Christmas vacation. What comes to mind? Probably not hiking, sunburns, traveling around in buses for hours and hours, or even eating pizza for Christmas dinner. Well, what’s traditional anyway? When living in Peru, it’s all about living the nontraditional life. Considering we traveled around southern Peru for two weeks, which means tons of adventures, there is not time to relive all of them right now, I will mention some of the highlights.
So we left Saturday night on a 20hr. bus ride over the Andes to Lima. I have never spent so many hours in a bus before and with it pretty much impossible to get any sort of quality sleep, the hours dragged by. But we eventually got to Lima and were able to stretch the legs and wander around the city with our huge, badly-packed backpacks. Using buses as our main source of transportation between major cities was not only cheaper but much more adventuresome than flying. Of course, the big drawback for busing is that it takes forever to get anywhere. So…many a night was spent driving from one city to another, usually with not many hours of successful sleep. Arriving at the bus station around 5 or 6am, many a time we were greeted by a handful of desperate off-season hostel owners, begging for our business. It was great! Usually we wouldn’t know where we would be staying in the next city, soo these people answered our prayers with amazing hostels for unbeatable prices that could be bargained down even more!! So for less than $3 a night, we were able to enjoy free breakfasts, hot water, our own beds, luggage storage, not to mention meeting some really nice people and just having a place to crash after traveling around town all day. It was such a blessing!!
For living in Pucallpa for about 5 months and not seeing hardly any foreigners except those from within our group, arriving in the Lima airport and traveling to the different touristy cities and places was actually quite a culture shock. I hadn’t seen so many English-speaking people, it felt really weird to talk to these people in English. So many of the restaurants catered to the tourists, and so much of the time we would ask for a menú (which is the cheaper food a restaurant serves, costing usually about $.90-2.00). Many of the restaurants didn’t have menus, or the cheapest plates they would have would be like S./10-15 or about $3.50-5.00. Quite expensive for us from Pucallpa where it’s quite easy to find places to eat cheap and safely! And when we did find a place to eat, we complicated matters by asking for vegetarian food. Much of the time the only option was eggs, rice, soup, and salad. So by the end of the trip, we all hated eggs, mostly cause Peruvians don’t know how to properly them and so much of the meals consisted of almost raw “sunny-side-up” eggs. Nasty. So finding food was always a stressful time, because we would be hungry but unable to find places that would serve decent food at a reasonable price. On Christmas Day, however, we splurged and went to a tourist restaurant and ordered clay-oven baked pizza, for about S./12 (about $4.00) per person with a pitcher of lemonade to share. AMAZING!! We felt so giddy and weird spending so much money on one meal, but hey, it’s Christmas right?!
Our travels took us to Arequipa, which is quite a beautiful city. I highly recommend it! From there we traveled to Cusco, Puno, which took us to the floating islands and Isla Taquile of Lake Titicaca, then on to Copacabana, Bolivia where we renewed our visas and spent a beautiful night on Isla del Sol!! Quite an amazing two weeks. Definitely the highlight was hiking to Machu Picchu, just outside of Cusco. The three of us girls, Tara, Kaitlin, and I had ever really backpacked before, but thankfully Brent, is not only an expert backpacker, but also very patient and helpful to us newbies!!J The first day of our quest for Machu Picchu found us riding a supposedly 5hr. bus to Santa Maria. It turned into more like an 8hr. ride as our bus as to navigate through mud slides, some of which came a little too close to the edge of the cliff for my liking, but our guardian angels were with us, and we safely arrived in Santa Maria. The trail we were to take to Machu Picchu started in Santa Maria, with us spending a day hiking for about 7hrs. to Santa Teresa where we would spend the night. The 2nd day of hiking had us hike from Santa Teresa to Aguas Calientes. The third day hikng from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu and spending the day checking out the place.
Well, we got to Santa Maria safely. But we didn’t really know how to get to Santa Teresa. Of course, there is the road, which cars take, but we wanted the trail, and of course we didn’t know where that was. So after some searching and asking around, we finally figured out the general direction to take. So early the next morning we set out, knowing that a few other guided groups were to be on the trail as well, so if we didn’t know which direction to take, we could just follow one of the groups. The trail was absolutely amazing! Incredibly beautiful. As we slowly ascended higher and higher along the narrow path, the view would just get better and better. Hiking the trail wasn’t easy and we had to stop often, but it was totally all worth it. In the late afternoon we came to the part of the trail where we had to cross over the river by a simply constructed cable car. Quite a thrilling experience. After hiking a few hours, we stopped at some hot springs just outside of Santa Teresa to relax with the other groups of hikers for a bit. This whole hiking experience was different because there were quite a number of places/towns to stop at along the way, so we didn’t have to carry any food! Many of the locals have taken advantage of having the trail run practically through their front yards and have set up water/Gatorade/snack stands along the way. Day two of hiking was much easier, though my back was still sore from the day-before’s activities. We hiked through almost every kind of terrain possible, or at least it seemed like it. So fun sloshing through creeks, climbing over rocks, descending steps, and climbing seemingly straight up a mountain, crossing rivers by cable cars, walking on railroad tracks, mud, so much variety, it never got boring! After hiking along the railroad tracks, we finally made it to Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu.
We got up early the next morning to climb the last little bit and enjoy the sunrise on Machu Picchu. Well, when we finally arrived at the top, the fog was so thick we couldn’t see anything. So we decided to hike around and find the classic machu picchu photo op. Place. Well, apparently we were overachievers and instead climbed Machu Picchu mountain. With the fog so thick, and after climbing for over 1 1/2hrs. with no luck, we finally stopped to rest and have Sabbath worship. As we sung, the clouds parted and Machu Picchu unveiled itself in all it’s glory over 1000ft. below us! It truly was beautiful. As the four of us surveyed the scene below us, we could see much of the trail that we had hiked, except from way up on the mountain top. As the clouds continued to burn off, we could see for miles and it was so amazingly beautiful. This place was just breathtaking, I can’t even imagine what heaven will be like!! Well, we decided to actually go explore the lost city, and so made a much quicker decent down to the ruins. Brent practically ran up Waynapicchu (probably to escape from us slow-pokes..haha:-)) as us girls decided to rest and take in the whole scene. We spent the day checking out the place and unknowingly picking up quite a bit of sun rays apparently, cause when we got back down to Aguas Calientes, we discovered we got quite toasted:-). Well, Machu Picchu was quite beautiful, though I think I enjoyed the hike (as hard as it was) and the view from Machu Picchu mountain better.
Sunday was spent trying to get back to Cusco, which consisted of riding the train partway, then riding a stuffed minibus (21 people, 2 babies, and the cutest little puppy ever, plus all the luggage) for 3hrs and catching an overnight bus back to Cusco. Quite the trip back, but definitely cheaper than $46!! The four of us then caught a bus to Puno where we spent Christmas Day visiting the floating islands and Isla Traquile on Lake Titicaca. Riding the bus across the border into Bolivia to renew visas was uneventful, except being from the U.S. always requires more money to be paid and a few extra documents, but soon we were on our way to the border town of Copacabana, Bolivia. We quickly found out that the town is like Hippy-capital. So many foreigners, I hardly saw a Bolivian the whole time. I liked Bolivia, mostly cause the exchange rate is even better than Peru!! But Lake Titicaca truly is more beautiful on the Bolivian side. We took a boat out to Isla del Sol and camped out on the island. Soo beautiful. With snow-capped Andes mountains painting the backdrop, we slept under the stars and watched an amazing sunset and sunrise on the lake. Soo cool!
We then headed back over the border with no trouble, and so I’m now able to live in Peru for another 90 days legally:-). So we then spent the evening in Puno making quite a few purchases at the local alpaca markets. We then headed to Cusco then back to Arequipa to catch our plane back to Lima. So we arrived safely back in Pucallpa early Monday morning. and that was 2 weeks! Now I need a vacation to recover!!
For many many pictures from the trip visit (click "Christmas in Peru" on the left side): http://s48.photobucket.com/albums/f214/lkclark/
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