And before I begin - if you are reading this – thanks for being so patient…I was always going to get back to writing about this odyssey – I was simply immersed in the moment there for a time. Was it wrong of me to be ‘where I was’? I think not!
Peru!! Why visit Peru? Well why not? I chose an organised ‘Intrepid’ trip to fill a 3 week gap before I was due to attend the International Wildland Fire Association, Fuels conference in Spokane. I nearly went to Cuba, and I’d still love to visit there at some stage in the future, but South America beguiled me. And so to exuberant, colourful, diverse and welcoming Peru…
Lima airport was bustling at midnight with a mêlée of newly arrived, bleary-eyed airline passengers and an equal hoard of over-enthusiastic taxi drivers touting for business in the humidity. I’d heard from friends that it is common to be robbed in taxis stopped at traffic lights so one is best to put all bags – including day packs - into the boot. I found the desk of the green cabs, recommended by Intrepid and I immediately started practising my rudimentary Spanish on the locals…
I can’t say why I was surprised to read that that Lima is home to over 9 million people, but I can say a good many of them were on the brightly lit streets as we crawled through the almost gridlocked city in the middle of the night. My taxi driver and I then sped past a fat swell breaking on a broad beach, illuminated by city lights to a posh suburb called Miraflores, which for me was the start of a magical trip with 8 new companions across 3 exciting weeks.
My roommate, Hayley seemed friendly enough when I finally made the hotel room and a welcome shower after a long 12 hour journey from Alaska. She confided early that she had just finished a trip in Mexico that was ‘awesome’, and she was worried that this one would be boring with older people (me?) and couples as opposed to the young group she had just broken from. Right…
The next morning I met the group; Maritza our organised and kind leader (she was really our mother for the 3 week trip)- a Peruvian from Cusco; Tedy, an Indonesian-Chinese bloke with an Australian accent and a generous and endearing nature; Jaime – or ‘Hi-May’ pronounced with a particular throat sound that I just can’t spell – from Madrid in Spain, who would become my personal pronunciation policeman; Manja (who spoke great Spanish, having lived in the ‘real’ Spain for over a year) and her workaholic partner Kai from Germany who were fun and entertainingly irreverent; British Anne and her partner Patrick from Belgium who were a little older than me; and Hayley from Brisbane with the thick Australian accent and intellect to match. As far as I was concerned the trip started well with a tortoise emerging from the garden bed outside our room as I got up. Hayley was characteristically nonplussed.
We headed into the centre of the city together as a group after a quick meeting in the hotel only to find the whole of Lima constipated by elections, and basically closed for 3 days while local leaders in all corners of the country were chosen by the masses. Only pharmacies were open, no drinking was allowed and every public building, including churches were closed for the duration. Maritza described what the place would have looked like had the elections not been on, and I squinted to see imaginary throngs of people crowding the empty streets, save for the armoured vehicles and battalions of soldiers and riot police stationed on every street corner. Elections – tricky business in this neck of the woods I guess. Street stalls started appearing in the afternoon as we wandered about and I paid a mere $2 to have my boots cleaned for the first time of many to follow.
We left Lima in the late afternoon and began south on a bus through an impressive desert that was startlingly completely depauperate of any vegetation, to Pisco - a town that had been levelled by an earthquake in 2007 and was not yet rebuilt to any acceptable level. Sadly, we learnt much of the international funds donated for rebuilding may not found their way to those most needing the aid. The brand new council chambers were embarrassingly ostentatious and although the high school had been rebuilt only a few houses here and there were under repair with most in a ruinous state, covered with old bent tin and blue tarpaulins. After a wander through the busy main square where most of the towns’ inhabitants had gathered awaiting the results of the voting, we ate dinner at the hotel, in a private room and I tasted my first Pisco Sour, despite the ban on alcohol, which was the first of many we were to sample.
Arriving in our room Hayley unselfconsciously disgorged the contents of her pack, covering every available surface with her “stuff” and I was abruptly transported back to the world of self-obsessed teenagers… wondering if this was how it was to be for the rest of the trip. It was…oh well… I must be in need of a life lesson from this experience, I told myself.
Our next morning we arose early and lined up like school kids with hundreds of other tourists and school kids to get on a speed boats for a ride over to check out the Ballestas Islands or Galapagos of Peru as they were described. The islands were home to hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of a few species of seabirds including Humbolt penguins, cormorants, Peruvian boobies and brown pelicans, all in rookeries covering the white guano splashed islands. Sea lions lazed in harems on the low boulders close to the sea, presumably copping some of the guano that rained down, even on us. Collecting the guano is a local industry that has gone on for centuries and small rock walls have been constructed around the islands to improve the catch of the spoils of the birds. Our guide told us a war had been fought over the right to harvest the guano just as the wind changed and the stench from the islands became overpowering in the boat. I could only imagine the Peruvians doing the harvesting had stronger constitutions than I.
Enroute to the islands we passed by a fascinating feature named the candelabra – a three pronged, 200 odd metre high drawing etched almost half a metre deep in the parched mountainside, maybe 2200 years ago, thought to have been created by a pre-Columbian society that no one knows anything definitive about. The reason it has survived is that the place is so dry – receiving virtually no rainfall since its construction. Theories abound on what the candelabra is, from an ancient pulley system, to messages to the Gods or even landing instructions to aliens or a representation of a long extinct plant that produced a hallucinatory effect when chewed. For my money it was art, on a grand scale!
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