Coming Home

(Note: My pics of this trip are on cds in North Carolina. I'll add them toward the end of the month.)

My apologies to all of you who have been faithfully checking my dormant blog. I am now back in Texas, and have not had a chance to update (and finish) this blog since early July. There is far too much to cover all of my last month in Peru, but here are the highlights.

Our time in Huancayo ended well. We graded papers and tests and assigned final grades in time to get on the bus at 8am July 17. We both had to buy new bags to transport all the stuff we bought. When our supervisor showed up and saw us each with four times the amount of luggage we’d brought, he laughed his head off.

It was sad to leave, because our time in Huancayo was wonderful. It is going to be odd not to wake up and see the same mountains every morning. It’s going to be even more odd to go to a grocery store, to speak English, and to not have to worry about getting electrocuted by the shower.

Stephanie went home the next day, but I met up with my friend Melanie to travel for about two weeks. Our friends the travel-agent couple had put together a trip for us, so we had a route completely planned and pre-paid. It was a bit of a new experience to travel like that, but not altogether unlikeable. It was extraordinarily low-stress because we didn’t have to worry about anything. No waiting in train stations until midnight trying to find a place to sleep!

Our first bus left at 4:30 am on Friday, July 20. At 1:30 am on Friday, July 20 I woke up puking. That’s right, good old food poisoning again. This time it was some bad orange-pineapple juice that I’d drunk the night before. In case you’ve never had the experience, let me just inform you that vomiting nothing but orange-pineapple juice is one of the more painful types of food poisoning you can get. It was so acidic that I think I actually burned my throat, as it hurt to drink for the next day or so.

And of course, we were supposed to leave at 4:30. I dragged myself out of the room and into Raul’s van. I puked up the last of the orange-juice in the bus station, but found myself without any water or tissues. Let me just say that life at that moment sucked.

We got in the bus, and I thanked God that we had paid the extra $6 for first-class: big, reclining seats and blankets. I bought some water, curled up in a blanket, and went to sleep. I didn’t even bother looking at the itinerary to see where we were going.

At 7:30 we arrived in Parracas. I staggered off the bus, and was all ready to tell the pleasant-looking guide we met that I was sick, and that I would rather just find somewhere to lay down, and that Melanie could go on whatever tour we had planned, and that I would really like some Gatorade. I had time to say none of this. We were whisked off the bus, and put directly on a BOAT. That’s right, a boat. A little speed-boat that was going to take us on a two-hour tour of the Ballesta Islands.

As it turns out, these islands are home to all sorts of interesting things like penguins, sea lions, pelicans, and many species of birds. I think I was the only one on the boat who didn’t particularly care. Rather than appreciating the first time I’ve seen wild penguins in my life, I was instead curled up in the fetal position in the back of the boat, repeating over and over “don’t throw up don’t throw up don’t throw up.” To make things worse, I hadn’t brought any warm clothes with me, and the boat was freezing. My hands quickly turned white, and I could only keep my teeth from chattering by huddling into a ball.

Luckily, I looked miserable enough that someone took pity on me. Two Madrid guys who had just come off two weeks of mountaineering were sitting behind me. They kept giving me clothes, until you couldn’t really see my face.

Finally, one of them asked if I was sick, and very handily produced a pill that keeps you from throwing up. Isn’t medicine amazing? So I took this pill, and life just started to look so much better after that.

We spent the rest of the day looking at the national reserve, where the Parracas culture grew. It’s one of the driest coasts in the world, as the ocean current is extraordinarily cold. As such, what should be a tropical paradise is actually quite literally a desert pushed up against the ocean. It was beautiful in a way, but it was a cold, windy desert. We got into the bus at the end of the day, and I slept a good four hours all the way to Nazca.

Nazca is a tiny town in Peru, made famous only by the discovery a few decades ago of the Nazca lines. These are lines etched into the hard sand of the desert by pre-Incan cultures, visible only from the air. They are still visible partly because the sand is packed in so tightly and partly because there is very little harsh weather.

So the thing to do at Nazca is to pay about $7 to go up in a little airplane with three other people (including the pilot) to see these lines. And yes, tiny means tiny. You can barely fit four people in these planes.

It was actually quite fascinating. The drawings are still clearly visible, and enormous. There are about fourteen total that the companies fly over, but the entire valley is crisscrossed with lines that this culture drew.

By this time, I was feeling terrific, and was really interested to see everything. Melanie, on the other hand, started feeling a little nauseous after the second drawing. See, a four-seater airplane really begins to feel like a roller coaster before too long, which is quite fun if your stomach is feeling strong. If, however, you start feeling sick, it kind of sucks. Melanie put her head between her knees and held her stomach for the last 15 minutes of a 35 minute flight. I knew how she felt.

The next major stop was Puno, where we spent a day on Lake Titicaca. This was possibly the most beautiful part of our trip, though at first the elevation of 12,500 feet gave us both some problems. We went out on a boat and saw the floating islands of the Uros (read this for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uros), and then had lunch on the island of Taquile. The water was a deep, bright blue, and we spent about five hours just getting back and forth from the islands.

From Puno we went to Cuzco. By this time, I realized that I had officially entered what Peruvians call “gringolandia.” Remember how in Huancayo we never saw other white people? In Cuzco, we could basically walk down the street and speak English to everyone.

Of course, I could understand why it was the most popular tourist spot: it was gorgeous. It reminded me a little of Seville, or maybe the prettier parts of Madrid. The main plaza split off into a half dozen small, winding alleys, each of which were filled with tourist markets. My resolve not to buy any more souvenirs quickly disintegrated, and I had to buy another bag to carry it all in. Beautiful experience of nature on Lake Titicaca, and then unbridled materialistic frenzy in Cuzco.

We saw the ruins and major sites of Cuzco before spending a night in Ollantaytambo, the capital of the sacred valley of the Incas. The next day we took the train with the rest of the gringos up to Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu (a newly named world wonder) is the most famous part of the trip, and clearly the most popular. There were so many people that you had to wait in line for everything and you almost couldn’t walk without tripping over someone. Don’t get me wrong, it was still pretty spectacular, but it reminded more of Disneyworld than the lost city of the Incas.

By the time we were done, we were absolutely exhausted. Melanie and I spent our last days in Lima sleeping, reading, and watching movies. (Not kidding…we slept most of the entire first day!) I ate my last Peruvian food, did laundry, and helped Melanie plan out the rest of her trip. It has been a wonderful, wonderful three months, but by the time I boarded the plane I was quite ready to come home.