Peru: the Good, the Bad, and the Very Poor

Lima:

We arrive at the huge bus terminal in Guayaquil, Ecuador expecting to stay the night before being able to catch a bus to Lima, and we´re wrangled yet again and suddenly on an overnight bus destined for Piura, Peru. Fast asleep in our camas on the bus, we´re rudely awakened first, to go through Ecuadorian immigration; second, to go through Peruvian immigration; and third, to get kicked off the bus in Tumbes, Peru. Protesting farmers are blocking the roads to the South, so we´re given a five-dollar refund and left to fend for ourselves in the small, garrison town. After hearing about the dangers and lengthiness of previous protests, we decide to buy $140 tickets for the only flight out of the Tumbes airport: a 9p.m. flight to Lima. So we have about twelve hours to kill, and we spend them at the internet joint that´s run by a woman who wears her pajamas for a good part of the day; the pastel-colored Plaza de Armas; and a restaurant called Budabar, where we sip some beers to cool off and where I eat some delicious Peruvian ceviche. Finally it´s time to leave Tumbes, and we board the nice, air-conditioned plane at the tiny airport and sleep the whole way to Lima.

Luis, the taxi driver hired by our next hostel, picks us up at the Lima airport, and halfway through the ride to The Point in the Barranco neighborhood of Lima, I notice that Luis is falling asleep. First he makes a turn, leaving the signal on and drifting into the next lane, and then his head falls backward and his eyes roll with it. I hold on for dear life, and yell, ¨Hey! Hey! Hey!¨ so that Luis comes to and slams on the brakes, barely avoiding rear-ending the car that´s stopped at the red light in front of us. Thankfully, we pull up to the hostel a few minutes later, and I can´t help but notice its resemblance to a fraternity house with its pool and ping pong tables, 1a.m. bar crawls every night, wall of shame, etc. We settle into our dorm room for some sleep, woken up occasionally by party-goers and honking cars (if you´ve ever been to Peru you know that drivers use their horns very liberally).

The whole next day is spent lounging about the hostel. We use the wi fi to upload photos, and, in the company of some hungover hostel mates, we watch There´s Something About Mary and later the news, which mostly consists of footage about the U.S. Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River. We leave once to get some groceries and thoroughly enjoy being in a supermarket for the first time since leaving the States. I, personally, am ecstatic to see a good selection of cheeses since the only type of Ecuadorian cheese was not very tasty.

The next couple of days in Lima are also lackadaisical. We move to a more low-key bed and breakfast in the well-to-do Miraflores neighborhood, which is run by a group of older people and adorned with religious paintings and figurines. From the b&b, we go to a restaurant for some causa and chicha, popular Peruvian fare, and to the oceanfront, which is lined with parks and shops. Around midnight we head to my friend Jorge´s hostel. Jorge is a friend of mine from my last visit to Peru, and he is just as I had remembered him: hospitable, poetic and witty. He serves up some wine and some paella that he made, and we sit and talk with a few of his hostel guests. One of them is Flavia, a large-breasted, black-haired, gregarious Brazilian woman, and a couple of others are Chilean hippies who tell us about the four months they lived in Nederland, Colorado. The morning after Jorge´s, we hit up Starbuck´s for some familiar comforts; return to Punto Azul, the restaurant we had eaten at the day before and where Stephen eats fish for the first time in ten years; and in the evening we take a cab to the Plaza de Armas to watch the end of the parade that celebrates the anniversary of Lima. We sit in the plaza, admiring the colonial architecture and people watching, and then head to Barranco, the neighborhood known for its art and nightlife. We have a bottle of wine at Barranco´s oldest bar, with no frills and a bunch of posters haphazardly tacked onto the walls, and then head back to our b&b, ready for the next day´s trip to Cusco.


Cusco:

Cusco is a twenty-hour bus ride from Lima. We arrive in Cusco, thrilled to be off the bus and excited about visiting the capital of the Inka world, and our level of happiness grows when we see that Obama´s inauguration is live on the television screen in the bus station. Our happiness and excitement, however, turn to sheer panic when we notice that Stephen´s camera bag, with $4,000 in photo gear, his passport, credit cards, iPod, etc., has been snatched out from under us. We head immediately to the office of the unsympathetic tourist police and file a report. One of the officers tells us that we may be able to reclaim the stolen goods from the black market held every Saturday; he promises to accompany us to the market, but unsurprisingly, he´s not around on Saturday morning.

We spend a week in Cusco, but it´s filled mostly with running errands (getting new passport photos, ordering new credit cards, etc.) and hanging out at our hostel, Loki, a 450 year-old building, formerly a viceroy´s estate, which houses some 200 beds and is known for being the place to party. There´s trivia on the first night at Loki, and because it´s sponsored by a charity that does its best to put impoverished children of Cusco through school, we learn that there are about 14,000 child laborers in Cusco and that the weekly pay for teachers is fifty Peruvian soles (roughly 17 dollars) - interesting information to learn after having been robbed earlier in the day. Hours after trivia, I'm startled awake when an intoxicated girl jumps into my bunk and lies on top of me, thinking that I'm her friend who had previously slept in the same bed. I manage to say "Wrong bed," and suddenly top bunk seems a lot more appealing. Later in the week we witness the spectacle of a toga party at the hostel, and Gal, our Israeli bunk mate, and his muchachos, blatantly do lines and give us a hard time for not wearing togas. Oliver, another bunk mate who´s Swedish, is a lot of fun to hang around, and though we don´t exactly keep up with his drinking (he pours a glass of rum with a splash of Coke and says, ¨What? I´m a viking!¨), he certainly helps us to forget our troubles.

We debate doing a trek to the jungle or renting motorcycles to tour the Sacred Valley, but we decide that these options are too expensive (a jungle trip could cost us one month´s budget) and too risky (renting 2008 Honda 250´s in a country where auto insurance does not exist could lead to an early termination of the trip). Alas, we make the decision to go to Lake Titicaca for a few days before returning to Cusco to pick up Stephen´s new passport and credit cards.


Puno:

Puno is a touristy little town that would have no appeal if it weren't situated on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, which straddles the border of Peru and Bolivia. We stay at Inka's Rest, a comfortable hostel where our kind host, Alfredo, and his wife and son make us happy to no longer be in a Loki-type accomodation. Alfredo books a tour of the lake for us and recommends a local remedy for my sour throat. His son, about our age, tells us about the year he spent living in Brooklyn and his love of TV on the Radio and other American music.

The lake tour has two stops: Uros and Taquile. Uros is a series of floating islands that are made of a cork-like substance and reeds. The indigenous people that live on the islands quickly put on display their handicrafts (also made of reeds), and the wide-bodied president of one island, who oversees six families, does a little presentation for our group of twelve or so. Uros is interesting, but it's essentially a tourist trap of reeds and inhabited by people with high-proteins diets who view us with dollar signs in their eyes. Taquile, much further from the mainland, takes a while to get to on the in-board motor boat, but we sit on the boat's roof and enjoy the views of the largest lake in South America. Taquile, covered in farm land and a number of solar-powered huts, is serene except for the chaos in the main plaza. There a handful of young girls relentlessly begging you to buy their bracelets. "Un sole, un sole," they say, with puppy-dog eyes and weathered skin that's never under the protection of sunscreen. An old man obliges when I ask to take his photo and afterwards asks for money for the photo. It seems the importunity in Peru has no limits, and it's just as annoying as it is sad.

Besides the Titicaca tour, Puno is pretty uneventful. We have dinner with a couple of girls from Cyprus who we met on the tour, and I try to kick my nasty cold. Before I know it, we're back on a bus to Cusco. The overnight bus gets us to Cusco around 6am, and the day does not get any easier from there. I find out that, back in Cincinnati, my five year-old cat had to be put to sleep because of heart failure, and minutes later I have to haggle with a sheisty travel agent to get a refund for bus tickets that he had previously sold to us for what we found out to be an extraordinary rate. Stephen, luckily, receives his new passport and bank card, but we have several hours to kill until our late night bus to Arequipa. It's days like these when the life of a backpacker seems torturous and you have to remind yourself that it's all worth it in the end.


Arequipa and Colca Canyon:

Arequipa brings a nice change of pace. It's a lot less touristy than Cusco and Puno, and with buildings made of volcanic rock; a plaza with palm trees and a backdrop of snow-capped peaks nearly 20,000ft high; and a restaurant that serves up delicious falafel, I'm feeling quite content. We stay in Arequipa for a night and head out the next morning to Colca Canyon. The bus ride to Colca is quite possibly the worst of the trip thus far. Sitting in the back row of the old bus that bumps along poorly-maintained roads for six hours is a painful experience, and it doesn't help that the bus is over capacity by about thirty people for a good part of the ride. Once in the main square in the town atop the canyon, we´re hassled by a man trying to sell us tickets into the canyon that are unofficial, mas or menos. He follows us a couple of blocks to our hostel, and our host, a guy named Pablo, ends up arguing with him for about an hour. The fight turns physical with pushing and shoving, but luckily nothing more severe. We end up evading the entrance fee, which, as we discover, is not applied towards things like cleaning the litter along the trail; instead the money stays in a neighboring town, seemingly doing nothing for the good of the canyon.

After downing the calories from a couple of pb&j's and some fruit, we head through fields of purple corn and yellow flowers down into the canyon. We hike down switchbacks for about three hours into the depths of the canyon. At the bottom near the Rio Colca we stay the night at an oasis. We jump into a pool that´s fed by a waterfall, sleep in a bamboo hut, listening to the sounds of insects and the river, and walk down to the river in the morning. It´s the perfect sliver of tranquility, but perhaps it makes me a little too complacent before the sweaty, heavy-going ascent back to the hostel. Once there, I have an alpaca steak and beer and then crash.

The next day it´s back to Arequipa for nothing more than taking it easy and drinking boxed wine with other hostel guests from Australia, Canada, Argentina, Germany and Colorado. The German girl, in a very diplomatic but stern way, tells me her perspective of the United States ever imperialistic policies and cautions me against having high hopes for the potential of one person, a certain Obama, to change the world. The Canadian is the kind of lonely traveler who talks a lot, and she never manages to finish a sentence, always starting new ones before finishing those that she´s in the middle of. I´ve had my share of socializing, and it´s time for bed because tomorrow we go to Chile!