A Million Minutes in Africa

Cuzco is the gateway to Machu Picchu and therefore a huge number of travelers pass through there. The central plaza is full of backpackers and touts pushing restaurants, tours, shoe shines, even finger puppets.

There are some interesting museums there, including the regional history museum. Here’s a victim of overexposure to touts.

Outside of Cuzco is the Sacred Valley of the Incas. There are many Inca ruins here, including those of Pisac. Here’s our Aussie travel companion of 10 days, Christos, and me exploring. We found Christos in Huancavelica, actually he found us. We returned to our hotel after a hard day of looking around and eating when the front desk clerk gave us a note. It asked if we were heading out of town and had transport. Christos found his way to Huancavelica in an uncomfortable train and was looking for a way out.

In the town of Pisac there is a bustling Sunday market. This lady brought her kids and her kid goat.

From Pisac we drove to Ollantaytambo, where we left the car and took the train to Aguas Calientes, also known as Machu Picchu pueblo. (It’s the town at the foot of the mountain on top of which Machu Picchu sits.) We stayed overnight there and in the morning set off on foot for the famed lost city of the Incas. It was a steep climb, mostly involving uneven rock stairs. It took an hour and ten minutes to ascend. Here’s what we saw.

We met these guys up there.

Those of you who have been there are probably wondering why we didn’t hike the 4-day Inca Trail. Well, that was our original plan, but it turns out that this is the rainy season. The trail is muddy and slippery, and it rained a lot on the days surrounding our visit. We were lucky to have sun on the morning of our ascent. We talked to some people who did hike the Inca trail, and they confirmed that it was wet and miserable. When they reached Machu Picchu, it was fogged over so they couldn’t even see it. We feel lucky.

The drive from Ayacucho to Andahuaylas was another bone-jarring 10 hours on rocky roads with incredible scenery. Not a lot of other traffic, but we did pass a combi van carrying human passengers within and canine ones above, safely encased in plastic bags.

Met some more friendly police officers in Andahuaylas. We asked them where a particular hotel was, and they had us follow them straight to it. They wished us a good trip. Somehow we didn’t expect all the police in Peru to be so welcoming. What a nice surprise.

We successfully made it to the highest driveable pass IN THE WORLD on our way from Huancavelica to Ayacucho. Ayacucho is a nice enough city, but when you read about it, it is usually referred to as the stronghold for Sendero Luminoso. If you don’t know about Sendero Luminoso you are not much behind me, and it is probably better that you do your own research rather than depend on what I know about them. In a nutshell, they are either terrorists bent on killing everyone who does not subscribe to their philosophy, or they are a group trying to empower the oppressed campesino masses. Probably the truth is somewhere in between, but good luck finding it.

In the town of Ayacucho we stayed in a hotel that served as the headquarters for journalists trying to bring the story to the world. Sadly, several of them were killed years back in the conflict between the government and SL. The police we talked with said there has been no SL activity recently and there was nothing to worry about. The leader of the group, a former university professor, was captured a while back leaving the group disorganized.

On a happier note, we got to play AAA by yanking a truck out of the ditch on the side of the road, which was just about a half a mile from the highest driveable pass IN THE WORLD.

In the market at Ayacucho, the vendors were incredibly friendly. We would walk through and some of the women would say, “Oye Papi, Papicito,” come have a look.

Alejandro Gallardo is a master weaver in Ayacucho. He’s carrying on his family’s tradition of high quality weaving. He described to us with great passion the process of the craft.

The other day we began our journey from the shore of Peru, zero sea level, to the highest drivable pass at over 5,000 meters. That is about three times the altitude of Denver; serious altitude sickness territory. The road was well-paved, scenic, and lightly traveled for the first three hours.

Then we headed off the pavement at a town called Rumichaca. We have a good map of Peru which includes dirt roads so we were pretty confident of our location. There were a few forks in the road, and as Yogi Berra was reported to have said, we took them. We were doing well until the wrong town showed up in our windshield. We arrived in Castrovirreyna- but wait a minute. This town is all the way over here on the map. We still had about three hours of daylight, but who knows how much more driving there was.

We scrambled back to the last known point on the map; the little settlement of Santa Ines. When we arrived there we asked how to find our destination of Huancavelica. A group of about 15 guys gathered around the truck with longing eyes. They all wanted a ride. Uh, guys, there might not be enough room in here. Later.

Next fork we ask another guy. Surprisingly enough, he wanted a ride, too. It turns out he had run out of gas and wanted a ride back to his vehicle after getting gas in the current outpost village in which we found ourselves. He pulled out an ID card with a little badge to show that he was a police officer. Fair enough. Looked fairly real in a sort of worn out way. Plus, there was another guy who had given him a ride from his stuck vehicle and he looked to still be in good condition.

The policeman turned out to be an excellent tour guide as well. He pointed out mines from the Spanish colonial era, he talked about the people of the region and shared his personal story.

When we finally arrived to his vehicle a couple of hours later, his cohorts approached our vehicle, one with his gun drawn and pointed in our general direction. I rolled down the window quickly and showed my hands as we slowed down. Apparently, twenty years of fighting with Shining Path members have put them on edge a little.

Just in case this little story concerns anyone about our safety traveling through Sendero Luminoso territory, we are now almost at the border with Bolivia. We had no other sketchy incidents, and in fact, because so few tourists checked out the sights during years of fighting between the military and Sendero Luminoso in this region, we had the opportunity to glimpse a part of Peru untouched by the cold, clammy hands of heavy tourism. We were universally welcomed with smiles and handshakes by people who were happy to see our tourist dollars as well as people who were not even remotely associated with tourism.

Some people might say I have issues, and they are probably right. For example, when I saw on the map of Peru that there is a place in the Andes noted as the “Highest Drivable Pass In The World” I was on a mission to go there. Never mind that it involved a detour on our way to Cusco, hours of driving on washed-out dirt roads gripping the sides of crumbling rock mountains, getting lost, having a gun pointed in our general direction (more on that later- ooh, a cliffhanger), traveling into the pitch black of night, becoming ill with altitude sickness, etc.

But, hey, we have almost made it. Sure, you don’t have any issues?

Here’s a lady we met in the abandoned town of Santa Barbara. She was spinning yarn while tending her flock of sheep.

We got the car back! Yay! It only took 5 days of signing, waiting, stamping, waiting, taking taxis and collectivos to and from warehouses, offices and customs, and waiting. Did I mention the waiting involved?

More to come…

Manana is the day we are supposed to collect our vehicle. I must say that the representative from GRUPO ULTRAMAR, Luis, has been doing a wonderful job. Do not try something like this without professional help, or maybe seek professional help before trying to do something like this. No exaggeration, yesterday and today we spent 17 hours with Luis running from different office to office with documents and photocopies of documents and notarized photocopies of documents. This was after GRUPO ULTRAMAR spent two days preparing documents for us.

Tomorrow, Luis has promised (more like suggested, actually) that after eight more hours of running around and paying more money than the stupid shipping company quoted us, we will be driving around with the other lunatics on the streets of Lima.

While we wait for the truck to continue our South American foray, we just wanted to post some photos we didn’t get a chance to share from Central America. They were taken in December.

Dan on a zipline canopy tour in Nicaragua. It is called a canopy tour so that it takes on the air of eco-tourism, a popular term these days. However, it is really just a great excuse to zip through the trees and get an adrenaline rush.

A boat washed ashore at San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. Just some purty light on a rusty hulk.

The crater of Volcan Irazu, Costa Rica.

A guest in our room on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. I go to take a shower and as I touch the shower curtain to pull it back I notice this little critter hanging out in the folds of the curtain. Often Giselle screams moderately when there is a creepy crawler about so I ease her into this one. “Honey, there is something you shouldn’t see in the bathroom.”

The same guest, close up.

One of the most trying things about traveling is the constant pounding you take from strangers’ indifference. Actually, that would be one of the most trying things about everyday living. However, when you come across someone who shares an idea or the excitement of travel, it makes a strange place feel like home.

We had the good fortune to run into Rafael del Campo Quintana at Ultramar, a customs agency. When we told him we were driving through the Americas he said, “I want to go!” He was only half-joking, but he has taken on the cause of getting our car out of Peruvian customs as if it were his own. He broke out a map of Peru on his computer, and we talked about all the places we should visit. As a contrast, the first agency we ran into told us because the car was more than 5 years old we could not import it; we would have to ship it back to Panama. They said that was probably our only option. We are going with Rafael.

Tomorrow we are supposed to go to the port to see if the car is in one piece. At the risk of sounding like an unabashed advertisement, if you ever need customs agent services, we can give you Rafael’s number in Lima. He is a good person.

Nazca is an area described by a Quechua word that means “suffering” because the ancient people had little water in this part of the world. It is in the Peruvian desert, a place notable for mysterious shapes marked into the landscape by removing dark-colored stones and exposing the lighter sand underneath. We didn´t know Peru had such a desert; we figured Peru- Machu Picchu and jungle. Wrong.

Anyway, the drawings in the desert are huge, somewhere on the order of football field size. The spooooohhoooooky part is that noone can say for sure why they are there. They can only be recognized from the air, so they went undiscovered until the 1930s when some pilots noticed them. The lines are supposed to be from the time of the Nazca people, or maybe the Paracas people, or maybe little green beings from Mars. There are many theories of their significance, from solar/lunar calendar, religious ritual walkways, indicators of scarce water in the desert, etc. My vote is an enterprising individual made them to draw tourists into an otherwise stark landscape and boost the local economy. Sure, sure, you say, Dan, you are such a skeptic.

We took a 5-seater Cessna to have a look at the lines from the air. It is the thing to do in Nazca. I normally enjoy things with engines that move quickly, however, the 35 minute flight was about 31 minutes too long. The plane makes a circle around each figure, banking hard so the people on one side of the plane can get a good look at the shapes of animals and plants etched below. Then, after the three people on one side have a good look, the pilot throws the plane into a hard banking turn the other way so the two people on the other side of the plane can have a look-see. This was fun for the first two figures. I believe there were 19 figures total. I held my camera up to the window while I focused my eyes on the horizon in the hope of not throwing up all over the back of the Brazilian guy sitting in front of me. Yes, the word Nazca means “suffering.”

Above is a picture of me nazcaing and below is a picture of Giselle nazcaing.

There is a museum in the town of Ica which displays oddities of ancient cultures for our pleasure. The ancient desert dwellers were entombed in the desert in sacred rituals so one day I could pay a dollar to take their photographs. Above is an incredibly well preserved mummy that bears a spooohooooky resemblence to some of the backpackers staying at an especially noisy hostel that G and I referred to as “Porky´s.”

The archeologists say that the ancients would partake in the practice of skull-shape manipulations. Ancient photographs show young children with large rocks strapped to their foreheads in order to create these cone-shaped skulls. I am no dummy. Mysterious lines in the desert visible only from the air and skulls of space aliens. Duh.

Huacachina is a town in the middle of the sand dunes. It is an oasis really. We had never seen such a thing, except in the movies. No camels, but this little lake had palm trees in it and it was completely surrounded by sand dunes. It only lost a little bit of its magic when the guy at the hotel told us that water is pumped into the lake every week to keep it from drying up.

Huacachina is an ancient word that means, “Holy cr@@, I am going to die in this desert because I foolishly paid for a dune buggy tour with a completely insane driver.” When I first heard about dune buggy rides I got all excited, because like I said, I enjoy things with motors that move quickly. After we paid and walked towards the line of three dune buggies, the guy asks, “Do you want to go with the high adrenaline, medium adrenaline, or the low adrenaline driver?” Well, duh, give me the adrenaline. Giselle, the foolish sport that she is, agreed. I figured how much adrenaline could be produced from a dune buggy that seats nine! people and sounds like it needs a serious tune-up. Plus, the driver was filling the radiator with water from a bottle that clearly had been doing this duty for a long time. Yeehaw, I figured the adrenaline was going to be required to push this sorry vehicle back to Porky´s after it died pulling away. Can I get my money back if I have to walk back?

The driver slammed the jalopy into gear with a clunk and then the snorting contraption jerked forward. It was pleasant enough as we squished up the first dune past the scattering of people who had walked into the mountains of sand and gave up after trudging until overcome with sweat or lust (quite a bit of making out amongst the locals). After the crowd thinned out to nothing, the lunatic behind the wheel (not me this time) was cleared for take-off.

I could not believe how fast that machine could go with 1500 pounds of human cargo. I was still doing math in my head. Then Mr. Insane pointed the buggy up a dune. Up, up, up. Oh my gawd, down, down, down. This isn´t right! We are going to die. Next dune, waaaay up. You got it, now, waaaay down. No more math in the head. Small waves of panic. Is my seatbelt tight? My previously cracked kneecap is perilously close to a frame tube. We go faster and faster. At least we are not going up a dune. Faster, faster. A dip and then bam! we hit a small dune and we go airborn. We are in the air, all nine of us and this sorry dune buggy. Bam! we slam into the sand, slipping to the right and then to the left. Who is this guy driving? I know him. He is the jerk from high school who was the first kid to get his license, pile his friends into his parents´car and try to scare everyone to death with his advanced driving skills he learned the previous week.

As terrifying as this was, it truly got the adrenaline going between trying to figure out the best way to brace for a crash while trying not to swallow too much sand as we hit highway speeds on a terrain that has wisely been crossed at camel-speed for centuries.

Now look at his smile. Do not trust your children with this guy.

Between moments of terror in the dune buggy the driver would stop and we would get out and ride snowboards down the sand dunes. I am sure this is not helping maintain the pristine beauty of some of the largest sand dunes in the world, but it sure was fun. Everyone fell. G and I were cleaning sand from ourselves for two days!