entry). Dancing felt like being at a school disco in a village hall. 3 guys played traditional Andean music while the locals pulled us up to swirl our skirts around in a really monotonous but quite fun traditional dance. It was really touristy, they do it every night and you could tell the locals were a bit over it.

When we got home we could hear a grown man balling his eyes out. Libia´s dad, who danced in the fiesta, had a few too many beers and had to be carried back to the house and put to bed. I must admit it seemed like the whole community was pretty drunk.

The next morning (after sleeping in all my clothes under 4 alpaka blankets) breakfast was some kind of deep-fried batter, pure fat. This time we resorted to taking some with us so as not to offend. We headed to another island called Taquile, a smaller and even more traditional place. Here the men knit their own hats (like bobble hats with bits that cover your ears and pom poms hanging off two bits of string). Single men wear a certain type shaped like a cone. The top, floppy bit is bent over to the right if they don´t have a girlfriend and to the left if they do. If they´re not looking they flop it backwards (the little boys wear it this way too). The married men wear a different type of hat which they make themselves. It takes them 1 month to knit and it looks like really intricate embroidery. The married guys also knit a bag for coca leaves and they greet each other by exchanging leaves rather than shaking hands.

Lake Titicaca was everything I hoped and we still have the Bolivian side to see. We´re all pretty nervous aobut Bolivia, it´s the least touristy country and famous for food poisoning and altitude sickness, something we´ve all had enough of. We head there in a day or two.

As for my mental state, I still feel like coming home, I´m pretty exhausted and the hardest bit is yet to come. One month in Bolivia will be tough. Just the idea of carnival is wearing me out! I´m kind of craving the Heathrow arrivals lounge now that I´ve got less than two months to go. I feel like I just want to spend the next 7 weeks in somewhere like Buenos Aires learning tango and having a nice time. I think after people have been travelling for a while they need to stop somewhere for a bit. Maybe we´ll find somewhere in Bolivia to do that. If not, I can always change my plans and go somewhere more developed to sit tight for a while, who knows.

I´ve done so many bus journeys recently that they´re all merging into one. So after some journey I can´t recall, we arrived in Arequipa, second largest town in Peru, at about 7am and slept for a few hours. Arequipa is ... [Continue reading this entry]

13 hours from Cusco to Ica, or so we were told by the bus company. At 8pm, we piled on to the bus, it was definitely not a 1st class one. The locals tend to buy 2 tickets ... [Continue reading this entry]

After white water rafting we checked into and out of our hostel at the same time. I hate doing that, but you have to when leaving at 5.30 the next morning. The train from Cusco takes 4 hours ... [Continue reading this entry]

Happy New Year everyone! During the day on new years eve we took a tour to the Sacred Valley, an amazing area between Cusco and Machu Picchu with fantastic scenery, great ruins and cute towns. We loved it, although none ... [Continue reading this entry]

Hi all Had a lovely chilled out Christmas here, I hope you all had a good one too. Having my friends Justine and Pippa here made it ten times better, otherwise I reckon I would´ve been pretty home sick. [Continue reading this entry]

On 20 December I cheerily bounced up to the check in desk of Quito airport, with a ticket dated 20 January, bugger. Stupid travel agency, stupid me for not noiticing, stupid Taca airline staff for finding it all so ... [Continue reading this entry]