A Peruvian Horse Ranch: Mosquito bites, breaking backs, sweating, crying and singing

We arrived in the dark at Rancho Santana, our home for the next few weeks, to be greeted at the gate by Manuel, the owner of the farm. We exchanged simple Spanish greetings, and then lapsed into silence. We had traveled so far and wide it was so hard to even begin to think of some sort of Spanish conversation to start. Manuel didn’t seem to want to talk either and he escorted us to his Swiss wife Andrea who greeted us with enthusiasm and showed us to our bungalow which we would be sharing with a Finnish girl named Marta.

Marta was pretty and fun and willing to answer any question we could possibly ask about Finland as she was our first Finnish. We soon went to the little kitchen which was a freestanding room about 50 metres from our bungalow and had rice and lentils for dinner and were soon off to bed, exhausted after a million travels and happy to finally be in a nice bed in a place where we didn’t need to worry about money every day.

As all of our things had been drenched by Amazonial rain the first thing we needed to do the next day was wash our smelly clothes. Andrea, even though she talked a lot, didn’t always convey to us exactly what and how she wants things done, Marta showed us the ropes. She told us we could borrow some soap and hand wash everything in a basin. Andrea showed up home soon after taking Jocelyn to school and almost freaked out coz I was using special soap for the guests (albeit a little bit) and washing soap was not one of the things she was willing to share with volunteers. She then continued to talk for ages while I washed about all the terrible, lazy and weird hippie volunteers they had had and got me really scared for how she would feel about us as time went by, especially as there I was first thing, using her special washing soap.

 Anyway, the first week at the farm was quite nice, sleeping in a clean bungalow with a hot shower. By day we worked hard, mainly making beds for grass. As we were in the middle of the

desert the earth was almost as hard as rock and we had to dig this dirt up with a pick axe and shovel, chuck a lot of manure in and mix the soil and then plant some grass. We worked hard and well and what Andrea thought would take us two weeks took us four days and we were soon on to the next task of removing all the little trees and bushes from a huge field because they needed to plow it in a few weeks. This would have been fine had they given us a good tool to use but they gave us shovels which we were meant to hack with. It started out kind of fun but it became never ending as the field kept on stretching endlessly around. Some trees took a few slices with the shovel yet others took a lot more sweat and effort. It came to a head when, a few days later while walking on a medium sized thorn tree I scraped and yelled and huffed and puffed and sweated and screamed and finally threw my shovel down and burst into tears. It was too much.

The farm was dirt mainly besides the grass beds that had already been made and, it consisted of a few free standing buildings; our bungalow, the kitchen, a mud brick large room where Andrea, Manuel and their daughter Jocelyn slept and a mud house where the worker Jorge, his wife and their baby lived. Jorge and his wife were real traditional Peruvian people from the mountain, they lived immensely simply and their mud hut didn’t even have a covered floor and they lived on the dirt.  They cooked over a little fire outside their hut and normally just ate a lot of mielies and they spoke Qechua

 which is one of the native languages of Peru. The wife was really strange and dirty and so was her baby and she didn’t seem to do anything all day but wheel the baby around in her little wheelie cart and sometimes stand near where we were working and stare at us. Occasionally she would bark a stream of strange sounding Spanish at us which we could never understand. Interestingly enough she was 28 years old and her husband was 25 which are Roman and my own ages yet I couldn’t even begin to fathom the different worlds in which we separately inhabited. They even had their own toilet as there was a the nice outside one but this had been built by the family the previous year and previously everyone had used a long drop at the end of one of the fields. Andrea said that she hadn’t invited them to use the new toilet as they barely showered and didn’t wear underwear and apparently they never asked.

A week after we arrived, our time in the nice Bungalow was over. Marta was leaving and with her pretty blonde hair she had caught the eye of a local who wanted to buy a cow but instead kept phoning Andrea to ask if instead he could have her. Andrea had declined luckily and Marta left for Cusco and we moved into a tent because the farm had a guest staying for another 17 days. This was obviously something we were not looking forward to but it was made worse as the tent was placed on dirt and we knew that meant that it would be unavoidable to not have dirt in the tent as much as we tried. Not only this but getting up every night to go to the bathroom was hell as well as now our showers were outside in a field and could not happen past about 5pm because it was too cold after that. It was a big tent which you could stand up in yet now in the day time there was no place to escape the heat when we had a little break after lunch. It was not possible to spend time outside when you weren’t moving as there were too many mosquitoes and flies buzzing around (I was already drenched in bug spray every day) the kitchen was hot and bugs got in there anyway, and the tent was a furnace. We would kind of wonder around or sit in the tent sweating like soldiers yet it was better than being eaten by mosquitoes.

And then a few days after we moved into the tent things took another turn for the worse as the worker, his wife and the baby had all run away home under the pretense that his wife was just going home for a little while and he was escorting her half way. Andrea had told me that the wife was unhappy at the farm, mainly because there are no mosquitoes on the mountain, which I suppose I totally understand yet this meant that all the work that Jorge used to do was now our responsibility. Now one may think the work of one small Peruvian man with a bit of a limp would be easy for us strapping young people yet what his work mainly entailed was carrying pasto which is these long reeds they first cut and then feed the horses and the cows. And carrying pasto is no joke. At the end of the field Manuel would cut piles and piles of these long heavy reeds which were almost double my height and we would have

to hoist it onto our back or shoulders or behind our back, whichever way was possible, and drag it across the field and onto the farm where Manuel would grind it up with the LOUDEST machine in the world. Then we would have to give the food to horses. Now, maybe everyone does know this but horses eat a lot. They don’t just eat a lot, they eat a load and they don’t stop eating, they only stop eating occasionally to sleep a little but they wake in the night and eat some more. With 11 horses doing this eating thing constantly that is a lot of grass to carry across a field while mosquitoes swarm and attack your face, while your back aches and your shoulders are twisted weirdly around it and feel like they may fall off.

The tourist that arrived was a 50 something year old Austrian named Karin. She had her own host of stories to tell, about traveling in Africa and marrying an Ethiopian man 20 years younger and learning to make Chapatti. In face she loved to tell stories and didn’t really enjoy listening to stories but we enjoyed her and listened to all her opinions on all sorts of stuff and telling us when we (or more when I) was definitely wrong. Mostly she was fun and we had good times in the evening chatting and laughing, drinking beer and studying some Spanish. We didn’t have a dictionary and we wanted to study so we would use Jocelyn’s school books and Karin’s Spanish-German dictionary in a 3 language process but it worked and we collected new vocabulary daily.

The family was really poor,( probably poorer than most Peruvian’s Andrea said) and every Sole was thought about carefully, every new tool or thing that was needed was not bought but instead one simply made a plan and hoped it worked out. The family, ourselves and the Austrian were fed on something like 8 soles a day ($3 or R28) and everyday Andrea would buy food from the village and give it to a cook who would cook it all for 3soles (R10) and we would stroll to town pushing a (usually punctured) bicycle as it had a basket and the food was impossible to carry otherwise. 

In fact there were lots of cheap simple ways we thought about improving the farm, like a soap dish in the outside bathroom or more preparation minimizing trips to the village and perhaps a cart to carry the pasto, or carrying all the pasto in the morning so we didn’t have to do it twice day yet it was not our farm and helplessly we continued with the way things were.

The daughter, Jocelyn was 8 and spoilt. Considering her parents had no money she still had 50 barbies, expensive clothes and when she complained she got what she wanted. She didn’t seem to have any friends and expected her mother to play house and Barbie whenever she wanted to and even though her mother was busy she would always comply. Besides her somewhat spoiltness I loved her dearly and she was quite a spark of light at the farm and Roman and I would play with her or more often, pick her up from school (a 10 minute walk away) and I would do her homework with her when her mother was too busy. Teaching and especially tutoring is one of my favouritest things and when Jocelyn’s homework was my task, I was only too happy. When we had a moment and we weren’t exhausted we set up the slackline for ourselves and she would join. She didn’t speak much English but occasionally she would understand very well. In fact she was our best Spanish teacher we had. I would say “Jocelyn, che es?”  and she would give me the name and say it very slowly so I would hear her. When she wanted to convey something to us she would look at us directly the eyes and speak very slowly in Spanish and use all her body to explain what she was saying. I picked up so much just by her slow deliberate way of conveying things- in a way no adult seemed able to do.

Manuel, on the other hand, decided as we didn’t know much Spanish we would stop saying sentences to us and just mumbled a word like “Caballo!” (horse) or “soga” (rope). Now if we didn’t know a particular word then we were helpless for there was no sentence for context. However I kind of forgave Manuel for all of his unsociable behavior because of one thing. He had blue eyes. And not just any blue eyes, deep and  blue and piercing and it is the maddest thing seeing a Peruvian with these

 glowing eyes contrasting with his dark skin that, in a way, I excused anything else about him. Everyone called him ”gato” or cat as that is the name for anyone in Peru with coloured eyes and I think, in a way, perhaps everyone else forgave him of anything for the same reason.

And then there was Willy. Roman had bought a ten stringed instrument named a Charango in Lima and I had bought a pan pipe flute name a Sampona and when Andrea saw this she told the music man of the town that we liked music and he should come by. Willy showed up with his Charango and his Sampoἧa and proceeded to teach us traditional folklore music with songs like “Lejos de ti, voy a morir” (far from you I will die) and others of a similar nature. He was a great Charango player which involves a lot of fast tremolo strumming and Roman learnt a lot from him. The first few times Willy showed up in his little Tuk Tuk (motorbike-cart thing) with his long black hair and we began learning some songs Roman and he on the charango and me on the ukulele. Soon I decided to tackle Sampona and singing and it was really fun and we enjoyed his visits as we never knew when they would happen as he would always show up on a different day as to what he said. We were unperturbed by this after being in South America for some time but soon he decided he should show up every day and he also seemed to only want to play the same songs. After long draining days of pasto carrying, lunch and Jocelyn fetching, manure picking up, bush cutting, stick shoveling we were so tired and all we wanted to do was watch a quiet movie in the tent and there he would be expecting us to be constantly excited about repeating and repeating and repeating these songs….

And then sometime in our second week everyone watered their fields and the mosquitoes got excited and made babies and then the babies hatched. Before this happened, we thought there were mosquitoes and then there were MOSQUITOES. As we walked back to the tent at night we would feel a cloud moving against our bodies and now there really was nowhere to escape the heat and the bugs and our insect spray was depleted and they didn’t sell it in the village! 

 I think when one thinks about working on a horse farm they imagine horse riding every day and raking some manure yet sadly we only got to go riding once after much asking and pleading. There were these Inca pyramids which are a 5 hour return horse

ride which we really wanted to see and were promised that we would. Yet with Jorge gone and with them always wanting someone at the farm and many of the horses having various troubles it was apparently too much to have us go riding one day. To say that this upset me was a bit of an understatement and I suppose I felt after working every day for almost a month without complaining (out loud) we deserved some kind of special treat yet we didn’t really get it. I know that considering a lot of people pay to volunteer we should be grateful yet although we learned a lot I think in our last week we were counting down the minutes. Our Austrian told us that Andrea thought we were the best volunteers she’d ever had (which was not surprising with all her lazy volunteer stories) but I suppose I would have liked this sentiment to have been demonstrated with at least, one day of horse riding.

The last week passed by slowly and painfully, we couldn’t wait to leave, we were exhausted and Willy would show up just at that perfect time in the evening, where we were almost finished and I really needed a shower and a little rest. He showed up on our last day all of a sudden and asked us if we could give him money as he was starting a little band and they needed a drum. I was somewhat affronted by this yet unsure what to do.

We spoke to Andrea and she sighed and said “Tis is why I have no Peruvian friends, they see you as a gringo and they always, in the end, want something from you.” We had already promised him some money so we gave him a portion of the price, although I didn’t like the whole affair and although he promised a million times to come back that night, he didn’t and we never saw him again. To be honest, I was glad, I was so tired and now that I had a little bit of a new understanding as to what it means for a gringo to be friends with a Peruvian, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be part of it. 

 Yet I suppose now, a few weeks later as I look back on it, regardless of my complaining I remember sitting in the kitchen at night, eating dinner slowly and talking about everything there is in the world to talk about. Picking Jocelyn from school and pretending to be butterflies as we skipped home. All of us singing songs, Karin joining in with a shaker, Andrea with her guitar and Jocelyn

trying hardest to raise her little voice. The end of the day when I was so happy the day was done and now it was time to sit, guilt free as it was night time and we don’t work at night time. We would walk back to our tent, so afraid that the wooshing bats around us would fly into us. We would go inside the tent and listen to all the myriad of birds with their different bird calls going on all night and wake in the morning to hear different birds, the cow, the goat, the cock and a horses ninny- singing us a tremendous song of nature’s chorus.

Mishaps and foibles in the Jungle

We were greeted back at our hostel in Cusco at midnight by Juanita, some corn ships and a delicious chocolate truffle cause she’s good like that. She had stayed behind as she had done Machu Pichu some months before with her boyfriend and couldn’t spare that kind of money again. Luckily for her, in the four days we were gone, the people at our hostel offered her a volunteer position so she was living and eating for free and painting a new bar for them which are 3 things Juanita loves best.

It was definitely time for bed (we had been at Machu Pichu that morning) and we went into our dorm to get our toothbrushes. In the dorm we heard a girl making the craziest noises I had ever heard anyone make in their sleep. I concluded she was having the maddest of dreams and we went to brush our teeth. When we returned, we realized it was not simply dreams that was causing the mad noises but something to do with an exorbitant amount of alcohol. The girl was lurching in her sleep and throwing up all over herself. The room smelled like a glorious mix of wine and vomit and so we quickly woke up the girl and took her outside with a bucket so she could vomit quickly and cleaned up the mad mess she had made in, on and under her bed. Oh it was disgusting and to be honest I more assisted than helped with my squeamishness and Juanita did most of the caring as she seems to handle all of these situations. She was crying and muttering about some boy and after she had vomited herself out Juanita took her to the bathroom to shower her and she gave her some of her clean clothes. Anyway exhaustively we finally made our way to bed once he we were sure the girl wasn’t going to choke on her vomit and the room didn’t smell so awful.

The next day we woke up to see the girl awake and talking to her boyfriend who had left her to go partying all night. He said thank you a million times but the girl didn’t seem too perturbed about us having to clean after her and shower her and give her our clothes. Anyway with that out of the way we spent some days in Cusco hanging around, we helped the hostel with the painting and soon it was time for Juanita to leave South America and go to England to get some money. She needed to take a bus to Lima and we were ready to do some volunteering up North so we decided to go with her to Lima and then continue North to the farm we were to volunteer at in the Amazon. We hopped on a bus which consisted of 22 hours of MAD curves and the night was sleepless with our bodies jolted against each other and bashed against the side of the bus repeatedly… When the sun rose we saw ourselves in an endless desert of nothingness and the bus winding like mad on the steepest of roads. The amount of times I thought of the bus falling off the road and thus down the mountain was too much and in the end, again, I had to remember that this was not in my hands and thus worrying was futile.

We arrived in Lima, found a rad hostel named Friend’s House with a Kitchen!Juanita left the next day at 6am and Roman and I looked at each other, and, not ready to get on a bus yet, we decided to tackle the waves of Lima and go surfing. It was pretty fun, though the waves were weird and it was kind of expensive for an hour and half. We stayed another night and then went for a long mission to find the bus company that will take us to this particular jungle town named La Merced. We found the bus, bought a ticket and went on a big mission to find Roman a Charango which is a 10 stringed instrument (like a mandolin, with 5 different notes) that Peruvians play. After hours of searching for the best one with the lowest price we left a shop, satisfied  (I had also bought a pan flute) and made our way to the hostel to collect our thigns and then to the bus to catch our 10pm bus.

We arrived in La Merced at the glorious hour of 7am and immediately asked for the trucks that would take us another 8 hours to Puerto Bermudez where this farm was meant to be. We found the cheapest 
deal with us sitting on the back of this bakkie on wooden boards with 5 other people and not very much leg room. This would have been fine had it not have been the maddest, baddest dirt road I had ever seen. It was a jolt and bump every second, no position was vaguely comfortable for a little snooze and a moment of comfort was followed by pain as your body was slammed against the bars around us. Oh but the scenery was spectacular. Green treess, and colourful villages we passed, incredible rivers and little waterfalls and a constant sound of natural life surrounded us on this long jungle road. After hours and lots of pain we finaly arrived ust before Puerto Bermudez at the place where we were meant to be. Roman went in to speak to the woman as I got our bags off the truck. From where I was standing at a distance watching their body language, I knew the story before it was told to me. We could not stay there and we had traveled all this way for nothing. Strangely, I didn’t feel any disappointment as I feel a part of me seemed to know this was going to happen.

Our truck driver said some nonsensical stuff to us in Spanish and we supposed he intended to take us somewhere. Which he did, he took us to Alberge Humboldt owned by a crazy chain-smoking Spaniard (from Spain). It was a lovely little hotel attached to a poor village and a surprise in this place and still I do not know why he has this little hotel in this middle of nowhere place but we were happy for a clean bed, hammocks and an open air house full of interesting art all over. Two young German girls were also staying there and it turned out they had the same story. Apparently what had happened to all of us was that we were emailing the son of the couple who said we could come there anytime but apparently he wasn’t even there, he was in Mexico and the husband was in Lima and the woman said she was sick and thus couldn’t have any people there. They evidently didn’t have a phone or email to communicate this, or maybe they did and they just weren't concerned. Regardless, we had transported ourselves to death to be in the jungle without anything to do and a long way from Lima.

Our crazy Spnaiard said we could stay one night in a room but the next night the mayor of Oxampampa and all his people were coming for a meeting and they would stay at the hotel and thus we could sleep on the hammocks. He also said that when Mayor goes home the day after they will hopefully give us a free lift back to La Merced. We spent the following day messing around the town and walking up the river and going for a swim and watching the people. As no tourists were ever there the people constantly watched us but never seemed to offer a smile or a kind look. But it was saturday and when we were passing a bar after our swim, 2 men hailed us and told us we had to sit and drink beer with them. With nothing better to do we acquiesced  and ended up drinking a lot of beer with them and soon we were invited to go to one of the men’s house to drink more beer. As still we had nothing better to do we went along with him to his nice clean house with his nice wife who was a teacher and he spoke to us for a long time and we nodded and nodded, not really understanding but happy to listen and nod and drink his beer.

After maybe too much beer we were ready to finally get some lunch at 5pm and we went into a restaurant where a blonde boy was sitting inside. He shouted, “Mama!” and out of the kitchen came a white girl about our age and she spoke to us in English. We were so surprised and asked her a million question and it turned out she was from the Ukraine and had moved there because that was where her husband was from. When I asked how she had met her husband she said “Let us say God brought us together” which Roman said later meant she was a mail order bride. I couldn’t imagine a Peruvian in little Puerto Bermudez having the money or the need for a mail order bride, but of course anything is a possibility and Roman sounded so sure.

Anyway that night the Mayor and his friends drank loudly for hours and we ended up sleeping on the floor in the lounge upstairs. Tiredly we woke up and were told the Mayor would give us a lift back to La Merced about 2pm. We went back to the restaurant and met our Ukrainian's husband, James, who could also speak English and was a young and very good looking guy. So we decided maybe God brought them together in a more salubrious fashion and friendly James took us down to the river in his tuk tuk to see if he could get us a 5 soles boat ride down the river. He found out that he could but we would have to stay down the river for 2 days wich was 2 days we didn’t have. Apparently

this happened to an English guy who was there and he only made it back in 3 days. We declined the offer but instead they organized us a tuk tuk down the road to this lovely clean river to swim in. The water was crystal clear and we decided to ignore all the rubbish that surrounded it (Peruvians have NO concept of not littering) and enjoyed our time.

It was time to return to see if the mayor was ready to take us back and went back to the hotel. And we waited, and waited and waited until 7pm when finally they arrived and put us in the back of their truck and then we waited longer and then we were traversing through the glorious jungle air. Roman felt ill with all the mad lurching and thus we swapped spots, him lieing at the end of the bakkie and me uncomfortably curled around some miscellaneous items beneath me. It was to be a painful journey but I couldn’t help glorying in the spectacular show given to me by the smells, the towering trees, and the stars above me. And then, the stars left us and it was covered by a strange mist, and then the fog descended and I enjoyed the mysterious sounds and low visibility yet soon I realized 2 things, if I couldn’t see much then the person driving at a ridiculous speed on this dangerous road couldn’t see much and secondly, and more importantly, it looked like rain. Now it had rained a bunch on our way to Puerto Bermudez, strong 10 minute rains and then a nice warmth had followed it. Everything within my being hoped that this would be how the rain would fall. We could handle a 10 minute pour with our sleeping bags over our heads.

A light rain began and I enjoyed the feeling on my face as my body lay dry and warm under my sleeping bag. Then the rain became a little harder and I got a little worried yet decided not to think of it and thus not encourage it. And then it began to come down, and come down and come down, Roman was already completely covered with his sleeping bag and I hid under mine too and I heard such loud rain banging on my sleeping bad which I was so grateful was still dry and warm. And then, suddenly the water came through  and dripped onto my stomach, then to my thigh, then to my calf and the water kept on coming and coming. We kept driving through the storm, the men inside didn’t seem perturbed by our condition and drove like mad for another hour or 2 hours or whatever hours, I don’t know. I was so miserable it was unbearable until I decided it was time to think of all the millions of things I am grateful for. “I am grateful to be in the Amazon, I am grateful that at least this lift is free, I am grateful that I do not feel sick, I am grateful that at some point this will end, I am grateful for Roman, I am grateful for my family, I am grateful for….” I named my favourite friends, I dreamt of Wilderness and I went on for ages until the rain subsided a tiny bit, enough for me to check if Roman was ok and to play the game with him. We did for a bit until the rain came back in full force and we hid under our sleeping bags, not that they were more than soggy masses now. I had been thankful for so many things I went back into negative thought patterns for what seemed like FOREVER until we stopped in the middle of nowhere next to a building.

We jumped out of the van and one of the men did too and they knocked and called until finally a grumpy woman came out and opened up her shop for us. Like drenched dogs we asked her if he had a room and she grumpily shouted back something incomprehensible to us. So we waited around as she served everyone else and more and more truckloads of people came from who knows where and it would have been festive had we not been so desperately wet. Finally she gave us a tiny key with an extremely big wooden key ring and showed us our room which was a single bed in a wooden room barely bigger than a single bed, there was no light or windows and if there HAD been, there may have been a lot of things that we wouldn’t want to see so we searched in the deep centre of our bags for the only dry-ish clothes we had, put them on, and found some sleep.

The next day we awoke up to loud knocking on our door and some people shouting “VAMOS!”. It was 6am so we decided to ignore it but when it had happened three times we supposed this was wake up and leave time so we got up and prepared to leave. The rain had not stopped and everyone seemed to have vacated the property except for the woman and her dirty baby. We asked for breakfast which consisted of white rice with an egg on top. We asked how much we had to pay for our bed, she replied “3 soles” which is the equivalents of R10 or $1,5. And that was for both of us. So we waited by the door for some sort of vehicle to come along and I played ukulele while Roman wrote in his journal for an hour or so and we played a little with the dirty baby until a minibus showed up, we hailed it and got inside and continued our bumpy mad journey towards La Merced, this time warm and dry yet still, incredibly uncomfortable.

Finally, we got there, booked on a bus for Lima for 10pm, went to a huge coffee bean place where they sold all sorts of things to do with coffee and jams and gave us a MILLION tasters yet the one thing they didn’t sell was ACTUAL coffee. The sad thing about Peruvian coffee is that in general everywhere you go the coffee is instant and not real because it is too expensive for the Peruvians and mostly exported. We then went for a little wade in the river, had some dinner, drank some wine and and the time had come. We got on the bus to make a full circle of our mission and went back to Lima and hopefully, to a more fruitful adventure.  

Machu Pichu- Inca Adventuring!

When I think of Peru I think The Emperor’s New Groove which is one of my most favouritest Disney films and I dream of llamas and emperor Cusco and lots of green cartoon hills. However, I have learned that not everyone is a fan of the movie (how could they not be) and most people think of the old empire of Machu Pichu and it is the pinnacle thing to do when visiting Peru. As a tourism officer told Roman, “We don’t charge people for visas to enter Peru, we just charge them for Machu Pichu", and yes, charge you they do.

Roman had done some extensive researching online about the Macho Pichu thing and from this we decided that instead of doing the official Inka Trail (which can cost anything upward of $500) we would to the Inka Jungle Trek which was a four day adventure, for less money where you walk AN Inka trail if not THE Inka trail. The day we were set to start out we waited outside our hostel at the appointed time of 7.30am. After waiting for 45 minutes we finally concluded we were forgotten and at this moment a very very very short woman arrived in a taxi (we were staying on the smallest one way street in the world) and got out, got us, hailed another taxi and took us to another part of the city where we got on our bus and which drove us bumpily into the Andes. The bus wound around bump and curve and curve and bump and amazingly the German sitting next to us fell asleep with his head lolling in front of him and sometimes on my shoulder. We wound up and up and up through these mountains for a couple of house and the fog and cold slowly descended upon us and at the top of the mountain the bus stopped and I put on all the warm stuff I owned and some knee and shoulder pads and helmet and got on a mountain bike to wiz down these hills. Well we wizzed down the mountain and through the cloud we were in and it was amazingly beautiful yet very wet and as it was donhill it wasn’t really cycling but really braking (which gets painful on the hand after an hour or so of it  and we cycled through little river and through other little river and the rain came and soaked us through and we continued for what seemed like HOURS until we arrived at a stop next to a waterfall and construction was stopping everyone at this place in the road for another hour and a half. Fun. Many people were there and it was a bit festive with guys having a rock throwing competition and taking pictures and Argentinians jumping under a waterfall (a 60 year old man and his son, what a legend).

We finally continued on to our hostel that night (this time drier and in the van) and arrived in Santa Maria which is a beautiful little Andean town. We walked around looking for amusement and found a trampoline which we tried to get onto until a man shouted at us to give us money. Then we saw

some kids and a volleyball net and we asked to join them and thus ended up playing volleyball in the Andean sunset with what I came to understand to be the catholic girl’s orphanage. They were pretty good volleyball players and I think this may be thanks to the Italian girl volunteering there (Italians are mad volleyball players) but nevertheless we were impressed and sad to leave our little orphan girls, and a part of was thinking of abandoning the trip and just staying there to practice Italian and play Volleyball atop an Andean sunset every night. 

This story may have been cooler had I given into that desire yet the next day found me and my group beginning out trek along a beautiful river and through lovely forests. The 16 other people of our group compromised of 4 Irish men,2 Canadians, 2 Italians, an Australian, 3 Americans, a German and an

Israeli and they were all great. Well mostly. I never learned the Irishmen’s names because they were somewhat insular and one of the Canadian’s was sick most of the time, didn’t even try the cycling, and didn’t seem to like life much in general. But otherwise they were excellent. The Italian couple had only got married 2 weeks before. They were in their late thirties and in their cute accents she told the story that a little while ago they were drinking lots at a party and she said “Why don’t we have a party and get married?” and I guess he said yes so they had a party and got married and were going home in a few days to have another party for their friends and we were all invited! I went through the logistics of flying to Florence for a wedding party and realized it was somewhat impractical … Otherwise the Americans were rad, a hilarious Thai-american named Laty who was a choreographer and girl who does some rad volunteer nursing projects and made me regret my squeamishness and consider nursing for a moment. The Australian was on his way after Machu Pichu to go on a 7 day Ayahuasca journey in the mountains with an Ayahuasca guy who was apparently not a shaman but he knew his stuff. For those who don’t know, Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic made from the Caapi vine which many Peruvian people take for certain rituals and such. Our guide told us that on the drug ones memories become incredibly clear and thus people take it to remember those who have died and to keep them alive in a sense. Many people come to Peru to have a kind of spiritual experience on the drug and I have heard of doing up to 6 month journeys, taking it every 2 days. One of the things I know about Ayahuasca is it makes you throw up and I think it’s supposed to. Thus throwing up every second day for 6 months must be rather tiring. 

Anyway, our guides name was Guido which was fitting and he was nice enough. He showed us some Inka berries which made war paint and the coco plantations which is a pinnacle part of the Andean person’s life. The coc

a leaf is to the Peruvian, or Bolivian is an integral part of their lives and they use it for everything, energy, altitude sickness, ailments, skin diseases, sexual drive and of course, making cocaine. As soon as you get to a place of high altitude one is supposed to chew the leaves as it cures you of altitude sickness. I tried it a few times and wasn’t too excited about the dried leaves in my mouth or the taste of it in tea form. Luckily my altitude issues lasted only a few days. Yet the Peruvians are always chewing it and spitting it out and the older people have green teeth because of years of use.

Anyway it was a beautiful day and we ended the day pulled in a little box high across a raging river which was kind of thrilling (the grumpy Canadian girl wrapped her face in her hood, closed her eyes and cried) and the Italian man got out of the box exa
lted as he felt he had conquered his fear of heights And then we walked down to huge hot spring pools


where tons of tourists were soaking their day away. I found a child to play with who got very annoying after a while and wanted me to throw her across the water again and again, again and again and then tried to get us to buy stuff at her mom’s shop. Even the kids have agendas! Ah it sucks being a tourist. 

We went on to the next town for the night and watched a very emotive video at supper time about ziplining the next day. Roman and I were opting out of it because we “love to hike so much” which in reality meant we didn’t want to spend the extra money. However, grumpy Canadian had paid for it but decided not to do it after the frightening box experience and the Australian jumped on the opportunity to take her free spot. We were kind of jealous, but kept it quiet and went walking for the day with our guide, the Italians and the German and had a nice quiet day for a bit. When we met up with our group for lunch we were only too pleased to hear that the promotional video had been a lie for most of them and they only got to do 3 ziplines and spent most of the morning waiting around at the restaurant. I don’t know how well Roman and I held back our glee at their misfortune but yes, sometimes it is difficult to always have to travel on the cheap and deny yourself all those fun adventures stuff that everyone else gets to do as they didn’t decide to travel for an undefinable amount of time.

After lunch we began walking on the train tracks to Aguas Calientes which is the gateway town to Machu Pichu. After walking for a bit I remember I had left my hat at the restaurant and ran back to get it. I was only wearing my bra and my shorts and some Peruvian construction workers stopped me,
took out a surprisingly fancy camera and asked for a photo. It was my first photo op in South America and after this happening almost every day in Korea I was only too happy to have a little bit of my former fame and identity back. I continued on the way and enjoyed a moment on my own. It was a beautiful walk, the trees were exquisite, the mountains dramatic, the water clear and luscious. So little time had I had on my own in the last few months I soaked in every moment, listened to all the sounds and appreciated the incredible scenery.

Finally, we arrived in Aguas Calientes which is a tourist town of madness. Prices are hiked up and everything is a restaurant and hostel or hotel and “specials” are shouted about everywhere and all you can hear is English. It was a bit like Venice really, you are in Italy geographically but really you are in a hustling bustling global community with English shouted in different accents all around you. We enjoyed a happy hour which is 4 drinks for the price of one (yet 1 is the price of 4 drinks so it’s no deal really) and enjoyed the first really hot shower we had had in what felt like a year (Hot showers are ALWAYS touch and go in Peru and if you find a lukewarm one you are doing quite well). We had our final dinner with our group and then opted for an early night as we were waking at the glorious hour 3.45am for our trek up the mountain. 

We met some of our friends early and bought a coffee from an intelligent opportunistic vendor and started our journey. They checked our tickets and passport at the bottom of the mountain and started walking up. And up and up. It is an hour and a half of steps, steps and more steps. Big steps forever going up. Our guide had told us the walk takes from 45 minutes to an hour depending on your fitness and tha was enough of a challenge to make us gun it. Without stopping we huffed and puffed and the more we climbed the stronger we felt, so dark it was and the sun

started the rising and the dramatic mountains fell all around us as we saw the most wondrous of plant life and we got to the entrance of Machu Pichu in just 50 minutes. What heroes! We were right in the front and we waited for the grand opening. Well they checked our passports and then we were in and up some more stairs and around a corner and THERE IT WAS! Machu Pichu before our very eyes, we were in all those postcards, we were those pictures, it seemed unreal and here it was and! There was a million people. They kept coming, it was hard to take a picture that looked like it was just you there because tthye streamed in and in and in and in. We tried to eat a little food and their were all these guard people who kept on shouting at us telling us no eating and all this so we used our school day tactics and ate covertly and waited for our Guido- guide. 

Guido took us around and told us all kinds of interesting stuff, about Hiram Bingham (the guy who found the place) and well, to be honest I don’t remember much of what he said. But we followed him around and he said things about the place where the Inca ruler addressed the people and how the priests lived further up , near the sun as the sun was all important and about how the buildings are all but perfectly, the stone cut perfectly so that it fits atop each other and no cement or something like that is needed. Still today people do not know how to create these perfectly slanted stones and buildings. 

Guido talked a while and then he went and we rested a little bit and then it was time for our ext trek- Mount Machu Pichu. So the thing most people want to do when they go to Machu Pichu is hike Huayna Pichu because that is the mountain you see in the background when you look at a Machu Pichu postcard. It

also has some more Inca ruins to see up there. But it’s another one of those things you have to book months in advance which of course we didn’t do. Thus we hhiked the mountain on the other side, Machu Pichu mountain so we could see that view one sees on the postcard. Well it was more steps and steps and big steps and this time we werenot so motivated by the sunrise and huffed and puffed and at times I crawled up that mountain. An hour and 10 minutes of this excrutiating pain we arrived at the top to see a view that made every aching step worth it, glacial mountains in the distance, macho opichu small down below, all this tall peks, so much more pointy than the plateaus of the mountains back home. We had a picnic of joy at the top without the grumpy security guards shouting at us, and a nap and soon we were told it was time to go down the mountain. We stepped slowly down to the ruins and slowly and surely we walked around the ruins, overhearing interesting facts from other guides and stalking the llamas in the field. It was getting later in the afternoon an it seemed that all the tourists, after spending a ridiculous amount of money to get to and get into Machu Pichu they took some pictures after sunrise and then left and so the place was quiet w8th asome lingering people enjoying walking silently through the ancient place. 

It was time to go back down the mountain, have some supper and get non the train and a bus to go back to Cusco. We walked back down the millions of steps, somewhat elated after such a beautiful and worthwhile day. Funnily enough, considering I was one of the most un-amped person about the Machu Pichu thing itself I felt in the end I was the most unenthusiastic about the experience which just proves the (somewhat depressing) adage: Always greet everything with a manner of premeditated disappointment, and you will almost always be pleasantly surprised. And in this case, I was blown away.