Most of you already know this, but I am in Peru. If you want to follow my adventures for the next few weeks, check out my travel blog, Far Away Places. I’ve had good wireless connections so far, and I’ve been writing a ton in my notebook. I’m transferring this writing to the web as fast as I can, while still trying not to compromise the time in a foreign country.
I’ll have plenty to post back here when I return in November. Chao!
After my first night’s misadventure with the taxi, I was a little nervous about what to expect in my first full day in Lima, Peru. Fortunately, things worked out just fine.
After scolding me for not finding him at the airport, Manolo — the agent for the travel company — asked me what I planned to do with my free day. “I don’t know,” I said. “I may just wander around Miraflores. But maybe I’ll try to head downtown. Is it walkable?”
He frowned. “No,” he said. “You need to take a taxi. If you’d like, I can show you around.”
“That’d be great,” I said, so we headed out together. Taxi rates are much more reasonable when you have a Peruvian asking for the fares. Instead of 95 soles from the airport to Miraflores, it only took 14 soles to get downtown (and the distance was about the same). We wended our way through the chaotic Lima traffic, traffic that’s much more of a mess than any city I’ve ever been to. Worse than New York. Worse than Rome. Worse than Paris. I would not want to drive here! But at least I learned some new Spanish swear words.
Manolo and I spent about five hours together in the center of Lima looking at churches and tiendas and watching the changing of the guard at the Palacio de Gobierno. We paid seven soles to take the guided tour of the Museo San Francisco, a sixteenth-century Franciscan monastery.
Longer ago, this church served as Lima’s cemetery. When people died, they wanted to be buried beneath it. “They thought it would bring them closer to heaven,” Manolo told me. “But it wasn’t true.” He was raised Catholic, but doesn’t know what to think now. (He’s been dabbling with Mormonism over the past few years.)
As we followed the small group from room to room, we chatted in both English and Spanish. I asked Manolo a little bit about himself. He’s from Aguage, a small town near the jungle city of Iquitos in the north of Peru. He’s been studying tourism for the past few years, but it’s slow going because he can’t always afford the classes he wants to take.
As we toured the church, I smiled at a painting of the Last Supper. “They’re eating apples and potatoes and chili peppers,” I said.
“And cuy,” Manolo said, indicating the roast guinea pig. “They’re eating only Peruvian food.” Por supuesto!
As we toured the crypts beneath the church — or the first of three levels, anyhow — I was reminded of the Basilica di San Clemente, the church I loved in Rome. There, though, the tunnels under the building were actually city streets that vanished as sediment was deposited throughout time. And instead of being 350 years old, the catacombs in Rome are 2000 years old.
After the museum, we stopped briefly at Casa de la Literatura Peruana, the Peruvian writers museum. It was packed with schoolchildren, but there was little to interest me. (Although I did take a photo of the Mario Vargas Llosa sign for Aly, my tutor.)
Outside, we stopped in the Plaza de Armas to watch a part of the changing of the guard. The brass band was fun because instead of playing only marches, it played Latin-influenced jazzy stuff.
For lunch, we ate lomo saltado at a restaurant Manolo recommended. I wanted to try lúcuma juice, but the jungle fruit was not in season. “You might get sick from your meal,” Manolo warned me. I told him I knew the risks. I ate heartily, but still couldn’t finish all the food on my plate.
After eating, he led me down a long calle that has been closed off for several blocks as a pedestrian shopping mall. (This is very similar to places I’ve seen in Dublin, Paris, Florence, an Cape Town.) And then we took a taxi back to Miraflores.
“How long have you been learning Spanish?” Manolo asked at one point.
“Solamente cuatros meses,” I said. I keep saying three months, but it’s closer to four months now.
Manolo smiled. “Cuatros mas y ya sabes todo,” he said. Ha. Not likely. It’s nice to be complimented, but I feel like I’m really struggling.
In the later afternoon, I walked around Miraflores — or a small part of it, anyhow. I explored the shops around Kennedy Park, and here I got confirmation that my Spanish is still very raw. While my conversations with Manolo had gone well, I couldn’t understand the folks in the stores — and they couldn’t undrestand me. But I muddled through.
In the evening, I spent some time lounging around Kennedy Park in Miraflores. But that’s a story that will have to wait until tomorrow.
Hola, todos! I am safe and sound in Lima and will soon depart for Cuzco. Before I go, I want to share a bit about the journey from Chicago to Peru. Generally, I don’t think of the actual travel part of travel as being very interesting. This time was different.
Things got off to a good start in Houston when una abuela asked me for help. In Spanish. And I was able to help her. In Spanish. We only exchanged a few sentences, but it felt good. The only problem? I forgot to use usted, and used the familiar form tú instead. Oops. (I also practiced my Spanish in flight by watching 30 Rock en español. For some reason, the show is even funnier when I barely understand a word.)
I was seated next to Mark, who lives in California. He’s in Lima to visit his girlfriend. They met on a Latin American dating site and want to get married, but need to iron out some issues with her visa. He gave me some practical tips about getting around town. “Be careful of the taxis,” he told me. “They’ll try to rip you off.”
Also on the flight was Ben, whom I’d met briefly at the airport. He came to find me, and he and Mark and I had a long conversation about travel in general and Peru in specific. Both Mark and Ben have traveled extensively. Ben has been traveling for 30 years, and has strong opinions about Americans who are stuck in the rat race.
“The world is full of abundance,” Ben told me. He stood in the aisle, using his styrofoam coffee cup to gesture for emphasis. “Food. Clothes. Housing. It’s all out there and will come to you if you let it. I mean it. Its true. ” I listened, but I didn’t say anything. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you know what I think of the Law of Attraction.
Mark and Ben talked about their visits to Peru and Colombia. They agreed that Latin American women are beautiful, but that Colombian women are the most beautiful of all. I winced at the loudness of it all, especially when Ben began to generalize about Peru and Peruvians. (Mentally I noted that sometimes generalizations about Americans are correct.)
I hesitate to tell the next anecdote because it’s precisely the sort of thing you’re not supposed to let happen to you in Peru, but truth is truth. I made a mistake, and I may as well be honest.
After clearing customs at the Lima airport, I wandered into the reception area, which is a large funnel of people. There were dozens of drivers holding signs, but nobody was holding a sign for me. Not ten minutes in the country and already I’d hit a snag! I went back through twice more but couldn’t find my transfer.
Not to worry. There were plenty of helpful taxi drivers offering to assist me. I brushed them off until one clever fellow convinced me to let him call my hotel. They had my reservation, he told me, but they didn’t have me down for an airport transfer.
“I can take you, señor,” he volunteered helpfully. (Read that “helpfully” with a touch of irony, please.)
“Cuanto cuesta?” I asked, not sure if that was the right way thing to say. He understood.
“Treinta soles, señor,” he said. That’s about $12, which sounded reasonable, so I agreed. He helped me put my bags into the back of his car.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I was a little scared. I’ve taken few taxi rides in my life, and I’ve heard too many warnings about taxi scams in Latin America — not just from Mark, but from other people. But my driver and I had a pleasant drive into Miraflores. Between his broken English and my broken Spanish, we made it work. I remembered to use usted. He complimented me on my Spanish, saying it was good for having studied only three months.
But then, as he was driving me through a dicey neighborhood, he asked me to pay him. “Now?” I asked.
“Si, señor,” he said.
“Thirty soles, right?” I said. Confirmation seemed like a formality.
“No,” he said. “Treinta dólares.”
I was caught off guard, and I tried to argue a little, but there was no use. He held firm. He even dug out some sort of rate card (although he wouldn’t let me hold it) where something was listed as $30 or 95 soles. In the end, I gave him 60 soles and $10, or about $31.60.
The rest of the drive was pleasant enough. I focused on practicing my Spanish, but inside I was steaming. I wasn’t mad at the driver. I was mad at myself. What a dope!
This morning I met Manolo, my liaison in Lima. “Where were you last night?” he asked. He had been at the airport, holding a sign for the travel company. I explained that I’d looked several times but seen nobody. I apologized profusely. “It’s okay,” he said. When I gave him my receipt for the taxi, he shook his head in disapproval. “You should have only paid maybe 22 soles,” he said.
Some personal finance whiz I am. I paid four times as much for a taxi as I should have. And I didn’t need to take one at all. But you know what? Lesson learned. I need to make this same taxi ride twice more while in Peru, and now I know what to expect.
As I mentioned, I spent the day seeing a few tiny pieces of Lima: Plaza de Armas in the city center, and the area of Miraflores around the hotel. More on that tomorrow. Right now, it’s time for bed. I need to catch an early-morning flight to Cuzco!
Earlier this summer, I made plans for the trip of a lifetime. I would fly to England where I’d spend most of August and part of September walking from coast to coast, following the path of Hadrian’s Wall. From there, I intended to hop a ferry to the Netherlands or to make my way south to Cambridge, where I’d lodge with some Get Rich Slowly readers.
Real life, however, intervened. My mother got sick. Our roof sprung a leak. Work demanded my attention. Between these things (and more), I was forced to cancel the trip.
I was bummed for a while, but soon put plans into motion for a different adventure. And tomorrow that adventure begins. As I write this, I’ve just wrapped up a weekend at a Financial Blogger Conference in Chicago. But I’m not returning directly to Portland. Where am I going instead? Well, on Tuesday I fly from Chicago, Illinois to Lima, Peru.
“Why do you want to go to Peru?” a friend asked me recently.
“Well, at first I thought I wanted to go to Ecuador,” I said. “But as I started to make my plans, my heart just wasn’t in it. Nothing about the trip excited me except the excursion to the Galapagos Islands. Then I did some reading about Peru, and I realized that Machu Picchu is there. Not just Machu Picchu, but also Lake Titicaca and Lima and the Nazca Lines. Plus there’s the Amazon rain forest. In fact, the more I read about Peru, the more I realized that there was too much to see and do.”
It took me an entire day of planning to come up with a five-week itinerary that packed in plenty to do while still remaining affordable. It was tough. I feel like there’s more to do and see in Peru than there was in Paris!
First up, I’ll do the Andes and Altiplano Trek from World Expeditions. I’ll meet the other members of the trip on Wednesday in Lima. From there, we’ll fly to Cuzco, the historic capital of the Inca Empire. After a few days to acclimate to the high altitude — Cuzco sits at 3399 meters above sea level, which is twice as high as Denver, Colorado — we’ll trek to Machu Picchu.
Machu Picchu is an ancient Incan city or estate — archaeologists can’t really agree on its original purpose. Nobody denies its beauty and importance, though. (It was selected as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World.) Tens of thousands of hikers walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu each year. I chose an expedition that takes the less-traveled Salcantay Route.
After reaching Machu Picchu, we’ll return for a couple of days rest in Cuzco before journeying to the town of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca. (At 3811 meters above sea level, this is the highest navigable lake in the world.) From here, we’ll venture into Bolivia for a four-day trek through the Condoriri region (and elevations of up to 5100 meters!). We finish the trip in La Paz.
From La Paz, I’ll fly back to Lima, where my wife will join me for a less strenuous trip through Peru. We’ll do a short culinary tour of Lima, and then fly to Cuzco for several days of site-seeing and a train ride to beautiful Machu Picchu.
With just 36 hours remaining before my flight leaves from Chicago for Lima, I’m eager to begin. I’ve never done anything like this. I’m both excited and scared.
But I’m packed and ready. I’m carrying a 45-liter travel pack weighing about 9kg. I also have a small daypack that comes in at about 4kg. I would love to get everything to fit in the bigger bag (and get my total weight down to 10kg), but that’s going to be tough. I picked up another kilogram of bulky material here at the blogging conference. Besides, I actually think I’m under-prepared for once. I may have to buy additional cold-weather layers in Cuzco.
My main worry is crime. Everyone I talk to says something like, “Oh yeah, you’ll probably get mugged, but it’s no big deal. Just accept the fact you’ll probably lose your laptop.” I don’t want to lose my laptop. I don’t want to be mugged. I know there are things I can do to reduce the likelihood that I’ll be targeted, but still…it’s not comforting to have every person I talk to — including native Peruvians — tells me that I should just accept the fact that I’ll be a victim of crime. (But you know what? Many folks told me I was going to get mugged in Italy. And Paris. And Cape Town. But I never had any trouble whatsoever.)
The truth is, aside from my life, nothing I have is that precious. Yes, I’d be pissed if my laptop were stolen, but everything I do on that machine is backed up online automatically anyhow. And it’s really the data I’m afraid of losing, right? As long as I can find a way to back up my photos as I travel, I should be fine.
My top choice for this trip was a actually “tour” from Gap Adventures that consists of two weeks volunteering at a drop-in center for kids in Cuzco. I want to to explore “volunteer vacations” — I’ve been looking at projects with Edge of Seven, for instance — and I’m certain there’s some voluntourism in my future. But not this time.
The literature for the Cuzco Kids program strongly discourages folks who are’t proficient in Spanish. After three months of learning Spanish, my skills are coming along and I’m able to read it okay, but my speaking ability is terrible (and my listening skills aren’t much better). I’ll have to keep the Cuzco Kids program as an option for 2012 or 2013.
