We rose at 4:30am on the morning of the 6th of June. Outside our tent Anand and I had 1 foot of space before a steep drop towards surrounding high Peruvian jungle, a river and the small town of Aquas Calientes far below. Hastily we prepared our packs, cursing the early hour and our ¨Inca cough¨but finally shedding the weight of our rented sleeping bags and mattress rolls in preparation for the final leg. In the makeshift lodge next to the latrine our gang of five had one last breakfast together: stale cold bread, pancakes drizzled with dulce de leche, and hot tea, all prepared by our porter/chef whom we had lovingly nick-named Cookie (what a cook!). In the darkness 250 hikers then waited quietly in an awkward line for 5:30am at the final checkpoint, just outside of camp.
My acheing throat compelled me to quietly nurse Canadian lozenges obtained from a friend, and I hadn´t purchased sufficient water the night before nor had our porters boiled anymore for us - tough shit.
We 5 shuffled about nervously with our guide Fredy, cracking jokes and singing little songs. For some reason Enrique Iglesias was particularly amusing that morning. We were perhaps the 20th people in line. When the rangers finally appeared and began waving groups onward our adrenaline collectively surged -- at once the singing and joking ceased. We were off and running towards the Sun Gate to Machupicchu.
You could almost hear the drums banging away, that background music one fantasizes about when you know you are living an epic moment. Picture 250 gringos with their backpacks, exhausted and on their 4th consecutive day of grueling hiking, sprinting at dawn in sweat-stained clothes through jungle mountains at an unhealthy, sustained pace for 1.5 hours. We knew our group would not be the very first to reach the ruins; countless hikers from miscellaneous paths in the jungle converge on Machupicchu each day. But somehow knowing others were out there rushing made us push harder.
It was the climax of some bizarre yet fantastic competition. And of course tourists in Aquas Calientes on 5am buses would also have us beat, but they were not hiking - they hadn´t earned it in the punishing way we had. I could not help but conceive that we were in the opening scene of a film, reenacting the charge of warring parties sent by Pizarro to hasten the collapse of an ancient empire already torn by internal discord, preparing to decimate an ill-prepared and unsuspecting Inca stronghold. The hairs stood tall on the back of my neck as my historical nerdiness roared its head through my imagination. During that intense, spiritual sprint we pressed on murderously, ascending steep slopes and rounding narrow passes with little natural light to guide us. Numerous hikers could not sustain the pace and simply stepped aside from the conquest.
Let´s be honest, Machupicchu is expensive - nearly $300 for a 4 day trek. But it´s certainly worth it. On day 2 we ascended more than 1200 meters during 7 hours of stone stepping torture to camp at a freezing altitude of 4,100 meters. But then the amount of down hill hiking we did on ever-more Inca stone staircases on day 3 nearly broke me. By the time we completed the trek I was sick of hiking but happy.
Our guide Freddy was pretty useless as a guide but a great guy to hang out with. He seemed to know more about drugs than Machupicchu, and had more stories about sleeping with gringas than about the ancient Incas. When it came to women (Freddy had been through quite a few), Freddy said, ¨Be careful what you wish for, it just might come true.¨
Now he promises he´s ¨getting serious¨as he has a baby on the way - congrats Freddy! Still, he did a fine job leading the way and keeping the pace, and filled in some blanks about our questions concerning Ecuadorian-Peruvian or Chilean-Peruvian relations. Plus, as Anand smartly pointed out, it´s worth a lot that the guy was educated and spoke english.
Marie was from Quebec, the only single girl on the trek but Anand wouldn´t bite. Apparently she has a boyfriend anyway, too bad. She was very cool and had great throat lozenges.
Thomas and Afia live in Amsterdam. He´s an architect and she an industrial designer. It always amazes me how many languages the Dutch speak, and these kids were particularly cool. They understood our sacasm and we laughed our way across the mountains chewing coca leaves.
Just a few words about Cuzco because we didn´t spend enough time there to go rafting or even to visit the Sacred Valley where Erica told me she road horses. Cuzco is super-expensive but beautiful, the former capital and center of the Inca empire.
Jumbo jets to and from Lima arrive all day long. We bumped in to my friend Nicole from Quito who was there with her boyfriend and a friend from home to hike a few days after us. With them we visited a museum built on the former Temple of the Sun, and that night we all attended a concert of a famous folklorica band, the Kjarkas. Truth be told I´m a little sick of the folklorica music, all the songs sound too similar. And it was so cold in the stadium that we all used my poncho as a blanket.
Besides that we didn´t do too much in Cuzco but wander, and wander we did into a good looking but terribly shitty Indian restaurant that Anand made me try the night before out trek. Thank god it didn´t get us sick.
Bolivia - When´s the Last Time you made a new friend?
The best part about being on the road is meeting good people, buena gente. Sometimes you just click. On the 3 hour busride from Copacabana to La Paz we fell in with a very cool group.
Adela and Mark live in San Francisco. She´s from Cuenca in southern Ecuador and he spent a few years in Mexico but is from the Bay Area.
Pepe is a Nigerian born American with dual citizenship, a current night student at G-Town Law while he works days at the US Patent Office, smart as fuck and a real pain in the ass after a while with incessant talking about himself!
Danny and Dani are an English couple, both fairly quiet and just about the nicest travelers you could meet. Danny works for a development company in London that does a lot of work on the river.
David is also from California, a psych student who had a fascinating but harrowing story from his time in Rio de Janeiro - and the stab wound scar in his hand to prove it. David roomed with Anand and I in Bolivia for a few nights. Maybe it was the sarcasm, goofing around, or the quasi-inappropriate racist jokes at the end of the night? Maybe it was because he´s a fellow jew and went to Brandeis? Whatever it was, we three got along famously in the big bowl city of La Paz.
I´d like to send a special shout-out and thank you to Erica Fox and her friend Jocilyn for their Bolivia advice, most importantly for the hostal recommendation in La Paz, Hostal Milenio. $3 a night, $1 for breakfast if you want it. Sure beats the price of the the $4 per night sleeping bags we had to carry to Machupicchu through the Peruvian jungle!
A lot of people don´t enjoy La Paz, but I´ve found over and over again when travelling that it doesn´t really matter where you are at any given time, its the people you surround yourself with that make or break your enjoyment. We had an absolute blast. The city is tough to walk because it is such a bowl, neighborhoods rising thousands of meters above the city center on all sides. They say the poorest live up the highest, but it seemed pretty mixed to us. And the whole city is like a giant artisan market, ponchos (got one for $6!), sweaters, panatalones, scarfs, whatever you want.
Whether out at a local Columbian restaurant, a NYC pizza joint, roaming the streets or the local bars, it was a great few nights. Our friends encountered the famous ¨Bolivian Mike¨on day 1 in a restaurant. This guy tries to sell you a rock from his pocket, and while you examine it just to humor him he steals all your belongings. What a gig!
By far the highlight in La Paz was a late night at Sol y Luna, an intimate, chill, long wooden-tabled bar where we sampled nice area brews (Anand and I loved the Brock) and late night a salsa band shook things up. The quiet congo drummer could seriously belt out some wicked rhythms while screaming crazy lyrics about horses at the top of his lungs. It wasn´t long before Adela (who´s cousin is a salsa instructor in Cuenca), and Mark (who has taken copius lessons and is good despite his lanky frame!), were tearing it up in between the tables. There wasn´t room for more than two or three couples to dance so it was just them, Mark on his knees at one point spinning Adela at shin-level. But then entered the stars - like a scene in a movie - a few regulars with their ladies who seemed to know everyone including the quietest members of the band. Soon they took over the floor. I´ve never seen salsa dancing like that in my life; partners switching every 3-5 seconds in a whirlwind of spinning and throwing bodies, endless swirling of skinny ladies, bodies upside down and flipped throught the air, legs and heads and boobies bouncing dangerously close to the horn section and drumset cymbols. My friends, it was better than the most impressive nights at Havana Village.
Since we never made it south to the salt plains and colored lagoons with pink flamencos, or north to the Bolivian jungle, the word Bolivia now just evokes a lot of strange travel memories in and around the capital La Paz, funny things:
The bus that brought us into the country from Peru across the border and and around Lago Titticaca we dubbed the ¨Beatles Bus.¨ It was the first bus I had taken in South America completely full of tourists, white people from all the richest corners of the world, and the speakers pumped Beatles albums through the thin air at 4,000 meters while we cruised our way to Capacabana..;
- The whole area from Peru into Bolivia was full of hostels that promised agua caliente, por el dia y la noche!, and always failed to deliver. The ¨electric shower¨is a failed invention - the inventor should be taken out back and flogged. It had been a couple of years since I went weeks without a hot shower, and its not fun at that altitude. Needless to say there were a lot of jokes about spooning flying around just to keep warm. Images of the movie Alive that we were forced to watch on a busride through the Peruvian mountains entered our minds more than once;
- The buses circling Titticaca need to cross the lake at a certain point. There is ample opportunity to purchase empanadas and other treats (snickers and pringles if you want´em!) while all passengers get out and are ferried across for $1 a person. The boat is ferried separately while you watch from afar, praying it doesn´t sink with your backpack, waterbottle and sweater still on board. It´s an odd sight, to be sure. The locals have been striking and petitioning amidst plans to just build a god-damn bridge and speed up the process - it´s only a few hundred meters to the other side but would devastate the local economy born around the delay;
- Peru is so damn touristy it is a true pleasure to enter Bolivia. No hassles, no salesmanship - it is as if they have not yet figured out how to get tourists to spend money;
- What do Bolivian chicas look like?
I ran into a nice group of local drunk girls wandering the center of La Paz with cold beers for a bachelorette party; and
- Crammed in a combi (minibus van) for 3 hours I was squashed up against a smelly drunk on the way to Tiajuanaca, an ancient archeological site. The guy kept trying to talk to me and recognized a few curse words coming from Anand and David´s direction as they egged him on to piss me off. Tiajuanaca, by the way, was a civilization around for about 2,000 years (a lot longer than the 100 year Inca period later on), and first developed many of the innovations the Incas now get credit for, such as advanced stone masonry and sophisticated agricultural techniques and astronomy.
Finally, the Tiajuanaca experience was extra bizarre because we hung out with a bunch of hippy friends of David´s bent on a mission to trip on Ayawasca amongst the ruins, meanwhile the place was still being excavated all around us by local workers wearing their traditional, normal nice dress clothes in the ditches.
The Devil Went Down to Tumbes
After Cusco Anand and I flew to Tumbes via Lima, the west coast of Peru up at the Ecuadorian border. The plan was to hit the beach in Mancora for a few days before returning to Quito por tierra for a week. Lonely Planet, which we didn´t read to diligantly except for the history sections, had a little warning about Tumbes. Actually they said it is the toughest border crossing in South America. Maybe its the rough history and animosity between the two, maybe its the landmines...? We hadn´t given it much thought, we´d get through.
Well, let me begin by saying NEVER GO TO TUMBES! There are no redeeming qualities or characteristics to the city or its people. They´re all a bunch of lying bastards working together to fuck over tourists. And the worst part is they are very good at what they do. It´s essentially a collective conspiracy, even the police officers will lie to you on the side of the street. Here´s the deal: you are a gringo passing through Peru, they know you speak just enough to get by but not to have full confidence in new information, and so, despite the Virgin Mary adorning their dashboards, they will pounce on you. You see, in Ecuador or Bolivia there´s no problem being open and honest, telling locals about your travel plans, etc. They are friendly and helpful there; in Tumbes they use the information against you. They will say anything to get your money.
And so when we casually mentioned our travel plans - we were heading 2 hours south to the beach before crossing the border - the friendly taxi driver and his buddy up front smoothly unleashed their hussle en español: ¨If you want to go to Ecuador you better cross the border today...we can take you there. They are closing the border tonight due to the banana protests and sometimes it takes days for the crossing to reopen.¨ Then silence, and maybe a few other locals from the street outside the window who confirmed what they were saying was true. Then more lies about hours of operation, prices to get to the border and to cross by taxi vs. bus, etc.
In hindsight it all sounds ridiculous but Anand and I almost fell for it despite knowing where we were and that it was a 24hr border crossing. At the last moment we demanded they turn around and let us out, and so we wasted just a few dollars getting scammed.
Mancora was cool, but not the Montañita of Peru my Ecuadorian cousin Daniel had promised. It was a little too quiet, a sleepy surfer town bereft of visitors. At least it appeared to be all locals or Peruvian travelers from Lima, a nice break from the tourist madness that is Peru. There´s a nice break that allows for good surfing year round. We spent a few lazy days wandering, eating seafood on the beach, watching movies like Anand´s new favorite Hitch in the room, and (finally) doing some laundry.
Lucky for Me, Gaby Just Rode Into Town
Gaby had a rough ride, but I was thrilled she decided to take off work and meet us. I hadn´t seen her in weeks. When I met her early morning at the Loja bus station in southern Ecuador she had just been robbed by a nun. ¨¡I can´t belieeeve it!¨ she screamed. ¨A nun just stole both my books!¨
We all crashed in our Loja hostal for a few more hours, Gaby got to see Anand naked through our shitty glass shower door (a fine way to meet eachother!), and by midday we were off to the enchanting town of Vilcabamba.
Vilcabamba - Visiting the Fountain of Youth
What an amazing place, one of those places you can´t seem to get your head around but could suck you in for days...The town is most famously known as a remote farming village in the mountains — a "clean" area with rich soil and traditional farming methods without modern chemicals. In the 1970´s researchers began documenting the incredible number of centarians -people who were over 100 years of age that were lucid, agile, and active in their old age. They did not get diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, cancer, or other diseases afflicting modern cultures.
So of course the first thing we did after check-in was go looking for old people. ¨Perdon señor, quantos años tiene usted?¨ Unbelievably, the first guy we asked was 101. He said his father had lived to 130 (someone call Guiness immediately!). Old man number two: 96 years old. Incredible! So we started asking why, how was it happening so frecuently here? The answers we got were logical: less chemicals in the food and cattle, an active lifestyle in the mountains, and the minerals in the local water. All this, unfortunately, is changing for the worse and I´m not sure the next generation will be so lucky. We shall see.
I had emailed my cousin Maurie in San Francisco´s friend Luis because I´d been trying to meet him in Ecuador where he was building a house on the coast. Sitting at dinner that night I received a call from him:
¨Peter, where are you, it´s Luis¨
¨I´m in Vilcabamba, you?¨
¨Hey me too, where are you staying?¨
¨El Jardin, you?¨
¨You´re kidding, what room number?¨
¨Number 24¨
¨OK, I´ll see you in 2 minutes¨
And so we met Luis, a fascinating guy. He´s been a drummer all his life, playing all over the world, and is half-Ecuadorian with roots in and around Guayacil and Vilcabamba. We talked all night until we dropped, and then we hung out for the next few days all the way up to Cuenca.
In Vilcabamba we did a half day of horseback riding up thorugh the cloud forest towards a nearby national park. It was rainy and misty and muddy and exhausting and painful and lovely. Anand says he´ll never ride a horse again. I´d pay money to see him again yelling at the horse to stop as we cantered back into town through the city streets. I enjoyed it, but it was painful. Gaby basically ran in circles around the rest of us, horsebacking riding being one of her passions back home in Quito. Our guide spent the entire 6 hours taking us on wild goose chases thought the mud on foot or making disturbingly sexual sounding sounds at the horses to keep them moving. Supposedly we would enter Podocarpus National Park on a short hike after lunch and have a chance to hike around a bit. All we really got was a messy, muddy hike to a few little waterfalls and a steep jungle climb to a rare Podocarpus tree.
Cuenca
The 4 of us entered Cuenca during a period of daytime record rainfall accompanied by a violent river, but also dryer nightly Corpus Christi celebrations with pyrotecnicos and the works. They were releasing giant fire balloons into the sky followed by the igniting of huge firworks towers in the streets. Yes, that´s me busting a move under a shower of sparks we somehow didn´t notice them lighting over our heads...Definitely a little dangerous, this festival, especially the larger fireworks that took surprising turns from the sky and down into the crowd, striking families and couples flinching back in surprise and wonder over bags of popcorn and fried plantains.
The town´s central plaza was adorned with endless sweets stands with delectables of all imaginable forms, from candy apples to torts to brown sugar balls and endless variations of cakes I´d never heard of. One night we attended an opera, a bizarre but impressive individual performance punctuated by the jolting booms and blasts of the festivities taking place outside.
During the day we´d avoid the rain and make it to as many of Cuenca´s amazing number of churches as possible. We also met up with Adela and Mark, currently living there with her family, who showed us around a bit. It was funny to see Anand (all his clothes in the laundry) walking around town in a red Peruvian wool hat, raincoat, mesh shorts and flipflops. ¨Who is that strange dark-skinned man?!¨ seemed to be the look on most people´s faces.
Cuenca is also home to the ever-famous ¨Panama Hat.¨ Back when they were building the Panama Canal Ecuador´s president struck a small economic deal to supply all the workers in Panama with special hats, and the factories were in Cuenca (so they´re really ¨Ecuador Hats,¨ thank you). Venders with a fat stack of rip-offs roam the streets of all of Ecuador´s cities trying to sell you one. But if you truly buy a good one, with intricately tight stitching, it can run you several hundred dollars.
At night we hit up random little bars and dance spots dotted around the old city streets. Luis took off for the beach to work on his house in Olon, and probably left at a good time because the rain didn´t stop.
We ended up seeing a terrible movie called
Conquistador that sounded really cool in Spanish but of course was a loose translation for PathFinder, the english name. I´m still mad at Gaby for the shitty translation - obviously we would have seen something else if we knew it was called Pathfinder! What we should have been doing was visiting museums, like the Banco Central where apparently we missed some of the finest art work in the country.
On our last day in Cuenca we visited some thermal baths. Anand got insulted and removed himself from the facility after some old woman told him not to enter the pool in his boxer shorts. Gaby and I stayed to enjoy the steam room and chat with Mark and a big fat Iranian Jewish guy living in Ecuador that was swimming in his own black tighty-whiteys. Sorry you missed that one Anand!
Road trippin' with my two favorite allies
Fully loaded we got snacks and supplies
It's time to leave this town
It's time to steal away
Let's go get lost Let's go get lost...
The majority of the time, I´m told, the message is pro-government and nationalistic. Coming from the States I was floored by this realization that the entire country is subjected to national hand-fed news when they just want to continue on with their Rhiannon, Ben Harper, and Britney Spears. There´s something unsettling about the lack of competition or competing opinion, as if Fox news were to dominate all tv stations for an hour every evening. Just an observation...
If I was terminally ill and closed my eyes, then awoke to see this place I would think I had died and gone to heaven. Gaby´s mother has a small apartment in the city where we are staying, but she splits her time studying law here and then relaxing on her husband´s farm about 40 min away. Fernando is an amazing man. A former engineer for the government, he has transitioned into a full-scale farmer. His main crop is corn, but he houses more than fifty thousand chickens and grows beans, soy, and some fruits like my favorite in the world, maracuja. He took me on a long walk around the farm, explaining the need for good technology to ensure production, the current favorable state of the markets and pricing tied to Chicago trading, and details like the nutrients lost and replaced in the soil when harvesting corn and beans. He wears a wide-brimmed hat, a ratty old t-shirt, classic farmer´s boots, and a frequent smile to match his easy nature and fantastic sense of humor. Last night he sat down with me to design a plan of attack to combat the freezing temperatures in my Baltimore apartment during the winter - something about optimal air circulation and hanging a fan facing upwards...
