Carolina en Peruuuuuu!

I’m in Peru! Actually, I have been for a while, I’m just very slow at updating the blog… But I left Quito after my last day of volunteering and my last day at school (I had to take an ‘extra credit’ final online for marketing) on and overnight bus to Guayaquil where I would meet my friends Jen and Steph, who were flying there in the morning. We met at the bus terminal and then had to go outside to another office to get our bus tickets to Lima… a 26 hour trip! We thought the bus would leave at 2pm, which gave us a good few hours to eat lunch and hang around the bus terminal, but it turned out Lonely Planet was wrong, and the bus actually left at 11:30 am. So we had to rush over and we got on the bus just in time.

The bus was actually surprisingly nice, the seats turned into semi-beds, with a footrest type thing. It was 2 floors, and the bus actually didn’t fill up at all, so we were each able to have a seat to ourselves. They gave us hot meals on the bus, and it ended up taking 30 hours in total, but it was pretty interesting to ride through the desert in northern Peru and see the coast occasionally.

We got to Lima and shared a taxi with some nice foreigners to Miraflores, a really nice neighborhood in Lima. We picked a hostel in LP called the Flying Dog, and arranged our things and then went to the internet café and wandering around. There was a big park right outside the hostel, and it had a little nighttime market in the middle. There was also Starbucks, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Pizza Hut… but we wanted some Peruvian food, so we came back to a restaurant right next to the hostel where there were some guys from Virginia who we had met in the hostel. Steph actually ate some goat, and we tried pisco, the liquor from Peru, and then we tried chicha, thinking it was ‘fermented corn beer’ and therefore alcoholic, but it turned out that there are 2 kinds of chicha, and we were drinking the non-alcoholic one, which was pretty funny.

We had a good night’s sleep in the hostel, and Steph and Jen caught a flight to Cuzco early in the morning, leaving me for a day until Sam arrived at the airport that night from Chicago. I spent the day relaxing and talking to a lot of awesome people in the hostel, from places like Israel, France, England, and Canada. I went out to get coffee (Starbucks Caramel Frappuchino!) with a girl from Florida, who had finished school and was working on some archaeological digs around Peru. We talked for a while about that because I had just finished my class on Andean Archaeology that covered some of the stuff she was working on.

I also took a walk to the coast, which was a little hazy, but pretty looking. I didn’t go down to the beach, but just went to a lookout over some cliffs that looked out on the ocean.

Later that evening, I went to pick up Sam at the airport, and there were tons of teenagers waiting around and screaming occasionally when certain doors opened, because apparently the JONAS BROTHERS were coming on a flight right around the same time. OMG! haha. I wanted to stay for a little and see what sort of madness ensued, but when Sam got there we just headed back to the hostel. We dropped her stuff off and went out to get food. There wasn’t actually much open because it was Sunday, but we walked down a road with a bunch of restaurants where everyone was pleading us to go in. We walked right past that, feeling a little annoyed, and decided we shouldn’t go to McDonald’s because that would be “too American”… so we went to Burger King instead! hah. Back at the hostel we listened to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me before going to sleep, planning on wandering around downtown Lima the next day.

Monday (May 18th) we got up and had breakfast with some women from Israel, and a guy from San Diego, and then we took a taxi to go find out about buses to Cuzco, that we wanted to get on that night so we could arrive late Tuesday in Cuzco (another long bus ride... at least 22 hours). The bus company only left for Cuzco at 4:00 pm, so that didn’t give us much time to see Lima before we had to leave. Also, at first I thought the bus was terribly expensive, because when I asked them how much it cost they said ‘160’. I assumed she meant dollars, as I had just been reading Lonely Planet where everything was in dollars, but she obviously meant the Peruvian currency, soles, which equates to about $50 (3 soles to 1 dollar). So, after realizing I was a silly gringa, we bought tickets and then went to see the Plazas and churches in the centro.

We ate lunch at a nice little restaurant, and I made Sam try yuca frita and choclo con queso. After seeing the sights we then rushed back in a taxi, grabbed our stuff (I left my big maleta in a closet in the hostel! thank god I don’t have to lug that thing around) and got to the bus station. Now I’m writing this post on my laptop on our bus ride to Cuzco! But we just found out that there’s a mining strike on the road to Cuzco… but there might be another way to get through. So we’re actually on our way to Puno (by lake Titicaca! hm, didn’t expect to be going there… but I guess we’re making a stop) and the bus company is organizing a car for us to either make it to Cuzco tonight or tomorrow morning. We still have 3 days before we have to be in Cuzco to leave for our hike to Machu Picchu, so it actually isn’t a horrifying set-back. Thanks Peru! Oh… interesting travel experiences.