Bob and Karen's Circle Pacific Tour: Day 1 @ Lima

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.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Day 1 @ Lima

The fun has begun. Now that we're in Lima, we've switched from "last this" and "last that" to a day of firsts. "First beggar" got us started and we´ve now done our first sidewalk cafe and first ocean promenade. Our first nap was this morning and now it's late afternoon and we´re headed for our second nap. Strange, though, we´re just tired and not jetlagged, so we don´t feel nearly as queasy as after flying east or west. The instant switch from autumn to spring is a bit odd, and it's coolish here but not uncomfortable. We thought we were going to take it easy but we strolled for a good four hours before settling into a coffee bar with leather couches and found out just how tired we are. We're finding the architecture, urban layout and plant life reminiscent of Cuba, Spain, Mexico and even Morocco. We found a side street full of restaurants that Karen likened to the Left Bank in Paris. We'll head there after our second nap. Maybe tomorrow we'll liven up and hit a museum.
This is our first day on a Spanish keyboard and I can´t figure out the @ sign, so I put it in the title and now I can copy it as needed.

3 comments:

Bill Dunphy said...: First post!; September 3, 2009 at 11:07 AM
Bill Dunphy said...: Also - sorry I wasn't in Kitchener for your last day or your open house. Have a great trip - and POST PICTURES.; September 3, 2009 at 11:08 AM
John Harder said...: I remember seeing those Wicked vans when we were in N.Z. They're all painted in weird colors and have big "slogans" on them. My favorite was: "I need a woman real bad. Honk if you're real bad."

John Harder; September 5, 2009 at 8:24 AM