Peru favors the brave.

Well, now that memories of Peru and Spring Break have faded in my mind like a yellowed photograph, I figured it was time to finally write about them 😉 I’m sorry it’s taken me so long, but days have been crazy since we returned from free travel week. Plus, I was too intimidated to sit down and try to write about all the many, many new and insanely awesome experiences we had on the trip while they were still fresh. Now only the most important things stand out.

The entire trip involved six total flights: Montevideo to Santiago, Chile, Santiago to Lima, then Lima to Cuzco, then the same in reverse. I wish we had gotten to walk around and see some of the fabulousness of Santiago, but it costs something like 150 dollars to leave the airport in Chile, so we spent our layovers scoping the airport out for Starbucks and cheap souvenirs instead. If you’ve read this blog from the beginning, you know I hate to fly; this trip was no exception. The flights were miserable – no more details.

While in Lima, we stayed in a very nice hotel called the Leon de Oro (Gold Lion) in the Miraflores region of the city, the pretty, garden-filled, affluent part of town. Lima was fun, modern, and very Americanized. We ate KFC and had Domino’s pizza delivered to our hotel, we went to the three-story mall and saw Watchmen at the nice theater there, and everyone – everyone – spoke English in some form or fashion. My Spanish got really rusty over free travel week.

Cuzco was a different thing entirely. According the “Latin America on a Shoestring” book, it’s the city that has been consistently inhabited for the longest of any city in the Americas. It’s nestled in these green mountains, with houses climbing up the slopes everywhere, and big words and pictures carved into the mountainsides. Everywhere, walking through the streets, there are women in traditional clothing (long skirts, button-down shirts and jackets, top hats, and brightly colored blankets tied around their backs to hold either a baby or their wares), occasionally leading llamas. You can take pictures with them, but they expect a good tip for it.

Interesting foods we attempted in Peru: Ceviche, a raw fish that’s cooked only with the acid of lemon juice. It’s got a strong flavor, and it kind of explodes in your mouth, but the texture is exceptionally unpleasant to me. Not my fave. We also tried alpaca (llama’s brother), which was good, like steak but a little more flavorful. One thing we did not try was cuy, also known as guinea pig, in the states. We’re talking guinea pigs the size of cats, here. I lost my nerve to try one of those when one of our tour guides felt the need to remind us that guinea pigs do not have tails, so if we were served an animal with a long tail on it, it was not guinea pig. *Shudder*

In the middle of the week sometime (it was hard to keep track of the days) we took a four-hour train ride to Machu Picchu, probably the most beautiful place I have ever been or ever will be. My pictures on Facebook are such a poor, poor representation of what it was really like. I was breathless the entire time, both because there was a lot of high-altitude hiking involved and because the views in whichever direction you looked were absolutely breathtaking. There was a point, actually, on the bus ride up the mountain to the ruins (aside to my family: Remember how scary it was in the van in the mountains of Oregon? Well, Peruvians drive with much less fear, and with much less room for error), when we came around one of the switchbacks and the trees cleared, and everyone in the bus just gasped. It was unbelievably, life-changingly gorgeous.

We spent the morning touring the ruins with this really awesome tour guide, then broke for lunch, which consisted of all the fragments of snack food we all had stashed in our bags, compiled in one big pile on the table, because we could not afford the worse-than-an-amusement-park prices for food there on the mountain. I think we had one crumbly pop tart, a tin of honey roasted peanuts, an apple and a couple of oranges, and some cheesy Ritz crackers. Not a lot for six people.

It had sprinkled a lot during our tour and finally started really raining during lunch, so the majority of tourists cleared out at that point. For this reason, when we decided to hike back up into the ruins (the tickets are all-day passes) and find the Inca bridge, the place was pretty much empty. That’s when we took all the best pictures. It felt like we had the place pretty much to ourselves, and the weather was fabulously cool and overcast, but not rainy.

The Inca bridge was a long hike along this little path with a rock wall dripping rain forest greenery on one side and a pretty sheer drop-off, sometimes, on the other side, and the views there were almost better than the ones over the main part of the “city” of Machu Picchu. We eventually came to the top of this ridge and could see straight across to the bridge (which wasn’t all that much to look at, really), but that wasn’t good enough for the photographers in our group. They wanted to hike down the rest of the trail, past the sign that said, “Prohibo El Paso,” with a little skull and crossbones next to it, clinging to the rope that had been rigged up along the wall for only half the distance to the bottom, and then lean out over the safety fence to take pictures of the bridge. Seems like a pretty good idea, right?

But in Peru, nobody worries too much about safety and liability, like they do in the States because everyone’s so terrified of being sued. When we went white-water rafting – and absolutely amazing experience, the most fun part of the trip for me, for sure – we were halfway through our rapids adventure, when our guide said, hey, you guys want to jump off a bridge? And of course, we all said yes. We steered the boat over to the side of the river while the second team in the other boat went to the other side, tied up, and clambered barefoot up these rocks to this rickety wooden bridge spanning the rapids. When I say rickety, I am not exaggerating; we had to go out on the bridge only two at a time, because our guide said that if more went, the whole thing would collapse. Not a confidence building statement.

One by one, while the guide of the other boat stood on the banks with a camera to catch us in mid-air, we ducked under the waist-high support wire for the bridge, leaned out over the water, counted to three, and jumped. We jumped right into the current, so it was some hard swimming against the stream to get back over to the bank. Definitely something I would do again, though, if given the choice. I’m turning into a bit of an adrenaline junkie! 😛

Anyway, the trip was great, the picture opportunities were great, the shopping was great (I bought more souvenirs than any one person strictly needs, but the stuff in Peru is so cool!), and then I was ready to be back at the Casa.

It’s a very good thing I finally got this blog entry out, because on Friday we leave for Iguacu, Brazil, for a week, during which time we will tour some gorgeous parts of Brazil, visit Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, the knock-off capital of the Americas, and also stop in one of the poorer parts of Argentina. I have a feeling I’ll have plenty of stories to tell when I get back.

~ by Sara McPherson on March 31, 2009.