Peru

In Iquique, Ruben and I said our goodbyes. He wanted to go to Bolivia while my head was turning towards Peru. Time to move on on my own again. It´s nice to have a travel buddy, but I noticed more funny unexpected stuff happens when you are alone. Saving quite some money, I minibussed myself over the border from where I took a night bus. Even though I was only 5 kms out of Chile, the differences were already huge. In chile and argentina, you go look for a bus, in Peru, the busses come to you! One foot inside the terminal and 5 company bus proppers surround you, all shouting their destinations and prices in your ear and promising they will leave within 5 minutes. Prices were a relief after Chile and Argentina and you can actually still bargain them. I randomly picked one of the girls that seemed nicest to me.

Now, this was a local bus, me being the only gringa on it. When I got on, I noticed the huge amount of bags (turkenzakken, that is) all the locals had piled up in the bus aisle, by their feet and literally everywhere. The woman next to me was actually wearing more clothes than what I´m traveling with! A quick, kinda anxious, ´Is it safe to put my luggage in the bus trunk?´ caused some laughter and a reassuring ´claro que si´! Somewhere in the middle of the night we were pulled over and my neighbour told me to get out of the bus to go look for my pack which I could no longer find in the trunk. Apparently customs pulled us over and they were checking all luggage. Seeing my innocent face, they handed me my stuff over immediately. Back to the bus, I saw huge amounts of clothes being thrown out of all windows. My loud and clear ¨Que???´ caused some more laughter and learnt me that secondhand clothes smuggling from Chile to Peru is common business. Back on the bus, i couldn´t really see the difference in amount of bags in the aisle, but we did leave a huge mess of clothes on the side of the road as we took off. Nobody is as smart as me, smiled the 100 clothes layered woman to me, blickering all her golden teeth, a fashion feature I´d see a lot in the coming weeks.

Anyways, we all got safe to Arequipa, my first stop in Peru. Lovely city, very beautiful, nice hostel. Good enough to make me spend a week there in which I visited the Colca Canyon. This is under discussion but this canyon is supposed to be the deepest in the world. It´s beatiful but honestly not what I imagined from a canyon (grand canyon images). It has a cool lookout point for condors, though. I suspect the locals from feeding the birdies since there were so many but that didn´t spoil the pleasure. We got there at sunset and I was still sleepy so no cool pictures, sorry. We hiked a few days down the canyon (valley, whatever) and spent the night in a tiny village with a local family.

In Arequipa, I also spent the worst 2 days of my travel, trying to change my United Airlines flight and spending literally hours on the phone, shouting to them. I even had the UA call operator hanging up on me with a sweet ¨thank you for calling United Airlines¨. Problem was some crap of me not having an Argentinean visa and them not believing that I wasn´t even in Argentina. Anyways, after 2 stressfull days, a nice lady from connections managed to convince them I´d have no visa-issues and they changed my flight to 20th of July.

From Arequipa, I once again took a local nightbus (gee, Peru WAS going to be cheap compared to Chile and Argentina) to Ica where I took a taxi to Huacachina. Huacachina is an oasis, no other way to describe it. Surrounded by sand dunes, a small tourist village around a lagoon. Main attraction of the village being sandboarding and lying by the pool. (Yes, hostels with pool!) . To go sandboarding, we requested ´the craziest driver´and got him. They drive you with a sand buggy over the sand dunes and give you a candle to wax up your sandboard. The sandboarding was great, great, great fun even though I just went down on my belly (but reallllly fast!!).

backpacking in style!

Huacachina being a dangerous place to lose lots of time, I forced myself to not do this and made it up to Paracas, by the ocean. From Paracas I visited las Islas Ballestas, also known as the ´poor men´s galapagos´. Well, I guess the lack of turtles and tropical coloured fish actually do make it the POOR men´s galapagos but tons of dolphins, pinguins and sea lions and above all disgustingly amounts of birds still make it a cool place. It is one of the world´s largest producers of fertilizer, meaning that every few months people go on the islands to scrape off the bird poo.

Although I didn t initially plan on going I did take a flight over the Nazca lines. A fellow traveler mentioned a theory that it is better to regret having done something then to regret not having done something. The flight was bumpy yet fun, even though the puking girl behind me wouldn´t agree. And the lines remain to be one of the world´s largest archeological mysteries.

In Paracas I met some travelers who told me a spooky story on their local night bus crashing as it only had 1 driver and the dude fell asleep. They were fine but people did die in the accident with kinda gave me a wake-up call on those cheap buses so I took a better one to Cusco. From now on checking amount of drivers and if contents of thermos is coffee whether pisco.

Cusco is place hard to describe. On one hand it is annoyingly touristy. It´s impossibe to walk over the main square without getting at least 5 offers for hand massages, inca trails or cocaine. But once you wander a bit off, you´ll notice this city has a soul. Cusco has lots of street food, an amazing central market next to which locals come dancing on the street at night, lots of alpaca clothing markets and lots of dodgy clothes markets. Lots of travelers stay around for weeks, just to party hard with fellow travelers, being it sunday, wednesday or friday. But you can party and meet locals as well. Personally, I had a great time, I think I was able to find a balance between all these things.

Ofcourse, people come to Cusco for one main reason. I visited ´the thing´ as well, but I refused to pay 450 dollars to book a hiking tour 3 months in advance, so I just kinda bussed through the sacred valley towards Aguas Calientes. Last part of this trip is a 2 hour train ride for the ´reasonable´ price of 31 US dollars (love that they even bother giving this prices in dollars i.o. local currencies). Adding the high entrance fee and tons of oher tourists.............. it is still absolutely amazing. We hiked up very early in the morning to be able to climb Wayna Picchu (the mountain you see in the background of all MP pictures) Only 400 people a day can climb this mountain and they go up in 2 shifts, giving us still a kinda priviliged view over the site. The tourist flocks only enter the site after 9, 10 AM anyway. I heard from a Peruvian guy there was a way to avoid the expensive train ride, resulting in us walking over a train track for some hours and bussing/taxi´ing over, ehm, ´interesting´ roads, including a stone avalanche and us running through it (and the driver shouting from the other side that we had to run faster)

This is still really early and there were almost no people on site yet

But they found their way...

Walking back over the railway

Besides MP, I got invited to a free canopy tour by some people from an agency who passed by the hostel. They were just starting this tour and wanted to make a promotional video. Backpackers hearing the F-word, we all massively joined in. A day of free mountain bike, some canopy and a thrilling rappel. The tour agency is called Omega and the video is supposed to be on youtube.

To conclude I went on an absolutely amazing 3 day rafting trip. Class 4-5 rapids, camping on the side of the river, hot temperatures compared to Cusco, campfires at night. It was one of the most fun things I´ve done so far, I enjoyed every minute of it! I have amazing pictures the agency took but I have them on a CD that is currently in my hostel. Will see to put some online next time!