Wanderlust

Gina. Mancora, Peru.

Beach life just isn´t my thing. We left Huanchaco a couple of days ago for another night bus farther up the  coast to Mancora. Mancora is about 1 1/2 hours from the Ecuador border and an 8 hour bus trip from Huanchaco. It seemed like a good place to stop and break up the bus ride. And it´s very nice, but I´m just not into beaches. Well, they´re okay. I don´t particularly like sand (I sort of hate it) and I don´t really like salt water (it irritates my skin. I know, I´m weird). But we´ve had a pretty good time here anyway just relaxing and watching people surf (and a couple of people try to kite surf which looks terrifying). We were going to try to take a surf lesson here, but the water isn´t that warm and while it´s pretty humid it´s also really windy on the beach so chilly. Since we´re heading farther up the coast to Ecuador anyway, we decided just to wait for warmer water and weather to try to get out there.

We had a nice last day in Huanchaco. We tried cebiche at this fancy restaurant that overlooked the ocean. It was pretty tasty–you could really taste the lime. And the raw fish texture was nice. We also got a plate that had a giant piece of lightly breaded fish and a pile of mixed deep fried shellfish. It was damn tasty. We even got to eat some baby octopus which was nothing like I thought it would be. I was expecting it to be chewy, but it really tender. It was a very nice lunch. I like eating seafood while looking at the ocean.

The bus ride was uneventful. I slept, Steve watched a cheesey movie in Spanish. We arrived in Mancora at 6 in the morning. It was dark. I was sleepy and grumpy and we didn´t know where we were going since we´d forgotton to write down possible Mancora hostels. But our taxi driver (Taxi! It was really a motorbike with a little back seat shell thing around it… it´s hard to explain) was very nice and patient and took us to three different places before we picked one. The first place was really cheep but also really grungy. The sink and bathtub were full of giant crickets. The second place was way more than we wanted to spend, but the first place was more our style. It was close enough to walk to the beach and was pretty clean. It´s very humid here so there are a lot of bugs. Our room had ants and our bed was a 24-hour buffet for some termites, there was mouse evidence in our room (and the teenager who ran the place–I guess–had seen a mouse and set traps recently) , and we had a nice lizard friend in our room (who was very welcome since they eat bugs), but whatever. I´m surprised all of our rooms haven´t been crawling in bugs since they´ve been so cheap. We´ve really only seen one or two other insects the whole trip (a spider and a giant, giant bee), but I´m sure the time for bugs has come since we´re planning on staying near the coast and just getting closer and closer to the ecuator all of the time

There were some pretty noisy Brits staying in our hostel as well (I think the walls were literally made of paper) who had some horror stories to tell. Two of them had all of their stuff stolen right in front of them while they were in Bolivia. They had just gotten into the mountains and put down their bags when they were snatched. I guess they made chase but the altitude is so hard on you that they didn´t have a chance. If someone would´ve grabbed our bags when we first got to Cusco they would be long gone–even though Steve ran track in college. Another couple had left Mancora the night before but instead of getting on their bus to Quito (North in Ecuador) they accidentally got on a bus to Lima (South)! They got all the way to Lima, and turned around and bought a ticket back to Mancora! Poor guys. I think the horror stories both made me feel bad for the poor suckers and also relieved that we´ve had very good luck. But really I think we´re just more careful in a lot of ways. These group of kids, specifically, were a bit crazy (a prime example is that we could hear them doing coke last night through the paper walls. Doing cocaine (period) let alone buying it in Peru is, in my opinion, completely nutso). Which doesn´t mean that you can´t be completely diligent and very careful and not get stuff stolen. It happens. I´m just glad we have all of our stuff still, except for a couple of little things that we lost on our own.

So off to Ecuador where we´ll catch another bus to Puerto Lopez which is on the coast and is the launching point for a National Park that has mangrove forests, whale watching, and an island with blue-footed boobies (boobies!). I´m very excited. We´re planning on staying there a few days before going up to Bahia de Caraquez where Steve is going to volunteer with an organization called Planet Drum and where I am going to look for somewhere to volunteer. They´re graciously going to allow me to stay with Steve in their volunteer apartment and help me find something else as they´re doing reforestation of a hillside, which means carrying buckets of water up hills all day, and that´s not really up my alley. I´m glad this is working out as it´s been pretty tough finding places to volunteer that we were both interested in and that didn´t cost a huge amount of money (this one is something like $15 a month a piece for food). So we can save money, do some good work, maybe take Spanish lessons, and still have weekends free to explore.

Gina. Huanchaco, Peru.

Since we´re now on the coast we decided that today would be a good day to try ceviche, a Peruvian dish that´s basically raw fish in lime juice and the lime juice supposedly kills all any bacteria or other bad things and ´cooks´the fish. We walked around this afternoon (after we got to our hostel and slept until one! Bus trips are exhausting) and checked out the prices on a couple of places our guide book recommended. We found one that looked good and decided to go back there for dinner.

After watching some tv and reading and being generally lazy we got hungry and went back out around 6:30 for our much anticipated dinner. But then everything was closed. All three restaurants that were crawling with people at lunch time were dark and locked up with no sign that they´d be opening again any time tonight. Feeling a little bummed and a little confused, we wondered around looking for something that was a) open, b) not too expensive, and c) not divey. I´m weary of raw fish at the best of times, but a divey restaurant at a beach town in Peru on the off season just sounds a little too sketchy for raw fish, no matter how much lime juice it´s soaking in.

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Gina. Huanchaco, Peru.

 We arrived very early this morning in Trujillo (around 5:30) where we discovered that another traveling couple of gringos had their cameras swiped on the bus during the night. Only one passenger had gotten off of the bus at what I think was an unscheduled stop (upsetting). It might have been scheduled, but our tickets only said there was one other stop and that was about an hour after we got on in Lima. We were traveling on Cruz del Sur which is the most expensive and supposedly the safest bus company (they take a video of all of the passengers as they get on). One of their great safety features (I thought) was that they don´t stop in the middle of the night and let people on or off of the bus. The most upsetting (and relieving) thing about the theft was that I woke up at some point during the night (with earplugs in, eye mask, no contacts, and a neck pillow) to what felt like my carry on backpack being slowly tugged from under my seat. I was sitting towards the window and had the bag at my feet (my purse with my camera was safely on my body under my coat and blanket). I immediately woke up and said Steve´s name a couple of times to see if it was him pulling on the bag to try to get some water or something. I obviously woke him up, so I knew it wasn´t him. Now, I was half asleep and blind and completely disoriented, and I halfway thought that maybe I was imagining things. So I just pulled the bag under my feet and wrapped the straps around my legs. I thought about hugging the bag, but there wasn´t anything in there except for a couple of books and our water. It wasn´t until the morning when the couple discovered that their bags had been opened from under the feet and their stuff taken out that I realized that what I felt was real and that I could have possibly done something to prevent their cameras being stollen. I have some guilt about not calling the bus dude over or even turning on the light and looking behind me. There was one guy sleeping behind us when I went to sleep, and he was gone when I woke up in the morning, so he was probably the culprit.

I´m relieved that none of our stuff was stolen but I feel bad about not making a fuss when I felt my bag move. I keep telling myself that I wasn´t sure if what I felt was real at the time, but hindsight is 20/20. Poor nice couple. They searched everyone as they got off the bus, but nothing. They lost all of their Machu Picchu pictures and were pretty upset about it. Which I would be, too. I´ve been keeping the memory card of the photos in my money belt as we´ve been trying to upload all of them. I´d be heartbroken if the photos were stolen.

We´ve been really careful with our stuff on buses in general (keeping all valuables either on our bodies or in our luggage which is checked under the bus and you have to show your ticket to receive your luggage), but this whole under the seat bag grab is going to put me even more on my guard. I´m surprised that I woke up at all since I´m usually a pretty deep sleeper. I think I actually had my leg on the bag and that´s why I felt it being pulled from under me. So just a warning for anyone traveling at night (or during the day, really) in Peru to be extra careful and keep all valuables on your body or stowed away under the bus. You can´t be too careful even on the luxury buses (and really maybe you have to be more careful on those as the only time we´ve seen other gringos has been on the ´safe´buses. The other buses are all local people and they just leave their stuff on the bus when they get off to buy snacks or go to the bathroom. So maybe the lower class buses are the safer bets since it´s be silly for a thief to target them as foreigners´buses).

Gina. Lima, Peru.

We´re already sick of Lima again. It´s just not our town. We´ve been staying in Miraflores this time around (instead of the center) and while it´s nicer and calmer it´s still just not really our kind of place. It´s just so dreary here. We walked around yesterday and visited the SAE clubhouse in Lima, had our 4th of July feast, and went to the ocean. And now we´re done. We´ve got a bus ticket for tonight leaving at 10 pm for Trujillo. It should be about an 8 hour bus ride up the coast, so we´ll get there bright and early. The plan is to find a hostel in Huanchaco which is a short taxi ride away and supposedly a calmer, smaller place to stay. The draw here is that it´s farther north up the coast, so closer to Ecuador, and they have good surfing and some neat sounding archeological sites, including the city of Chan Chan. According to wikipedia:

The largest Pre-Columbian city in South America, Chan Chan is an archaeological site located in the Peruvian region of La Libertad, five km east of Trujillo. Covering an area of approximately 20 km², Chan Chan was constructed by the Chimor (the kingdom of the Chimú), a late intermediate period civilization which grew out of the remnants of the Moche civilization. The vast mud city of Chan Chan was built between c.850 and c.1470 and was the imperial capital until Chimor was conquered by the Inca in the 15th century. It is estimated that 30,000 people lived in the city of Chan Chan.

The city is composed of ten walled citadels which housed ceremonial rooms, burial chambers, temples, reservoirs and some residences. Each of these citadels has a rectangular configuration with a north-facing entrance, high walls, and a labyrinth of passages.

The walls themselves were constructed of adobe brick, and were then covered with a smooth surface into which intricate designs were carved. There are two styles of design present in these carvings: one is a ‘realistic’ representation of subjects such as birds, fish, and small mammals; and the other is a more graphic, stylized representation of the same subjects. While earlier civilizations concentrated on feline and anthropomorphic forms, the Chimú style shows a preference for maritime motifs. The carvings at Chan Chan depict fish, pelicans, and nets for catching various sea creatures. Chan Chan, unlike most other coastal ruins in Peru, is located extremely close to the Pacific Ocean.

Chan Chan was added as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. The city is severely threatened by erosion from El Niño, which causes heavy rains and flooding on the Peruvian coast. Present-day visitors to Chan Chan can enter the Tschudi Complex, believed to be one of the later citadels built in the city. There are also several other Chimú and Moche ruins in the area around Trujillo.

So we´ll see some neat ruins and maybe take a surfing lesson or two, then keep heading north to Ecuador. Hopefully there will be some good photo opportunities in our future as Lima is so dreary it doesn´t lend itself to pictures (although I did talk Steve into going to a Dunkin Donuts today where I took a picture of him eating his first Dunkin Donut ever, and then another picture of him feeling a bit sick afterwards! There are a lot of American stores around Lima, including the first McDonald´s that we´ve seen–we´ve seen tons of KFCs, though. They´re crazy about their chicken in Peru!).

Gina. Lima, Peru.

Something about this trip is inspiring me to do things I wouldn´t normally do. Running down the steps on the Inka trail is a good example. Another excellent example is that Steve and went white water rafting on Tuesday in Arequipa, and it was all my idea. I don´t know what´s come over me. But I´m glad that we went rafting because it was awesome! And cold. Very, very cold. I keep forgetting that it´s winter in Peru. And winter means cold rivers.

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Gina. Arequipa, Peru.

I have a parasite (or hopefully, had). I´m not sure what kind, but the doctor I saw was pretty convinced that since I´d been sick for almost three weeks and didn´t have a fever or any other sign of infection that a creature of some kind was the culprit (I went to Hampi on Choquechaca which is the same street as the yummy Jack´s Cafe and as South American Explorers´Club. It was 60 soles for the exam and the doctor was very nice and spoke perfect English–and supposedly also French).

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Gina. Arequipa, Peru.

The last day of the trek started out very early. 4 a.m. I have a newfound respect for my Uncle Ron for waking up at 4 a.m. every day to go to work. Steve and I were both grumpy when we got up. It was strangely hot in our tent the night before and we weren´t sure what types of bugs/animals were outside, so we didn´t want to open up the flaps. We got little sleep because of the heat and, for me, because my legs hurt so badly that it was impossible to get comfortable (and our tent was on a decline, so I kept slipping to the bottom!).

After a hasty breakfast we got cleaned up and went as a group to wait a half hour for the final checkpoint to open at 5:30. I guess there`s some desire to be the first ones through the checkpoint or the first ones to the Sun Gate, but I would have preferred to sit in the clubhouse for that last half hour rather than standing in the dark with all the other hikers.

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Gina. Cusco, Peru. 

The first day of the trek was by far the easiest. The second day hell on earth. The third day was really very nice. I was so exhausted from day 2 that I slept like a rock that night. I woke up about an hour before the morning wake up call: ¨Amigos, buenos dias.¨It was strange waking up at 4:30 in the morning without any prompting, but I guess that´s what happens when you go to bed at 8 and you´re sleeping on the ground. Waking up early was actually a good thing as it gave me time to stretch really well in the warmth of the tent. The plan for day 3 was to hike over two small passes and then down to our final camp site. It was to be our longest day as far as distance goes, but the prettiest as far as scenery and lots of ruins. This day was much more my style of hiking. I don´t mind hiking as long as I have a destination of some kind. Whether it´s a pretty waterfall to swim in or a an ancient Incan town, I don´t care. I just like to hike a while and then stop a while to enjoy whatever we´ve hiked to. I also like to be able to stop and take photos without feeling rushed.

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Gina. Cusco, Peru.

Day 2 of the Machu Picchu trek… What can I say about you?

You suck.

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Gina. Cusco, Peru.

We survived! I´m tired and in a good deal of pain, but I made it, and I plan to do very little physical activity for the next few days at least! I think it´ll be easiest to write about the trip if I break it down by each day. Here´s what I wrote in my journal after the first day:

We survived the first day! The fact that it´s the easiest day isn´t phasing me, though. We passed the train to Agua Caliente (the city closest to Machu Picchu–you can take a train to the city and then a bus to Machu Picchu, so you don´t have to walk at all) several times along the way today. I wanted to yell ¨Cheaters!¨at it every time. I´m feeling pretty exhausted. We woke up at 6:00 this morning in order to meet our group by 6:30. I slept okay last night, but this morning my belly hurt and it took a while for it to settle. I wanted to take a shower, but our hostel was out of hot water (and then out of water!). But I won´t be able to shower for the next 3 days, so who cares. We stopped in Ollytaytambo and had a pancake and some coca tea. We also each bought a walking stick and some coca leaves that you´re supposed to chew as you walk to help with the altitude and for energy.

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