October 2018 – The Escape Hatch

Jared’s Top Ten Things To Do In La Paz

La Paz is a big city. So were Quito and Lima, but the geography of La Paz never lets you forget it. No matter where you are, you’re either at the bottom of the valley looking up at cliffs carpeted in buildings, or you’re on one of those cliffs looking down at the entirety of the metropolis.

La Paz sits in a valley in the Andean Plateau formed ten million years ago when the rising mountains cut what would become Lake Titicaca off from the rest of the Pacific, causing it to erode a huge swath of real estate as it drained. The city started life in the bottom of the valley, but now fills it and spills out over the rim.

La Paz is a fun, colorful city where something’s always going on. If you’re bored, you’re doing something wrong. Lea and I spent a week in La Paz (mas o menos). Here’s what I recommend based on our experience.

Lots of Cardio

This is going to happen whether you want it or not, so just make it part of your plan. With the sole exception of several blocks along Calle Illampu, I never saw a single level street in the city. Imagine if you scooped up another South American city, dumped it in the mountains of West Virginia, then levitated it to the height of the lower Himalayas, and you’ve got La Paz. Being at high altitude already increases your heart rate. In La Paz, walking one block up the street is like doing five minutes on a Stairmaster. Why even pay for a gym membership when you could just move here?

You can always sit in traffic, but where’s the fun in that?

Get Haircuts In Spanish

I’d already done this in Quito but it was Lea’s first time. The lady in Ecuador cut my hair so short that I was able to go two whole months before getting it cut again. Even so, my top had only just reached its normal length, but the back was slowly turning into a mullet. Lea had hers cut just before we left Atlanta, but it had reached the point where she couldn’t ignore it any longer. Fortunately, our hostel is right next to a row of about twenty barber shops. Guys stand in the doorways calling out to people walking by, as if a haircut is ever an impulse purchase.

Seriously, though, this is an experience everyone should try at least once. Find a barber or hairstylist with whom you only share a handful of words in common and try and explain in pantomime how you would like your hair to look for the next six weeks. Charades was never this fun.

In the end, Lea rated her haircut as “close enough.” My barber gave me something like flattop with lots of gel (that I wasn’t expecting) and gave my beard and mustache the best trim they’ve ever had.

Shop Your Touristy Heart Out in the Mercado de Brujas

The heart of the backpacker/tourist district of La Paz is Calle Sagarnaga, where there are hostels and travel agencies galore (as well as, if I may say so, an excellent Mexican restaurant called Kalakitas and a damn fine Cuban place called Sabor Cubano). The block between Sagarnaga and Santa Cruz, along Calle Linares and an adjoining alley, is the Witch’s Market (Mercado de Brujas). This is the souvenir-shop center of the city’s tourist industry.

The whole street smells of incense even after the shops close. About a quarter of the stores sell “witchy” items like herbal remedies, sex-aid potions, Tiwanakan totems, and mummified baby llamas (seriously) but the rest sell regular Andean souvenirs: T-shirts, bags, rugs, wall hangings, and about everything imaginable made out of llama or alpaca wool. Lea and I have avoided buying souvenirs so far, but knowing Bolivia was the least expensive place on the continent we finally broke down. If you happen to get a Christmas present shipped to you from South America this year, the Mercado de Brujas is probably where it came from.

Bless and/or curse your friends and loved ones.

Ride the Teleférico While Commuters Look at You Strangely

Several times on this trip we’ve ridden teleféricos (aerial gondolas) in other countries. In Quito there was the one up the side of the Pichincha Volcano, as well as the open-air cable car across the waterfall gorge in Mindo. In Peru there was the spanking-new teleférico that took us up to Kuélap, the ancient walled city outside of Chachapoyas. Those were all tourist attractions. The teleféricos in La Paz, however, are actual public transportation.

That didn’t stop us from being geeky tourists. There are at least seven color-coded teleférico lines in La Paz serving as a sky-borne subway system. We rode the Orange Line, which goes east-to-west across the north part of the city, and the Red Line, which rises from the valley floor to El Alto, La Paz’s high suburb on the rim of the valley and home to a five-square-kilometer street market on Sundays. Except for our first ride on the Orange, in which we had a car to ourselves, we shared our gondolas with regular commuters minding their own business and ignoring the silly gringos taking photos through the scratched-up plexiglass.

Witness the Warping of Spacetime In Mercado Lanza

At the bottom of Santa Cruz and Sagarnaga, about two blocks from our hostel, was the Plaza San Francisco and its big shopping center, Mercado Lanza. All cities in South America have mercados with crowded walkways between tiny stalls the size of walk-in closets. Most mercados are single story affairs. Mercado Lanza is another beast altogether.

From the outside it looks like a box. From the inside it looks like a car park designed by M.C. Escher in a particularly vindictive mood. The stalls are metal boxes on concrete ramps that shoot off in every conceivable direction: bookstores, vegetable stands, flower shops, and even restaurants that can sit up to eight people if they really like each other. Lea took me there on my first day in town, and the first words that went through my brain were “five dimensional hypercube.”

Hey, you got your transdimensional physics in my shopping mall!

What really blows my mind is that no matter which level you’re on in the mercado, there’s an exit directly to the street. How that works I’m not sure. I just enjoyed my Bs15 ($2) dinner and tried not to think about the geometry of the space. That way madness lies.

I swear they twisted a flea market into an infinite Mobius loop.

Visit Enough Museums to Become an Exhibit Yourself

You’d think we’d be sick of museums by this point and you’d be right, but La Paz has a depth and breadth of museums to keep even jaded three-month travelers like ourselves entertained. The only problem is having to climb mountains to reach them. That and the fact that they like to close at lunch and not re-open until late in the afternoon.

Lea checked out the Precious Metals Museum and the Museo de San Francisco before I arrived. Together we went to the National Museum of Art and the Museum of Ethnography & Folklore, both of which have impressive collections. The latter has an entire room of masks, a room of metalwork (both ancient and contemporary), and a room of clothing and hats made of plumage.

We later went to the National Archaeology Museum (also known as the Tiwanaku Museum) and tried to go to the Contemporary Art Museum (in a building designed by Gustave Eiffel of all people) only to find that it had been shut down. Wandering around, we saw a Museum of Geology and Paleontology that wasn’t marked on any of the maps, but didn’t get to go because of the aforementioned funky hours and an afternoon thunderstorm.

An alabaster fountain at the National Museum of Art.

We did not go to the Coca Museum, the Museum of Bolivian Beverages, or the Museum of Musical Instruments, but all those things are out there if you happen to be in town and feel so inclined. I’m convinced there’s a limit to how many museums you can visit in so many cities before they invite you into a glass case of your very own and lock the door behind you.

See Where Bolivianos Go When They Die

As is our habit, Lea and I visited La Paz’s biggest cemetery. The Cementerio General was actually the easiest place in town to find, since half the buses list “Cementerio” prominently as one of their destinations.

The cemetery in La Paz is big and does not waste space. There are no individual “graves” as we would think of in the U.S. and very few large family monuments. The Cementerio General is a massive apartment complex of a graveyard, including several structures that I could only think of as high-rise housing projects for the dead. The “streets” within are better marked than those in the city itself.

We visited the cemetery as they were getting it ready for Todos Santos. Artists had been creating large, creative, beautiful, and funny murals throughout the complex. It’s too bad that we’re going to miss all the excitement. Day of the Dead may not be as big in South America as it is in Mexico, but La Paz as a city seems to be really into Halloween. The Cementerio General may not be the prettiest cemetery Lea and I have visited, but thanks to it’s current artwork I’d say it’s definitely the most “gangsta.”

Tour the City In an Open Bus While Ducking Tree Limbs and Power Lines

La Paz is too big to see just by walking. Luckily there is an open-top double-decker tour bus that runs three times each day. It costs Bs100 ($14.50) per person and has audio that you can listen to in seven languages. The tour runs from the north end of town through the historic center, up to the panoramic Mirador Killi Killi with its 360° view of the city, then south through the middle class Miraflores neighborhood and finally out the bottom to the Valley of the Moon and its eroded rock formations.

A few words of warning about the tour: First, the bus is fairly tall and the crazy bundles of power lines strung across La Paz’s narrow streets are fairly low. The tour guide told us not to stand up and that’s the best piece of advice I got all week. Otherwise I’d have been clotheslined by an electrical cable and Lea would have collected on my life insurance. Even staying in my seat, I had to duck more than once.

The same goes for trees, which the bus is not low enough to clear. I only got smacked in the head one time, but there were several close shaves. The other problem is that the bus’s shock absorbers aren’t what they could be and La Paz’s streets aren’t that smooth to begin with. I learned to take what pictures I could while the bus was stopped. To do so with the bus in motion would have resulted in having a camera shoved up my nose.

Try To Take Pictures of the Surrounding Mountains

Speaking of photography, if there is one challenge that is both maddening and irresistible it’s trying to take pictures of the snow-capped mountains that circle La Paz’s valley, of which the giant volcano Illimani is the crown jewel. In the city itself they’re usually obscured by the buildings or the rim of the valley. If you do get high enough to see them, they’re often shrouded in cloud.

Attempt One: We read in the Footprint South American Handbook (that we chopped up to carry with us and discard in pieces as we leave each country), that there was a great view of Illimani at sunset if we walked up Calle Max Paredes, dodging homicidal bus drivers and edging around market stalls, up to the intersection with Avenida Buenos Aires. What the book failed to mention was that when we got to Buenos Aires all we had to do was turn around to see the mountain. We walked up and down several blocks looking for this supposed “view” until we gave up and headed back– only then to see the mountain right in front of us, all its glory blocked from photographic perfection by the hundreds of power lines strung across the street.

Mountains north of La Paz, seen from the Cementerio General.

Attempt Two: While walking around the Cementerio General, I happened to look down one of the alleys to see – snow capped mountains! I started looking for the best unobstructed angle and eventually decided to climb the stairs to the top floor of one of those “high rise” mortuaries I mentioned. Several of the mountains were in easy reach of my telephoto lens, although it was hard to keep trees, roofs, and other structures out of the frame.

Attempt Three: The Cementerio General, as it turns out, was right next to a station for the Red teleférico line. Instead of heading home by bus, we walked around the corner to the gondolas. On the way down we had a fantastic view of Illimani, blocked by the grill of the gondola doors. Once we reached the bottom, we bought two more tickets to ride back up, this time with the doors facing north and the large bay window facing the mountain. At last we got our shots of Illimani! At the upper station we had to buy two more tickets to get home. The attendants gave us funny looks, seeing as we’d gone through their turnstiles three times in ten minutes.

Illimani Volcano, seen from the Red Teleferico.

Watch the Flying Cholitas Kick Ass

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If you’re in La Paz on a Sunday, there is one thing you absolutely have to do. If you’re just passing through, miss your bus or skip your flight so you can hang around and see this.

The Flying Cholitas are women wrestlers who fight in full traditional outfits. They perform in El Alto on the rim of the canyon in a back-alley gymnasium that has the feel of an underground Fight Club. It takes place around and after dark in one of the sketchier areas of town, so booking a tour through an agency is recommended.

The show is up-close, intimate, and spectacular. It begins with some regular male luchadores to warm up the crowd, but when the ladies come out it’s Game On. They throw each other into and out of the ring, they chase their opponents into the stands, they go after the announcers if they don’t like what they hear. They’ll beat each other with plastic water bottles (with the effect of soaking any spectators nearby, such as your humble author). Once they tied one of their opponents to the ropes with her own braids before laying the beat-down.

Cheesy? A little. Hilarious? Absolutely. Surreal? You better believe it. But it sure as hell beats following a gaggle of tourists taking selfies in front of ancient monuments. Anyone taking a selfie in front of the Flying Cholitas would probably be rewarded with a metal folding chair to the head.

The Escape Hatch will be going dark as Lea and I head out into the salty Bolivian desert. I’m confident that when I report back, the photos will be worth the wait.

Stay tuned, dear readers.

The Highest Quiet Little Town In the World

I have a confession to make. I was really reluctant to go to Bolivia. As a matter of fact I almost didn’t. When we first started planning this trip, Bolivia was on my list of “don’t need to go there” countries. Also in the planning stages, Lea and I discussed the idea of splitting up at some point and traveling independently for a week or two. When that came up, the obvious choice in my mind was for Lea to head out to the Bolivian salt flats while I made my way down the Pacific coast to some nice little beach town in Chile.

Instead, how about a nice little beach town in the High Andes?

Why the prejudice against Bolivia? In all honesty I had it built up in my mind as an impoverished slum of a country much like Tanzania, which Lea and I visited in 2012. Tanzania was a mix of staggering natural beauty and horrifying poverty, and even for travelers living conditions there were far below anything I ever wanted to experience again. Knowing that Bolivia is the poorest country in South America (except for Venezuela, which is in total economic collapse), I expected much the same.

I’ve never been happier to have been so wrong. Wow, do I love Bolivia.

I’m writing from a hostel in the heart of La Paz, but this week I just want to talk about the little resort town on Lake Titicaca that completely changed my mind: Copacabana.

We bused into Copacabana from Puno, the main Peruvian city on the lake. The difference was staggering. Puno was bigger and more westernized, also with a big tourist sector, but like many of the cities we visited in Peru it looked like a giant garbage heap. In Copacabana, suddenly everything was pretty and not just the landscape. Yes, the buildings were dilapidated and under continual repair, but suddenly they were in color. Vibrant blues, greens, and orange-painted walls were everywhere. The main church, the Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana, is a blazing white with glistening green and orange tile work on the spires and Moorish-style domes.

The Basilica stands out in the center of town.

What I’m trying to say is that yes, Bolivia is poor, but the people here make an effort. My first impression of the country is that Bolivianos take pride in where they live and despite the hardships they do what they can to put their best foot forward. I know I may be an arrogant, spoiled American talking out of his ass about things whereof I understand very little, but I’m here to tell you that crossing the border from Peru to Bolivia was like stepping from black-and-white Kansas to Technicolor Oz.

Start to finish, this mural went up in less than eight hours.

And Copacabana is so laid back. It’s a tourist town for sure, but it’s not a pushy tourist town. There are hostels, restaurants, and travel agencies everywhere, but no one’s chasing you down the street to make you shop at their store. It’s possible to just sit on a bench and stare at Lake Titicaca in peace and quiet for as long as you’d like. For just a few dollars more, you can do the same from the roof of a backpacker’s bar while sipping 2-for-1 Cuba Libres.

(It was in Copacabana that I feel we really caught up with the Backpackers. In Peru we were among more traditional “two week package with luxury accommodations” tourists.)

The only trouble with Copacabana is that it’s so damn high. The elevation is 3,841 meters and the tourist maps don’t stop reminding you that Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable body of water in the world. That’s fantastic, unless you’re in your mid-to-upper forties and your body is already showing signs of wear and tear from extended travel. After a week at this elevation (counting the time in Puno) Lea went ahead and traveled “down” to La Paz (highest capital city in the world). Like a dork I stayed behind for two days to do a couple of hikes – because 3,841m just wasn’t high enough.

The first was to climb this thing:

Cerro Calvario is the hill that overlooks the city. On its peak is a series of monuments representing the Stations of the Cross. From below it was obvious that the views from on top were spectacular. And since the trail starts right in the middle of town, I thought “won’t be too hard, just bring some water and take it slow.”

It took me about an hour to reach the top. The steps and ramps on the path up were wildly uneven and it was all I could do to sit and breathe when I reached the summit. The views were fantastic, however, as you can see from all the aerial shots in this article. Having reached the top, I made sure and stayed as long as I wanted. The way down, though less taxing on the lungs, was far scarier. Once I exited the path from the hilltop, there were three choices of streets back to the center of town. I chose the shortest, but it ended up being so steep and slippery that halfway down I turned around and climbed back up so I could take a longer, gentler route.

This cat was waiting to claim my soul if I passed out and died at the top.

The next day I rode the ferry out to Isla del Sol, which according to myth is the birthplace of the Inca. Every square foot of the island is terraced and I swear they call it “Island of the Sun” because there isn’t any shade. At present there’s a feud between the people on the south side of the island and the north (something to do with the northerners allowing development on sacred ground) so only the south end is currently accessible to the casual hiker.

I did *not* take a paddle-swan to Isla del Sol.

Nevertheless, I took the boat to the village of Yumani, climbed the Inca Stairs, and walked the long donkey trail to the south tip of the island, then back up (and down) to Templo Pilkokaima, the main archaeological site on the southern end. I had five hours from when the ferry dropped me off in the morning until it went back to Copacabana in the afternoon, and I needed almost all of that for the hike.

The road block for this episode of The Amazing Race.

Despite hiking my body right up to the limits of its endurance two days in a row, I felt more relaxed in Copacabana than I had anywhere else on our South American trip since Mindo, Ecuador (another peaceful backpacker haven – I see a pattern forming). Still, there was a lot of continent left and it was time to move on.

Fun fact: Copacabana is on a peninsula that juts out into Lake Titicaca and, like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, does not connect to the rest of Bolivia except through Peru. Since border crossings are a pain, the buses ferry across Lake Titicaca to get to the road to La Paz. Thankfully, they make the passengers disembark and cross on a separate ferry. Otherwise, we’d have been going across the water like this:

I kept telling myself, “They do this every day.”

The Escape Hatch will return in just three days for a special La Paz report before I lose the Internet entirely in the wild Bolivian desert. ¡Hasta pronto!

Peru In Ruins: Machu Picchu, Cusco, and Lago Titicaca

It’s official: Machu Picchu is the most beautiful tourist trap in the world. Make no mistake, Machu Picchu and its surrounding landscapes are breathtaking. So is the cost of getting there, staying in a hotel, and eating a meal. Here’s an example: Anywhere else in Peru, $12 will get you an eight-hour bus ride from one city to another. In Machu Picchu, $12 is what it costs to ride the bus up the mountain to the site, and another $12 is what it costs to ride back down.

But it looks just like the postcards, only better.

Supply and demand, baby. You’re a captive audience and everyone knows it. The process to get entry tickets and train reservations is so bureaucratic and byzantine that I’m going to have to write a whole post just to give people instructions on how to do it.

The mountains seen from Machu Picchu are just… wow.

In the dark, ignorant days of the 20^th Century, we were taught that the Middle East’s “fertile crescent” was the Cradle of Civilization. The truth is that there were at least five cradles where civilization emerged on its own without any prompting from outside influence. One of these was the Peruvian Andes, which is why you can’t fall down a flight of stairs in this country without landing on some archaeological remnant of a bygone era.

The upside of that is that if you’re interested in history, then wherever you go in Peru there’s something unique to see. The downside is that is that you feel pressured to visit historical site after historical site as you travel around the country. I mean, how do you choose which ancient civilization to skip? Because there’s so much history to see in Peru (and little else that doesn’t involve adventure sports) we’ve kind of rushed our way through the country. We budgeted six weeks for Peru, but instead we’ve sped through it in four.

Cusco: Iglesia de la Compania de Jesus, and Starbucks

I’ve covered our visits to several of the big tourist sites in previous articles. Once we hit the Cusco area, though, we were suddenly in the Inca heartland, a.k.a. Tourist Central. Those of us brought up in the American education system probably think of the Incas as the dominant civilization of South America, but in fact they were merely the short-lived final stage of pre-Columbian Andean culture before the Spanish arrived. The Inca Empire only lasted for about a century. They conquered all the other Andean peoples, imposed their own culture on top of the others, then the Spanish appeared and convinced some of the Inca’s subjects to rise up and… you know the rest.

I guess it wasn’t just the Spanish who moved in.

Cusco was the Inca capitol, and it looks like the Spanish bulldozed the city and replaced it with a little bit of home. There are colonial Spanish churches, monasteries, and architecture everywhere. Unlike other cities in Peru, the roofs of the houses are pitched, not flat, and covered in terracotta tile, giving Cusco a distinctly European flavor. It’s only when you wander down the streets of souvenir shops leading to the central plaza and look at the stonework that you notice the bones of the old Inca city on which modern Cusco was built.

Inca stonemasons built walls by fitting stones together so perfectly that no mortar was needed. They didn’t square them; they just polished them somehow (it’s still up to debate) so that their walls were seamless. They saying is that the stones fit so perfectly that you can’t slip a dollar bill between them.

The stonework in Machu Picchu isn’t as amazing as in Cusco except for the fact that it’s at the top of a damn mountain. This site was never discovered by the Spanish and was unknown to Americans and Europeans until its “scientific discovery” by Hiram Bingham in 1911. (The locals knew about it, of course, and there’s evidence that it may have been stumbled upon by German explorers as early as 1867.) The site has been cleared of vegetation and is now open to thousands upon thousands of tourists every day.

How better to appreciate this ancient site than by completely blocking the view?

My advice: get there early and get through quick. The buses start up the mountain at 6:30 and do not stop. Floods of people will arrive behind you, and apparently the main reason they’re there is to take selfies. If you’re interested in seeing the site itself, you’ll constantly be craning you neck over one tour group or another, or some teenager doing fashion poses for her boyfriend, or a mass of senior citizens with their walking canes and selfie sticks. I kid you not – there was one group of elderly tourists following us around who for some reason were dressed just like Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange.

“Out for a bit of the old ultraviolence.”

Our final stop in Peru was the city of Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca. Puno is at the highest elevation we’re going to be on our trip through South America (unless we get to see the Flying Cholitas on the outskirts of La Paz) and we’ve had a hard time breathing given the lack of oxygen. We didn’t go see any ruins, but we did ride out to the floating islands of the Uros people who live on the lake.

The Uros are a very old culture who now live mainly off the tourists who visit their islands. The islands, made from reeds and mud, float on the surface of the lake and each houses four to five families. There were 87 islands in the community we visited. Some were mainly residential while others were geared for the tourist trade with reed hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops. The Uros aren’t entirely without modern conveniences – the first island we visited had solar cells to run electricity to the huts.

Peru has been both beautiful and taxing. It’s too modern to think of as a “developing country” but in many ways it seems to be lagging. We’ve stayed places with wide-screen televisions in every room, but no heating and unreliable water. We’ve gone to big-box stores cloned from (and cleaner than) any American Wal-Mart, but you can’t find a pair of sunglasses or more than one size of Band-Aid to save your life. And don’t get me started on the lack of garbage cans.

Next stop, Copacabana (Bolivia, not the one from the Barry Manilow song). Pretty soon there will be salt flats, the Island of the Sun, and Flying Cholitas.

Things I Forgot to Mention

Parades Everywhere!

Waaay back in Chiclayo I mentioned that one of the things we saw in our mere eight hours there was a random street parade. At the time, we thought it a lucky happenstance. Then there was a 6:00 a.m. procession in Chachapoyas, two days of parades near the university in Trujillo, a parade in the Callao district of Lima, a Festival of the Saints parade in Cusco, and nighttime and daytime parades in Puno, including one to celebrate the anniversary the city’s hospital. Apparently Peruvians will throw a parade at the drop of a hat. Our hostel in Puno was so close to the goings-on that it was like booking a room in the French Quarter without realizing it was Mardi Gras.

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Not Just Any Old Last Supper

In both the Convento de San Francisco in Lima and the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin in Cusco, there are paintings of the Last Supper. These aren’t copies of the Da Vinci Last Supper. The one in Lima is, shall we say, crowded. Apparently Jesus and his Disciples had quite a large wait staff for the event and the meal included South American staples such as chili peppers. In Cusco, the main dish served at the Last Supper was roasted guinea pig. We weren’t allowed to take photos and the painting in Cusco was policed rather heavily, so I’m just going to post these pictures I stole off the Internet and a video from John Cleese and Eric Idle that puts things into perspective.

My Recommended Read for Peru

One thing I’m doing is reading a novel by an author from each country we visit. I completely forgot to update you guys on my book for Peru: Death in the Andes by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. It’s the story of a Peruvian policeman investigating a series of disappearances in a remote village of the Andes, during the height of the communist terrorist organization Shining Path’s reign of terror. It has the structure of a murder mystery with the tension of a horror novel. Read my full review here.

That’s All, Folks!

For those interested, here is the map of our trip through Peru and a picture of Lea with a llama. The next time you hear from me, I’ll be checking in from La Paz.

Nazca: Graffiti of the Gods

When doing research for this trip, Lea found a long-term travel course on the website BootsnAll which suggested that instead of planning a rigid itinerary, one should pick “pillars” for the trip – stops along the way that you know you’re going to hit no matter what. If we were going to Peru then the biggest pillar for me, perhaps even more so than Machu Picchu, was going to see the Nazca Lines.

The Nazca Lines fascinated me all the way back to my school days in the 70s, when UFOlogy and pseudoarchaeology were going through a revival. Even then I never bought the “runways for flying saucers” theory, but the lines were there in the desert, laid out so that they can only be seen from above, by a people without the technology to view their own works of art.

So imagine my surprise when, on the day Lea and I were trekking to the Nazca airport in order to catch a flight and see the lines with our own eyes, I wasn’t even a little excited about it. When I realized this, it bothered me a great deal. What was wrong with me? This was one of the things I’d most wanted to see on this trip. Why was I in such a funk?

The Pan-American Highway ran right through the Lizard, which was unknown at the time.

Lea pointed out the obvious: we’ve been doing some hard, hard traveling ever since we left Loja. The distances are longer, the cities are more confusing. The learning curve for Peru is steep, and it seems to reset itself with each new city we visit. We’d just followed up a seven-hour bus ride and late night arrival by getting lost trying to find the place we were staying. I’d had food poisoning once already (and little did I know would get it again later that very day).

The Monkey and geometric pattern. Except where his tail is partially washed out, it’s all one line.

But thank Apu and the other gods of the Peruvian desert, all my dreariness fell away once I climbed into an eight-seat “flying ceiling fan” of an airplane, took off, and saw the outline of a giant whale sketched in the desert, crisscrossed with perfect geometric lines that had been there for two thousand years.

(Side Note: After viewing the Lines, you should attend the planetarium show at Nazca’s DM Hotel. The cost is S/.20 per person, with shows in French, English, and Spanish. It goes in depth about the possible astronomical significance of the Lines as well as their relationship to nearby sources of water. It also talks about Maria Reiche, the German scientist who devoted her life to studying and preserving the Lines, and who once lived at the hotel that now houses the planetarium. If the sky is clear, the planetarium operator will point out the southern constellations and show different celestial objects through a telescope.)

Speaking of Apu, see that thing behind the Andes that looks like a giant sand dune? It’s a giant sand dune – Cerro Blanco, the Everest of dunes, 2078 meters high.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I left off last week we were still in Lima, though we had moved from the slightly shady port district of Callao to the Centro Historico. This gave us time to wander around the Plaza San Martin, the Plaza de Armas, the Basílica de San Francisco (with museum and catacombs), watch the changing of the guard at the presidential palace, visit the excellent Museum of Peruvian Art, and eat a bucket of Norky’s Fried Chicken.

The Presidential Palace in pink at night.

We also went to Lima’s Chinatown, which had plenty of Chinese shops, iconography, restaurants, and not a single Chinese person that we could identify.

After a week in one place, the longest we’d stayed anywhere since Quito, it was time to move on. We took the afternoon bus to Nazca and took a chance on our accommodations. So far, aside from the two-week homestay that was part of our Spanish class in Quito and our one night at a posh resort in Papallacta, we’d made nearly all of our reservations at various backpackers’ hostels through Booking.com.

We’ve also been using the website Couchsurfing.com to meet people in various cities, just so we could have human conversations that aren’t business transactions. The results have been hit-or-miss: we’ve met some fantastic people who we’d love to stay in touch with and see again, but we’ve been stood up completely twice so far. The main deal with Couchsurfing, though, is that it lets you connect with people who will let you stay in their homes. We hadn’t bit that bullet yet, and one strange guy we met in Trujillo nearly scared us away from the idea. In Nazca we went for it, and we’re glad that we did.

Our host was Hendrie. (Hi, Hendrie!) Hendrie was awesome. He put us up in his house, told us where to get the best seafood in town, haggled with a tour operator to get us a deal on an adventure excursion, and even walked us to the bus station when it was finally time for us to leave. Remember when I said that the learning curve in Peru is steep? If you can get in touch with a guy as generous as Hendrie, everything becomes so much simpler. Experiences like this are why Lea and I plan to host travelers ourselves once we get back to the States.

Now about that adventure tour…

There are several archaeological sites around Nazca in addition to the Lines. We didn’t want to miss out, and a tour would hit several of them at once. Hendrie told us that the tours leave at 2:00 p.m. and if you get there a half hour before you can usually get a discount as they try to fill empty seats. We got one that was going to visit four locations, but we didn’t fully understand at the time what we were signing up for.

We went with a large group of Tahitians in taxis to the edge of town, where two dune buggies were waiting for us. (Say what?) The dune buggies took us off-road on bumpy trails to visit the Nazca aqueducts, an ancient burial site that had been looted by grave robbers (leaving the bones to bake in the sun), and the pyramid complex at Cahuachi.

An ancient Nazca aqueduct, still operational.

Then our drivers took us out into the dunes. “So the dunes are the fourth location?” we wondered. “They’re certainly pretty. I wish they would stop so we could take some pictures.”

That wasn’t the plan. The drivers did stop, but only to let some air out of the tires for better traction. We climbed to a high ridge with our buggy looking out over a pretty damn steep abyss of sand. Lea and I realized what was about to happen when we saw the other dune buggy zip down the cliff.

“No. No no no. No no no no no….”

The other passengers let out a roller coaster scream as our buggy shot over the edge, down the valley, and up the other side. And again. And again. And again. After the third plummet I stopped shouting “No” and just accepted the fact that our buggy was going to roll and we were all going to die.

So here I am, reincarnated as a llama, typing my final blog entry before the farmer comes to shear my wool.

Well, it might have ended that way. Llamas don’t do stupid things like sign up for dune buggy excursions without realizing that if they stick you in a dune buggy it’s for one reason only. As it is, we survived (though our two buggies spent a bit of time helping a third get unstuck from the sand). By the time we headed back for Nazca the sun had set and we barreled along bumpy off-road roads with only the vaguest bit of faith that our driver knew where he was going.

We got back to town in plenty of time to pick up our luggage, say goodbye to Hendrie, eat a dinner of cow’s tongue spaghetti from a street vendor, and get on a fourteen-hour night bus for Cuzco.

With a pound of sand still in our hair, eyes, ears, and teeth.

Trujillo to Lima – ¿Vale la Pena?

It’s been two months since we left on our voyage. Back then, I put up a snarky post in answer to the people who thought we’d lost our minds. Recently though, I’ve had doubts about my ability to hang in there and see the journey through. The last thing I want to do is quit, go back to the U.S., and get a soul-crushing job. On the other hand I have to ask if I’m still enjoying the experience or if I’m sticking it out for the sake of stubbornness.

The thing is, there’s so much left I want to do. Machu Picchu is so close (relativey speaking). I want to see the Bolivian salt flats and the stars from the Atacama Desert. I want to swim in a pool big enough to see from orbit. I want to spend the longest day of the year in Tierra del Fuego. I want to bask on the beach in Uruguay. And I want to write stories, novels, and finish this blog, dammit.

The problem may be that Ecuador was easy from a travel standpoint. Peru, on the other hand, is hard. You wouldn’t think there’d be this much culture shock crossing a simple border – not like walking from Israel to Jordan and back last year, for instance. But I’m telling you, Peru just makes everything difficult.

Por ejemplo, Quito was nice enough to upload their metropolitan bus routes into Google. Lima, whose routes are much more confusing, did not. Everywhere else, the buses have their major stops printed in the front window so you can tell where they’re going as they approach. In Lima, the destinations are printed on the side, so you can’t tell if it’s the right bus to flag down until it’s already passed you by.

And it’s the little things, like the lack of hot running water (probably true everywhere in S.A.) that makes it impossible to really clean pots, plates, and silverware. It’s the fact that we booked an apartment with a kitchen that it turns out has no pots, and no bowls, and a single skillet so small you can only fry one egg at a time. It’s the fact that getting around has become a logistical nightmare.

Lima is a labyrinth with streets that weave and split and merge in horrific traffic scrums. Our home town of Atlanta recently made a list of top ten cities with the worst traffic in the world. I can only assume Lima wasn’t counted because the analysts they sent here are still stuck in gridlock.

The spirits of my ancestors laugh at my feeble attempts to get from one side of town to the other.

One point in Lima’s favor: So far all the places we’ve visited have been overrun with dogs. Lima is full of cats.

I’m typing this from a fourth-floor studio apartment near the historic city center. Someone somewhere in the building has been playing (and badly singing along to) the exact same song over and over again for hours. We spent the last four nights in a very nice hostel in a sketchy part of town, but we haven’t had a chance to explore the museums, cathedrals, and other historic sites. Plus, we need a week off from long-haul bus trips.

We came here from Trujillo, a much more sane (in my mind) city that wasn’t too hard to navigate. Trujillo sits right between the ancient capital cities of the Chimu and Moche cultures, each of which is entirely different from the other, and both are very different from the civilizations up in the Andes. The diversity in art and architecture styles is astounding.

More of Chan Chan with a design that is probably a seabird, but all I see is “sideways rabbit on a pyramid.”

The face of the mountain god at Huaca de la Luna, Moche.

The uncovered exterior of Huaca de la Luna, original paint still intact.

Truth be told though, Lea and I are getting ruined-out. Archaeology is one of the main draws for Peru, to be sure, but we’ve been visiting archaeological sites and museums several times a week for a month, and the ceramics are bleeding into each other at this point. We’ve made reservations for Machu Picchu – a logistical nightmare in itself – but after that we may have to put a moratorium on visiting anything not built in the last hundred years. After all, South America’s got to have something else to offer, right?

Actually, yes.

(Side note to email subscribers: click here to watch the video.)

That is the Peruvian Paso, a horse breed known for its smooth ride and silly walk. The horse show in Trujillo is not to be missed if you’re down there. The program is normally in Spanish, but we happened to crash the party on a day that a Holland America cruise ship booked the event for its English-speaking passengers. We got to enjoy the show, but las turistas from the cruise ship were treated to empanadas and pisco sours. (emoji angry face)

In Lima we’ve spent four days learning how to get around the city, how vitally important it is to ask the bus conductor whether it goes to the stop you need even if it’s listed on the bus itself, and to just accept that you’ll probably have to walk five blocks at the end of your ride in any case. We went all the way out to La Punta, the tip of Lima’s harbor that juts out into the Pacific, in search of an excursion company – to no avail; one was closed and the other’s office wasn’t open to the public. On another day we went all the way to Miraflores (the part of Lima where the rich people live) to buy our train tickets to Machu Picchu – to no avail; the office only accepted credit cards, which we prefer not to carry.

Each of those trips took far, far longer than any bus ride should. The trip from Callao to Miraflores was an hour and a half each way. On the way back, we discovered that Lima must be South America’s Las Vegas from the sheer number of cheesy casinos we passed. All was not lost, though. We were able to sort out the Machu Picchu reservations online (though we still need to find somewhere to print our tickets) and after twelve back-and-forth emails with the excursion company we were able to set sail for Palomino Island to swim with the sea lions!

The technical name for a large group of sea lions is a “poopberg.”

Isla Palomino is a small rock off the coast that is home to a large sea lion colony. It’s an hour and a half by boat from Lima’s harbor, around the large Isla San Lorenzo and the smaller El Frontón with its spectacular swarms of seabirds. The tour’s promotional material shows happy swimmers smiling in the sun surrounded by inquisitive lobos marinos. The truth, dear readers, is that in late September the Humboldt Current is still merrily turning this part of the tropics into an extension of Antarctica. It was cloudy, windy, and cold as Dante’s Inferno.

Didn’t matter. I squeezed into my wetsuit and flippers, pulled on my goggles and snorkel gear, jumped in the water, and headed for the sea lions.

Only a guide and one other passenger were brave enough to join me. The water was too murky for the goggles to do any good and the cold went right through my bones and came out the other side. And the smell – no BBC Planet Earth documentary can ever clue you in to the smell of that many animals in one place, doing all the things that animals do (in the water too). Still, I did it!

And that probably answers the question as to whether I’ve lost my mind.