Temporary Nomad

We’ve just left Peru after nearly two months in and out of the country. What a fantastic place to travel! We were truly sorry to leave.

Compared with Peru, Chile seems just a bit tame – I mean, you can even drink the water. And it’s a bit weirdly normal too. The climate feels just like Adelaide, the cafés and restaurants are very like Australian ones (even down to the prices, unfortunately. In Peru we’d almost stopped looking at the prices on menus), and even stranger, when we arrived at our hostel, there was a pile of Australian womens’ magazines by the bed. (You’ll be pleased to know that I’ll be touching down in Australia with a full knowledge of all the latest news on Princess Mary.)

But, before my memories of Peru fade, here’s my collection of Peru for the senses.

Peru

Sounds like:

• Shakira – I have heard her current hit every single day since arriving in Latin America. Sadly, this is not an exaggeration.
• Simon and Garfunkel – not just the ubiquitous El Condor Pasa, but also The Sound of Silence, which we’ve heard in numerous versions, including of course pan-pipes, but also even a Spanish version with new words apparently related to the Lord of the Miracles festival.
• Taxis – not only does every taxi honk its horn at you as it goes by, (usually also annoyingly slowing down in front of you just as you’re trying to cross the road) but in the evenings they also play a non-stop medley of car-alarm noises.

(more…)

We spent a week in Cusco and the Sacred Valley region of the Andes.

Of course, Machu Picchu was a highlight, and it looks just like in the pictures. Here was our first glimpse of the site:

Machu Picchu in the early morning

But we also wandered across to an old Inca bridge:

Inca bridge near Machu Picchu

and enjoyed the local wildlife:

Leaf-cutter ants!

A viscacha - yes, it does look like a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel.

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Peru is not just a cheap country to travel in. Somehow all the prices here seem right. It’s like everything costs what it did when I was 7, which of course is, almost by definition, the right price.

We both thought that the food in Peru was pretty damn good, actually. Ok, so their signature dish is “ceviche” – basically raw fish (in lemon juice, which Helen just loves). And you have to try pretty hard to avoid getting rice with every meal (and this in the ancestral home of the potato??) But mostly what didn’t make you sick was pretty damn good.

Ceviche. I call it raw fish.

However there was always one enduring mystery when eating out in Peru. Virtually every restaurant has a “menu”. That’s a special menu. It includes a starter (usually a choice of 15 different kinds of soup), a main (alpaca, beef, or chicken with rice), a dessert (often rice pudding) and a glass of fruit juice, usually plus tea (normal or coca). But here is where the mystery comes in – the price of the menu is always just a bit cheaper than the price of a single main dish. So even if you want the chicken with rice, you might as well have it cheaper by ordering it with a starter, dessert, and big glass of papaya juice. Huh? How does that work??

At least if you want to have your fish raw, you mostly have to order your ceviche on its own.

Image credit: Pneff on Flickr

While possessing coca leaves in any other country in the world would probably land you in gaol, here in Peru they are an integral (and legal) part of daily life. Coca tea is at least as common here as “tea-bag” tea, and all the locals tell you that coca leaves are the best preventative for altitude sickness that there is. I tried my fair share of coca tea, and I tried chewing them straight just like the locals do (imagine the taste of old lawn clippings). But I never felt any effect whatsoever. It seems that the active ingredient is activated by chewing the leaves with a mild alkaline – usually some sort of ash. (“Black stuff that makes you foam black at the mouth”, according to my expert drug-taking friend, Dave Reader…) Well, I never found any black stuff for sale anywhere near where I could buy coca leaves. And despite Helen having postgraduate qualifications in biochemistry, she couldn’t come up with any good alternatives for me other than eating charcoal. So I never had as much as a buzz in my mouth from all my coca leaves.

Nevertheless, Helen and I both thought it was hilarious that you could buy packets of coca leaves in the supermarket proudly stamped “Export quality”. Excuse me? Export quality? Where do they export to? Columbia?

Still, I never did get altitude sickness, so they must be good for something.

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived with an electronic engineer, but I have. I used to share house with my mate Mike Sloman, and Mike used to have a fit if he even saw you handling flat batteries with sweaty hands. If you were working on your latest electronics project within ten meters of a tap, you would be sure to get a stern lecture on the dangers of mixing electricity and water. But here in South America, if you’re lucky enough to have running hot water, it’s mostly thanks to electricity being pumped directly through your shower nozzle at 220 Volts:

Thankfully, this hotel has “warm” water…

Peruvian electric showers seem to have three settings: tepid, cold, and icy. We’d already heard from other travelers that the most dangerous thing to do was to try to adjust these settings while the water is running – although personally I never understood why you would even think of using any setting apart from “tepid”.

While minor shocks are apparently quite common, they seem fairly unlikely to be lethal. (This is more than I can say for the Andean snow-melt that probably would kill you if showered under it cold.)

Some shower wiring inspires even less confidence than others…

Still, every time I stepped under an electric shower in Peru, I would hold my breath for an instant while my thoughts invariably turned, just briefly, to my old friend Mike Sloman.

Since Peru and Bolivia share a border at Lake Titicaca, we thought we’d take the opportunity to see Bolivia’s capital La Paz, supposdely only a few hours away.

The trip via Copacabana (no, not that one) turned out not to be quite as simple as we’d hoped, as we were shunted from one bus to another, and even at one point got sent off in a tiny boat while our bus went over on the ferry:

Our bus riding the ferry across Lake Titicaca

In all the confusion, Mike managed to leave his coat on the bus in Copacabana, leading to the dreadful realisation – if he didn’t get it back soon, he’d have to buy….. a poncho!

The whole trip was a bit traumatic and soon had us reminiscing about the good old days travelling form Arequipa to Puno, when the bus came with a hostess, movies and even Bingo in Spanish to while the hours away (an excellent way to brush up on the numbers in Spanish).

La Paz itself was a great experience, though Bolivia makes Peru seem quite prosperous.

The city is spectacular:

La Paz – the highest capital city in the world. Down there it’s 3600m high. Up here it’s over 4000m(!)

and the nearby site of Tiwanaku has its merits:

Tiwanaku, Bolivia

But strangely, one of the highlights was an unscheduled detour back from the site, via a host of small towns, because of a bicycle race.

We returned to Peru via the overland route, and miracle of miracles, Mike’s coat had been handed in. Spared the poncho for another day!

I can’t help noticing that we don’t seem to conform to the usual backpacker ‘chic’. When we turn up for a tour with other tourists, we often stand out in our ordinary, old clothes, while everyone else is kitted out in real outdoor gear, made from specially designed super fabrics, with lots of logos – and with a lot more zips.

At least now I have a poncho and an Inca Kola t-shirt so I blend in a little better with the tourists.