Well, we have met the rainy season as we travel through Peru. It rains all night most nights but fortunately, it usually stops during the day. The dogs have matted fur but the birds are singing to the tune of Spring. We’re nearing the time to put our truck in storage for a month to travel home to be with our family for the holidays and we’re looking forward to it very much. A word of warning here, this blog is very LOONNGG but I won’t write for awhile.
We’ve done and seen a lot in these past weeks. On our way to the Cusco area, we drove through productive agricultural land and the weathered, indigenous farmers were out plowing their fields and planting corn, strawberries, squash and other vegetables. Occasionally, you might see some oxen or even a tractor, but mainly it is them doing all the back breaking labor. On the roads you see them walking with loads of grasses for their animals, wood for their cooking fires or a baby in tow. We drove beside brown rivers that froth with suds from contaminants and overnourishment as we did in Bolivia. If you don’t protect your rivers……
We started visiting Incan ruin sites in earnest. All of the popular ones you have to buy a combo pass for and then rush around to use it before it expires. We tackled a couple before we met up with Ivan again. We did Pikillaqta and then Tipon which were both very interesting. The way the Incas channeled water in Tipon flowed like a roller coaster and is unique in what we’ve seen. They also seem to know no other way than up. We discovered a stone staircase with huge steps that climbed to the top of a mountain in a somewhat excruciating path that Jon calculated out to be the equivalent to a 138 story building. Needless to say our lungs & legs were shot after that but it was fun to get to the top of something. We can’t help it.
The touristy but cute town of Pisac has some really cool ruins, my favorite after Machu Picchu. We took a cab up to the top, toured the ruins and then we could hike all the way back to our trucks. We met some relatively friendly alpacas along the way that tolerated being touched. I love their cute little faces and they looked so perfect in that ruin scenery. It was a great day and we really liked the lively town. It almost felt midieval to me. In town, the ladies walk around with their cute, decorated alpacas and pose for pictures. I think they are a beautiful animal.
We drove the back way in to the city of Cusco right to the Quinta Lala campground which is an overlanders hub. There’s nothing fancy about it but it is above the city and sort of an oasis in that way. The three of us bought another tourist ticket and walked down to the city which has a few cute streets and a nice plaza but the outskirts are poor and rather unattractive. We walked all over and then hit the grocery store. As we all like to cook and eat well, we find the lack of good food in Peru to be a challenge. Bolivia was no better. You can buy a bag of things you really aren’t excited about and still get home and wonder what’s for dinner. We are looking forward to coming back to the US for a breather and eating some of our favorite things. The funny thing is, we will get better quality food and pay nearly the same for it than we do here. It is not cheap and we are lucky to be able to afford it when others can’t. We visited several museums on our pass that day that were just OK but it was a nice way to cover the streets of Cusco. I was wondering where all the Incan treasures went but I guess they were all taken to other continents!!
Then it was time for Jon & I to start the 4 day Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu. Friends had told us about it and it is easy to do on your own. At first we were going to do a tour for logistics but we’re so glad we changed our mind on that. We like to be independent. We would meet Ivan at Machu Picchu 4 days later and stay a couple of days in Aguas Calientes to get tickets since everything was full online. To get to the trailhead, we had to take a taxi at 4am to catch a minibus for a 4 hour ride. It stopped for a quick breakfast and then we were out on the trail by 8:30. It felt so good to smell the mountain air after being in the city. Clean air really matters to us and it’s something we don’t take for granted. We wish the US didn’t require us to import a 25 year old truck because we would have bought newer and we would pollute less. For this trip, we decided to stay in hostels along the trail which is a common thing to do. We could have a hot shower every day and just worry about our lunches. After a couple of hours, we reached the first one, dropped our packs and hiked up to Humantay Lake which is a beautiful shade of blue. You’re not allowed to swim in it. Along the way, we could see Salkantay mountain glowing white. The little cabins have glass roofs so you can see the stars at night. The food was pretty bad but the staff was very nice.
Day 2 dawned beautiful again and we made our way up to the pass. The scenery was impressive and we love hiking through that stuff. There were plenty of hikers on the trail and burros carrying loads for them. We lingered at the pass taking in the views and knowing that even though the rest of the day was really long, it was at least downhill to the jungle. When all is said and done, the high mountain scenery gives us the biggest buzz. By the end of the day we were in shorts, our legs tired from all the downhill but we were amoung jungle flowers in a cute hostel that had good food and a turkey walking around with all of her chicks.
Day 3 was a doozie, over 16 miles in hot jungle terrain and the last 10km provided 3,000 feet of gain up a steep mountain pass and another Incan set of endless stairs. In the middle of the day, there was a section of dirt road through some drab scenery that we really didn’t enjoy but it improved over the miles and once we got over the pass and saw the panoramic view of Machu Picchu in the distance and sat down in our chairs at the hostel with a beer, we felt like it was all worth it. We had a cute room with an awesome view and little biting flies that left big welts all over our legs. The food was pretty good, we had gotten to know some interesting travelers over the 3 days and we slept well despite a rock hard bed.
Day 4 we would complete the walk to MP. After a steep 3 hours downhill, you end up on quiet train tracks for the last 10km. I actually enjoyed this part because it was mostly just wooded jungle alongside the tracks which only had one train pass. Then as with any great backpacking trip, when you emerge into civilization so to speak, you feel a little taken aback by all the hubbub. Aquas Calientes is the gateway town to MP and since no one is coming back, there is that feeling that you are only a dollar sign to an impressively persistent sales crew for all things food, trinkets, massage and whatever else they can hock. We met up with Ivan and got in line straight away for our deli ticket number and then were instructed to come back at 5pm to buy the entry. There are 1000 tickets per day left for walk-ups. Incan ruins are bug tourist business for Peru and you can feel it. In a game of musical chairs, everyone who didn’t get tickets online, could move through the line from chair to chair until their turn at the window. We had no problem getting 2 circuits for the next day. We met up with Dave & Francine from Big Bertha for dinner who were staying at a hotel nearby and we would also tour the ruins in the afternoon with them the following day.
It was a pretty day and we got an early start getting a bus up to the top before climbing up to Huayna Picchu which was high on our list to do. We were so happy to get the tickets for it. It was really steep but short and the views were really cool. After lunch, we entered the site again to tour the classic section of MP with Dave & Francine on another circuit. Unfortunately, there are no interpretive signs in the whole area. You can get a guide and they drive you nuts asking, but as soon as I would tell them that we were climbing Huayna Picchu, they would quietly walk away! Funny how well that worked. I guess what is most intriguing about the Inca people is that they weren’t here building for very long- something like less than 150 years if I remember right. So the fact that they accomplished all the building that they did is an amazing feat. At the very end of the day, Jon & I walked down the Inca stairway back to town to complete our Macchu Picchu experience. There is a small species of bear that live on those hillsides but we didn’t see any. It had been a long time coming getting here and we were happy to have finally seen the site and as you might imagine, the backpack trip was my favorite part of the whole thing! We had really lucked out with the weather too.
We ran the gauntlet again coming back in to town with all the vendors urging us to eat at their restaurant. That night, we had a great dinner out together. I was hoping that none of us would get sick from anything. You can’t drink the water in Peru without filtering it and you can’t rely on the safety of anything that isn’t cooked. In the truck, everything is bleached, filtered and then even UV sterilized if we’re drinking it and we’re careful washing our produce too. Even then, Pepto is my friend at times. We’re accustomed to this with all the travel we do but it is a pain in the butt at the same time.
Unfortunately, we all had the whole next day to kill until the late afternoon train to Cusco because we didn’t know at the get-go if we’d be able to get the tickets as easily as we did so had built in some buffer. We walked to a butterfly garden to kill time. Finally, 3 pm rolled around and we walked to the train station. Just as Jon & I were getting ready to board, we were told our tickets had not been “verified” so we were sent to the ticket office. Not getting on that train. Apparently, even though we got tickets sent in a separate attachment when booking online that had a seat and a QR code, this is not good enough. But at the ticket desk, we could buy another train ticket for $100 each and have it verified on the spot! Well that makes a lot of sense. There was no choice but to buy another ticket and this time we would be on the same train as Dave & Francine, 2 hours later. So we sat around the train station among some pretty flowers getting eaten up by black flies, then sat with Dave & Francine when they arrived, until it was finally our time to board. Peru Rail’s logo is “making once in a lifetime journeys”. Yup! Once in a lifetime for sure! It’s the world’s slowest train and covers some incredibly ugly scenery once you leave the green beauty of Machu Picchu. Peru has a problem with trash. We see people littering all the time and pass piles of it on the roadsides. The government has spent money on road signs to discourage it, but it will take generations for it to improve is my guess. If there isn’t a good infrastructure to take care of it, then it will end up where it does anyway. And education does help with these things too. We did finally get back to Cusco and our truck and fell into bed.
It was off to Ollantaytambo the next morning to meet up with Ivan to tour one more ruin site – before our pass expired. This is another tourist town with a good vibe and both hillsides have atrractive Incan ruins to look at. There is a nice lot where we could camp where all the minibuses park for the day. Like everywhere around the Sacred Valley, the Incan ruins are a part of the landscape. People live in their walls, take water from the channels for their cattle and themselves, water their fields and in this parking lot, all the minivan drivers wash their vans with it. All day long it is a constant procession with buckets of water to clean up their vans. We liked it here. It is known for hiking trails. Noted.
With 2 weeks left before we were to fly out, we decided to go ahead and drive to the coast with Ivan and Big Bertha to knock that off our list and then we would come back to Cusco while everyone else continued on their separate ways. It would be a lot of driving over some significant mountain passes but we would do it with friends and we wanted to do something significant with the time we had left anyway.
We were headed to the Nazca Lines and then on down to the coast to Paracas which has one of the only attractive parts of coastline left in Peru from what we’ve been told. The Nazca Lines are ancient geometric lines and geoglyphs in the Nazca desert made by a Pre Incan civilization somewhere around 450 AD. Not much else is sure than that. It is a thing to take a flight over them to appreciate their size and what exactly they were meant to be when planes hadn’t come about yet. Flights aren’t too expensive and we could all do it together.
It took 2 1/2 days to drive to Nazca on Peru’s challenging roads. We stopped at a little park with some beautiful rock formations. Many Peruvians drive like they’ve never had a driver’s ed course and like they have a death wish. Between narrow roads, steep curves, speed bumps doubled up in the middle of a rural landscape, trucks carrying all matter of what appears to be just junk and crazy drivers, it isn’t fun to drive here. And to top it off, along the way, our oil pressure started running lower than usual again. While we’d thought it was the oil pressure sensor, it really didn’t fix it in the end. While the numbers still fall within the perimeters of Mercedes, it is a definite change and we’d like to know why.
So after getting to Nazca, we already had it in our minds that the prudent thing was to say goodbye afterward and turn around. Since Ivan is headed back south to wrap up his trip in S America, we knew this would be our final day or two together. Along the way, we met a German couple Marta & Gerhard and they would be joining us for the flight the following day so we went to the airport to make the arrangements.
Once again, you are a dollar sign here. As soon as we pulled into the lot we were approached for the flight. They are pumping tourists through here like crazy. After paying for parking, 2 airport fees and for the flight, we were then told we would be being split up based on weight into separate planes. Ivan had to talk to the guys to say that we wanted to fly together. In the end, we were split up into 2 planes and it was so rushed that Marta didn’t even have her seatbelt on and her headphones on before we were taking off! The headphones didn’t work so we could barely hear the explanations for what we were seeing. Some people were nauseous and we were all in silence not having mics. The lines were interesting enough but overall, the experience wasn’t too special and it didn’t matter to the staff because they were just trying to hurry back to get the next load of payers. We have so much more fun flying with Mark & Anne where we feel safe and can talk to each other!
We said goodbye to the gang including Ivan and headed off to re-do the drive that we’d just done hoping the truck would be OK. After approaching I think 4 years traveling together and countless cool things, it felt oddly empty knowing that we wouldn’t be traveling with Ivan for the forseeable future. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, from high summits to the depths of the sea, we have been through thick & thin, good times & bad, sickness & health and we’ve seen Ivan with long hair & short hair, beard & no beard and glasses & no glasses! Hahah. We have enough close friends that we stay in touch with to know that we will be together again because we will make it happen. Even so, we felt the loss.
On the drive back, we passed two 18 wheelers on their sides which is no surprise really, but the timing of it was creepy. We found a campspot that was very beautiful, but had a pile of charred llama carcasses in the field and it is one of those things where you just don’t want to know. We camped the following night at the same campground that we’d all stayed at a few nights before and the pet llama wanted a hug from me one minute and then spit some mist on me right after but I forgave her.
The oil pressure remained on the low side of normal and Jon had set up a mechanic in Cuzco for 2 days later to replace the oil pump since it was worth a try.
We had to get up early the next morning to beat road construction closures and all was going well that day for the last push to the Cusco area when all of a sudden we came to a halt in a small town along the way. It was a road blockade because the locals don’t like the Peruvian president. While this happens in Ecuador and Bolivia, we didn’t know it happened in Peru. We were feeling strung out already and nervous and a road blockage was not what we needed. A long line of buses carrying tourists, trucks, cars and locals formed at the line of dirt piles and other refuse strewn across the road. We just sat in the truck cab and waited and talked with the bus drivers. While no one was killed like the rush on the US Capitol, it is that same small thinking that can get dangerous in a hurry. We felt uneasy and were glad when the police came and opened the blockade after 2 1/2 hours rather than the 6 we were originally told.
The rest of the drive was uneventful and we even got through the police checkpoints without being stopped.
We camped on the square in the little town of Maras to hike to the Salineras de Maras salt pans the next day. These pans are a UNESCO site and are of Incan invention by channeling salty water from a hot spring into a hillside full of constructed salt pans. Still used to procure salt mainly for cattle salt licks, it is in a neat mountain setting and a decent walk through farm fields to get there. We were excited to have a day to rest and get some exercise. We had planned to sleep in a little but that wasn’t meant to be when the garbage truck (this was a progressive town) came to park behind us with the speaker blasting at 5am. Yup, 5am. Bring out your dead! I mean trash…..
Early the next morning, it was off to the mechanic in rain. Pulling in to the muddy shop area was like nothing we’d ever seen as it was a toxic environmental disaster. There were buckets of oil overflowing in the raindrops, the ground was saturated in it and the smell burned our noses. Efram, the owner of the shop was a friendly guy and really seemed to know his stuff having worked in a Mercedes shop for 20 years. He made sense and agreed that changing the oil pump could be a safe way to troubleshoot or even fix the problem. Within an hour, there were 3 mechanics under our truck working on it. They were vey professional and careful with the pieces which seemed ironic given the surroundings. There were chickens around the place and a rooster standing there, covered in black oil, still crowing. Out comes one of the young mechanics, covered in oil too, with a smile full of braces. It struck Jon because here is this young guy trying to better himself with braces, working in this really unheathy environment crawling around under our truck for hardly any money and with barely any tools. You wouldn’t call a Peruvian’s life soft in any way that is for sure.
At the end of the day, the work was done and we thanked everyone before scrurrying back up into the hills. Unfortunately, the new pump didn’t fix our issue but Jon will come back from the US with a mechanical pressure sensor, new wiring, a new guage and the parts for a light rebuild if nothing else shows. The truck is running so well and tackles the hills so well that it is hard to know if there is a definite problem or not because it is within the perimeters of what Mercedes says is OK but why did it change? Even so, we also got new sway bar bushings put in, a new rear oil seal put in, fresh oil & filter yet again and a new oil pan gasket.
We moved back to Ollantaytambo to do some hiking for which there are some really cool spots here. Along the way, we pass through the villages where locals wave yellow bags tied on a stick if they’re selling bread or red plastic bags if they have an eatery. Then there are bbq’d cuys (guinea pigs) on sticks at every shop you look at because these are a huge thing here. We haven’t mustered the appetite and don’t think we will. We did 2 full days hiking up into the mountains above the rough & noise which was great. Peru has got some beautiful mountains for sure. This town has tourism and is cute and lively. Now we will head to Cusco to get ready to go.
For myself, I think it’s good to get out from behind the “secure wall” of a first world country to see how different life can be in another place that in some ways is less fortunate. It takes a lot to bring a developing country into the first world. It takes a lot to preserve what’s been accomplished in a first world country. It takes perspective to know the difference. While it can be overwhelming at times, experiencing a less fortunate place breeds empathy. An appreciation of all that is rather than what isn’t. I might be getting older, but I’m still growing. I wish other people from my home country would do the same. Because it doesn’t feel like home anymore.
