Bob and Karen's Circle Pacific Tour: Small points about Peru (a week old)

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.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Small points about Peru (a week old)

Getting back on track with a few funny or weird things about Peru.
* Taxis and buses -- Every single time one passes by, the driver toots to see if you are interested. One tooted at us while we were in a restaurant. When we settled in the small fishing village of Huanchaco for two weeks, the same taxis passed us several times a day and tooted every time. Stop it. Now.
* Adobe -- Peru's key archeological sites are badly decaying, centuries-old mud brick pyramids. It's a photographer's nightmare, except for a few fragments of coloured wall.
* Surfing in Huanchaco -- The only place we've ever seen where surfers ride parallel to the beach, then get out and hike back to catch the next wave. The best rides were at least a kilometre long.
* Balloon tit and ass man -- This was one of the strangest marketing gimmicks we've seen. He was selling candy on the beach.
* Starch -- Most meals had three: rice, potatoes and yucca, which resembles a potato, but is not related.
* Potatoes -- Dozens of varieties were in the markets. With such variety, Peruvians are able to perfect various cooking styles, including mashed and french fries.
* Chicha -- Often translated as purple corn beer. When we finally got around to asking if it contained any alcohol the answer was "not ours" so I suspect some versions did contain alcohol. It would explain the slurring. Every batch tasted different. If the chicha wasn't loaded with cinnamon and cloves, it tasted a bit like purple grape juice.
* Scallops -- I've eaten scallops for decades but only recently discovered what the shellfish actually looks like (the Shell Oil logo). I was dumbfounded when I dug a scallop (still attached to the shell) out of my seafood pasta. Did I mention that the seafood is shockingly good in Peru?
* Chicken -- The first time we saw chicken priced for whole, half, quarter or eighth, we laughed. An eighth of a chicken? After neither one of us could finish our quarter chicken, we quit laughing. The chickens in Peru must be huge.
* Blogging etiquette -- We were a bit surprised when our hostess thanked us for calling her hotel the best in town. We didn't remember writing that. So this is a reminder to ourselves to be careful what we say. And I'm going to go back and edit that post to insert the name of the hotel (Club Colonial in Huanchaco, Chile).
Enough about Peru. On to Chile.