Our 3^rd morning in Cusco and I’ve been awake since 5 o’clock this morning when I was awoken by… honestly, I’m not really sure by what. For a building in an earthquake zone where temperatures drop below freezing in winter, the walls (and for that matter, the windows and floors) provide surprisingly little insulation against the myriad sounds of people coming and going, dogs barking, neighbouring guests vomiting, taxis reversing (they beep when they reverse. WHY?!?! They don’t have blind spots), American tourists discussing their impending hangovers and music coming from the hostel lobby downstairs.

The last of these is certainly the least intrusive as Gonzalo, the Hostel owner (I assume he’s the hostel owner, he is here 24/7, either using the computer behind reception or chilling in his little room next to the lobby playing guitar and singing away to himself) has surprisingly good taste in music. From when breakfast starts at 6:30 until about 10:30 at night, there’s a steady stream of 20^th century pop-rock, prog rock and blues playing at a perfectly non-intrusive levels throughout the communal areas of the hostel. We’ve had Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Credence Clearwater, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Neil Young, The La’s even some Coldplay to keep Katy happy, all peppered with the occasional interruption by enthusiastic Spanish language adverts for YouTube premium.

The exception to this is in the morning, where Gonzalo’s sole employee gets control of the music whist she puts on breakfast for the guests and plays Peruvian pan pipe instrumental covers of late 20^th and early 21^st century pop music. Our first morning here, waking up with splitting headaches from altitude sickness, we were greeted by the soft tones of George Michael, Madonna and the theme from Titanic. You quickly learn to take life as it comes in Peru.

The hostel itself is a quaint and quirky affair with real character. There’re about 10 rooms or so, some private, some shared dorms spread across a pair of two-storey covered courtyards. Each courtyard is uniquely decorated with bright paintings and artwork, colourful hanging ornaments, plants growing from flowerbeds sunk into the corners of the rooms and a large skylight made with a patchwork of coloured glass allowing in plenty of natural light. The first and larger of these two serves as the reception and ‘restaurant’ (in the loosest sense of the word) area with a staircase at the back splitting off up either side. One side leads across a short landing to our room (private, of course, we didn’t spend the last 18 months being antisocial in order to socialise now) whilst the other side snakes its way around the first courtyard, through a little alcove and into the second. The second courtyard is more of, what I believe the cool kids refer to as a ‘chill-out’ room; with sofas, arm chairs, a bookcase full of books and games and an industrial clothes dryer still in its original packaging placed in front of the book case preventing easy perusal of the available literature. I guess that’s what you get for travelling in the off season; world class tourist attractions all to yourselves, and industrial machinery in the middle of your hostel.

Getting to Cusco proved to be a relatively smooth affair, peppered with the usual minor disruptions that we’ve found are pretty much par for the course in this part of the world. After our pleasant (if slightly unnerving) journey with Walter of Gringo Taxis on our first night in Peru, we decided to again entrust him with our transport to the airport. ‘We didn’t get mugged or kidnapped’ we enthusiastically reported to him. ‘of course, not’ he said, ‘this is San Isidro, nothing happens here’ (he could have told us that on our first night I thought, but I decided to be British about it and let it slide). The journey to the airport was about 45 minutes, delayed somewhat by the sporadic removal of manhole covers along the main highway. Apparently during the night, gangs come up from the poorer districts of Lima with pickaxes and get to work digging out the manhole covers, drain covers and anything else they can prize away from the road, taking them off to be sold as scrap. ‘It’s funny for the first few months, but after a while it just gets annoying’ Walter bemoans. It is funny to us too, but you can’t help but sympathise with someone trying to make a living around these inconveniences. Walter is a genuine, sincere and very well meaning (if slightly glass-half-empty) kind of guy. Should you ever find yourself in Lima, we can’t recommend his services enough.

We arrived at Lima airport a good three and a half hours ahead of our flight to Cusco. Check-in was refreshingly straight forward, no queues, no confusion, no unexpected administration issues, just an extremely friendly and efficient check-in attendant. We quickly made our way through security and waited for our gate to be called. At this time, we noticed that we’d been assigned seats 2A and 2C for the flight and, after a bit of research using the intermittent airport wi-fi we worked out that we’d been given a free upgrade to business class. Nice!

Lima Airport is a bit of a microcosm for the country as a whole; it’s chaotic, bustling, nothing is signposted particularly well, nobody really seems to know what’s going on, yet everything tends to end up where it should be in the end and more-or-less on time. After initially being assigned one gate, the gate was changed after the plane still occupying that gate was delayed. After being assigned a second gate the departure gate was changed again to one that would require being bussed out on to the airfield. At each gate; without the plane being present, without the gate being opened or boarding being called, with no buses yet ready to take anybody to the plane (including the flight crew and cabin crew, who had also joined us for this game of musical gates around the Airport and were now hanging around by the doors waiting to be taken to the plane) and despite each ticket having a boarding group printed on it, the majority of the Peruvians promptly formed a queue at the boarding desk, with multiple feeder queues jostling to join the main queue. Katy and I sat to one side in bemusement, waiting patiently for boarding group A to be called, at which point we sauntered up to the front skipping the wholly unnecessary queue.

The flight from Lima to Cusco was just over an hour, it wasn’t the most comfortable of flights as the Andes throw up quite a bit of turbulence, but the descent in to Cusco was spectacular, gliding through the mountains adjacent to Cusco before banking hard left swooping down on to the runway. The high altitude and the resulting thinner air has the effect of requiring the planes to have much faster landing and take-off speeds than at sea level and so the runway here is much longer than usual. Even so, touching down at such a high speed and decelerating for what felt like an eternity, you can’t help but feel like the plane’s going to run out of runway.

Back to this morning though, today is the first day since arriving in Cusco that I’ve felt more or less Human. I’ve always been relatively fortunate to be in generally good health; I don’t get sick all that often, I have very few allergies, I don’t burn too easily, and I have a pretty solid stomach that allows me to eat near enough anything. As such, I’ve often taken a relatively cavalier attitude to general health advice and so faced with the general advice about the effects of altitude in Cusco my attitude was mainly ‘yeah yeah, I’ll be fine’.

I was not fine.

For the best part of 36 hours I was completely out of commission, and Katy wasn’t faring much better. Altitude sickness is like having a relentless hangover on Jupiter. Your head pulses relentlessly, you’re disorientated, nauseous and something as simple as a walk down the street takes ages as every limb feels like it is weighed down by a ton of bricks. Sufficed to say, our first day in Cusco was uneventful, consisting mainly of intermittent sleep and the consumption of whatever painkillers Katy had had the good sense to bring. Most of the advice for dealing with Altitude sickness simply reads ‘try returning to a lower altitude’. Helpful. Really helpful.

We briefly ventured out for a coffee and an Empanada (they look reassuringly like Cornish pasties and at the time that familiarity was very comforting) at a small coffee shop about 150 meters down the road. Returning to our hostel up a gradual incline took a good 15 minutes or so and we promptly collapsed into bed and fell asleep again.

That evening, drugged up and delirious but semi refreshed, we ventured out again to the highly rated ‘Hanz Homemade Craft Beer’ which, despite its name, is in fact a restaurant. Hanz’s is a cosy little place with just 4 tables seating at most 16 people; we were lucky to arrive and get a table when we did as they had to turn away several potential customers whilst we were there. One wonders what it must be like during the peak season. We’d later learn that this small size is quite normal in the old town, where UNESCO protection prevents any significant modifications to the buildings to create more space and so the numerous coffee shops, restaurants and mini-markets just work with what they have. This has its advantages however; every restaurant we’ve been to so far has had a very different, yet homely and personal vibe to it and the service is, as you’d expect with so few tables to cater for, very attentive and the food is invariably cooked from fresh and very timely.

Hanz’s menu consists of a solid selection of Peruvian and South-American Japanese fusion dishes (This combination is quite a common and popular one it turns out, finding its roots in the waves of Japanese migration at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries) as well as a selection of Craft beers brewed on site (hence the name). We tried the free samples presented to us but decided any more than that was a bad idea until we stopped feeling like we had hangovers already. A delicious and beautifully presented meal of soup, savoury crepes, cheesy lentil croquette like things and wanton like things later, we made our way back to the hostel along a route Google Maps reckoned should have taken us about 7 minutes to do. Google Maps needs an Altitude sickness mode, or at the very least a ‘stop taunting me’ mode.

 

A passable night’s sleep later and we wandered in to the centre of Cusco for the first time to do our favourite activity in every new city we go to; a walking tour! Elvis, our tour guide from Lima, had informed us at the end of his tour that his brother Richard did a tour under the same name in Cusco, so we quickly sought him out amongst the sea of street vendors trying to sell us massages, tours to Machu Picchu, bus trips to undisclosed locations, definitely not fake Alpaca jumpers, sunglasses (whilst we were wearing, and thus clearly not in the market for them) and browsers full of identical paintings they all claim to have painted. We weren’t totally sure that Elvis and Richard were actual brothers or just ‘brothers’, but it turns out they are actual brothers who used to work together on cruise ships. Richard shares his brother’s dry wit and propensity to test his tour group on their knowledge retention, frequently asking us to recall factoids he’d told us earlier in the tour (sometimes only 30 seconds earlier) with embarrassingly poor results. Richard and Elvis might be the most prominent examples of this, but it’s a trend we’ve noticed with all our Peruvian tour guides; they like to know that you’re taking in what they’re saying. We half expect that one day one of them will lead us into a classroom at the end of the tour and make us sit an exam.

Richard leads us through the sights of this small city centre, taking us through the botanical gardens, down through the San Pedro market (designed by Gustave Eiffel. Not as impressive as some of his other structures, unsurprisingly, this isn’t the one he chose to carry his name) where he talks to us about the unique fruits available (WE DID THE FOOD TOUR, WE KNOW THESE ONES!! TEST US ON THESE RICHARD!!) and also tells us about the other foods available in the market, helpfully pointing out all the food stuffs that will ensure we have a very unpleasant night on the toilet. He also talks us through the production of Pisco and Pisco Sour, Peru’s national drink, adding that ‘every Peruvian was conceived after a Pisco Sour’.

Our last stop takes us down to the only Inca ruins in the city proper. Before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, Cusco was the capital of the Inca Empire, seated at the crossroads of it’s 4 territories that stretched, at its height, from Colombia through Ecuador, Peru and deep in to Chile. Pre-Colombian Cusco was filled with palaces, temples and shrines, with the city itself laid out in the shape of a puma. Sadly, much of the historic city was destroyed during the Spanish conquest of Peru, the palaces and temples torn down to make way for churches and colonial buildings.

 

Much of the foundations of the Inca buildings can still be seen however; in the old town the bases of many of the buildings are original Inca walls (this includes a 12-sided stone which, for some reason, is a tourist attraction and has become something of a nuisance to us as it is on the most direct path from our hostel to the old town, meaning we have to barge through the gaggle of gaping tourists milling about it taking photos and blocking the path) or are, at least, made from stones repurposed Inca buildings. Richard dryly observes that it was a good thing that the Spanish never found Machu Picchu, as they probably would have built a church on top of it.

Right in the centre of Cusco however, the remains of an Incan palace not unearthed until the 1950’s after a major earthquake can be found. The remaining walls are only a few feet high, but without more modern buildings placed on top of it, the layout of the palace is clear, and it gives at least a glimpse of what this city must have been like in its heyday. Richard takes us down to another part of the ruins and talks us through the construction techniques the Incas used to cut the stones and build the temples and how they made them resistant to earthquakes. Finally, he leads us through a small colonial courtyard and in to a shop. He insists that this is because local laws prevent him taking payment in the streets, but given how friendly he is with the shop owner and the number of vendors on the streets touting their wares, I feel this might be a cunning ploy. No matter though, Katy has made friends with a local dog that has followed us around for the last hour.

Two and a half hours walking around in the sun whilst still acclimatising to the altitude is quite enough though, so we again fight our way through offers of massages, bus rides to nowhere and re-produced artwork back to our hostel to enjoy a bit of down time in the ‘chill-out’ room. Missing western food a bit, we settle on the idea of having Pizza for dinner and head to a little pizzeria just around the corner.

The restaurant again is a tiny affair, a single room with 4 tables leading straight on to the kitchen, giving us a good view of our food being prepared. I decide that Altitude sickness, now well subsided, is not going to stop me enjoying a beer. I order a medium (which turns out to be more than a pint, glad I didn’t get a large) and the server pops next door to buy one from the mini market.  The walls feature a mixture of small utensils and farming apparatus and several handwritten customer reviews, each with a small passport picture, presumably of the reviewer. On closer inspection however, despite them being in different languages and with different dates, we notice that several of the reviews feature the same passport picture. Shenanigans I say!

We’re the only customers in this evening, and the staff give the distinct impression that they’d rather be elsewhere, at one point both going off out front to sit in the street leaving us by ourselves in the restaurant. After our meal they don’t ask if we want any further drinks or deserts, they just give us the bill unprompted. Ok, hint taken. To be fair, we were sitting there saying ‘Potato’ in stupid voices for a good 10 minutes beforehand. The food was, however, bloody fantastic, so I guess that’s the main thing.

Anyway, that’s quite enough for now, there’s lots to do in and around Cusco and we’ve decided we’re going to spend the next few weeks here psyching ourselves up for our trek up to Machu Picchu.

So long for now.

Monday. Sitting in our newest accommodation – a hostel named Pisko & Soul – and they’ve been kind enough to throw a big bash just around the corner complete with marching band and fireworks to celebrate our arrival into Cusco. Dave also noted they’re playing Pink Floyd downstairs and was immediately set at ease (he’s easily pleased). Cusco sits at an altitude of around 3400m above sea level. That’s higher than Ben Nevis…stacked on top of Snowdon…with another Snowdon on top. Our taxi driver was kind enough to carry my bag to the hostel, Dave had to carry his own (yay sexism!), up a large flight of steps which, when you’re still adjusting to the altitude with a 14kg bag on your back is no easy task, though our taxi driver nimbly ascended and made us look like complete gringos by the time we reached the top. Heads spinning and legs wobbling, we collapsed into our room. At check-in we were given a helpful map and directed to Jack’s Café or as Gonzalo helpfully added (after successfully averting a gas fire in the kitchen), ‘The Gringo Restaurant’. We’ll be heading there later for a bite to eat so we’ll see how it is. (it was great, huuuuuge portions, thanks Papa Gent for the tip off!)

When we last left off we were still in Lima so perhaps I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s fill in the gaps.

 

Lima is big. Lima is really really big. Did we mention that? Coming from little Bath to this sprawling Metropolis was really quite daunting for country mice like us. However, following the success of our free walking tour around the old town the previous day, we decided to splurge a little and spent around £50-£60 for the both of us to go on a food walk tour around the city. With Walter’s words of wisdom regarding traveller’s stomach stuck firmly in our heads, we wandered off down to Miraflores once again to meet our tour guide. Well, I say that, but turns out we went to the old meeting point. A puzzled woman in a bike shop called our guide for us. We’ve very quickly come to learn that the motto for Peru might as well be “meh!”. Not in a callous or uncaring way but just in a “that’s the way it is” sort of way. I would like to point out as well that both the website and the email confirmation we received had the ‘old meeting point’ on them. Ho hum. Having located our tour guide Antonio we met up with 2 Cassies from Canada who had arrived in the city that morning and who I suspect were slightly terrified at the idea of spending the following 4 hours with two slightly eccentric Brits. Nevertheless, we continued onto our first destination where we were presented with a fish broth with half a crab. There were also tentacles. With little suckers on them. Dave managed to persuade me to eat one, “it’s just like calamari!”. It was not just like calamari. It was not just like calamari at all.

Our second stop took us to a little botiga where we sampled Inca Kola for the second time. It still tasted like Irn Bru. Cassie 1 was not keen on Inca Kola and could not finish it. We soon discovered that the Cassies were really only the tour for the ceviche and decided quite soon on that we probably weren’t going to be penpals, but they were nice enough. We stopped at various places around the city, sampling the local delicacies and finished up in a chocolate museum with a nice bowl of ice cream. Along the way we visited a fruit market where we tried all sorts of things neither of us had either seen or heard of before. My favourite was the Guanabana which google tells me is Soursop though I am none the wiser either way. It tastes like strawberry-pear-banana with the texture of a stringy ripe pear. It was great to dig a little deeper and see the “real” side of Lima and to experience a slice of what life is like for regular Limans rather than the polished Westernised surface. There’s something about seeing a Starbucks every few blocks over here that is particularly jarring. Why would you drink Starbucks coffee in Peru? Anyway I’m getting off topic slightly.

The midday sun in Lima is brutal. It’s easy to forget that you’re in the middle of the desert with the beautiful sea views and the lush vegetation around the city. The sweat dripping off your forehead after 10 minutes of walking however, quickly snaps you back into realising you haven’t applied sun cream in 4 hours and now look like a very shiny tomato. There are advertisements for factor 80 and factor 100 sun cream on the billboards around the city meaning our measly factor 50 felt somewhat inadequate, but we managed to escape relatively sun burn free. A particularly good method we found of avoiding the sun was the Parque El Olivar, around a 5 minute walk from our little studio. It’s a bird watchers paradise with hundreds of olive trees, many over 400 years old. The story goes that Antonia de Rivera brought the first of these olive plants over from Sevilla in 1560, of which 3 survived and thrived in the rich Lima soil. By the time Peru won its independence in 1821, there were around 3000 olive trees in the park. However, as a parting gesture from our Spanish comrades to their former colony, the park was all but destroyed. You can see some of the damage on some of the older trees but thankfully the park has flourished and provides ample coverage for two very sleepy, very hot Brits in need of a good lie down and somewhere to read a book. The park is also home to a rather impressive array of birds. We saw Long-tailed Mockingbirds (affectionally referred to as Wagpies – wagtail + magpie – before we knew what they were), Saffron Finches, Vermillion Flycatchers, Blue and Black swallows, West Peruvian doves, Eared doves, Canary-winged Parakeets, Shiny Cowbirds, Blue-grey Tanagers, Peruvian Sheartail and Amazillia Hummingbirds. I was very excited to see the birds, Dave read his book, looking up every now and then to miss a hummingbird I was trying to point out to him. The Wagtails do an exceptionally good rendition of both a car alarm and a car being unlocked, something we came to realise after wondering why our neighbours around San Isidro seemed to be obsessed with both locking and then subsequently setting off the car alarms in their own cars…

Our final full day in Lima we joined another walking tour, this time of the bohemian Barranco district. We had actually met the tour guide the day before while waiting at the ‘old meeting point’ where he bounded up to us and immediately won me over by stating “sorry to interrupt you but would you like to come on a free walking tour?”. He clearly had a very good grasp of the English language. We told him that unfortunately we had plans for that day but we’d be back in the morning and indeed we were! We left our little studio flat and once again headed for Miraflores. We reached the main road we’d used several times on our trip to find the whole thing completely empty. To put into perspective just how busy this road had been the day before, think about when Bath closes the Lower Bristol Road for the Half Marathon, except apparently they do it every Sunday morning until about 1pm, leaving the road for the exclusive use of cyclists, dog walkers, and a few motorbikes who weren’t going to let a silly thing like rules get in the way of where they wanted to get to. It was actually really pleasant and we decided it was a really good idea as there were lots of people out exercising, even jogging – madness in the heat – and made our penultimate walk down Avenue Irequipa a very pleasurable one without all the honking and fumes from the previous days.

Anyway, back to the tour…

Barranco is full of artisanal shops, huge painted murals and public servants with a healthy Peruvian disregard for health and safety. Our tour guide this time was an exuberant chap called Alejandro who we suspect moonlights as a Will Smith impersonator. After joining him and a few others we hopped on one of the scary local buses down to Barranco to join some others. We were curious to find out about how the local buses work as they’re very cheap (between 1 Sol and 2 Soles depending on how far you want to go) so eagerly asked Alejandro to explain. It’s all done by colours apparently. There are no numbers on the buses, you just have to know which painted bus goes to which district. The bus from Miraflores to Barranco was the red, white, and green bus, ‘like Italy!’ he cheerily pointed out. As to where you can pick up the bus from, it seems to be a case of sticking your hand out to get the driver’s attention and they’ll pretty much stop anywhere. It’s a system that just seems to work somehow but needless to say, I don’t think we’ll be using it upon our return visit. Will Sm-Alejandro led a group of 10 or so of us around Barranco, pointing out various murals, explaining the history of the area and leading us into some spectacular art galleries. One artist caught our eye in particular and goes by the name of Jade Rivera, you can check out his work here http://jadeuno.com . We were led via another gallery to a roof top terrace with, yep, you guessed it, more cats. I use the word terrace as loosely as possible, it was more a mish-mash of various chairs and floorboards. Alejandro explained that if you bring something for the terrace, you can get cheaper drinks and proceeded to enthusiastically point out two chairs he had brought from his Grandfather’s house. Suspicions regarding the consent of his Grandfather regarding the acquisition of said chairs were quickly eschewed as I seemed to be the only one phased by the fact that you could feel the floor move beneath you and I suspect if I had not already shed a few pounds on our trip already, the whole thing might have collapsed. We quickly moved on, all the while Alejandro explained why you shouldn’t eat/touch/drink/go near various plants as they’ll get you high. One suspects he’s the type of chap that knows this from first-hand experience. The final leg of our tour took us along the seafront once again, giving us another look at the Service Station and the Peruvian military playing with their toys. A fire engine had stopped just ahead and was spraying water from the hose, much to the amusement of the local children and to the benefit of our very hot tour group. That is until we saw the power lines overhead and decided that we should probably move on. Electrocution was not on the list of activities for the walking tour it seemed, so we carried on. Approaching our final destination, Alejandro was keen to point out a sign above our heads (pic below) meaning that if you stand in one place too long along this road, you’re going to be leaving with a sticky white avian souvenir. It’s fascinating that they have the foresight to put up signs to warn you of bird poop but spraying water near electric cables or closing a whole street every Sunday morning is also just as normal. We quickly moved on. Once again we finished up at an ice cream parlour where, with our new expertise of Peruvian fruit ready to be put to use, we ordered a Guanabana cone and an Aguaymanto cone. Delicious.

After the tour we once again hopped back onto the Italy colour bus and took a slow stroll back to the room. Back at the flat and musing over our time here, we decided that Lima had grown on us since our first day and being told we were going to be mugged and murdered at every street corner. While we were certainly looking forward to getting to Cusco and its more tolerable temperatures, our time in Lima had, on the whole, been a pleasant one. Our last evening was spent lounging about with the fan, watching Los Simpson in VOST on the Spanish TV. I’m still not quite sure why they’re The Simpson and not The SimponS in Spanish. Some things are better left unsolved. Onwards to Cusco then!

2 and a half days in Lima. Katy’s having a little siesta (contrary to popular opinion, I do sometimes do things other than sleep, writing snarky comments on Dave’s blog posts for example…), and I’m on the laptop looking at things to do and marvelling at how bloody big this city is and how long it takes to get anywhere (public transport here is… well, it is both transport, and public, so I guess it does technically exist, but it consists of one very well organised and well run mass transit bus line, and then a myriad of local buses whose routes are indecipherable, unlicensed buses pretending to be buses that are equally indecipherable, licensed taxis which are fine, but pricey, and unlicensed taxis masquerading as licensed taxis, which are also pricey, and may take you off for a very expensive and unwanted adventure involving an ATM machine). I don’t really do siestas, but it’s a skill I may have to learn as it really is just too hot to do anything during the middle of the day except stagger from shady place to shady place sweating the contents of the Thames. The sun is directly overhead at midday this time of year, and that makes shade hard to come by as only buildings with covered exteriors or awnings provide any shade. Annoyingly, those are not as readily available as you might suspect for a city in a near permanent heatwave. The Peruvians themselves carry on in jackets and long trousers of course. I suspect they are just trying to rub our noses in it.

We’ve taken it pretty easy these first few days, acclimatising to the heat, working off the jet-lag, getting to know our local area and breaking in our limited (very limited in my case) knowledge of Spanish. We’re in an area called San Isidro, just to the north of the well-known upmarket touristy (and hence expensive and full of pushy street vendors) area of Miraflores, which is about a half hour walk from here. San Isidro itself is home to many western businesses and Embassies. G4S and PWC have big shiny buildings up the road and the French and Cuban Embassies are just around the corner.

This is a very clean and well-maintained area of the city, according to our friendly American taxi driver there are only rich people and poor people in Lima and there isn’t really a middle class, so I guess that means we are in the rich area. Gardens are well tended, cars are clean and have their bumpers intact, there’s a big tanker that drives around with a man on the roof hosing down the trees and shrubbery that line the roads, the fences are high, the windows are adorned with thick steel bars, and the big plush western buildings have armed guards. (We have also discovered that there’s the Peruvian equivalent of an ice cream van, ((much like the ones that play music when they have run out of ice cream…)) which is, in essence, a bloke on a bike riding round with one of those paper party horns, tooting on it to signal his presence – wonderful.)

Yes, this is definitely the rich area.

Our first morning here, despite finally getting in at about 1:30 am, we slept until 6:30am. I looked at my phone, Katy was awake as well, we both looked at each other with a mutual recognition of the others disorientation. It was dark outside, maybe we had slept through a whole day? We certainly were tired enough. But no, that was all we’d had, 4 hours sleep.

We overruled our body-clocks and went back to sleep, waking up again at the much more reasonable 10:30am. Our converted garage has frosted glass doors in loose fitting panes allowing us to hear all but see nothing of what is going on outside. From our door is a short gravel driveway leading straight on to a (relatively) quite residential street seemingly used as a rat run for local emergency services. Before setting foot outside on our first morning here, we had flashing lights and sirens blaring past and could hear the beeping, shouting and general commotion of what we would later find out to be the normal sounds of a typical Lima street, but at the time, after our friendly American Taxi driver’s warnings of all the scary places not go, put us on edge about venturing out at all.

Hunger got the better of us however, so after a trip to the safe familiarity of a western style supermarket to get some pastries, we set off in the direction of John F Kennedy Park in Miraflores (Why is it called JFK park you are probably wondering? Well yes we were too. According to our tour guide, he never came to Lima, they were just quite sad when he was shot so naturally decided to name a park full of cats after him…) to see something that would make us feel right at home. Cats! Park Kennedy is home to a clowder (and yes, I did just google ‘collective noun for cats’) of semi-domesticated felines. Semi domesticated as in they’ll approach you looking for food and will let you stroke them right up until the moment they realise you don’t have any food, at which point you’ll get biffed. Nobody really knows why they are there, but there have been cats in Kennedy park for years and now it’s just a thing that is. A local charity provides food and basic veterinary services for them, but beyond that they just roam around lounging in the flower beds.

Our first interaction with some locals took place in Kennedy Park, whilst making the most of limited available of shade and guzzling our own body weight in lukewarm water, two Peruvian women strolled over and struck up a conversation with us is near perfect English. We got chatting about home and travelling and good places to visit in Lima, one of them had visited England before and so we compared notes on places we’d both been. A very pleasant interaction which was rounded off by the handing over of Jehovah’s Witness literature. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

Time to move on.

Quick aside, as Katy has now woken up and asked me to mention it, we have been taking pictures and would be uploading some to put in to our blog, but the internet connection here is exceptionally slow. Consistent, but slow. Think late 90’s ISDN speeds. Katy is optimistic that we will be able to get a better connection which allows us to upload our pictures in Cusco (our next stop) but as we are currently in a rich neighbourhood of a capital city of more than 9 million people, I am somewhat more sceptical that the internet will be any better in a remote city in the Andes. But we’ll see. (um, excuse me, the logic in my lunacy is that many of the hostels in Cusco boast about the availability of Netflix, hence my assumption regarding internet speeds, so there nerh!)

About a 15-minute walk down from Kennedy Park is the sea front, and for the first time in either of lives a view of the Pacific Ocean. Lima is a coastal city, built several hundred feet up on top of volcanic cliffs with only a thin strip of beaches and a 3-lane highway below. All along the cliff-tops is a very pleasant board-walk with musicians, artists, para-gliders, well-tended parks (we’re still in the rich area), posers using the street gym furniture and drug dealers (all of whom seem to make a beeline for me, I can’t think why). We’re going to keep a tally of how many times we get offered drugs whilst in south America. So far I’ve been offered cocaine and marijuana 5 times each. ‘No drugs please, we’re English’ works as a dismissal as it puts them off just long enough whilst they try to work out what I said to allow us to carry on our way.

 

Whilst walking the board-walk, a fighter jet from the local airbase was blasting past the cliff-tops performing banked turns and barrel rolls, firing up the afterburners with each pass in order to scare the shit out of the birds and set off multiple car alarms on the street behind us. According to a local called ‘Tupac’ (I suspect this to be his street alias) the military were demonstrating their might in order to make the Americans and the Russians think twice before getting involved in the crisis in Venezuela. Sadly, I doubt this lone fighter and the couple of helicopters we saw later would give them much pause.

After being strong-armed in to buying overpriced wrist ornaments from Tupac (my fault – quite! Dave has a terrible habit of being POLITE to people. It’s very British and I’m trying to get it out of him. A more gallic shrug is certainly more applicable in these situations) we carried on down the board-walk to Larcomar Mall, a ‘highlight’ of Lima’s tourist offerings where we were greeted by a lovely statue of Paddington gifted by the British Embassy just across the street (and designed by Stephen Fry!). Larcomar Mall’s marketing photos make it look like Tracey Island, but it is essentially a motorway service station rammed into the side of a cliff complete with motorway service station prices. It’s fleshed out with every western high-street brand you can name and even features a food hall serving well known delicacies such as the Family Bucket (you are a family bucket) and the Stuffed Crust. It was awful. Katy and I sat drinking overpriced Mango Frappe’s in a sub-par Costa clone and felt thoroughly miserable having conformed to the tourist stereotype so blatantly. We took advantage of the clean toilets with their ample supply of loo roll and promptly left, returning to our converted garage via the supermarket to get a little something for dinner and made plans to move on to Cusco the following week. We then climbed in to bed for a long, hot and sweaty night of good hard sleeping.

Day 2 in Lima and with a little less jet lag and little more sleep we were a bit more upbeat. We’d booked ourselves on to a walking tour in and around the ‘Plaza de Armas de Lima’ probably Lima’s most iconic location about 4 miles north of us in the older colonial area of the city. We headed off back down to Kennedy park where we were picked up by our guide, an indigenous Peruvian called ‘Elvis’ with a fantastically dry sense of humour. He escorted a group of about 12 of us pasty westerners to the nearby Metropolitano bus station, stopping on the way to do a head count and collect our bus fare; 2.50 sol each (about 70p).

The Metropolitano follows the massive arterial highway that cuts right through the middle of Lima, with numerous bridges connecting the 2 halves of the city. It’s a simple, but effective, mass transit system. However, as there is only 1 line, it serves more to simply throw into sharp focus the city’s chronic need for a metro system and as such is always jam packed (yes, like the tube, so yeah, maybe a metro system wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference). (Apparently the Chinese are funding the construction of one in 2020).

15 minutes on the Metropolitano (a word which I have now added to my computer’s dictionary, so it stops nagging me to change it to metropolitan) and we reach our destination, meeting up with a few more pasty westerners for the tour. Our meeting point becomes a hive of activity when 20 or so police officers swoop in on a woman allegedly running a scam on tourists taking pictures of a nearby church. Evidently the police here aren’t too tied up with paperwork to provide a heavy-handed disincentive to petty crime.

Elvis leads us up to Plaza de Armas de Lima, flanked on the south and west by grand, yellow baroque style government buildings, a large extravagant church to the east and the Presidential Palace to the north. We go about a third of the way in to the Plaza before a police officer (whom Elvis refers to as a ‘Robot’ seemingly quite confident that the ‘Robot’ in question doesn’t understand English) informs us that we have to leave the square as the police don’t want there to be any protests. Disgruntled but unphased, Elvis continues to walk us around the perimeter of the Plaza telling us more about the history of the city.

About an hour in, Elvis lead us down the road to the west of the Presidential Palace, across a bridge over the fast flowing and cascading Rimac River; the primary source of the cities fresh water and (from upstream hydroelectric plants) its electricity. Across the river, according to Elvis is the non-touristy and much more authentic Lima, showing much more typical everyday life for Peruvians. There are shops and traders and it’s a little more run-down than the well-kept and heavily policed touristy areas to the south, but it’s still clean and seems functional. Rising up on the hills in the background however are rows upon rows of slums. These slums are no doubt clearly visible from the rear of the presidential palace only 200m behind us.

Peru has, like so many countries in the developing world (and indeed those in the ‘developed’ world I would like to add!), a history of chronic corruption amongst its elites. The country has come a long way; in less than 30 years its poverty rate has dropped from 60% to 20%. According to Elvis, this rate would be even lower by now were it not for corrupt politicians squandering resources and absconding with wealth. Investing so heavily in policing wealthier areas frequented by westerners has probably, on balance, helped to bring that poverty rate down, but somehow the juxtaposition of the opulence of the presidential palace and the slums in the background is very jarring. Making tough political choices about the national best interest is one thing, but you can’t help but wonder about the mentality of someone who will steal the wealth of a nation whilst staring at such poverty in their own back yard.

Enough politics for now. Our tour rounded off with a trip to an authentic Peruvian restaurant recommended by our guide; we sat down with a few of the others from our tour that we had got chatting to and were each treated to a 2 course meal with warm iced tea (we think), an apple and cinnamon compote (we think), roasted and salted corn (we’re pretty sure on that one), and a glass of the local tipple; Pisco, mixed with fruit juice and some sort of sugary sponge (we think), all of which together came to 12 Sol (about £3). For reference, our soul destroying Mango Frappe’s from the motorway service station were 14 sol each.

After sharing lunch together and swapping anecdotes and travelling stories, we and our new friends made our way back on to the Metropolitano down towards Miraflores and then went our separate ways, never to see each other again…

Such is the way when travelling.

Hello Mums!

And Dads, who are likely now having this read aloud to them. Also hello to anyone else who has also subscribed to this blog and is now reading back through older posts. I know it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that we will be accruing more subscribers as our travelling unfolds, but it’s good to aim high. Build it and they will come etc. etc. but for now I’m working on the theory that the only people reading this at present are our parents. (And Steven, Katy just yelled across the room that you are subscribed, Hello! Katy here, I’ll be in bold for this one)

It’s currently about 6:30 (5 hours behind the UK, whose time my laptop is defiantly sticking to, British time for British laptops!) and we’ve just got back to our little room; an air BnB in a converted garage with a bathroom attached (this description undersells it, but not by a huge stretch). It’s basic, but is clean and has a surprisingly comfortable bed! Well, it was comfortable last night, but we had just been travelling for the last 26 hours so by that point a bed of nails would have seemed comfortable. Tonight will be the acid test!

We finally got here at 1:30am after landing in Lima at the stroke of midnight (about 5 am UK time). Katy had had the foresight to pre-book us a taxi with the wonderfully named ‘Gringo Taxis’, owned and operated by a lovely chap called Walter from New York who emigrated here about 3 years ago. Very enjoyable guy to talk to, he told us about all the places in Lima you DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT GO, and also said to never get your phones out in public and, if possible, get your cash out of your wallet via osmosis so as to avoid opening up your bag. He then told us about 2 customers of his last week who, in only a few days, had had 2 phones and $900 stolen from them. All very useful stuff to know, but in our sleep deprived state and in the dead of night driving around the streets of a foreign city, somewhat unsettling. Our contribution to this cultural exchange was teaching him the utility of the word ‘prat’ as a descriptor of those who leave their valuables on display (There is a lot of crime here, but it is mostly opportunistic, so as long as you’re not being ‘a prat’ you’ll usually be ok).

Overall, though, it was a pleasant way to round off what had been a very long and tiring journey (from here on in I’ll stick to UK time just to make things a bit easier). We’d set off from Dorset at about 4:45am arriving at Heathrow just after 7 for our first flight of 9.5 hours to Houston departing at 10am. This flight was barely a quarter full and was just about as positive an experience as a long haul economy class experience can be. With so few passengers there was room to spread out and we pretty much each had our own personal flight attendant, as they were almost tripping over themselves looking for things to do. They were lovely, brilliant, can’t stress that enough, really friendly and professional and happy to offer us the good stuff usually reserved for the business and first class passengers. It was a smooth flight across the north Atlantic and we got gorgeous views of the Greenland Ice sheet and Northern Canada as well as seeing much of central USA under a light blanket of snow. Descending in to Houston was a breeze and the landing was so smooth Katy didn’t even realise we had touched down (pah! I think the massive sigh of relief and the fact that my shoulders descended from around my ears for the first time in 9.5 hours would have been a bit of a giveaway), a little ahead of schedule at about 7:20pm. We then taxied across what felt like half of Texas to the terminal (Planners for Heathrow must fantasize of having this kind of space to plonk an airport on; runways as far as the eye can see and not a NIMBY in sight). After disembarking we made haste to US customs as, unlike what one might expect, connecting passengers don’t go straight through but have to enter the US, then re-enter the airport for their onward flight, and it was a pretty tight turn around for our flight to Lima, departing just over 2 hours later at 10pm.

Now is probably as good a time as any to explain the name of this Blog post, so let’s further chop-up the chronology of this post and re-wind a further 24 hrs. There I was, lying on the Bed, packing pretty much finished, lists checked off, i’s dotted and t’s crossed, Katy getting the last of her bits together ready for our early start the next day, and whilst double-checking for the 20th time that we were definitely right about not needing to do anything in advance for passing through Peruvian customs, I casually wondered if we would be passing through any kind of checkpoint in the USA (Mainly, I wanted to know if we’d be getting a stamp in our passport to say we’d been there, nerd that I am). This was when I discovered, with that horrible cold sinking feeling that, not only would we be passing through customs (and getting a stamp, so that’s nice) that we needed something called an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorisation) before travelling to a US airport, and that it is strongly recommended that we apply for it at least 72 hours before we depart.

“Ummm, Katy” I sheepishly said. The panic in my voice was obviously readily apparent as she just looked at me and said, alarmed “Oh God what’s wrong”? “I think we might have a problem” I continued, before explaining what I had just read. After a quick Google search to make certain that we weren’t exempt as we were connecting, the realisation that, after all the work and saving we’d done for the last year, after all the planning and checking and double checking Visa requirements and reading travel advice that we’d missed something so big and so critical was sinking in.

All hope was not lost though, from reading blogs by other travellers who’d made the same oversight as us, it was clear that whilst it can take up to 72 hours to process an ESTA application, more often that not it was done in minutes. To action stations then! Katy was straight on to the US Customs and Border Patrol Website to fill in the application. Photos of Passports were taken, ridiculous questions about importing livestock and handling explosives were answered.

I made tea. (Earl grey. Hot)

One of the sections that needed filling in related to current or previous employers, with my previous employer being registered at ‘The Old Potato Yard’. Katy was using her phone to do the application, and Android decided that there’s no reason you’d need to use the word ‘Potato’ when an Emoji would do the job just as well. Well no, Android. Not in this instance! Not when the difference between the word ‘potato’ and and an emoji of a Potato might also be the difference between us being able to enter the USA or not.

It was a very tense 10 minutes or so, but after refreshing the page about 40 times, there it was! Our approved ESTA Form! Everything was back on track, and the relief was tremendous.

It will come as no surprise, of course, that once we actually got to US customs, nobody asked to see the bloody thing! But better safe than sorry. Clearing US customs was time consuming,but fairly straightforward, with the exception of being thrown by the passport control officer asking what the name of the airport is in Lima, (to which Katy Answered Hugo Chavez, not the best answer that could given, but as the airport is called Jorge Chavez it’s an understandable error). We made our way back through security just to re-enter the airport we had already been in anyway, got on the silly train (a replica of the silly train at Stansted) and headed to our gate.

There’s no good way to lead in to this; Houston Airport is weeeeird. Somehow the fact that it’s all in English makes it weirder; at least in a non-English speaking foreign country you expect things to be different, but when everything is in English the little differences really stand out, it’s like being in an alternate universe rather than just an alternate country. Everything is that bit bigger, that bit shinier, that bit more in your face, the forced friendliness of the advertising is that bit more pronounced, the goods and services are than bit more overpriced, the contempt with which the PA announcer chases down passengers late for boarding is that bit more overt.

There aren’t the usual banks of seats arranged around departure boards, instead there’s rows of tables at various heights with sizeable (by European standards) chairs all bolted to the floor forcing you to face towards your own individual ipad. I’ve never seen so many ipads in my life, they are literally everywhere! There’s seemingly not a single seat in the airport that doesn’t have an ipad docked 8 inches from your face, each one blinking and flashing adverts at you and trying to squeeze every cent it can out of you whilst you’re in its grasp. I may have left my anti-capitalist socialist days (so he says!!) behind me, but boy did this have the grotesque overtones of dripping corporate excess and late stage capitalism. It was like something out of Black Mirror.

Our second leg then, the flight from Houston to Lima. Another 6 and a half hours. Sadly this time we didn’t have the plane to ourselves, and the flight attendants didn’t have quite the same friendly professional air to them. 1 of them was positively matron-esque getting very short with passengers when they wanted to put their cabin luggage in the locker above their seats, not one on the other side of the aircraft. Annoyingly she didn’t have quite the same disdain for the weirdo who kept walking up and down the plane really slowly when the seatbelt signs were on (he looked like April’s weird goth friend from Parks and Recreation). Shout out though to the flight attendant who found us some vegetarian meals when they thought they only had chicken left, she was good.

And that brings us up to today. I was going to talk about our first day in Lima, but I think that’s enough for now, there wasn’t a huge amount to write home about anyway, so we’ll wrap that up in to the next post. Katy’s fallen asleep now (no surprises there…) and I think it might be time to join her. All our love to everyone back in the UK, and we’ll keep you posted with our adventures soon enough.

Nos Vemos las proxima vez!

 

 

 

It all kicks off on the 29th January….watch this space!