fresh n juicy chunks of oyster :: RTW travel blog

When I first stepped out into Lima's microclimatically humid night air from an Internet cafe one of those strange feelings hit me momentarily. It was one of those feelings that amount to nothing more than the hint of a vibration producing a note inside your body. And you feel that once in your life that note had already been sounded in another composition - back then it was different and only a single instrument in the elaborate symphony that was pounding away inside of you. And you try to remember and then it comes flooding back to you, fragments of melody, and you focus on that resonating tone that still tickles you from inside, all the way to your fingertips.

First, the city talked to me, its cars screaming metal and fumes, whispering into my ear - my anonymous ear! - of things that comfort me with a voice as silky smooth as the footsteps of strangers.
Then the city glanced at me searchingly for a split second, I almost missed it, with its bright, neon eyes locked onto mine. Only a passing glance at another one of the nameless many deep inside its nervous system.
The beginnings of a note were forming inside of me, at that point barely more than hints of harmony found in a chaos of electron storms, when, unexpectedly, the city touched me, wrapped me in its equatorial arms and floated its warm, wet breath through me.
Within split seconds the layers combined to compose a memory and some dark recess of my brain activated and spat out frames and frames of fast forwarded movie reel.

I saw the strange portal that dropped me into this strange continent. I felt Caracas re-entering my body. That distillation of another metropolis, ancient and cold yet alive, now again a straight dripfeed into my veins. My mind stretched out trying to unite the two places in space and time but the distances that lay between them just unrolled like rag carpets flung down empty roads all over South America.

What was I to do in Lima? More congregations of people, more churches with foundations on the rubble of Inca temples, more hunting for obscure and probably unsanitary places to find my next meal, more walking of meaningless streets in search for invisible alleys, more of everything else that has happened in parallel universes at least once before?
The only possible answer to my hangover: downtime. Preferably with an old friend who now lives in Lima, mourning the distance of the far-away world we both used to live in and now miss.

But I won't be coming home just yet.

[Click here for Album Peru 3 with all pics, scroll down to the bottom.]

I have yet to meet someone who is willing to stick their neck out, be courageous and say that the Inca Trail is rubbish. As much as I crave for being novel I can't be that someone either. Everyone's Inca Trail is a personal trip and mine felt epic. The Trail moved as though it was hewn into the mountains by a gifted artist with a razor sharp understanding of dramatic curve and the human psyche.
It would be a story that we always knew the plot and ending of but as with all good art it is the unexpected bursts of genius that overwhelm you and its capacity for revealing nuances and extremes of emotion that you never knew existed within you that differentiate this from your standard walk in the park.

The trail gently teased me on its first day with mild suggestions of what it may reveal of itself in the next three days. The scenery and variety of fauna encountered would already have made it into a memorable trek by itself but the myths and infamies that hang in the air of every gringo hangout in Cusco played on my mind and made sure this was only the light reading of an introductory chapter. There was the buzz of anticipation on the campsite that night and we were introduced to the most creative - and mostly tasty - cooking possible with the bare minimum variety of ingredients available. I was personally also introduced to sleepless nights in the cold tent in my summer sleeping bag and eight-fold layered clothing.
Powered by hot coca mate - luxuriously brought to our tents and guzzled before our eyes were yet fully open - a monster breakfast and more coca leaves stuffed into my cheek we set off the next day - by reputation the most punishing one of all. Gently ascending it started out nicely enough, new species of flowers popping up every ten metres of climb.
After several hours however, the punishment started being meted out in the ascent to Dead Woman's Pass at 4200m. The path was steep and long and when I'd feel like my lungs were about to cave in and my legs were about to buckle I'd push myself to climb faster, all in the name of the search for that elusive natural high. It worked. By the time I was down at the camp for that night and had lunch I and two others felt cocky enough to climb more and pre-empt the next morning's ruins. They and the mountainside were dipped in a marvelously mysterious mist that was drifting and revealing the parts it chose for us to see. It was an indescribable rush coupled with the high I was on at the time.
The come-down was all the more severe - the old adage that what comes up must go down proved true. Camping at altitude that night I froze worse than the night before, wrapped in everything I had carried including my rain poncho. Whether it was the cold, too much food I had eaten for dinner (I had developed a reputation for eating a lot so I was always kindly thrown the others' leftovers as to a dog), lack of sleep, the iodine purified river water or a combination of everything, I proceeded to empty my guts outside the tent early the next morning.
From then on I felt rough and irritable. The ruins we re-visited in the sunlight held none of the magic they had done the night before, the steps upon steps were starting to grate on my nerves and the idea of sleeping in a nice bed and going back to civilisation (and I wasn't thinking Cusco but more like the USA) seemed preferable to what I was doing right there. Instead I slept on the ground at our lunch camp, soaked in the hot sun and ate. Which did the trick. With renewed energy I started on the longest stretch to date which mostly wound downhill.
We passed through enchanted cloud forests that had trapped the clouds and were drinking their water. There were many species of orchids and moss, moist, colourful and so deep you could sink your entire hand into it. We passed other Inca ruins, again lent atmosphere by the fog that had descended on the old stones coloured red by the moss and plants.
I was immersed in this world and my imagination kicked in as I started running down the same rough, seemingly neverending stairs at breakneck speed that Inca messengers had used to hold together a huge empire that was lost half a millenium ago.
The camp we stayed at that night had all the amenities, a bar and lots of high Inca trailers (which is meant to suggest that a few of them decided to get pissed and started throwing chairs around). Dinner was a special occasion and the cooks of the different tours tried outdoing each other in carving animals out of vegetables - we all agreed that ours were the best even though our tour was on the cheap end of budget. What followed was an amusing attempt at a ceremony to say goodbye, thank and tip our porters who had carried food, tents and countless kilos more and had done so many other things for us to make the trek amazing and possible.
As the rain was pattering against our tent that night I slept like a baby and was warm if only for a few hours when we awoke at 4 AM for the final chapter. Nothing felt impossible anymore, we had survived the worst the Trail could throw at us, had forged bonds in the fires of hell and the cool heavenly highs and were now ready to reap our reward: being part of the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu.

The spectacularly entitled sun gate that we aimed to reach by sunrise didn't live up to its name - the clouds blocked out the sun as well as most of the Lost City. But even after the sun came out it took me several hours to start appreciating the full mind-blowing extent of Machu Picchu's beauty. The place is a giant work of art of stone. There is intelligence, refined aesthetics and creativity in its design, sitting there atop and nested in incredible mountains. The different neighbourhoods revolve around beautiful open green spaces, sitting on terraces of different levels with almost everywhere being accessible by at least two different sets of stairs - backtracking is rarely necessary when moving through the elevations from A to B. Temples to the various gods have been situated meaningfully and abstract symbolism abounds. You can tell it had been designed to be a place of beauty - the path up the nearby mountains from the city can only have been made as a showcase of Machu Picchu's aesthetics. Machu Picchu smacks of self-awareness and purpose everywhere you walk.
The city drew me in more and more the more I explored its streets and alleys and started noticing subtle details in the stonework and decorations. There was harmony. The llamas roamed the streets and gardens and seemed as though they were solely in charge of their maintenance. I imagined what it must have been like when the majestic condors still ruled the skies and lorded over this place.
Even the huge tour groups of largely Japanese, Koreans, Americans and French could do nothing to spoil the place for me. On my cocaine-like natural high I felt above it all. I understood this place, I knew I had been an Inca for a few precious moments when running down their ancient trails forgetting about the existence of buses, trains and cars and the world outside.
For the rest of the day I made Machu Picchu my home and got to know its shortcuts, hidden alleyways and character. I could almost see what it looked like when it was still populated.
As the sun started setting I said goodbye, my heart heavy with lightness, and ran down the steps, Inca style, to the tourist village of Agua Calientes. The hot spring there is funneled into a cesspool of human Inca Trail filth but the hot water did wonders for my exhausted body. The train back to Cusco the following day was, however, full so I resigned myself to spending another day there.
In the morning the village was drenched in rain and the mountains were hidden in impenetrable clouds. What was up had come down again and I felt like a nobody. There were no more elderly congenial US-package tourists congratulating my 'achievement', I didn't show the signs of four days without a shower anymore and had slept in a comfortable bed the previous night. I was barely sure anymore of what exactly had occurred in the last few days. But in some places in my body I started feeling the tingling recollection that whatever had happened had been infinitely different from all standard walks in the park I had had so far.

[Inca Trailage and Machu pics in Albums Peru 2 and 3 -- still no captions, will be added shortly.]

My search for a genuine cuyeria (guinea pig eatery) has landed me in a back-alley back-yard restaurant where I'm sitting and sipping on a strawberry-vomit flavoured drink. Unfortunately cuy (guinea pig) seems mostly available on the weekends as a special treat.
Sheesh, that's the problem with trying to write contemporaneously, things never stay the same way for long: the delicious main course had arrived and only one half of it is still in existence and I have ordered a coke leaving the frutillada (ugh) to sit there and ferment. Oh, and the slightly spicy, green salsa they have here tastes incredible. How about I just freeze time to spare you all the slightly dull details of my diet?
And since we are on diet (ha!), I did eat guinea pig yesterday at a tourist joint but it tasted like tough, skinny rabbit so that's why I'm still looking for the genuine article.
But seriously folks, I have done more than just eat here. In my attempt to become the foremost authority on Incas in Cusco I bought this book that was written by a near-blind historian about 150 years ago - umm, and have yet to read much more than the prefaces. Partly to blame are indeed Cusco's bars which irresponsibly hand out free Cuba Libres and with a bit of blagging and bar hopping seal the night making bed time reading impossible.
On the cultural flip-side of the coin I have tried to pre-empt the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and walked, horsed, bussed and hitchhiked to more ruins I wanted to manage in this time.
Cusco lies in the so-called 'Sacred Valley' which does deserve the title in my humble opinion. The land looks fertile (to my highly trained agriculture-eye) and most of the mountains have been landscaped into terraces which already on the bus to Cusco immediately looked quintessentially Incan to me although I can't remember having ever seen them before in such a context. I think more than the temples and ruins - which often require a lot imagination to even recognise as temples or ruins owing to the Spaniards' infatuation here of building huge churches out of other cultures' houses - it was the terraces and the landscape that have hit me so far. They seem as though gods have set to work on the mountains and the valley to make them inhabitable to humans.
The ruins at Pisaq, however, were very impressive to me. Probably mostly because of the natural-high-phenomenon which I had previously been often told existed but always attributed to fairy tales told to keep kids on the straight and narrow. In this case the phenomenon was triggered by sweating like a pig after climbing up steep slopes at high altitude and being hormonally rewarded after seeing the view and my first proper Inca ruins.
Which I hear is more or elss what the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu is all about, so I may get bored. Good thing that you can enhance natural highs unnaturally.
Soso, dinner is long finished, the pink-vomit is still sitting there, fermenting, a band has started playing and I have asked for the bill. And time's been unfrozen too. Which means I'll have to do some shopping, upload photos and these ramblings and then make myself learn about Incas from the near-blind historian. I hear when you're wise you get higher. Naturally. Which may at least reduce any craving for free Cuba Libres while sweating like a pig on the trail for the next 5 days. Let's just hope I won't O.D. on the endorphins and seratonin.

[Too much time wasting had gone on after writing this post which means I probably won't read any of the book...
But click here for Album Peru 1.
A final note - everyone can now download all the pictures at the full resolution they were taken at - including all the panoramas (including Iguacu falls) which may make for good desktop backgrounds although I wouldnt currently know. Didn't realise there was a setting I could jiggle to enable this option on the gallery page. Just click on the medium size pic to get the full one.]

My hunt for a local joint in Cusco that serves guinea pig has so far been unsuccessful. Actually I was overwhelmed by hunger caused by two days of bus travel and ate cheaply and deliciously at the central market instead. But as I'm sitting here, sipping on coffee and slurping on desert I have a more serious problem than catching that so far elusive guinea pig: I have to write about the events of the last week and this is proving difficult when the last week has just been a blur of sensory overload to me. My time-honoured friend Chronology will have to come to my rescue to prevent me from getting ahead of myself and muddling it all up. Which of course I already have done since I started with guinea pigs - for the sole reason to get the attention of all the vegetarian animal lovers out there and with this I also want to pre-empt any major militant show of strength on this page by you. :)
We arrived in Uyuni from Sucre some time last week early early morning after a wonderfully unrelaxing busride, slept for two hours and then jumped on one of the hundreds of three day Salar tours. For good reason this area is one of the top destinations in Bolivia: the jeep drove us into some of the strangest landscapes I have ever seen.
It started out like a strange dream. Everything in all directions below the sky was flooded with that most uncoloured of colours: white. And it was a gleaming, blinding white, looking tranquil and somewhat heavenly but at the same time probably being one of the deadest places on earth: it was all salt. Like off of a mirror the sunlight was bounced into space and into our eyes and faces (sunglasses obligatory). I started wondering whether it would be possible to construct a hell on earth out of this place by finding a substance that reacts with salt to turn it black or purple and spraying it systematically over the place. Now that would be a tourist attraction, just imagine the boiling purple earth and fumes as far as the eye could see. Of course the salt miners would be slightly miffed but it'd be a small sacrifice for my personal entertainment. If there are any chemists out there who can suggest a suitable chemical I'll take it up with Bolivia's minister for tourism.
But I guess the landscape is already strange enough on its own. Out of the white nothingness there rises a rocky island full of cactuses. Mounds of salt lie around to be ferried off by salt miners. There are holes in the surface of the salt where one finds strangely coloured, bubbling water. There is a sea of rainwater on the salt that is cut in two by an elevated driveway of rock - and I dare anyone who's seen Sen to Chihiro to not cry when first encountering it. There's a hotel built entirely of salt which is slightly tacky but kind of cool anyway.
To tell the truth it felt good to be on the tour. Everything was organised, nothing had to be worried about and we were shuttled from one amazing place to another.
Over the next two days the landscape changed like a chamaeleon from rocky mountaineity (?) to beautiful lakes that changed colours several times a day, were populated by flamingos and backdropped by majestic mountains to quintessentially deserty deserts with funky rock formations to geysers of fuming sulphur and bubbling mud, to terrains that seemed to be constructed after NASA Mars Rover pictures and finally some wonderfully relaxing hot thermal baths (which incidentally was my only chance at washing until this morning's shower - I am starting to like being dirty and I am only mentioning this in case there are readers who like the disgusting details on my lack of personal hygiene).
After the tour Mechi and I spent another day in the Salar at the foot of a volcano where the harsh wind beat us and the landscape into submission permitting only the growth of tiny shrubs and the survival of cats with thick, very strokable fur. The few humans there subsisted on tourism and at the lodge we met an old woman, a cook, who was wrapped in layers and layers of llama-wool clothing like the age-rings of a tree. Weather-beaten and stable she would stand there as though she had dug her roots deeply and securely into the rock and earth around her. When she spoke the sole bottom row of her teeth would become visible like pebbles strewn lovingly amongst the mountainside and every word she would slowly and thoughtfully produce seemed infinitely wise and true. Before I knew it I had told her of my dreams in life while to most other locals I resort to a spiel that I know they'll understand and not judge or resent me by. When she answered me I knew she understood. Her dream was to climb the volcano one day when life would let her. She was amazing and has made me believe that cold winds and harsh climates make people more wise as they withdraw into their layers of clothes to introspect. I too started to feel comfortable while wearing two sweaters and three shirts inside.
After this intense experience the next morning, anti-climactically we made it into Chile - which I didn't like much. Superficially it may just have been the high prices but the town we landed in (San Pedro de Atacama) had dullish vibes for me and too many tour agencies. Thus Mechi made her way back to Argentina and I headed up to Peru that night, sans travelling companion, again alone.
The benefit of travelling alone is that I spent eight straight hours on free internet (that came with my bus ticket) the next day at the bus station in Tacna, Peru, just across the Chilean border. Ok, so maybe the benefit of that precise action is debatable.
That night, however, several other gringos kept me company on the bus to the gringo capital of Peru: Cusco. A dodgy woman tried to give us a volleyball that weighed 3 kilos, some shoes and random other packages to keep safe in our backpacks - now there was a coke-carrying mule if ever we saw one. Random movies kept us entertained before we tried to sleep which was an operation of only moderate success.
So, here I am in Cusco, eschewing chronology yet again since it is now evening, I am in an internet cafe and have since also booked a Machu Pichu tour for Tuesday. Until then I will try to saturate myself with useless facts about Incas so maybe I can experience a flashback while I am on the trail or some other near-religious experience that would rival tree-woman. Or I may just succumb to all the free drinks that get handed out around here to tourists... Only time will tell.

[Check out Bolivia 3 and 4 Albums for more pics of Salar.]

Since I am currently searching for the worst place in the US I may as well make this the worst entry ever. I am frustrated by the crawling internet here and trying to upload pictures for a couple of days so I'll just use this space to vent a little. Grrr - the bastards in the internet cafe are playing Shakira, non-stop. How much worse can my life get? And I need to eat. And I need space on my camera for more pictures for the Salar de Uyuni - a Salt Desert - which is where we're heading tomorrow.
I didn't get to hang out much in Sucre either. Shame, but instead we went trekking to middle of nowhere which is a place I always like (Maragua in fact it is called). So, nutshell time: Beautiful nature, yadiyadiyaa; exhausting hike for 5 hours there; on arrival in Maragua played a basketball game against the teachers of the 'frontier school' there and the altitude smacked me down again reducing my height advantage; slept in the school; jogged back downhill in about 2 and a half hours early next morning while bumping into kids on their 2 hour up-hill school-run; ultimately made it back to Sucre in a cattle truck chock full of people. Yeah it was all cool and fun but I am feeling nasty right now and am in the mood to be mean so I won't praise it or talk more about it. Some of the pics are kinda pretty though.
But actually they're still stuck in some internet cable somewhere in Bolivia.
Ladidadidadi.
Ok, almost done. So here goes, Albums Bolivia 1 and 2 with pics of Cochabamba and Sucre, some panoramas and some pics from the hike to middle of nowhere.
I feel much better now, finally done.
Love to all and begging forgiveness for grumpiness earlier - nothing personal. Just my deep-rooted hate for the world and all...

I think I'm in love with Bolivia. I spoke to an old(ish - he didn't look it) man today in Sucre who told me I should buy a cheap house and live here. Indeed that is what a lot of Germans seem to have done as Sucre is teeming with cafes and bars with German names, usually chock-full of Gringos but very nice places!
And this is exactly what I intend to do the next few days in Sucre: relax and enjoy this lovely city, eating good food, sitting in cafes watching the world go by, reading, writing, and consuming copious amounts of caffeine.
Which brings me to my next point: these are activities anybody should be able to enjoy but unfortunately this kind of lifestyle is out of reach back at home. I always knew that Bolivia was economical to travel in (I won't call any lovely country cheap!) but putting a number on things after I found out the actual exchange rate to the Pound yesterday was a shock. A complete lunch with soup: price of a pack of gum in the UK. The meanest, largest fruit salads imaginable: cheaper than a cigarette in the UK (healthy alternative, but then again a pack of smokes here is only slightly more). Delicious cakes and sweets: pennies. I could go on but everything in fact comes in similar price ranges.
Now I obviously feel a little bad and unethical since I am in effect trashtalking a country's economy and unfairly reaping the benefits of a ridiculously high Pound and I fully understand why some locals here are resentful of Gringos coming and living like kings and queens. I am no economist but something must be wrong here anyway - either how overpriced everything back at home is or just how wide the gaps between places really are, as cliched as it sounds. Someone must be stuffing their pockets full of cash somewhere! But probably all I'm trying to say is that it will be incredibly difficult being a good consumer again once I return.
But enough about money since it is already a truth universally acknowledged that it is the root of all things satanic and otherwise worthy of worship in our world.
And since we're speaking of Satanic, I arrived in Sucre from a warzone: Cochabamba carnival. I thought the carnival in Tilcara was bad with the armies of armed kids roaming the street but in Cochabamba the army was a professional one composed of youths and adults. A cottage arms industry of selling filled water balloons had sprung up to meet the demand for arms, thousands of cans of carcinogenous (and incidentally CFC containing) artificial-snow spray were sold and half the crowd were armed to the teeth with imitation super soakers. That, being a Gringo who's a head taller than everyone else and the folly of having worn a bright-red (and what I thought at the time as festive) shirt made me into the prized Target of the Day. I was fucked.
After several hours of punishment the sun started going down, I was freezing and soaked and I decided that it'd be best to leave. Of course not before I had my diary (of all things again - but only a few pages this time!) pickpocketed in the crowd while I must have been shivering, dodging around and trying to defend myself against overwhelming odds. I think the parade was pretty good too but to be honest didn't catch too much of it -- too much foam in my eyes. I'm such a hero!
The next day however, made up for it. Cochabamba has the most amazing market I have yet seen. It stretches for 5 blocks and you can buy (almost) literally everything you desire. And, as we've established, it's cheap. So while I had been looking for a new diary for two months in Brazil to finally find one after much searching in Buenos Aires, in Cochabamba something suitable reared it's head within the first half hour of looking. At the same time I also fell in love with the 'antique' Bolivian fabric patterns and handicrafts which are simply gorgeous! Needless to say, shopping spree ensued.
So to finish off like I started: House in sucre - $15000; 12 water balloons $0.10; Diary with 'antique' cover: $1; having to go to dinner while leaving the slow, slow internet cafe to upload the rest of the pictures: priceless. (ok, that one's lame, but I really have to go to dinner and can't think of anything right now!).

[Click here for Albums.]