Bob and Karen's Circle Pacific Tour: Dizzy days in Cusco

Peru was the right place to begin a year's travel

Peru was an eye-opener of a place to launch our trip. It’s a little difficult to remember all the things that went through our minds as we settled into our year off during that first month of leisure. But I recall being sharply aware of the need to travel differently than any previous travel we’d done. This was a year off, and there was no way any person could spend that many days in full-on explorer mode. You have to stop and let the time pass you by. And you have to do that surprisingly frequently. You can bully your way through the strenuous two days of climbing Mount Putukusi and neighbouring Machu Picchu after a big bad bout of altitude sickness, but there are serious physical limits in the longer term. I speak now from a position of clearer understanding. Our first major steps on returning home were health care – Karen to a naturopath to fix her digestive tract, me to the family doctor to treat a knee injury. Now the knee MRI data is in and it turns out that a year of stress to one’s knees doesn’t necessarily cause ligament damage. At least not in my case. Instead, a year of daily strain (and about a dozen mountain climbs) results in bone injuries – extensive bruising and a small fracture to my left femur. My knee may take as long to heal as it took to cause the damage. And Peru was a powerful dose of knee wear with which to begin our year’s adventure. About two-thirds of the way through our year off we began to look back at Peru and comment that it was a good thing we’d done Peru first, because at that point we didn’t feel capable of the mountain exploits we’d done back in September. Now, a full year later, I have similar thoughts regarding the year off. I don’t think I could do it again. I certainly can’t do it again in the condition I’m in now. The effects of aging isn’t the point of this piece but I had to get past that to get to the wind-down in Huanchaco. While Machu Picchu was one of the icons that we built our year off around – the others were Easter Island (up next) and Angkor Wat (towards the end) – the lazing away of days and weeks in Huanchaco is the travel style that we wanted to perfect. Later, we executed a nearly perfect down-time dropout on the island of Koh Phangan, where we spent 33 days doing as close to nothing as two people can manage. In Peru, we spent almost half our month in Huanchaco. It is a small fishing village, with little going for it but charm, and we made it our home. By the time we had wandered every street I knew we were successfully living in the moment. That’s a sensation that we are striving for in our travels and, as much as Machu Picchu was a miracle in the mountains, Huanchaco was its own miracle on the seashore. I am more likely to go back there, but that may just be the bad knee talking. We could always bus it up Machu Picchu.

Re-living our tour in photos

A totally unexpected result of travelling for a year (unlike any other number of months) is that we are re-living the experience month by month as we sort photos. It's September now so we have spent weeks sorting and editing our Peru pictures. As we build a slideshow of our month in Peru, we are choosing from photos that weren't available for posting during our trip. We carried two cameras but only blogged from a backup point-and-shoot. So, here's the result, a handful of our Peru favourites. We might find a few more before the end of September when we switch to reminiscing about Chile. But first we'll have an essay on Peru, which will be our next text post.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Dizzy days in Cusco

This is our sixth day in Cusco but only the second in which we could hike uphill. Karen spent most of the first two days in bed suffering from mild altitude sickness. Nothing alarming: slight headache, dizzyness and shortness of breath but she could barely walk around the level parts of this high-altitude city, much less climb the stairways that sometimes rise up for several blocks. Yesterday, though, she was all better with the help of a few huffs on a spray can of oxygen. No kidding. They sell oxygen here. That enabled us to visit Sacsayhuaman, an incredible Inca site that I've wanted to visit ever since I spotted its immense zigzag walls on GoogleEarth. Any ancient ruin you can see in a satellite photo has got to be impressive and Sacsayhuaman is beyond impressive. We spent hours wandering around and over it, taking many, many pictures. We've now got a wiggly hand signal for "give me the camera". There are two other Inca sites, each another 20-minute hike further uphill through eucalyptus forests. Ummmm . . . lovely aroma. As we left Sacsayhuaman, the clouds grew nasty dark and we were in the middle of nothing. A few shacks along the side of the trail had the usual knitwear for sale and then we saw the word "menu" over one doorway and ducked inside. The guy who welcomed us in made us a few basic sandwiches and coca tea while the rain poured down. Soon the rain stopped and we hiked on to Qenko, mostly a bare rock with some carved niches and caves. On our way to the third site, Salapunco, a couple of local kids pointed the way. Quite cheerful and didn't even ask for money, kind of unusual for this touristy town. These last two remote sites were remarkably free of tourists, in fact, we were the only ones at the last one. We then managed to wander our way home, including stumbling upon an Inca highway that led back into Cusco. Extremely cool.
One other topic: food. We had no idea that Peru was such a great place to eat. Now that our tummies are improving we've been sampling some of the most tasty meals since France five years ago. Karen loved the alpaca and plantain stew, as well as the sweet potato and parmesan ravioli. I've had Andean lake trout in 3 different styles, all fabulous. The local wine is a bit sour, but Argentinian and Chilean are everywhere. The coffee is less exciting than you might expect so we've continued to sip away at the coca tea, which does help with the altitude. Kind of like an earthy green tea.
At 7 a.m. tomorrow, we head off to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu so it'll probably be a while between posts . . . unless the hotels there are as well-equipped as the ones we stayed at in Lima and Cusco. Meanwhile, we'll post a few pics and-or attempt a slideshow.

2 comments:

Unknown said...: Sounds like a great trip so far, keep the blog updates comin'! Glad to hear you're conquering the altitude scikness, that can put a damper on things. Thank goodness for cans of oxygen! Hope you have a fab time at Machu Picchu, can't wait to see the pics. I'm heading to Spain Sept 23-Oct 10, look forward to checking in on you when I'm back. Love, Rose; September 14, 2009 at 9:23 PM
Anonymous said...: Hi Bob and Karen
Just had a call from Aly and he said you guys did great! He really enjoyed spending time with both of you! Can't wait to see pictures

Sandy; September 16, 2009 at 1:54 PM