Breakfast in Tokyo, Lunch in Cape Town & Dinner in Medellín

Our overnight bus that I mentioned in the previous entry arrived in Cusco at 11:30am to glorious sunshine and warm weather, never mind the fact that it’s at 3400m elevation.  We have 4 days here before leaving for the 4 day inca trail hike to give plenty of time for acclimatization.  I don’t see this being a problem, after being here for 1 day now and walking around the town for most of it and not having any altitude sickness or related issues.

Before we’d even gotten off the bus it was obvious that Cusco is a much nicer place than Nazca, and actually does have colonial buildings, cobble stone streets and almost every building in town has clay tile roofs on them as well, adding to the scenic beauty of being surrounded by hills and mountains in the not so far distance.  We spent the day just wandering, no plan, no attempt to see any particular sights and it’s a great city for this.  Loads of small streets, archways, colonial churches and lots of open, laid back plazas.  The atmosphere is great, only downside is the people trying to sell you things around the plaza de armas, though they aren’t that persistent like in some places (Kowloon, Hong Kong comes to mind there…).  The plaza itself is great, surrounded by 2 large, old churches and arch lined buildings on the other sides.  Topped off with a green, open, plaza with a fountain in the middle of it.

After that, and lunch, we walked through a couple more plazas, arches and took a lot more photos.  This is one of those places where I could walk around all day just taking photos.  There’s so many cool buildings, plazas and streets, not to mention the fact that you can go up hills in most direction for different angled views of the city.

We walked up one of the hills just before sunset, great overview of the area…

Other than just wandering around the city, which I will be doing more of, there are several inca sites within easy hiking distance of the city that we will be spending the days before the inca trail visiting, a sort of warm up hike.  This area is sounding, and so far looking, great.  The inca trail with it’s finish in Machu Picchu will be the climactic end to my stay in the Cusco area, and it’s also the last big adventure activity of my trip I have planned.  I have exactly one month today until I will be back in the US, 2 more weeks in Peru and then finishing in Colombia.  That hardly seems possible, only one more country to go and I’m done.  For this trip anyway….

We left Lima for Nazca, a 8 hour bus ride through some of the most boring landscapes I’ve ever seen.  The worlds driest costal desert.  Looked more like the moon to me, unearthly scenery, and this was the same around Nazca.

The town of Nazca was described in my guidebook as a nice colonial town and a pleasant place to spend a couple of days.  After spending a couple days there I could not disagree more.  It is a total shithole with no colonial buildings in sight.  There is absolutely nothing to do in the town, the only draw here being the Nazca lines, made centuries ago by the Nazca people in the surrounding desert.  There are mountains here but they are the most uninteresting I’ve ever seen due to the complete lack of colour or growth on them.  Don’t buy the “rough guide south america 2009” book.  Enough said.

People come here to do a flight over the lines, the only way you can see most of them.  However that is expensive and I had no intention of doing it.  During the two full days we were in Nazca, the only sightseeing we did was a trip to the viewing tower where you can see a few of the lines.  This trip was highly overpriced as well.

We spent most of our time in restaurants just killing time before our bus to Cusco…

2 days in total, having some good food, more Cebiche which I really like and various other good dishes, this was the only good thing though, stopping here to break up the bus ride was a terrible idea.  The bus to Cusco left at 9:00pm and arrived around noon the next day, pretty much all of the trip was through mountain switchback roads making it much harder to sleep than on the bus rides in Chile and Argentina.  There was also less legroom then the buses in those places and this was a more expensive bus.  I’m not impressed.  The last few hours of the ride before we got to Cusco was pretty spectacular, even saw some snow capped mountains in the distance…

My Uncle arrived at my hostel the next morning, and after a brief lunch and walk around Barranco we caught a bus into Central Lima to see the main sights here.  The bus ride to the centre took about an hour and was interesting, on an old US school bus colourfully painted.  The people in this city do drive like complete maniacs and use their horns very liberally.  When we got the the centre, we missed the initial place to get off, (there are no “bus stops”) and ended up on the bridge over the river.  The other side of the river looks like a very different place..

Central Lima is busy and pretty crowded, like most large cities.  It has a number of old churches and other various buildings.  The main square, plaza de armas is nice with the cathedral, govt palace and city hall surrounding it.

Next we stumbled across the monastery of san francisco, which has some catacombs underneath.  It’s a nicely built monastery, the library in it has a large collection of historic books.  The large one on display had some original medieval music displayed, cool stuff.  The catacombs were what catacombs are, crypts full of bones, 5 meters deep apparently.  Some arranged by the caretakers interestingly…

After wandering through some more of the centre, going by most of the buildings of note some very busy pedestrian streets and the other large square, plaza san martín the light was starting to fade so we got a bus back to Barranco.

For dinner in Barranco we ended up at the same restaurant I’d eaten at the night before, this time with fish in mind.  Cebiche is a local specialty which is raw fish, served with corn, sweet potato, onions, lime juice and some chili.  We had that as an appetizer, delicious.  Fish for the main dish in some sauce, I have no idea what it was but the fish and sauce were both good.

Considering all I’d heard about Lima before I arrived from other travelers was to leave as soon as possible I’ve been very pleasantly surprised that there is actually something to see here and some nice areas.  It’s not the best of cities, but the central district has some very worthwhile sights and I’ve had some great food, staying in a laid back area full of nice buildings and good atmosphere.

The next day we had to change hostels since the one in Barranco was full, moving to one in the Miraflores district, in the heart of touristy mayhem.  The hostel was nice, but the area was full of gaudy shameless international chain restaurants, people trying to get you eat at their place/buy something and not much else.  Only here for 1 night though since we’re catching a bus to Nazca tomorrow. We walked around, trying to get away from all the tacky stuff, wandered to the top of the cliffs and watched a load of people surfing and parasailing from there.  Not much else to see though as the district seems to be either hotels and restaurants/bars or modern apartment buildings.  Made me very glad with my initial choice of hostels in neighboring Barranco and also eager to get on a bus to somewhere else. At night it was even worse, with people everywhere pouring in and out of the places with large neon signs everywhere.

My flight to Lima was at 6:55am Wednesday morning.  (only flight available to me with this ticket) You can’t get a bus to the airport until 6:00am, so I had to choose between paying a lot of money for a taxi, and booking another night at the hostel, or, taking the last bus the night before for $4 and spending 7 hours overnight at the airport.  The latter is what I went with, fun stuff.

Before any of that happened, I had the entire day to kill in Santiago so I took the metro to the far side of town, to what were supposed to be interesting historic barrios.  I did not find them interesting, instead found the area I was walking around in to be becoming increasingly dodgy and abandoned the walk, heading back to the city centre. 

I had a churrassco for lunch, wandered around the pedestrian areas for a while and stopped in at one of the “cafe con piernas”, had a coffee and headed back towards the hostel to kill the rest of the night.  I had two of by far the largest empanadas I’ve seen for dinner and then rolled myself down to the station.

By the time I had boarded the airplane around 6:15am, I was very tired, hardly sleeping in the airport.  The flight proved a great place to catch up on some of the lost sleep, nearly 4 hours long, but not before watching the stunning scenery straight after take off.  Flying North parallel to the andes with clouds in the valleys, mountains poking out of them and then watching the sun rise over those mountains was nothing short of spectacular.  Then I fell asleep.

Arrival to Peru was straightforward, I had the usual 2 forms to fill out and the additional currently popular health form because of swine flu.  I am convinced no one ever sees these and they go straight in the bin, waste of paper.  Passport with a fresh new stamp in it I met my driver from the hostel at the airport and we headed off through the, as he called it, the “loco lima drivers”.  Amazingly, I understood a fair amount of what he was saying in spanish and could carry out a decent conversation with him.  Unlike in Chile, here people don’t talk at the speed of light.

The weather in Lima was grey, bleak, on and off drizzle which is the typical winter scene apparently.  At least it’s still 20 degrees in the day.  After dropping my stuff at the hostel I ran out for some lunch and got my bearings in the area.  I’m staying in the Barranco district of Lima and after all the negative comments I’ve heard about Lima I was very pleasantly surprised by this area at least.  Very near the ocean, full of old, interesting buildings and the main plaza of the district is one block from my hostel full of bars, restaurants and cafes.

After spending the afternoon exploring the district and a power nap I went for dinner, and had some delicious Peruvian food.  I don’t remember the name, but it was rice, layered with mince in a sauce with fried plátano.  Brilliant stuff.  The dish cost $4 as well, bueno.  So after just one day in Peru I’m liking it already, just have to pay a lot more attention when crossing the road than in Chilé! 

Tomorrow my Uncle flies in and we will meet up and he’ll be traveling with me for my last 5 weeks outside the US, in Peru and Colombia.  Yes I only have 5 weeks until I fly to Miami, time had really started going fast recently…

Second day in Santiago, I crisscrossed it a couple times on the metro, walked a lot of km and went to most of the areas frequented by tourists.  My conclusion is that there aren’t many things here in the way of attractions, not surprising from what I’d heard, but sometimes the masses get it wrong.

Central Santiago is a typical centre of a city, there’s a lot of pedestrian walkways lined with your typical banks, cafes, minimarkets and restaurants.  The main square, plaza de armas is nice enough, surrounded by old buildings and with some greenery in it.

After that, I headed over to what I had been told was a good area full of restaurants and stuff happening in one of the modern districts of the city.  It is full of restaurants, I walked by tgi fridays, starbucks and ruby tuesday in the same block, felt slightly disturbed and headed in a different direction only to stumble into this alarming road.

This may as well be in any North American city, I could hardly notice a difference.  I managed to find a cafe hidden away that wasn’t serving steaks or western fast food,  had some very good empanadas and got on the subway to take me away from that district as fast as possible. It was like walking into the USA. I didn’t travel around the world to see more of the same.

Next stop was the cerro san cristobal, the large hill in the middle of the city with the big, obligatory statue of the virgin mary on top of it.  I went up for the view of the Andes and city.  Santiago is extraordinarily close to the mountains but half of the time when you are walking around the city, you look in what you know is the direction of them and cannot see anything but smog.  On top of the cerro you can see over the smog to the mountain range, which is incidentally the worst I’ve seen anywhere I’ve been.  (this is apparently because the city is in a valley and the pollution is trapped in between the mountains)

On the way back from the cerro, I walked through the bellavista district, home to the lively bars of the city, the bohemian district.  Since I was there at 4pm it wasn’t exactly heaving, but there were definitely some interesting looking bars and restaurants scattered throughout.

Overall it’s hard to describe this place. There’s districts that have interesting cafes, bars and shops and then there’s districts that are mini Americas. It also has much less of the interesting architecture I saw in Buenos Aires, the only comparable city I’ve seen in South America so far.

It’s really strange, I’ve been in South America for over a month and with a few exceptions it doesn’t feel like I’m traveling in South America. The buses are nicer than any I’ve used before, the roads are better than many countries I’ve been to, I have access to every modern convenience I’m used to etc etc. There are a few things that are noticeable here, the amount of street dogs is one, the poor parts of cities I’ve been through on the buses is another. In general though, highly developed and mostly modern. I have a feeling this might change a bit when I fly to Lima, Peru in 36 hours.

Since I like it a lot I decided to spend another day in Valpo, before heading to Santiago.  I wandered around a few areas I hadn’t walked through yet, this is not hard to do, the city is a maze so just walking around you inevitably come across stuff you haven’t seen before.
It was a gorgeous sunny day, so I caught a bus to the neighboring town of Vina del Mar.  Vina is like the alter ego of Valpo.  Quieter, flatter and where all the rich people in the area live.  Not nearly as much character to it, but it has the beaches.  I walked through the main square and avenues, there are only a few things to look at, it just looks like a mostly modern city.

After I reached the beach the temperature was at it’s highest for the day, plenty warm enough to lay on the beach for a while, which is exactly what I did…

Once I got back to Valparaiso I  took one of the ascensors up to near my hostel.  The easy (+ historic and cool) way to go up the steep hills, course you have to pay for these as opposed to walking, otherwise I’d have used them a bit more…

Next morning, Sunday, I got a bus to Santiago.  I really like this traveling on Sunday mornings, the bus stations are 1/4 as busy as during the week, no chaos and far less suspicious looking people hanging around.  3rd week in a row I’ve been in transit on a Sunday!  The bus ride is through small, green mountains dotted with groves of fruit trees, olive trees and vineyards and the closer to Santiago you get, the more of the Andes you see.

I spent the remainder of my day in Santiago, with my Chilean friend who lives there, who I met in Mendoza a couple weeks back at the hostel there.  He showed around the main areas of the city, and we ate at the really cool central fish market.  The market is unique among fish markets I’ve seen before, the buildings on the perimeter are the market places, looking just like most markets, but the large center is all nice restaurants, serving, yes, fish.

I’m really getting used to these overnight buses, I slept more on this one to Valparaiso than any of the previous ones, almost as much as if I was in a typical bed!  I got in to Valparaiso at 8:30 in the morning and then embarked on the 1/2 hour walk to my hostel from the bus station (I’m trying to give up taxis at the moment).  Most of the walk is flat, through the sea level part of the city, but the last part is straight up to get into the cerro alegre where my hostel was.  Valparaíso is built around the bay and the hills start going up fast once you move away from the waterfront, very picturesque but not so much fun walking up the hills with a backpack on.

After I found the hostel and left my backpack there I took a walking tour to orient myself with the city, the price for it included a lunch at a good fish restaurant with a killer view over the city.  I can’t remember the last time I had fish, maybe fish n chips in England!  Good views, good food and a good day.  By the end of the afternoon though I was physically exhausted, the combination of hiking all day the day before, rushing to my bus, then walking around the hills of Valparaiso all of the next day!

The next day, after a good nights sleep and one of the best hostel breakfasts I’ve had I headed out and wandered all around taking loads of pictures.  The buildings here are colourful and of all sorts of different architecture.  None of the buildings are that old, considering the city was founded hundreds of years ago, because in 1906 an earthquake destroyed almost everything here.  What followed was rebuilding the city quickly, though not particularly structurally safe.  All the styles of building, and everything on top of everything else on the hills along with the colours make for some great views though!

I descended to the “plan”, the flat part of the city and went to the working area barrio puerto which has lots of cheaply priced restaurants serving fresh fish and seafood.  I had the paila marina, which was basically a seafood stew served piping hot in a stone bowl, reminding me a little of the dol-sot-bibimbap in South Korea.

After lunch I walked around “the plan” a bit more, before heading back up the hill/cliff to my hostel where I collapsed into a chair.  Later on, I went out at dusk, got a great twilight view of the harbour and then found a restaurant specializing in Chilean food for dinner.  I had the conejo con salsa de vino tinto y frambuesa with a pisco sour, the classic Chilean cocktail.  Good meal.