Ollantaytambo

And the last set of ruins were at Ollantaytambo, a really touristy little village but beautiful and charming all the same. The ruins here are of a fortress in which one of the last Inca rulers succeeded in holding out against the Spanish before retreating to another fortress further in the jungle. The ruins in the second photo really reminded me of Lord of the Rings (The Two Towers). Yes, this is the second reference to Lord of the Rings so far and I am indeed a huge nerd. I embrace my nerdiness!

Moray and the Salineras (salt pans)

These pictures are from the ruins of Moray, which as you can see are really cool! I was lucky in that there were few tourists around when I visited them, so I could really enjoy the atmosphere - kind of mystical. At the bottom is a photo of some impressive salt pans I passed on the way back to Urubamba.

Ruins, ruins and more ruins

I am just about to leave the Southern (and more touristy) part of Peru for Ayacucho in the Central Highlands. I just want to post some photos because I saw some really beautiful ruins in the Sacred Valley around Cuzco during the past few days. It was kind of a weird time - Flo had just left, I got food poisoning, and I also had some strange hotel experiences. But I have to say that the ruins were pretty spectacular. This first set of photos is from the village of Pisaq and the ruins perched above it.

A vacation from my vacation - 4

We managed to have a bit of adventure in spite of ourselves. There is currently some political upheaval going on because the indigenous peoples in the Amazon are protesting the government's attempt to sell tracts of jungle to corporations for development. A lot of protesters and military folks were killed during protests, and as a result there have been strikes and other political action throughout the country in support of the indigenous peoples.

Since strikes here include blocking transportation routes, our bus ride to Cuzco ended up being 12 hours instead of 7 because we had to take an alternate route (otherwise we would have had rocks thrown at us). Protesters had even destroyed a bridge on our route so we had to get out of the bus, walk across, and then wait for the bus to drive over some temporary boards that had been nailed onto the bridge as a track. It was intense, but I'm appreciating being in a country where people are so politically active. Here is a photo of some political art that was exhibited in a Cuzco plaza:

And finally, some pics of Machu Picchu:

A vacation from my vacation - 3

Some photos from our rafting adventure:

A vacation from my vacation - 2

Here are some photos from Cuzco. Flo was on a mission to get the ultimate llama photo, and he ended up hitting the jackpot. The last one is the hotel we wished we had enough money to stay at, with white Jesus overlooking the city in the background.

A vacation from my vacation - 1

Flo is leaving today after spending 10 days in Peru with me. Instead of doing a crazy rushed tour of the country, we took our time and pretty much just hung out, wandered around and watched lots of TV. It was awesome. It also gave me an excuse to eat at way better restaurants and to stay at way better hotels than I had been up to this point. For our last dinner we went to a fancy place and ate steak with gorgonzola sauce, with a side of whiskey risotto. Oh my god! So much better than chewy beef with rice and potatoes, or chicken with rice and potatoes, or fish with rice and potatoes...

The few touristy things we did do were great - visiting a beautifully restored convent in Arequipa, spending a day doing white-water rafting on the Urubamba river, and (of course) checking out Machu Picchu. The latter was truly spectacular, although I have to admit that I was actually more impressed by the surrounding mountains than by the Inca city itself. You'll see why from the pictures. Definitely in the Top 5 most beautiful natural things I have ever seen.

I seem to only be able to post five photos per blog post so I'll start with the Arequipa ones:

The deepest canyon in the world, and the worst bus ride ever

I don't have too much to say about the canyon, other than that it was awesome. I couldn't fit it all into one photo (obviously!) so I made a video.

When I left Cotahuasi I embarked on 24 hours of hellish travel. Some of it was kind of funny actually. On the first 10-hour bus ride, the guy next to me puked on himself and got some on my pants. Gross! Then I had a wait at the Arequipa bus terminal from 2am to 5:30am, which was okay but hardly pleasurable. I ate some sheep soup at 4.

Then on the second 10-hour bus ride, we started off on a bad note: one of the bus company employees thought it would be appropriate to start peddling natural products at the beginning of the ride, at 6am. I wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't been totally exhausted and if he hadn't been yelling at the top of his lungs for half an hour. Then we watched Braveheart dubbed in Spanish...twice! We were two hours into the movie when we got to a rest stop, and when we got back onto the bus the guy didn't bother finding the spot where we had left off, he just started the goddamn movie again! We finally made it to Nasca, but instead of going straight to the terminal the driver decided to do another 30-minute rest stop. So after all that traveling, I was finally at my destination but couldn't get to the hotel. Brutal!

And the object of my journey: the Nasca Lines, some enormous drawings in the desert that "continue to puzzle archaeologists today." It was kind of a weird experience flying over them, I was so busy trying to take photos and feeling nauseous that it was hard to take it all in. But the documentary was cool. Here are an astronaut and a hummingbird, hopefully they're not impossible to see.

Flo is arriving tonight!

Something I wasn't expecting

There are multiple sights to visit around Cotahuasi other than the canyon itself. I decided to check out the village of Pampamarca, where you can hike up to something called the Bosque de Piedras (Rock Forest). When I arrived, the contact person I had been hoping to stay with wasn't in town, so I ended up staying with the lady who lived across the street. I had been told that it would be best to get a guide to go to the Bosque, so I asked if she could organize something for me. The next morning, I saw that my guide would be an eight-year-old girl, Yadira.

I started feeing the child exploitation discomfort again, but was relieved to find out that this was not her full-time job - she goes to school, it was a Saturday, and she had only brought tourists up the trail a handful of times. Plus, it felt like we were just hanging out because she seemed to be having a lot of fun. She ran ahead picking flowers, slid down slopes as though they were a natural playground, and talked to me the entire time. She told me a ghost story which I didn't quite understand (something about a floating head) and listed the flowers' names for me in Quechua. She also rescued me from at least four bees. It was lovely.

At the end of the hike, I asked her how much I owed her and she seemed uncomfortable with the question. I managed to get an answer by asking how much others had given her in the past. This was surprising to me; almost every other encounter I've had with folks in developing countries where there was an exchange of money for services has been about money first, and cultural sharing second (if at all). I reacted with the same surprise when the woman I was staying with asked me for a fraction of what I had been paying for accommodation so far. I realized that I had experienced something that I wasn't expecting in a country with a tourism industry as developed as Peru's: a village's genuine generosity towards a traveler, unaffected by the drive for tourist dollars. I'm really glad I went.

When trying to be hard core just isn't worth it

On my way to the Cotahuasi Canyon, I decided to make a quick stop in Corire to see Toro Muerto, a field of petroglyphs that is a UN heritage site. Cool, I thought, petroglyphs! So off I went, on what was supposed to be a one-hour walk because I scorned the easy way of paying a taxi to drive me there and wait for me while I visited the site.

I had to ask directions multiple times, partly because there were no signs and partly because I didn't really understand what people were saying. Finally I get to this huge desert field and it's still not clear to me where the hell I'm supposed to go. I was in a place that looked like this:



And I'm thinking: Okay, petroglyphs. What the hell is a petroglyph? Am I supposed to be looking on the ground? Are they carved in to the slopes? Finally I figured out, in my genius way, that perhaps I should follow the tire tracks. By this time it was blazing hot, I was totally dehydrated, and I was also completely alone in the desert, which was both disconcerting and a relief. In the end I did find the field of petroglyphs. It looked like this:



Pretty awesome huh? That's what I thought. Upon closer inspection, I did manage to find some petroglyphs.




I couldn't help thinking that they looked like kids' drawings. Is that disrespectful of me? Anyway, I guess I can't expect every excursion to be the best thing ever.

Dipping my toes in Lake Titicaca

There are a few main things you do when you visit Lake Titicaca: buy wool stuff because it's freezing, and visit some of the communities living on the islands. Since I will be coming back here with Flo and checking out some of the more popular attractions with him, I decided to visit a couple of places that were "off the beaten path" (but of course not so off the beaten path that they weren't clearly spelled out in my guidebook).

I started out by heading to a community on the Capachica peninsula called Llachón. They have developed some neat community-based tourism there. Basically I e-mailed a guy listed in my book to ask if I could stay in the community and he was like: "Sure! Come on down!" So off I went. The colectivo dropped me off at his house and I stayed there for a night. His wife prepared some delicious food for me and sent me off with a fisherman the next morning to get to the island of Amantaní.

Again, I pretty much showed up at the dock and there was a lady who came down to greet me. "Is there somewhere I can stay?" "Sure! Come to my house!" It was pretty basic living - I didn't take a shower for 2 days which was a little weird for me - but it was cool nonetheless. One of the best parts of my short visit was the actual lake, which is the most spectacular clear blue ever and worth the trip in and of itself. Another was being outside and being reminded of how bright the moonlight can be without the aid of electric light. I totally basked in it, chuckling to myself like a kid. Small pleasures...