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Articles Tagged ‘Cusco’

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Welcome to the Jungle

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

I literally had to drag myself out of bed the next morning as I was so exhausted from the night before. We only had one day in the jungle and I didn’t want to waste it. Justin, Lucia, and I met downstairs for breakfast and spoke with the owner about what we could do in a day. Justin wanted to see a village in the jungle nearby. A lady who worked at the hotel needed to go to the village to take care of something so she came with us to show us the way. We hired a taxi to take us as far as he could before he thought the road was undrivable. Having seen a whole other level of bad roads the night before, I thought the driver gave up to soon. He agreed to meet us back at the spot in a few hours. He pulled away leaving the four of us alone on a dirt road completely surrounded by jungle. We set off walking and I soon began to feel very grumpy as I often do in hot sticky air. My mood was lifted a bit when we began to see brightly colored butterflies and parrots. You could here monkeys howling in the distance. On the way to the village we passed several outlying houses. They all were made of thatch and had one room. Outside was a covered cooking and laundry area. [read on]

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Last Days of the Tour

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

I joined Justin to go volunteer at a school out in the countryside near Cusco. After taking a share taxi, then a tuk tuk (motorcycle pulling a cart basically. I don’t know what they are called in South America), and walking through some fields, we arrived at the schoolhouse. The school had about 25 kids attending it. The ages ranged from 7 or so and younger. When we arrived, it was recess. The lone teacher was outside with the kids who were running around the yard screaming and playing with various dogs and chickens. We immediately joined in. It always amazes me how open to the public schools are in the developing world. No one bats an eye when strange foreigners come walking in from a field and start playing with the kids. In the US the schools are like prisons. I believe the teacher may have known Justin though. We spent sometime playing soccer, being used as mules, and for a while I was a train conductor. They loved having their pictures taken and looking at them on the camera screen. When recess was over, the lone teacher informed us that the other teacher wasn’t coming back for the day and basically left us with a room full of kids to teach while she went back to her classroom. They had been working on writing their vowels so we spent some time helping them with that. Every fifteen minutes or so we had to stop and let the kids get up and dance and sing or they would lose focus. In the afternoon when the school let out, we had to walk a long ways down the road before a car passed that could pick us up. Justin, the teacher, myself and two kids from the class got in the car and rode to the bus stop which was quite a ways away. The two kids who were with us must have been only six or seven and they sometimes walked a few hours each day by themselves to get to and from school. [read on]

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Cusco – Capital of the Incan Empire

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
The night bus to Cusco was identical to the one I had taken to get to Arequipa. This time though I actually did manage a few hours of sleep as I was still very worn out from the mountain climb. ... [Continue reading this entry]

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