Honking, the new language of Cuzco

Laura and I woke up today both a little sick. Laura has been sick for a day or two and I think I´m coming down with it. We decided to do an easy bicycle ride on a route the tour operator had recommended the last time we rented bicycles.
It started out a little crazy. There were Peruvians parading aroudn the main sqaure with signs and dances and banners. I think it might have something to do with the upcoming election but I´m not sure. I had to walk my bike through the crowd, though Laura managed to stay on hers. We turned off of the main plaza onto a street choked with cars. I remained walking on the sidewalk with my bike. We decided to turn off and made it up the hill to the Avenue de Cultura, the street we were taking out of town. As I tried to get my bike going on the hill someone approached me to sell me postcards. He told me he´d give me a really good price. I´m not sure how much he would have had to paid me to stop struggling with my bike, go dig out money from the backback that Laura was carrying and then carry around some random postcards for the rest of the ride. Sometimes people have no conception of when you might possibly be interested in buying something. I almost fell over on him as he walked up the steep hill beside me as I tried to get going. I´ve enjoyed talking to people selling me things, but I do have my limits. We made it to the Avenue de Cultura, with Laura way out ahead, clearly more comfortable weaving in and out between cars people and potholes. The road was mostly downhill so the biking was minimal, but trying to pay attention to collectivos(van taxis), buses, taxis parked on the curb, and random people running in the street was more than I can handle. Honking seemed like a new form of communication with some honks meaning ¨I´m here¨ others meaning Ï have room in my collectivo for you¨and some people maybe thinking, what the hell is this gringa doing on the road.I couldn´t believe the tourist company had specifically given us a map and told us to go down this road. I was terrified. Laura who has been on the cycling team a little longer didn´t seem to mind as much as we had a discussion about the relative safety of cycling in the United States versus Peru. On the way back Laura could tell I was scared and we took a lot of side streets to avoid traffic. We realized that food was really cheap far away from tourists with a lunch menu only 60 cents for an entire meal. Once we were on smaller streets I calmed down and enjoyed looking at Cuzco. At least we had completely excaped the tourists.

Macchu Picchu escalarons

Today we woke up at 5:30 in the morning to take the bus up to Macchu Picchu. Laura was a little sick so it was hard to leave the beds. We had gathered some food the night before so at least we had breakfast. There were a numbe of women selling banana bread and coffee to the people who hadn´t thought ahead. We eventually found our guide amist a large group of people and were dismayed to learn that she hadn´t bought our tickets even though we´d given her our student ID cards the night before so that we could get a discount. She told us the that the comany had not sent her the money and that we would need to buy more tickets and figure it out later with the company back in Cuzco. We felt that she should have to figure it out with her own company. Luckily there was another guide with her who helped us buy tickets and was able to call the company to get the money. Unfortunetely our student ID cards were expired so we didn´t get the discount and had to pay 80 soles(35 dollars). This was by far the most expensive thing we had done here.
We rode the bus up a narrow road with switchback after switchback. It didn´t seem particularly safe because buses coming the other way would frequently be coming fast towards us on the narrow road. The drivers seemed to be able to slow down and pass each other on the tiny road with a minimum of backing up.

When we reached the park I convinced the bathroom guard that I shouldn´t have to pay because I was only going in to take off the long underware I had on under my pants,which were still kind of wet from being washed in the sink the night before. (On a random side note a new special pair of travel quick drying underwear I bought at REI on the way to LAX started to mold when I set it out to dry in Lima. Maybe if it were black instead of white I wouldn´t have noticed the mold. )
Anyways as I was changing the same man came in the women´s bathroom while I was changing. I´m not sure if he was doing it on purpose or not. I made it out though and went up a flight of stairs to the postcard picture point.


After than we started wandering around the terrances while we waited for our guide to come back and start the tour. Laura decided to do yoga on these cools stairs that protuded out of the walls and I chased multiple baby llamas and managed to feed one of them.
Yoga.


After the llama adventure our tour started. We decided to take a Spanish tour to help us learn more because it has been so hard to practice in a super touristy place where there is so much English. I think that we both understood a fair amount. She told us for example that three steps carved into a rock represented the three layers of the world, the earth the sky and maybe water or hell or something(my Spanish isn´t that good). Laura wasn´t convinced that they really served religious purposes. In fact she is skeptical of everything that people claim is religious. She thinks they probably carved steps into the rock to help them go up. Then we continued through the main gait after waiting awhile for a group of girls on our tour to take pictures. Our guide showed us a rock that was perfectly aligned with north and was in the same shape as the constellation of the southern cross. I think I´d been able to find the constellation the night before and was really excited to learn about astronomy. Seeing new stars down here is really exciting and I tried to ask the guide if she knew where alpha centauri( the closest star to the earth at 4 light years) was but she hadn´t heard of it. She also showed us small pools of water which reflected the stars for the Inca.
<>Reflective pools for star observing. I don´t know why they couldn´t just look up.
The rock in the shape of the Southern Cross.
The Inca had special rocks aligned to make special shadows during the summer solstice (which is not in June because we are in the Southern Hemisphere, a kind of confusing point in Spanish).

We also saw the temple of the sun where Hiram Bingham(the explorere who rediscovered Macchuy Picchu in 1911) had found some tombs. The picture is more notable for me looking like an arab with my special mosquito repellant hat.

After the tour was over we started to climb up Hyanu Picchu the tall mountain the background of all the typical Macchu Pichu shots. The steps were carved into the moutain, making a seemingly impossible climb only moderately scary. It was however pretty difficult and someone asked me if I was a smoker because I was breathing hard. I wanted to ask him if perhaps he thought it was the altitude and the 200 steps I had just climbed and not a result of a bad habit. The top of Hyuano Pichhu had more great views of snow capped volcanoes, the Inca trail and Macchu Picchu. Laura and I tried to take some action shots in our Patagonia shirts for the cataloug.

An action shot for Patagonia.
Laura climbing around(but also kind of faking it)
Laura climbing up slab.

I got to climb around on some really nice granite that made me want to go climbing really badly. It was nice to be able to move around on the rocks so easily. After climbing down a ton of stairs with people passing me left and right because I was primarily using one leg we wandered around a little more but mainly laid around and absorbed the view. The Andes were just a spectacular as the ruins. Afterwards we took a train back to Cuzco, massaged our sore legs(or leg if you are me and only used one all day), and ate an entire package of crackers because we hadn´t really had a chance to eat except at the exobiantly priced Macchu Picchu lodge.

presidentes y impresionar

A little girl in Cuzco was trying to sell me more finger puppets. I tried to insist that I already had enough but she kept talking to us. Usually you can get people to talk to you about something other than buying things if you hang out for a minute or two. She started to tell us all of the presidents of the united states starting from bush and going back to kennedy. I was impresionar(impressed) because I don´t think I could do that especially when I was 10. She told us she learned all the presidents in the school. She liked Clinton better than Bush. In the upcoming Peruvian election she wanted Alan to win because he would bring more tourists to Peru. We asked her why she liked tourists and we think the answer would have been something like¨It´s the economy stupid!¨ She knew a lot for being a young girl selling puppets for food in Cuzco.

escalas, miniscua, mangos grandes, altura

Well, I suppose that I should start with yesterday even though I´m really excited about everything that happened today. Yesterday we rented biciletas in Cuzco and rode for about three or four hours to three or four Inca ruins. The trip started up a really really tall hill which was really difficult given the altura(altitude) and our really heavy mountain bikes. I missed my grandpa´s carbon fiber bike he had been letting me borrow. In Cuzco it is impossible to go anywhere without being constantly harressed by people trying to sell things or asking for money so being on a bike was a nice change. I was shocked that I was able to make it for so many hours after being so tired from the altitude the day before. Of course, Laura was faster than me even though she was carrying the backpack. Laura is always carrying the backpack but I think that it is good for her. There were two local boys who were riding their bikes and we were a little faster than them even though they lived in Cuzco. That made me feel a little better but their seats were ridiculously low, no one here seems to know the proper height for a seat. When we returned the bike shop was closed and because it didn´t have a sign we couldn´t figure out where it was without the help of a nice lady. She let us put the bikes in her restaurant and we ended up eating there even though it was the most expensive meal of the trip. This is partly because we ate cuy(guinea pig) which was 35 soles(10 dollars). We figured that we would pay that much for food in the states so it was probably worth it for the experience of eating a small rodent with a claw still attached to the meat. It was alright though the white meat was a lot better than the dark meat.
Later that night we had a grand adventure trying to buy bus tickets. We were thinking about spending fourty hours on a bus and then decided it was a bad idea and now we are going to make a stop at Ica, about fourteen hours from Cuzco. After leaving the bus station we took a wrong turn and ended up on a big road, with railroad tracks, hungry dogs eating garbage, and not much else. We eventually realized we had gone the wrong way and saw that we needed to go up a flight of stairs to get back to the main road. All I have to say is that i´m glad my boots are waterproof because the stairs were like a tiny waterfall of urine with appropriate garbage on the sides. We emerged into a huge group of Peruvians haning out in what seemed to be where they really lived as opposed to the ridiculously touristy parts. No one tried to sell us anything. We were sold however by a huge lemon merigue pie in the window that was at least six or seven inches high. Things were so much cheaper a little off the main tourist area. When we saw whitewashed colonial buildings and stores with lots of cameras, film, batteries, and alpaca hats we realized we were back in touristville. A boy immediately approached us for money. In the non tourist area they sold many things from the united states like pirated dvds and adidas hats. The peruvians want things from america and the americans want things from Peru.

Today we woke up at dawn to take the train to Aguas Calientes or MacchuPicchu Pueblo. The train ride was slow but had great scenery and we went along side a river that I really wanted to kayak or raft down. It made me miss the rafting company days. Upon arrival in aguas calientes we were bombared once again by people trying to sell things at a slightly higher price than in Cuzco. We decided to escape the town almost immediately and headed for a hike up to the top of a mountain. This didn´t actually look like it would be possible to do because it was so steep but we figured we´d try. I was still a little worried about my rodilla(knee) but decided to go as far as I could. Going down stairs is so much harder so I was a little worried about ending up with 1000 feet of elevation gain and a really sore knee. After scrambling up a poorly maintained eroding dirt trail we reach a set of wooden ladders. It was weird to climb things without a harness and rope, but it seemed safe enough. I had to be careful to check that none of the wood rungs were rotting away. After making it up a hundred feet or so of ladders we emerged on a ridge line with a gorgeous view of mountains and big rivers on either sides. We continued up stone stairs that seemed like they would never end. I think it was more stairs than i´ve ever climbed in my life, i´m not sure why I thought it was a good idea after surgery. We met a nice man from Mexico who first told us that he was a gigolo and a drug deal before informing us he sold pharmecuticals to treat heart surgery. He started teaching us spanish words like miniscua(meniscus) and berrido(path).
His birthday was tomorrow and he wanted us to guess his age because we were math majors and should be good at things like that. Laura guessed 30 something and he was happy because he was 44. Laura peeled a mango for me that was twice the size of a normal one and we ate mango looking at a great view of macchu picchu, and far off snow capped volcanoes. It seemed pretty perfect except for the fact that I was going to have to walk down only really using one leg.
On the way down a bunch of people trying to go up the ladders were hassling me because I was slow only using one leg and it was impossible to pass people. I kind of wanted to pretend to be scared and hang out on the ladder for another five mintues because they kept ordering me to go faster even after I explained knee surgery.
All in all this path was what I wanted to do after so many days in cities full of people who wanted my money. Laura and I are looking forward to more time in the selva(jungle) and on the playa (beach) in the north.

marionettas, camote y gorros

Today Laura and I arrived in Cuzco after only being delayed for an hour or so for the weather. Our taxi ride back to the Lima airport was much less eventful and a cost about half as much. We also discovered that the ride should be 45 minutes and not two and a half hours. We booked a tour to take the train to macchu picchu in the airport. This might have been a bad idea for gringas like us but the price seemed about what the guidebook said it would be. Immediately upon leaving the airport we were accosted by taxi driver who insisted that he could provide a hostel and a train to macchu picchu for less. Laura returned to inside to barter a little more with Jessica the girl who had sold us the train tickets and lowered the price a little. I had a fun time laying on the bench outside listening to the man talk in Spanish. He returned to our hotel with us and was desparetly trying to plan our entire stay in Cuzco. He gave Laura and I coco tea and after a small argument about whether or not the tea would show up in a drug test that Laura has to take for skiing we drank some of it. Although it was supposed to help the altitude it wasn´t really working for me and I started feeling really tired and lost my ability to speak in Spanish and make decisions. I retired to my room and Laura went for a run. I barely had the energy to make it upstairs and I couldn´t believe it that Laura was running around Cuzco. I guess that is what happens to people who train to race at high altitudes. Oh I forgot to mention she was doing situps and pushups in the airport while we waited. I felt guilty and decided to join her for a little bit.

After I slept for awhile we went to eat lunch at a small restaurante close to our hostel. For 1.25 dollars we got soup, an appetizer, chicken, rice and rice pudding and a drink made out of a fruit that we hadn´t heard of. After that we started to wander and were immediately accosted by little kids, teenagers and adults trying to sell us things. They tried to sell us postcards, bracelets, paintings, assorted musical instruments and my favorita, marionettas. Marrionettas are small animals that mother knit and give their children to sell. They are either 33 cents each or 66 cents depending on how cute I think the kid selling them is. I now have a alpaca, a turtle, a parrot, an aligator, a tiger, and one or two others. My neice is going to have a lot of these things is all I have to say. Then I tried to find a gorro, a hat made out of llama or alpaca wool. Those made out of llamas are mas rústicos(corse) and those made out of alpacas are mas suave(soft). I havn´t found the perfect one yet but I will because it is really cold here. I´m wearing almost all of my clothes.

Laura and I found a man who painted pictures of Cuzco. Laura wanted a self´portrait and the man told us he was an artist and told us he woudl do a painting for her. He had to do it from a photograph however and not from real life. So we started to try to find a place to print a picture off of her digital camera with him acting as a tour guide and showing us things from the time of the Incas. Eventually after we had seen many paintings just like the ones he was selling we decided that he probably wasn´t an artist and Laura decided not to get a painting done. He seemed kind of upset for wasting so much time following us around but it was great Spanish practice for me.

After I´d already bought marionettas from a cute girl a really cute boy was trying to sell me more. I told him no but somehow he found me later. He very logically told me that I had ten fingers so I needed more than five marionettas. I told him that I really didn´t think so. Then two of his amigos showed up trying to sell us more things. One of them wanted to shine my hiking books which I thought was a little bit funny. He told me that he was really hungry. Laura and I were looking for a place to eat so we invited them along on the condition that they would practice Spanish with us. One of them was 7, one 15 and one 16. The fifteen year old actually liked math which I thought was cool. We asked them about their schools. They go five days a week and study languages and history and math. One studies English and Italian. I asked him to tell me his life story in Spanish but he said it was more expensive than the chicken I was buying him for dinner. We found out that they were all born in Cuzco and had not been to other parts of Peru. The 15 year old knew who George Bush was(when we say that we are from Washington everyone assumes that Bush is my neighbor). I asked him what he though of Bush and he said he was like the current Peruvian president who he didn´t like. He said that Bush was killing lots of people in Iraq. All in all we paid 28 soles for dinner or about 9 dollars for the five of us. There was chicken left over that they put in their pockets to take to their mothers. I guess feeding them was better than buying something because I won´t have to carry it in my backpack for the next three weeks. I did end up buying two more marionettas with the change from dinner though. One word that the boys taught us in exchange for dinner was camote, which was a vegetable which seemed a lot like yams. Its really hard to eat fruits and vegetables here becuase if they are washed in water we can get sick from the water. I hate having to tell people that I can´t eat their food because it will make me sick. I also hate having people accost me constantly trying to sell me things. I hate ignoring people but at times it seems necessary. A man followed me for a block trying to sell me cigarrets. I said No fumo so many times but I don´t think that he cared that I didn´t smoke. He told another girl that it was a special day and that the cigarettes were free. We decided that he would have to pay us a lot of money to get us to smoke them.
I´m really excited to ride bikes tomorrow with Laura and go to Macchu Pichu Monday and Tuesday. It will be nice to escape the crowds of tourists and the even bigger crowds of people trying to sell them things in the North of Peru later this trip. If anyone wants anything made of alpaca I´m in the right place. For only three or four dollars you can buy really nice hats that are very soft and wonderful.

dead looking leònes del mar in a sewage drainage

hacer ejercicios, incorpararse, rodilla, cadera, y caminar

Laura is starting to train with her equipo de esquiar(ski team) as soon as we return and does not want to be out of shape. Exerciseing is really important to her so she started by doing incorpararse(sit ups) at the park next to the Golden gate bridge on the roof of an old fort. In fact she has been hacer ejercicios (exercising) almost everywhere, including the floor of the airport in Mexico. I´ve been joining her a lot because I feel guilty watching someone else to situps but I can´t always do it. For example yesterday she did lunges around the entire museum because walking slowly hurt her caderas(hips) which had been bothering her from so much sitting. I couldn`t even attempt to do lunges because my rodilla(knee) hurt from so much walking. We decided that our bodies were incompatible. Luckily our personalities have been getting along fine. Right now she is running around by the ocean. Our hostel is right across the street from the beach. Today hopefully we are going to montar biciletas(ride bikes) because I´m a little better at that. I`ve been walking quite a lot though and doing okay.

cajero, cupable,, mentiras y surfear

Laura´s blog has a really good description of our encounter with taxis. You should check it out if you are not really concerned about my personal saftey. If you are a parent you might want to consider self censoring before you have nightmares about me getting scammed at one in the morning in a two hour taxi drive around Lima.

Let me just say that we were thankful that our hostel was real clean and safe and that one particular cajero(atm machine) didn´t work when a stranger pushed the buttor for 600 dollars late at night. Our taking driver was definitely cupable(guilty) for our crazy evening because he told us lots of mentiras(lies).

Today we went to the Museo de la Nacion. It had artifacts from all stages of Peru´s history. Laura and I got a lot of idea of places that we wanted to visit all around the country, especially the more remote ruins in the North of Peru.
The most notable part of the day might have been a number of conversations with personas casuales(random people).

We met a man on a terrace overlooking the ocean with family in San Diego. He was pretty willing to talk to us nonstop until a policeman arrived and he ran away because he was illegally selling braclets and metal Macchu Picchu things that had no concievable use. He told us all about everything. He told us all about the corrupt police who would steal his bracelets. Last night the taxi driver had told us about corrupt police when we stopped by a cajero with a police officer next to it and he told us not to use it. We thought that he probably did not have a liscense and wanted to leave before he got in trouble.
As we were walking back to our hostel a young man who had just turned 18 on May 14th said hi to us. He wanted to practice his English because he was going to Detroit to visit his aunt an uncle. He asked for my email address so maybe I will begin to recieve emails from him in broken English. There were people surfing on the beach and we asked him the word for surf because we wern´t really satisfied with the dictionary definition sobre las olas. He said surfear was a good verb. Sounds a little Spanglish to me but I´m not surprised. They also laughed at me because I couldn´t role my r`s. Laura thinks I need to practice but I think it`s impossible. Laura and I decided that we liked talkng to people as long as they wern´t trying to sell us anything or give us information about tourism. A lady who we´d met at the airport and given the name of our hostel called us early our first morning and woke us up. We had no idea who could possibly know the name of our hostel and were upset to be bothered by people selling tourism after not getting to bed until 4 in the morning because of the two and a half hour taxi dis gracia (misadventure).

velocidad, leònes del mar, curvas y puentes

Laura and I started speaking predominately in Spanish as we left Walla Walla. We decided to listen to Spanish radio the entire way to California. At times there were no more stations which gave us a welcome break from lots of accordian music. One of the words we learned in Oregon is velocidad which means speed. We learned this word the hard way after getting pulled over in the 55 mph beteen Bend and California. We weren´t going dangerously fast and the cop let us go with a warning. I was sad to have been pulled over for the first time in my life and kind of annoyed because people(including a semi) had passed me already. No one was sticking to 55.

That night we found a state park, threw my futon mattress on the ground and slept until it started raining. We moved under a tree and were really glad that the rain stopped quickly because we were sleeping on a giant sponge of a bed. We were very grateful to Alan(Laura´s boyfriend) for looking online to find places without rain because it rained for a large part of our journey to LA.

Laura and I decided to go to San Francisco instead of continuing down the five. We took the road to Napa which had tons of curvas(curves). I got kind of sick but she told me it was good practice for the buses in Peru.
Napa was really pretty and it was interesting to see one of the big wine spots that was around long before Walla Walla became famous for wine.
We drove over the Golden Gate puente(bridge) which was really pretty. It was so much nicer to be on the coast than driving down the five even though it probably took five more hours.

After more curvas driving along the big sur we were driving, speaking to each other in Spanish, when we suddenly were shocked into English: "what are those bodies?" We pulled the car over to a beach absolutely covered with leònes del mar(sea lions). They were fighting, swimming and wiggling around on the beach like giant slugs. Laura speculated that they would be more graceful in the water. We learned that they could for three months without eating while giving birth on the beaches in California.

Next drawn by the olas(waves) and arene(sand) we stopped in 20 minute parking in a state park on highway one and jumped into the ocean. Everyone else was too timid to get into the mildly cold water but Laura and I both love the ocean enough to jump in.

That night we stayed with my friend Jamie, and got up at 4:20 am to take a cab to the airport. In hindsight it was a pretty wonderful and uneventful cab ride.

Creating a Blog in Spanish

I´m sitting in my hostel in Lima, Peru. There is loud American music playing in the bar behind me, a courtyard full of hammocks in front of me and to the left a room full of American and English students watching The Italian Job. Because I´m using the interent in Peru all of the directions for creating this blog are in Spanish so I´ve been having a bit of trouble figuring it out. But I think I´ve got it down and learned some more Spanish words while I´m at it. Laura and I are trying to learn 10 words each day and write them down in my Journal. So far we´ve been pretty successful. I even got in a fight with my Taxi driver in Spanish. But for the next month I will try to write about my adventures and post pictures. Laura has already posted at www.lauravalaas.com
Check it out!