Patience with the 1900 Hostel ran out somewhere very early on Friday morning. There were little tiny roaches running around our lockers, the place was just far too noisy, and the pool table was a shambles. Thank God we were into our last 24 hours there. This good fortune was overshadowed by the return of Sarah's bad tummy bug, back with a vengeance and determined to make its presence felt.
The poor dear was struck down something horrid, stuck in bed almost all day. Nasty cramps, almost certainly due to some bad water somehow breaking into our food chain. It wasn't funny at all, awful stomach cramps and all the associated ills. I took a walk to find a chemist and returned with miracle pills called Espasmo something which eliminated those particular cramps, but which were not good for long term problems. Plus they only stop the spasms, not all the other stuff. Bad times.
I, somewhat better, am only suffering the misery of my recurrent trapped nerve, which has left me with permanent pins and needles down my arm again. Sleeping and walking, sitting and typing, no amount of stretches or exercises makes a difference. I expect another cheerful physiotherapy bill when I return home (although this time I shall be popping a course of anti-inflammatories before I even get there).
Anyway, Friday was a write-off. We walk as far as the shopping centre, five minutes away, and I get a burger for lunch. Sarah tries a few chips but the result is instanteous and painful, and we return to the hostel posthaste. I take a few hours to update my recent blog entries with a lot more photos, send an email or two, then get packed. The rucksacks are swollen with stuff, and we dispose of our bonus bag of food and liquids, none of which will make the journey to Cusco. I also leave the dregs of my bottle of Chileno pisco. Sarah, sentimental as ever, is disturbed at leaving a bottle of warm, flat Coke behind. A waste of money, she thinks, in her feverish state.
1900 Hostel is host to some sort of Good Friday party, and the music runs all night long. We try and sleep about midnight, but between our ailments and the noise, nothing doing. At 4am, eyes burning a little, we descend the stairs with relief and climb into a taxi bound for Jorge Chavez International Airport.
Lima is a monumental to traffic chaos, so taking a cab throught the abandoned 4am streets is revelatory. I wouldn't go so far as to call it beautiful (Sarah said her mother would have refered to it as Sticksville) but anyone who can imagine an urban landscape pairing Gengormley with the Boucher Road will understand. Its a city, nothing more, nothing less. Bars are closed, no hoodlums are hanging around the corners, the roads are empty until we reach the signs welcoming us, yet again, to the Municipality of Callao. Round the roundabout we go and into the airport carpark. PNS$40 lighter (what seems to be the standard fee to the airport from anywhere in the city) and we are ready to deal with Airport Security.
Lima Airport, somewhat like Dublin Airport, does not seem to cease at any time of the day. Gentle crowds roam around the check-in terminal, and we sweep straight up the StarPeru line where a very helpful chap takes our rucksacks and tags them. We receive a receipt acknowledging the small rip already present on Sarah's rucksack. Peru's professionalism is welcome and charming after the service in other countries. With our rucksacks coming in just over 20kg each we feel a little relieved in advance of our journey home.
It's a surprisingly pleasant and unobtrusive airport, easy to navigate and rather well set out. We hang around the food court for half an hour to kill time, but dont want to tackle the coffee, prefering a sleep on the plane. Security is excellent, no bother for Sarah and her insulin, no queue, no grief. There are some pretty comfy seats at the gate, and half an hour later we're on the 06.50am bound for Cusco.
The choice was a 22hr bus journey with Cruz Del Sur, doubling back on ourselves, costing US$60 at minimum, and probably more, or a stupid US$93 each for a one hour flight.
Our little plane, not completely full but only holding 120 or so folk at full capacity, was very comfortable, and as with all small planes, took off without a hitch, swooped through the clouds, and ten minutes later we played over a few brown mountains. Another ten minutes and we were crossing beautiful snow-topped peaks. Barely fifteen minute after that we saw the lush green of the Sacred Valley, and our plane circled round and dived onto the tarmac of Cusco Airport.
The runway runs up the middle of the valley, in the middle of the city, and due to the thinner air (Cusco sits about 3400m up, on the eastern edge of the Andes) needs a longer stretch to allow planes to stop properly. Still, absolutely no problems with out early morning flight, and StarPeru come highly recommended from me.
Of course the most visited city in Peru has the smallest, warehouse-style terminal for its airport, and facilities are meagre, although you have the pick of the tour companies operating there if you're in a rush to sort something out. Not too pushy, which was a pleasant surprise. We are offered, and decline, a PNS$35 'official' taxi, and barter it down to PNS$20. Still, we read later on Wikitravel we should have walked out to the main road and gotten one for PNS$10, tops. Live and learn, live and learn.
On the recommendation of Sonya from the US we have reservations at Pan-tastico!, a combination bakery and hostel. Any suggestion of a half-way decent breakfast is always going to win us over, no matter how bad we feel. We pull up outside and receive the by-now customary Peruvian hospitality. Other countries have, on and off, been less flexible for early-morning arrivals. Pan-tastico! had our beds ready for 10am and invited us to breakfast.Freshly made breads and jams accompany our Nambarrie tea as the other guests struggle from their beds. Sarah, better but not better, curls up in a ball and passes out, utterly exhausted. I eat as much bread as I believe I can get away with, and we retire to our room. At some point later, after emailing, checking the news, downloading some new games for the tablet, and a page and a half of Portrait Of A Lady, I pass out for a couple of hours too.
5pm, Saturday evening, and Cusco is cold. The difference in weather is startling; the Sacred Valley area is known for its diverse climates, but its still a shock to go from blazing heat in the midday sun to needing a woolen jumper a few hours later.There is speculation there might be thunderstorms tonight too.We've been here nine hours and seen nothing of Cusco. I head out on a walk to the nearest supermarket, half a mile away but easy to find, in search of soup for Sarah and maybe something tasty for me.
Without a sore head I was feeling like we had side-stepped 'soroche', the notorious altitude sickness, especially when we had had an easy time of it in Arequipa. That confidence left me unprepared for how thin the air is in Cusco. A brisk five minute walk later had my heart racing like I'd gone full whack on an exercise bike for an hour. Short, shallow breaths helped, and I sat for a few minutes to recover, but its a serious sort of impediment here. All the knowing articles about the area are at pains to point out Machu Picchu is actually at a lower altitude than Cusco, so acclimatisation is a bit unneccesary, but actually its the city itself you need to be ready for. Where Arequipa was a pretty flat cityscape, Cusco very much climbs the hills it is built upon, and you scarcely have a flat stretch of road at all.
Still, with a bit of wit I make it to the supermarket (featuring an entire aisle of bottled water, all the info one needs about the tap water here), pick up some powdered chicken soup for Sarah, and make it back through the darkening Cusco streets in one piece. Plenty of folk around, well lit from streetlamps, not sinister at all.
Our combined travel resources (Wikitravel, Lonely Planet, various blogs all about backpacking on the cheap, TripAdvisor) all suggested the vegan restaurant across from the hostel, Green Point, is worth a look, and my dinner comes from there; excellent Quinoa soup and above average vegetarian lasagne. Sarah manages to get through a bowl of cream of chicken soup and makes a start at another. The worst of the bug is past, I think, but she's understandably cautious.
We banter with a couple of girls staying in the hostel, and share our knowledge about Peru for their knowledge on Bolivia, but soon all of us are exhausted and bedtime is not late.
After the horrible snoring in Lima we were conscious of not being those people ourselves, and twice Sarah wakes me in the middle of the night to tell me to roll onto my side, my nasty sinuses are disturbing the two girls sharing our room. My sore shoulder does nothing to help the situation. Still, no one rises the next day with a knife in their chest, so I'm guessing an element of tolerance was exercised.
Breakfast is once again excellent, and I drown myself in pan-au-chocolat and tea. We share more stories with our peers and nominate ourselves for the Paraguayan Tourist Promotion Board. One girl, an Austrian, demonstrates starkly the differences that can exist between travellers. Talking of Lima, "Well, our taxi passed through Miraflores, so we had already seen the coast, then we walked around the historic centre and the Chinese part, then by 2.30pm we said Well what is there to do now? and we left Lima the next day". I couldn't think of how to argue with that, nor could I bring myself to point out that two weeks in that glorious capital hadn't been nearly enough for us, so I kept quite. It is quite difficult to work out why exactly some people are travelling the globe when they have such a shallow interaction with it on arrival. Somewhat reassuringly, she became the first person we had met who said they did not like Bogota.
Taking it slowly, very slowly, we ventured out to the streets around Plaza San Blas, beside our hostel. Those expecting high stone walls held together by mud and straw, streets so narrow a car can barely pass a pedestrian, and some of the most spectacular city views in Latin America will not be disappointed. Within minutes I knew Cusco would fall into the same camp as Rio De Janeiro, a city that is utterly spectacular in its own right, before any other aspect is considered. We eased up and down quiet Easter Sunday streets before finding the crowds at the Plaza De Armas, where once again the alleged pushiness was a second-best to the sellers in souks across the Arab world. A polite "No, gracias" kept everything friendly.
We spent an hour or two on our feet but hunger was our enemy today, Sarah's more than mine, but she was loathe to eat outside the hostel. Not only that, but where I had felt the grip on my chest the previous night, it was all new for Sarah, and between hunger and a lack of oxygen she was a little anxious. More soup in hand, we returned to the hostel and rested. I ventured out for something to eat, and returned almost an hour later with 'nachos' (not nachos, maybe bad wontons, but not nachos) and guacamole, and lomo saltado, which was as described and tasty for it. Sarah took a little rice, and it didn't kill her, so perhaps things are looking up. Still, that was a couple of hours ago. It's now 6pm, Easter Sunday, the sun has definitely fallen from the sky, and soon it will be time for a cup of tea and a creme egg.
Postscript : One of the most surprising (good and bad) things about South America has been how resolutely familiar things can be. Rarely do you have to eat something you have genuine trouble identifying, at least once its in front of you. For some reason Latin Americans love to have different words for the same thing. For example, chicken. A chicken is a galleta, as far as I can tell anyway. Chicken meat is pollo. Unless its a chicken stock, when its caldo de gallina. Or when its chicken fillet, when its filet de pechuga. This has caused problems (who would have thought one word in English would need so many variants in Spanish? Yet whe you go to Argentina and try and work out what all the different steak cuts are, you will understand it isn't just about chickens).
One of the worst aspects though, one thing that really stops you believing you've left Western culture behind and moved on to a better place, is music. In Brazil, you have Brazilian pop, which is a little like Jamaican dancefloor I suppose, although purists will get me about that. In Argentina too you have this fairly African pop music. But intermingled with all this is a weird selection of Western pop. Not modern pop, but very old popular music. Sitting in the little restaurant waiting 'ten minutes' for my lomo saltado, the radio played 'Summer Loving', 'La Isla Bonita', 'I've Had The Time Of My Life', and Cher's 'Believe' before one single Spanish-language song came on. Sarah is convinced she hears Alanis Morisette being played every single day, somewhere on our journeys. Bizarrely, the original lead singer from Toto is coming to Cusco to give a concert; I have heard 'Africa' and 'Hold The Line' a lot in the last five months.
Mercifully, no Rihanna, no Katy Perry, no Lady Gaga, although Calvin Harris pops up quite a lot. And, Armageddon approaching, One Direction are absolutely massive down here. Not that you ever hear their music anywhere, but I've seen more 1D merchandise here than in Castle Court at Christmas.
The poor dear was struck down something horrid, stuck in bed almost all day. Nasty cramps, almost certainly due to some bad water somehow breaking into our food chain. It wasn't funny at all, awful stomach cramps and all the associated ills. I took a walk to find a chemist and returned with miracle pills called Espasmo something which eliminated those particular cramps, but which were not good for long term problems. Plus they only stop the spasms, not all the other stuff. Bad times.
I, somewhat better, am only suffering the misery of my recurrent trapped nerve, which has left me with permanent pins and needles down my arm again. Sleeping and walking, sitting and typing, no amount of stretches or exercises makes a difference. I expect another cheerful physiotherapy bill when I return home (although this time I shall be popping a course of anti-inflammatories before I even get there).
Anyway, Friday was a write-off. We walk as far as the shopping centre, five minutes away, and I get a burger for lunch. Sarah tries a few chips but the result is instanteous and painful, and we return to the hostel posthaste. I take a few hours to update my recent blog entries with a lot more photos, send an email or two, then get packed. The rucksacks are swollen with stuff, and we dispose of our bonus bag of food and liquids, none of which will make the journey to Cusco. I also leave the dregs of my bottle of Chileno pisco. Sarah, sentimental as ever, is disturbed at leaving a bottle of warm, flat Coke behind. A waste of money, she thinks, in her feverish state.
1900 Hostel is host to some sort of Good Friday party, and the music runs all night long. We try and sleep about midnight, but between our ailments and the noise, nothing doing. At 4am, eyes burning a little, we descend the stairs with relief and climb into a taxi bound for Jorge Chavez International Airport.
Lima is a monumental to traffic chaos, so taking a cab throught the abandoned 4am streets is revelatory. I wouldn't go so far as to call it beautiful (Sarah said her mother would have refered to it as Sticksville) but anyone who can imagine an urban landscape pairing Gengormley with the Boucher Road will understand. Its a city, nothing more, nothing less. Bars are closed, no hoodlums are hanging around the corners, the roads are empty until we reach the signs welcoming us, yet again, to the Municipality of Callao. Round the roundabout we go and into the airport carpark. PNS$40 lighter (what seems to be the standard fee to the airport from anywhere in the city) and we are ready to deal with Airport Security.
Lima Airport, somewhat like Dublin Airport, does not seem to cease at any time of the day. Gentle crowds roam around the check-in terminal, and we sweep straight up the StarPeru line where a very helpful chap takes our rucksacks and tags them. We receive a receipt acknowledging the small rip already present on Sarah's rucksack. Peru's professionalism is welcome and charming after the service in other countries. With our rucksacks coming in just over 20kg each we feel a little relieved in advance of our journey home.
It's a surprisingly pleasant and unobtrusive airport, easy to navigate and rather well set out. We hang around the food court for half an hour to kill time, but dont want to tackle the coffee, prefering a sleep on the plane. Security is excellent, no bother for Sarah and her insulin, no queue, no grief. There are some pretty comfy seats at the gate, and half an hour later we're on the 06.50am bound for Cusco.
The choice was a 22hr bus journey with Cruz Del Sur, doubling back on ourselves, costing US$60 at minimum, and probably more, or a stupid US$93 each for a one hour flight.
Our little plane, not completely full but only holding 120 or so folk at full capacity, was very comfortable, and as with all small planes, took off without a hitch, swooped through the clouds, and ten minutes later we played over a few brown mountains. Another ten minutes and we were crossing beautiful snow-topped peaks. Barely fifteen minute after that we saw the lush green of the Sacred Valley, and our plane circled round and dived onto the tarmac of Cusco Airport.
The runway runs up the middle of the valley, in the middle of the city, and due to the thinner air (Cusco sits about 3400m up, on the eastern edge of the Andes) needs a longer stretch to allow planes to stop properly. Still, absolutely no problems with out early morning flight, and StarPeru come highly recommended from me.
Of course the most visited city in Peru has the smallest, warehouse-style terminal for its airport, and facilities are meagre, although you have the pick of the tour companies operating there if you're in a rush to sort something out. Not too pushy, which was a pleasant surprise. We are offered, and decline, a PNS$35 'official' taxi, and barter it down to PNS$20. Still, we read later on Wikitravel we should have walked out to the main road and gotten one for PNS$10, tops. Live and learn, live and learn.
On the recommendation of Sonya from the US we have reservations at Pan-tastico!, a combination bakery and hostel. Any suggestion of a half-way decent breakfast is always going to win us over, no matter how bad we feel. We pull up outside and receive the by-now customary Peruvian hospitality. Other countries have, on and off, been less flexible for early-morning arrivals. Pan-tastico! had our beds ready for 10am and invited us to breakfast.Freshly made breads and jams accompany our Nambarrie tea as the other guests struggle from their beds. Sarah, better but not better, curls up in a ball and passes out, utterly exhausted. I eat as much bread as I believe I can get away with, and we retire to our room. At some point later, after emailing, checking the news, downloading some new games for the tablet, and a page and a half of Portrait Of A Lady, I pass out for a couple of hours too.
5pm, Saturday evening, and Cusco is cold. The difference in weather is startling; the Sacred Valley area is known for its diverse climates, but its still a shock to go from blazing heat in the midday sun to needing a woolen jumper a few hours later.There is speculation there might be thunderstorms tonight too.We've been here nine hours and seen nothing of Cusco. I head out on a walk to the nearest supermarket, half a mile away but easy to find, in search of soup for Sarah and maybe something tasty for me.
Without a sore head I was feeling like we had side-stepped 'soroche', the notorious altitude sickness, especially when we had had an easy time of it in Arequipa. That confidence left me unprepared for how thin the air is in Cusco. A brisk five minute walk later had my heart racing like I'd gone full whack on an exercise bike for an hour. Short, shallow breaths helped, and I sat for a few minutes to recover, but its a serious sort of impediment here. All the knowing articles about the area are at pains to point out Machu Picchu is actually at a lower altitude than Cusco, so acclimatisation is a bit unneccesary, but actually its the city itself you need to be ready for. Where Arequipa was a pretty flat cityscape, Cusco very much climbs the hills it is built upon, and you scarcely have a flat stretch of road at all.
Still, with a bit of wit I make it to the supermarket (featuring an entire aisle of bottled water, all the info one needs about the tap water here), pick up some powdered chicken soup for Sarah, and make it back through the darkening Cusco streets in one piece. Plenty of folk around, well lit from streetlamps, not sinister at all.
Our combined travel resources (Wikitravel, Lonely Planet, various blogs all about backpacking on the cheap, TripAdvisor) all suggested the vegan restaurant across from the hostel, Green Point, is worth a look, and my dinner comes from there; excellent Quinoa soup and above average vegetarian lasagne. Sarah manages to get through a bowl of cream of chicken soup and makes a start at another. The worst of the bug is past, I think, but she's understandably cautious.
We banter with a couple of girls staying in the hostel, and share our knowledge about Peru for their knowledge on Bolivia, but soon all of us are exhausted and bedtime is not late.
After the horrible snoring in Lima we were conscious of not being those people ourselves, and twice Sarah wakes me in the middle of the night to tell me to roll onto my side, my nasty sinuses are disturbing the two girls sharing our room. My sore shoulder does nothing to help the situation. Still, no one rises the next day with a knife in their chest, so I'm guessing an element of tolerance was exercised.
Breakfast is once again excellent, and I drown myself in pan-au-chocolat and tea. We share more stories with our peers and nominate ourselves for the Paraguayan Tourist Promotion Board. One girl, an Austrian, demonstrates starkly the differences that can exist between travellers. Talking of Lima, "Well, our taxi passed through Miraflores, so we had already seen the coast, then we walked around the historic centre and the Chinese part, then by 2.30pm we said Well what is there to do now? and we left Lima the next day". I couldn't think of how to argue with that, nor could I bring myself to point out that two weeks in that glorious capital hadn't been nearly enough for us, so I kept quite. It is quite difficult to work out why exactly some people are travelling the globe when they have such a shallow interaction with it on arrival. Somewhat reassuringly, she became the first person we had met who said they did not like Bogota.
Taking it slowly, very slowly, we ventured out to the streets around Plaza San Blas, beside our hostel. Those expecting high stone walls held together by mud and straw, streets so narrow a car can barely pass a pedestrian, and some of the most spectacular city views in Latin America will not be disappointed. Within minutes I knew Cusco would fall into the same camp as Rio De Janeiro, a city that is utterly spectacular in its own right, before any other aspect is considered. We eased up and down quiet Easter Sunday streets before finding the crowds at the Plaza De Armas, where once again the alleged pushiness was a second-best to the sellers in souks across the Arab world. A polite "No, gracias" kept everything friendly.
We spent an hour or two on our feet but hunger was our enemy today, Sarah's more than mine, but she was loathe to eat outside the hostel. Not only that, but where I had felt the grip on my chest the previous night, it was all new for Sarah, and between hunger and a lack of oxygen she was a little anxious. More soup in hand, we returned to the hostel and rested. I ventured out for something to eat, and returned almost an hour later with 'nachos' (not nachos, maybe bad wontons, but not nachos) and guacamole, and lomo saltado, which was as described and tasty for it. Sarah took a little rice, and it didn't kill her, so perhaps things are looking up. Still, that was a couple of hours ago. It's now 6pm, Easter Sunday, the sun has definitely fallen from the sky, and soon it will be time for a cup of tea and a creme egg.
Postscript : One of the most surprising (good and bad) things about South America has been how resolutely familiar things can be. Rarely do you have to eat something you have genuine trouble identifying, at least once its in front of you. For some reason Latin Americans love to have different words for the same thing. For example, chicken. A chicken is a galleta, as far as I can tell anyway. Chicken meat is pollo. Unless its a chicken stock, when its caldo de gallina. Or when its chicken fillet, when its filet de pechuga. This has caused problems (who would have thought one word in English would need so many variants in Spanish? Yet whe you go to Argentina and try and work out what all the different steak cuts are, you will understand it isn't just about chickens).
One of the worst aspects though, one thing that really stops you believing you've left Western culture behind and moved on to a better place, is music. In Brazil, you have Brazilian pop, which is a little like Jamaican dancefloor I suppose, although purists will get me about that. In Argentina too you have this fairly African pop music. But intermingled with all this is a weird selection of Western pop. Not modern pop, but very old popular music. Sitting in the little restaurant waiting 'ten minutes' for my lomo saltado, the radio played 'Summer Loving', 'La Isla Bonita', 'I've Had The Time Of My Life', and Cher's 'Believe' before one single Spanish-language song came on. Sarah is convinced she hears Alanis Morisette being played every single day, somewhere on our journeys. Bizarrely, the original lead singer from Toto is coming to Cusco to give a concert; I have heard 'Africa' and 'Hold The Line' a lot in the last five months.
Mercifully, no Rihanna, no Katy Perry, no Lady Gaga, although Calvin Harris pops up quite a lot. And, Armageddon approaching, One Direction are absolutely massive down here. Not that you ever hear their music anywhere, but I've seen more 1D merchandise here than in Castle Court at Christmas.
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