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We stumbled out of the back of the plane onto the black tarmac and found our way to the gate. The lines at Naturalization were long and not moving, so we picked the one that was not moving the fastest. Of course, once we singled out our line, all the other lines began to not move faster. In another line, our neighbor on the plane, a river guide who came to Peru to raft some bomber rapids, paddled up to the counter, stamped, and exited even as we stalled in an eddie behind a family of 5 digging for their soggy passports.
Customs was quick. I'm not even sure there was a Customs. I guess not to many people smuggle coca into Peru...
When we finally arrived at the main terminal through a throng of people holding signs with passenger's names on them and peddling information about cabs and hotels for a few sols, Jen decided that this would be a perfect time to pack for her trip to Peru. We had both put our hiking backpacks into large, ripstop, waterproof duffles to protect them from ferral airline baggage handlers, but many of Jen's belongings were loose in the duffle alongside her pack. Our travel guides, online and not, had recommended caution in public areas, since they are apparently seething with thieves and Spanish sexist Machismo. Following the sage advice of our travel guides, we settled into a well lit, strategically defensible corner of the terminal, and begin the process of displaying each and every article of Jen's duffle to the airport population as they made their way to different sections of Jen's backpack. We must have done a good job, because only one pair of men whistled when Jen bent over to zip up her pack.
Another bit of wisdom we had learned before the trip was that we should not drink the water. You shouldn't eat anything that might have been handled either. You see, there are nasty bugs in the water down there and if you don't want a monster growing in your belly, you had best heed this advice. Don't eat it if it is not boiled, cooked, or peeled. Bananas and Pop Tarts are fine, of course, because they are peeled. Ice just puts the buggies in crygenic mode for a bit, but they will still wake up and burst out of your body like in Aliens, so don't do that.
The reason I mention this bit of knowledge is because it was at this point I learned how the bugs get in your food. You see, during the long flight to Peru I had had a liter or two of water, so my body was fairly screaming for a casual stop to the powder room. As I was smiling and waving at the people walking by on the street over the side of the airport urinal, a boy about knee high on a grasshopper decided it might be fun to play in the one adjacent to mine. It was cute, but his father seemed fairly unconcerned about his son's splashing or the fact that there was no soap anywhere in the whole place. I really should have offered him one of my antibiotic wipes on the way out, but I think I was still a bit too boggled by the experience to think straight.
We knew that we needed to meet Tim, Christine, Dan, Lynn, Bill, and Michelle at around 23:30, so we pushed through all the people with signs a second time and checked the Arrivals monitors. It turned out that Tim, Christine, Dan, and Lynn would be delayed an hour or two, but Bill and Michelle would be right on time. We felt it might be a bit difficult to greet Bill and Michelle, since we had never actually met them before. So we decided to make a "Bill and Michelle" sign of our own to wave around at any new applicable culture-shocked touristas we saw at the disembarkation door later. That job done, we then vigorously set about increasing our vocabulary by watching the airport news in Spanish for the next few hundred hours.
When 23:30 rolled around we shouldered our packs, waved goodbye to the little boys and girls that kept goggling at Jen's blond hair, and used our upstairs vantage point to hunt for any creatures that might vaguely resemble a Bill or a Michelle. As luck might have it, we didn't even need to unfurl our makeshift signs, because Bill's Michigan sweatshirt might as well have read "Hi, I'm Bill". It also turned out that Michelle seems strangely familiar to both Jen and I because we had rowed with Michelle's sister Nikki at the University of Michigan a few years back. Bing! Bill and Michelle had just arrived from Panama where they had been diving with a friend, so we had lots to talk about for the next hour as we waited for the rest of our friends.
At about 01:00, when we saw the other four coming down the disembarkation isle, Bill starting recording with a digital camcorder that he had brought for the trip. Dan must have been excited by all the attention as he entered the focal point of all the signs and selling, because he decided to attempt some trick breakdance move right on the spot. It might have been a headspin, I'm not sure. Bill may have gotten it on his camcorder, so maybe he'll donate some footage later.
We tumbled downstairs roley-poley to meet the rest of the group. It had been many years since I had seen Tim and Dan, but Lynn and Christine were new faces, so there were introductions. Christine was the mastermind behind the whole trip, and a savior of sorts because she could speak the mystical Spanish toungue. With her superpowers, she arranged a minibus to Hostal Torreblanca and off we went.
We did not see much of Lima that day because it was nighttime the whole time, but the driver was kind enough to drive us by a moonlit Pacific Ocean on the way to the hotel in Miraflores.
Our room was adjoined to Bill and Michelle's, so Bill and I decided to give water purification a go. I suspect Bill was about as impressed with his airport bathroom adventures as I was, so between the 3-micron bug scrubbers inside our Pure filter and the virii vanquishing Aquamira chlorine treatments we applied, I think we made up for any number of little boys who do not wash their hands. Twenty minutes and 7 liters later we hit the sack.
After everyone was up, breakfasted, and packed, we boarded the autobus for the Lima Airport again. Without even a chance to see what Lima was about, we boarded the 11:30 Aero Continente flight 1171 to Juliaca via Ariquipa. Now, Aero Continente turned out to be much more advanced than we had expected, because not only did they depart on time, but somehow they managed to skip the Ariquipa leg of the journey all together. Can you imagine an American carrier announcing this: "Welcome to flight 1234 from Dallas to El Paso. There has been a slight change in plans. We will be serving pretzels instead of peanuts on today's flight as a convenience to some of our hypoallergenic passengers. Furthermore, we will be skipping the O'Hare hub because it is 3000 kilometers out of the way and no one wants to go there anyways..." Um, I didn't think so. Compound that with the fact that a week earlier when Christine had heard reports that the Juliaca airport was supposedly "closed" to all travel, the fact that Aero Continente just said "Don't worry" and we still made it there, raises their mystical status even more.
Juliaca and Puno are at very high altitudes. Our first indication of this was when our ears did not pop during our flight's decent, and our water bottles hissed when we opened them after we landed. It was by design that we had planned our trip to visit Puno and Lake Titicaca before the Inca Trail. We wanted to acclimate before the strenuous, high altitude, four day hike to Machu Picchu. And it was a good thing too, because we all got altitude sick to some extent over the next couple days.
Our destination, Hostal Internacional, was off of one of these back streets and our rooms were on the third floor. Getting to the third floor turned out to be more of a challenge than any of us had expected, since someone had removed a good portion of oxygen from this part of Peru's atmosphere and our lungs did not quite understand how to handle it.
After laying on our beds for a while, gasping for air like beached fish, we decided to tour the city. Bill and Christine hunted around for exchange shops with the best rates and we found one that swapped 3.5 sols for a dollar.
Now, let me try to express how cheap this is. You could get thick, hand-made, alpaca sweaters on the street for 30-50 sols, which is roughly 10-15 dollars, a piece. A meal for yourself and eight of your good friends might come to a 100-300 sols, which is roughly 30-90 dollars, total. Granted, I live in Austin which has a fairly expensive cost of living, but that sure seemed cheap to me.
After exchanging currency, we stopped by All Ways Travel to pick up tickets for our trip to Lake Titicaca the next day. Then for the rest of the day and into the evening we simply meandered about the town, shopped in the markets, and generally just let our lungs acclimate to their newfound oxygen deficiency. After the sun went down, we picked out a restaurant that looked local, but once we sat down to eat, we realized that we had been duped and that no locals actually ate there. Ah well.
You might be wondering what altitude sickness feels like? Altitude sickness manifests itself with a tendency to run out of breath easily, nausea, and a kind of disconnected dizziness. We were all affected by it to different extents. I was only marginally bothered by it, but then again I always feel dizzy. =P Christine, however, was pummelled by her altitude sickness that night. The poor girl couldn't get out of bed, and if she did, you didn't want to be in the bee-line between her bed and the bathroom.
When one's body becomes aware of the fact that it is not getting enough oxygen, it starts cranking up red blood cell production to increase the oxygen intake capacity of the lungs. This blood cell factory overdrive is what you want when acclimating. It is interesting to note that red blood cells have a lifespan of about six months, so you can imagine the endurance of atheletes who live and train in high altitudes and then compete at low altitudes.
Some of our group decided to give the showers a shot before bed. We were all curious to know how they got hot water with only one cold water pipe, and why did all the faucets have electrical tape on them, anyways? In the US they teach you to not drop your electric hair dryer into the tub, but in Peru they find it necessary to permanently affix them to their water supply. Each shower head had a little electric heater that (occasionaly) warmed the water on the way through the head. The electrical tape on the faucets were to reduce the risk of you shorting a circuit that included the electrified shower head, the water falling out of it, your body, the faucet, and the pipe behind the wall. And when the heater, tape, and drain all worked together concurrently, we found it of cosmic significance and wise men from distant lands would gather about as you toweled off praising all things holy and speculate about when these mystical phenomena might just align again.
So I opted out of the religious shock treatment in favor of attending a long discussion on the landing with Tim, Dan, and Bill. We talked about interesting things like artificial intelligence, human-machine hybrids, conciousness, space tourism, and armageddon scenarios like The Grey Goo and Inadvertant Black Hole Creation. I realize none of these topics have anything to do with Peru, but I'm the one telling this story, so piss off.
Eventually, we hit the sack hoping for visions of sugarplum fairies dancing across Lake Titicaca in our head. However, sleep was not to be had that night. Oh, no. The bustle on the street and the beep of taxis only slightly diminished as the night progressed. It also didn't help that some of us had tried coca tea at dinner, which is a powerful stimulant, and were still wired even after midnight. Furthermore, there was one dog in particular that barked, honestly, all night long. The next day not many people could say "That Dog" without prepending it with the phrase "I couldn't believe" or "Someone should have shot". And once the sun began to rise and our canine neighbor had just began to settle down for sleep, some kind soul pounded on the locked front door of the hostel for about ten minutes to make sure that nobody was being foolish enough to oversleep.
We met our tour guide alongside his boat with a few other groups of international tourists. We took up residency in the front of the boat with our backpacks stacked on the floor between our benches. The Captain manuevered his boat through the cold green lake with a big wooden rudder hinged at the back of the boat. The inboard chugged along inside an old wooden box with a lid tied open to the ceiling to give it air to breathe. Even though the wind was a bit nippy, some passengers elected to take in their ride from the roof of the boat. The lake was very calm, but we were told that it was so cold that one could only expect to survive about fifteen minutes if we found ourselves, for some incontemplatible reason, on the outside side of the boat.
I am glad that we stopped at the floating islands, because they were truly unique, but it seemed to me that the islands had lost some authenticity now that they were a daily tourist stop. There were a few women selling goods, a couple cute little girls selling post cards, and a really creepy museum that Bill liked full of poorly taxidermied animals that you could pay a few sols to play with. On the way past the islands on the return trip the next day, the islands appeared vacant, which made me wonder how many people actually lived there anymore.
We boarded the boat again, and headed for Amantani Island. During this three hour ride, we passed heavily terraced Taquile Island, which we would stop at on the way back tomorrow. We were also impressed with how low the clouds formed over the lake. We were at such a high altitude that the clouds almost formed under us.
Jen and I followed our new host breathlessly up the hill from the dock, meandering around small dusty fields, rock walls, and the occasional sheep. We did our best to communicate (with our host, not the sheep), but with Joann in another house with Lynn and Christine languishing back in Puno, we found ourselves quite often at a lack of words. It was extremely frustrating for us to not be able to talk freely and we often lapsed into awkward silence. We were able, however, to successfully gift our host with a bag of fruit that we had brought from Puno, but honestly, how much skill does "Take this fruit bag, please" really require? We could have thrust out the bag and said "frobozz my happy dancing meat puppets" and I think they would still have understood.
We were shown our small room up on the second floor of the house, and then left alone to walk around the island while lunch was being prepared. The terraced mountains rose up behind the house, and I was hoping to get a chance to hike them later in the day. As we walked around, we noticed that the family relied on stonework for many things even still. They had hollowed out areas of stone for preparing and grinding food, and they would carefully remove and replace stones from their rock walls wherever we needed to pass over them.
After we completed our required tourist duties with the digital camera, we returned to a meal of some thick creamy soup, salty rice, fried potatoes, and fried batter. We were also offered coca tea, the leaves of which I surreptously salvaged and inserted into my Nalgene water bottle in case I got my chance to climb the mountain later. I was still getting winded on some pretty candy climbs, much to my red blood cell factory manager's chagrin.
We eventually established with our host that we would like to go find our friends, so we were led up to the meeting place a bit further up the mountain. Many of the other tourists were already there. The local women were dressed in traditional garb and were spinning wool as they stood and talked to one another. They really dug seeing pictures of themselves in the LCD of my camera, so I took a couple shots.
Once the entire tour group arrived at the designated meeting spot, our guide provided us some historical information about the island, and then, as I had hoped, started us up the mountain. The mountain was not that high, but as I had indicated before, we still only had 24 hours of hightened red blood cell production under our belt, so everyone was a bit sloppy. It was actually kind of funny watching a line of out of shape tourists being herded up the mountain trail, past small groups of Amantani women selling water and soda to help reenergize each new leg of the hike.
I know that you are supposed to hike a constant rate and regulate your temperature so that you do not sweat too much. Otherwise, you will get chilled later, and have a difficult time getting rid of the moisture. But what is advice except to be ignored, and what are mountains except to be climbed, and climbed hard? I know that crazy Tim Ballew feels the same way, because by the end of the Inca Trail many days later, we had both contracted nasty, phlemmy colds. Ha! But it was worth it!
The sun was setting by the time we reached the summit, which I am sure was how the guide planned it, since the view was spectacular. Cloud enshrouded islands stretched out their peaks from the lake on all sides. It was really quite a sight. Our summit, Pacha Tata, was the home of an ancient stone shrine. The main worship area was blocked off from tourists who would certainly take the true nature of this site for granted. As a consolation, our guide did take us around the perimeter and describe the cosmological significance of the location as the center interce of the lake. He also explained that the sister peak, Pacha Mama, was also enshrined, but we would not get an opportunity to visit it.
We made our way back down the mountain as the daylight faded, now encased in two or three additional layers of clothing from Jen's Backpack of Infinite Holding +3. Joann made conversation with some of the locals as we decended, and was suprised to learn that the locals who hosted us only saw 7 sols for every 11 dollars that we paid per person to the travel agency. We were sure to tip our family a little extra before we left.
We had an opportunity to talk with our host, Felix, some more once we got back. Even though our Spanish was so amazingly terrible, Felix was extremely patient with us anyways. After about thirty hours of extreme concentration, we had finally established which country we were from and how long we had all been married. I realize now that Felix's patience was instrumental in helping us past a language shyness barrier that we didn't even realize was afflicting us. From that point on, we would attempt all sorts of conversation without modesty or regret.
There was no electricity or plumbing on the island, so every house had a stone outhouse. One interesting feature of these outhouses was that footprints had actually been hollowed out on either side of the hole in the stone floor to make the system more user friendly. I'm sure some confused tourista found these foot guides useful for orientation, but I'm thinking "Hole. Backside. Duh."
Speaking of primitive restrooms, Lynn had some chronic anti-cleptomania thing going on where she kept loosing personal items in them. I really didn't understand it. It was this night that Lynn lost the lense to her flashlight down the outhouse hole. Needless to say, she left it where it was.
After our mountain experience, we were treated to another meal suspiciously very much like our previous meal of potatoes, rice, soup, and batter. Jen was feeling a little under the weather from the altitude, and as a result did not eat very much. I did my best to eat her food, or hide it all under one of the potatoes, since we did not want to insult our hosts. Ultimately I failed to defeat the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, and I didn't know how to turn the food into pure energy, so we figured out how to thank Felix for the food and appologize for Jen's lack of appetite and blame it on a sick tummy due to altitude and not the food. Felix looked genuinely concerned (probably didn't want Jen making a mess in his Bed and Breakfast) and brought us some muņa tea which he claimed would soothe her stomach.
An hour later, when Jen's stomach was indeed feeling much better, Felix and his wife came by to insist that we join them at a dance at the school house. We found the rest of our tour group already there and the music was performed live on drums, flutes, and guitars. Dancing was kind of funny: Girls would come over and ask us to dance, which was really just a lot of arm swinging while holding hands. We did a couple run-around-the-room-in-a-line dances as well, and I even got twirled by a woman or two along the way. The music was pretty good, but the songs seemed to be twice as long as was necessary to swing one's partners arms a satisfactory amount. Tim was very popular. The little girls would very rarely let him sit down, but he didn't look like he needed to. At one point we were all supposed to dance without holding hands, and everything became all improvised. I must have really impressed one teenaged partner with some really def dance moves, because everybody in my group was laughing, and the girl promptly exited the dance floor after the song ended all blushing.
Walking back from the dance, we found the sky occassionally lit up with flashes of lightning. And that night we woke up to the rucus of hail pummeling the tin roof of our house.
On the way down to the pier, we spied remnants of sleet from the night's storm on the ground.
We noticed a boat rowing from across the island bay on the way down the hill. When we reached the pier, it became apparent that Tim and Dan had gone out for a row with their family. It was far from a racing shell, but they still looked right at home.