Lima, Peru

Last stop! Lima, Peru. We just had two-and-a-half days to see the capital city of Peru. Caught a morning bus from Paracas to Lima, arrived mid-day. Our hostel turned out to be incredibly beautiful, a huge old colonial house in the fancy Miraflores neighborhood. We were so lucky to find such a cheap, beautiful old place!!

our beautiful hostel in Lima

hostel in Miraflores

The neighborhood of Miraflores is pretty fancy and international, a world away from Camana or Cabanaconde. We were near a beautiful park, lots of fancy looking private schools and homes in old colonial buildings, some big stores like Falabela and Plaza Vea, some interesting art galleries and cultural centers.

paper sculptures. centro cultural, Miraflores

nice garden. American high school, Miraflores

I think at this point in our journey we were simultaneously trying to enjoy our last days of traveling and freedom, and also looking forward to our imminent move with tons of excitement and anxiety and muchas ganas de hacerlo, YA! (that is, a great desire to get this thing done already!) We had some beautiful walks around the neighborhood and passed some nice afternoons writing postcards over coffee, reading and working quietly in cafes, shopping in artesan markets and eating DELICIOUS foods. Miraflores has lots of good food to offer! We had sushi, yakitori, snails, green tea ice cream and other delights at a Japanese place near our hostel one night. Saturday we ventured into downtown Lima, which was a kind of long cab ride, we had to take the highway. It’s a whole different onda in the center, more old and colonial, much more gritty and crowded and busy. We visited the famous Chinatown, got some delicious street food (sticky buns with pork & cabbage inside, fried rolls and crunchy things) and tasty cans of lychee juice. Visited the huge Mercado Municipal nearby. Had to wait for the restaurants to open for lunch so we wasted twenty minutes and a few quarters on the slot machines at the casino on the main peatonal in Chinatown. It was the day before Chinese New Year, so the barrio was really busy and festive and we got to see a parade with lots of loud drums and dragons passing by.

The butcher section of the mercado municipal. Lima, Peru

lunch counter. Mercado Municipal, Lima

parade in Chinatown

A few weeks have passed now that I’m writing this… my favorite memories of Lima are that beautiful hostel, walks around Miraflores on sidewalks shaded by huge trees, admiring the colonial mansions… eating a donut and drinking lots of iced teas (both are rare delicacies for an Estadounidense in South America!)… generally trying to take it easy for a few short days after a long series of adventures! … and lots of conversations with Mike about the end of our South American exploits and how soon we’d be moving back to Maine, what we expected and hoped for in our new lives, nervousness about the big move, hopes and dreams! Big stuff.

pacific coast

sunset & pelicans in Paracas, Peru

Sunday afternoon we caught a bus to Camana, Peru. We picked our destination kind of at random; I was distracted with work and just wanted to get to the beach, anywhere on the beach! So we heard that Camana was by the beach, we bought a bus ticket, and three hours later we were in Camana. The drive was just a winding two-lane road through a weird alien landscape of sandy, gravelly mountains and dunes. Really quintessential desert. As we went further, the dunes got less rocky and more sandy. And then, over a giant dune, appeared the ocean! There was nothing in-between, just desert merging seamlessly into sand dunes and beach and then ocean, I’ve never seen a place like this before. Camaná turned out to be a small city or a big town, a little bit away from the beach, but it still had a kinda beach-town vibe, lots of ice cream parlors and game arcades and seafood places. In the daytime the town felt really quiet but in the evening, the main plaza filled up completely with families and kids, running and shouting and enjoying the fresh evening air. Two french clowns set up a show in the main square and did a great show for kids; we got ourselves ice-cream cones and enjoyed the show too. They were really talented!

seafood shack on the beach. Camana, Peru

The next day we spent at the beach, doing beachy things like eating ceviche and fried shrimp, wading in the chilly water (I always think of the Pacific ocean as warm, but it wasn’t!) and reading paperback novels while drinking beer under beach umbrellas. That night, after enjoying another performance by the french clowns, we caught an overnight bus to Paracas, six hours up the coast. We were told that only the budget buses stop in Camaná, so we’d have to take a gritty budget service. Our bus turned out to be over an hour late, and then when it arrived, the guy at the bus station would not let us get on our bus! He kept saying “oh, no, there’s another bus coming really soon. You can take the next bus. It’s much better, it’s a very fancy bus, you’ll like that one much better.” We watched twenty other people get on that bus but he wouldn’t let us on! I did not believe him and I tried to argue to no avail and then just sat there, despondent, imagining us stuck in the bus station with all our bags, all night long. But lo, twenty minutes later, another bus appeared! And it was a luxury bus! It stopped just for the two of us, and we climbed aboard, very surprised but thankful… it was air-conditioned, it had huge bathrooms and plush leather seats that convert into actual beds, they gave us blankets and pillows, the whole thing was really surreal. We have no idea why this happened to us! But we slept well and in the morning they woke us up to get off the bus in Pisco.
Pisco is a port city a few hours south of Lima that was pretty thoroughly destroyed in an earthquake in 2007. We thought we’d just check into a hostel there, sleep for a while longer, then head over to explore Paracas, which is a beautiful beach town nearby, and a starting-point for boat trips to the Islas Ballestas. But I ended up feeling very sick all day and we never managed to leave our hostel until late afternoon. The hostel was kind of weird so we thought it would be nice to get out and walk around – but our walk around Pisco was seriously depressing. It was the scariest, saddest place I have ever been in my entire life. It was mostly comprised of piles of rubble, stripped hulls of cars, mud streets filled with sickly, limping dogs and gangs of teenage boys. And we were staying in the “nice” neighborhood. The four blocks’ walk to the main square were really unpleasant (maybe made worse by a bad stomach ache and dark, overcast sky above). The main square did not really lift our spirits at all, and we hastily retreated back to our hostel, deciding that we did not want to explore Pisco any further. In the morning I was feeling better and we were only too happy to move on to Paracas.
All of the places we visited on the south coast in Peru felt pretty quiet, pretty far off the gringo trail, which was a welcome contrast from Cuzco (except for Pisco, which was TOO FAR off the trail). Paracas is a tourist town but seems like mostly domestic Peruvian tourists, it’s a pretty small and quiet place.

beautiful beach day in Paracas, Peru

sunset on the beach in Paracas

The town has only a few streets, no street numbers. It’s built along a pleasant stretch of beach, polka-dotted with bright umbrellas on sunny days, and there’s a promenade along the beach, lined with seafood restaurants and souvenir vendors selling the usual seashell necklaces and stuff. We got a quiet, breezy room on the roof of a pretty whitewashed hotel. Ate ceviche by the beach and listened to a really great old man who played afro-peruvian songs and some latin favorites (Besame Mucho, Quizas, Quizas) on guitar while we lunched. Waded in the water – Paracas is on a bay, so the water is calmer and warmer! Got caught up on work. Paracas doesn’t seem to have a real internet connection at all, I think the only connection is via wireless phone networks? There was one “internet cafe” which was tortuously slow but allowed me to get enough work done so I could get back to relaxing. In the hammock on the hotel roof, I finished the book that I’d started in the hospital in La Paz. Finished writing postcards. Felt like we were really on vacation. Enjoyed a few last days of calm and peace and quiet.
The major attraction near Paracas is the Islas Ballestas, a sanctuary for millions of birds and sea lions and other sea fauna. The Islas Ballestas are a group of rocky islands, home to Humboldt penguins, pelicans, boobies, sea lions and seals, among many other species!

pelican with penguin friends

pelicans kind of look like dinosaurs.

mama sea lion and baby sea lion

thousands of baby sea lions and parents! the sound here was incredible, they all bark and cry at once and make a giant crazy animal roar!

Peruvian Tern? and Candelabra geoglyphs

Humboldt penguins. Every year, around the time we visited, they molt and lose all their feathers, and can’t go swimming (and can’t catch fish to eat) for a few weeks. So they have to go a week or two without food while they wait for their new feathers grow back!

We caught a boat early in the morning from the beach in Paracas out to the Islas Ballestas; it was a two or three-hour trip in all. We passed The Candelabra, a mysterious geoglyph on the sand dunes (maybe created around the same time as the Nazca Lines?). It’s been there for thousands and thousands of years, nobody knows how they got there or who made them! And then we cruised around the islands admiring the zillions of birds and sea lions. It’s a sanctuary and breeding ground for many species, so visitors aren’t allowed to go on the island, just ride around in a boat. Every three years there is a legal guano harvest, hundreds of workers descend on the island to harvest the nutrient-rich bird poop that covers all the islands. The whole island has a pretty intense animal-poop smell, even from the boat. And the sounds are amazing – tons of sea lions breed on these islands, and we arrived in early summer, so there were thousands of babies and parents covering the beaches with shiny brown, flopping bodies, crying and calling and shouting – an unbelievable mass of animal noise. On our way back to town, a flock of pelicans flew overhead in V formation, then swooped down to playfully chase our speedboat – they caught up with us and swooped down beside us, cruising past the boat just inches above the water, one by one, and then flashing back up into the sky.

pelicans dive-bombing our speed boat

hiking in the Colca Canyon

There are about a zillion tour companies in Arequipa that offer hiking trips to the Colca Canyon. We tried to pick one that claimed to be eco-conscious and socially responsible, etc, and cost a bit more (hopefully to good end). We had to leave Arequipa at 3:00 in the morning! to reach the Colca Canyon by 8:30-ish. First stop, the high lookout point at Cruz del Condor, where we were rewarded with a spectacular view down into the canyon below, and saw a few enormous condors gliding casually overhead.

condor sighting at Cruz del Condor. I initially assumed that the giant birds come here because they nest nearby or something like that; actually, our tour guide later told us that the town puts out carrion around this area to attract the condors here and give us tourists our photo ops!

Then we headed on to the town of Cabanaconde for lunch, and met with our group of fellow hikers, seven in total. We were lucky to be there for the start of a big four-day holiday, and we caught a really bright parade marching through town with a brass band and a big float covered with millions of fresh flowers and fruits. Mischief and throwing water on people are part of the holiday too – we saw at least a dozen little kids armed with water guns and water balloons (luckily we missed getting soaked) and saw a shop-keeper lady run out of her store and empty a whole bucket of water over some guy’s head and run away, laughing crazily.

celebration of the Dia de La Virgen de Candelaria in Cabanaconde

Like all the small towns around Bolivia and Peru, there were lots of ladies wearing beautiful and bright traditional outfits. Even more so here because of the holiday, I think. In this area, skirts, blouses and especially hats are covered in finely detailed bright embroidery. Our guide, Pepe, explained that since pre-Inca times, the Colca Canyon has been occupied by two distinct indigenous groups, the Kollawa and the Cabanas, and they are still easily distinguished by different styles of hats – the ladies of one group all wear rounded, brightly embroidered hats; on the other side, they wear white hats, with a more squared-off shape. In pre-Incan times, each group deformed the skulls of their infants to create a distinct cranium shape – the hats they wear now still reflect the different skull shapes traditional in each group.
After lunch we headed out of town and Pepe got us a quick ride to the canyon’s edge with some dumptruck drivers who were headed our way.

hitching a ride in a dumptruck

From the edge of the canyon, we peered down, down, down to the river far below… and we could see a few towns perched on the steep canyon sides opposite us.

looking down

The path down started out gentle, and then got steeper and rockier as we went down. I think it took about three hours of steady, often pretty steep descent to get down to the bottom. It was a narrow path, covered in loose gravel, and next to the path, just… straight down… so it was a bit scary, and tiring on the knees!

steep descent

My legs were all shaky by the time we finally made it down to the river at the bottom. We crossed a hanging bridge, and then had to scramble up a really steep bit before we got to sit and rest under some trees.

hanging bridge

It had started to sprinkle rain on the way down and by the time we stopped to rest it was really raining. The opposite side of the canyon was kind of a whole different world. We’d been descending through dust and gravel, surrounded by rocks and cacti and brush… the other side of the canyon was green and lush, with peach trees and avocado trees, terraced farmland and rushing irrigation brooks. We had a nice hour of gentle climbing through thick green forest, past waterfalls and terraced farms. Then crossed another hanging bridge, and then straight up up up up, and the rain turned to a downpour, and it was all a little intense.

climbing up into the clouds

We were very relieved (and wet) when we finally got to our destination, a little farm in the tiny town of Cosñirhua. We all stayed in a few adobe rooms owned by an older couple, Mauricio and his wife, who helped Pepe cook up a delicious dinner for us. Hearty sopa de sustancia, delicious fresh avocado salad, and sweet potato fritters! They had a tiny little store with some packaged snacks and beer, we asked for a bottle of wine and they didn’t have any… but Mauricio said “wait, I think I might have something in my house for you.” He came back with a giant jar filled with brown stuff, the label said Strawberry Marmalade, but Mauricio said it was homemade peach Pisco! Inside there were a half-dozen small brown pickled-looking peaches floating around… At first I thought “Is that safe to drink?!” but Mauricio offered us a free sample and we thought it tasted just right, so we bought the whole jar and shared it round with all the tired hikers. Perfect.

this is where we stayed in Cosñirhua. All the towns around the canyon were decorated brightly for the Dia de La Virgen de Candelaria.

In the morning, the sun was out again. We breakfasted, did the ritual sunscreen-slathering, and headed back out on the trail. Pepe stopped along the way for a few show-and-tell stops, explaining the different cacti and their uses (the Tuna cactus has delicious fruit and the plants host Cochineal bugs which are widely used for natural dyes; the San Pedro cactus is used to create a hallucinogenic drug used in shamanic rituals) and pointing out different crops, picking strange fruits from the trees and sharing them with us. He seemed to know everyone in all the towns, and stopped to chat or hollered greetings as we walked past. In the next town over, the plaza was littered with charred firecracker papers and remains of the previous night’s Virgen de Candelaria festivities. We stopped to visit the health center and a small museum, and Pepe explained lots of details about local life in the small canyon towns.

a baby fox at the museum in Malata. (Atoc is the quechua name, i think)

mules on the path ahead

Then down, down, down again, back down to the river bottom and across another hanging bridge. During the descent we could see the crazy path zig-zagging up the opposite side of the canyon, where we’d have to climb up after lunch. It looked intimidating.

below, the oasis… and above, the path we will climb up!

On the other side of the canyon we stopped at a touristy little oasis and had a glorious splash in a swimming pool and sunned ourselves on a huge rock while Pepe cooked up our lunch. He’d warned us that the ascent would be really intense and tried to talk all of us into renting mules to ride up the canyon! He said “I don’t know why you pay money to hike and suffer! Peruvians never walk up the canyon, they ride mules. Only foreigners come here and pay to suffer, climbing up in the hot sun!” Eventually Mike and Marthe were convinced, and agreed to rent mules at the oasis to carry them up. The rest of us were either gluttons for punishment, or too scared to imagine riding up that steep path on the back of a mule. Maybe both.

Mike and his sweet ride!

After all that, it wasn’t so bad. Just a long, slow, steady, hot climb. Luckily the sky was cloudy so the sun wasn’t burning. The second half was pretty spectacular, with the sun sinking, Andes all around, and the canyon below. Pepe somehow got the idea that we were crazy daredevils, and asked “Do you want to take a detour to do some rock-climbing?” Our first response was “nononoNO!” but somehow we agreed to it. We took a 20-minute “shortcut” that was super intense, we were just scrambling straight up these rock faces, hand to rock and foot to rock and it took complete focus to just pay attention to where to find the next hold. I looked down and there was nothing there! and I got all dizzy and had to just think about going up. When we finally got back on the path, we were all pumped with adrenaline and realized that for 20 minutes we had totally forgotten we were tired and hot and had heavy packs and all that. So it was kind of an awesome detour.

alpine glow

At the very end of the trail, the sky turned crazy orange and red and we got a spectacular sunset show as we came over the top of the canyon.

crazy sunset

It felt like a celebration of our arrival! I was seriously SO tired by the time we got there but SO excited and exhilarated about having made it. A high point of the whole trip, in every sense! Walked back to town in the pitch dark and enjoyed some excellent hot showers, roasted fish, and soft beds.

Cuzco part 2

Mercado Municipal in Cuzco, Peru. Every town and city we’ve visited has its own version of the public market, which is like a farmer’s market, the supermarket, the butcher, and the dollar store, all rolled into one, plus they have rows of lunch counters that serve hot and tasty homemade soups and cheap meals. The variety of merchandise is amazing and overwhelming! This place also had tailors, stalls that sell fabrics and notions, and lots of fancy traditional costumes for sale.

On our last day in town, we happened to wander off into the “other” Cuzco, that is, the less touristy side of town where the locals hang out. It was a totally different story! We poked around the Mercado Municipal, a big colorful public market just like the ones we’ve visited in almost every town along our trip – but this one was the biggest, and filled with tantalizing arroz chaufa and other favorite peruvian dishes on offer at the lunch counters.

a plethora of juice vendors!

pig head for sale

Beyond the market, we found a maze of smaller markets and shops, streets filled with vendors, etc… It was great to see a livelier and more genuine side to the city.

busy streets behind the Mercado Municipal in Cuzco

baby chickens for sale

South America tour ideas

So, the idea was to not plan our trip too much – but of course we’re excited to travel and whenever we get a spare moment we can’t help ourselves from flipping through our dog-eared Lonely Planet and browsing through pictures, picking out which places we hope to see along the way. The only reservations we’ll make in advance are our first bus tickets out of Buenos Aires, our final flight home from Lima back to Buenos Aires, and we’ve reserved dates for the Choquequirao hiking trip in the middle. In between those dates we’ll just see what we feel like doing and see what fits in. We’ve never really had enough free time to travel without set plans, so we’re looking forward to having the luxury of making it up as we go along. Also, we’ve heard that transport in Bolivia can be pretty unpredictable so it’s best to keep an open itinerary with lots of extra time for delays. Anyway here are some of the places we’re hoping we might see!

first step: January 1st, 6:00 pm overnight bus from Buenos Aires Retiro bus station to Salta, arrive in Salta at 1:00 pm on January 2nd.

Convento de San Francisco, Salta

Salta street

We’ve visited Salta before but we’ll be traveling with Andrew & Vickie, who’ve never been there, so we might stop over for a few days to see this beautiful colonial city and/or visit some of the surrounding countryside, perhaps Cafayate or Cachi.

Quebrada de Las Conchas (near Cafayate), Salta, Argentina

Cuesta del Obispo. The road from Salta to Cachi runs through the Valle Encantada (The Enchanted Valley).

Then northwards to Jujuy and the Quebrada de Humuhuaca, maybe stay a night in Purmamarca or Tilcara.

Purmamarca. Jujuy provincia, Argentina.

Camino del Colorado – Quebrado de Humuhuaca, Jujuy, Argentina

If we can fit it in, we are eager to visit the isolated mountainside village of Iruya, 4 hours’ bus ride from Humuhuaca, over steep hairpin gravel roads but it sounds like it’s worth the detour.

remote mountainside town of Iruya, Salta, Argentina

Then we’ll part ways with Andrew and Vickie, who will fly out of Jujuy back to Buenos Aires and then head back to the US.

We’ll head northwards and cross the border from Argentina into Bolivia at the border town of Villazon. From Villazon there’s a train that runs north on Tuesdays and Saturdays or something like that. We’re thinking of riding the train up to Tupiza, and then in Tupiza find a jeep tour to bring us out to the salt flats (a place you can really only visit with a tour guide and a jeep). After the salt flats we’ll end up in Uyuni, and continue northwards, we’re thinking of stopping in Potosi, probably Sucre, maybe Ororu or Cochabamba, then a few days in La Paz, then on to Lake Titicaca…

Arequipa, Peru, with volcano Misti in the distance

Monasterio Santa Catalina, Arequipa, Peru

Monasterio Santa Catalina, Arequipa, Peru

TO BE CONTINUED…