A Rum Do
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
35
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
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Cusco,
Peru
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
We were on the bus overnight, so we settled down to sleep but woke at around 3am roasting hot. It seems to be a feature of bus travel in Peru to heat overnight buses to a degree that even reptiles would find uncomfortable. We managed to make ourselves understood to the conductor and she (mercifully) turned it down a few degrees.
Breakfast was another interesting affair: as far as we can extablish, we were served bread and tapenade and coffee. We can only assume it was coffee: it was the right sort of colour but it had already been sweetened. And not just a spoon of sugar. It was impossible to detect even a hint of coffee.
The bus was due to arrive at around 8 or 9am, but this time came and went and we still seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. We eventually arrived after noon, but fortunately the hostel people were waiting for us at the bus station despite our late arrival. We were taken to the hostel, up the very steep hill, and we checked in, lay down and dozed for a while. We ended up doing very little with the day other than catching up on the sleep we had missed and sending some clothes to be washed. In the evening, we headed out into the town to find something to eat. We had a wander around the main square but decided to eat at a place we had passed on the walk in to town. It was a small place with only five tables, but seemed really nice. We both decided on the alpaca, which, when Kirsty asked what it was like, the waiter told us was similar to chicken. Funnily enough, it is nothing like chicken. It is more like a cross between beef and pork. Tasty though.
The following day, we had a lazy day acclimatising to the altitude and catching up on email and the like. We also didn't want to venture too far because all of our clothes were still at the laundry. They finally reappeared at around 6pm, so we got changed out of our thermals (the only thing we hadn't sent to be washed) and went out in to town for food again. We went for a pub meal at a place called Norton Rats (sometimes it's nice to see what a 'British Pub' is in the eyes of other nations) and Jacob ordered a pint of Greene King IPA (one of his favourites from home) but discovered that despite IPA having been invented as a beer which travels well (India Pale Ale, full of hops so it doesn't go bad when you ship it off to the far reaches of the Empire), this one was terrible. Had it not been for the context, it would not even have been identifiable as beer. We had a couple of sandwiches, then went for a game of pool, on the worst pool table the world has ever seen. The playing surface was covered in dents and grooves, as were the balls. The felt had long since gone from being stained and ripped old pub pool table felt, it had become lino. There were no cushions, just a raised edge. Not so much pool, more of a pond really. Maybe a puddle. Some of the staff came over to watch us play - we were probably something of a novelty.
After the terrible pool, we grudgingly went on a particularly bizarre errand. The hostel were having a Christmas Party for the kids of the neighbourhood, and we had been shanghaied into providing some of the presents for the intended guests. One morning at breakfast, one of the hostel staff had come over and told us about the planned party, sneakily introducing the idea by asking if we celebrated Christmas, to which we of course said yes, thinking that maybe we were about to be invited to some sort of do. She said they'd be having a party for these kids, of whom there were about 35, and that it would be nice if the guests could provide some little presents, so, how many would we be buying? Hmmm. Bit cheeky really, but given the prices of stuff locally, we said we'd buy four presents. So, after our awful beer, perfectly OK sandwiches and comedically terrible pool, we found ourselves trudging about in the rain looking for a toy shop.
We'd selected a girl and three boys (dollies and toy cars, easy), and, having found ourselves a little late-night toy kiosk (no, that's not a euphemism for anything), got some cheapo plastic cars and dolls. The following morning, Cathy the hostel girl told us that about another seventy kids had signed up for that afternoon's party...so although our four presents were very nice, they'd have to use them as prizes for party games and provide everyone with little goody-bag type presents instead. How much would we like to donate? How may Christmas cakes would we like to buy? We had suspected that as much might be the case (we had noticed the list growing the previous day), so said that really, kids' parties were not our thing, we hadn't intended to be involved with it at all, we were going to be out all day Christmas shopping for each other, so we weren't going to do any more than we already had. Her face fell a little, but she did seem to realise that saying "Buying presents for complete strangers isn't enough! You have to donate money as well!" was a bit beyond the pale.
Breakfasted (on the "Amazing American Breakfast" advertised on their booking site: bread, jam, crap coffee/crap tea, your choice of a fried or mangled egg), we headed out, got a cab to the local bus shed and set off for Pisac, home of a famous Sunday market. Pisac is a little town with an enormous market. Actually, Pisac is an enormous market with a little town. Really, the stuff on offer was the same sort of stuff as we'd seen for sale in various stalls and shops around Peru, but in vastly comprehensive quantities. After some wandering to get a feel for the place, see what was on offer and gauge each others's reactions to the assorted trinkets, we split up, set an approximate budget and went a-shopping for presents.
Peruvian market traders can be a funny bunch:
"Oh, so you've shown a passing interest in the rainbow-striped fingerless gloves, well, then you'll just love this enormous white blouse thing with flowers round the neckline!"
"Hey, hey mister, hey lady, look, it's traditional, it's excellent quality - hand woven and everything - look at the colours, all natural dyes..."
Yes, lovely, but what the hell is it? I can see it's about three yards of woven alpaca wool, but it's only about two feet across, and I have no need, when backpacking, for a stair carpet. Smile, nod, move on, brush aside the heart-felt wounded looks.
The upside of such determination is that when asked "Have you got one of those, in that style but this colour, but a bit smaller so it would fit my wife? She's about...so big", they'll set off at a run, calling over their shoulders to wait just a minute. Five or ten minutes later, they return with a stack of every possible colour and variety of whatever you've asked for. Being 'sold out' is a concept which hasn't occurred to any of them. It costs a wee bit more - they won't haggle as readily when they're out of breath from having done your rummaging for you, but it does save a lot of time, effort and shoe leather.
Jacob is an awkward bugger for whom to buy clothing. Peruvians are not, on the whole, of a comparable size to northern Europeans. Especially not this particular northern European. Kirsty likes assorted beaded, woven, pretty, colourful, bohemian odds and sods and is of a fairly compatible size with the peoples of most nations. Kirsty had a rather difficult time trying to find something for him to wear which would fit; Jacob had an awkward time keeping within the confines of the budget and, indeed, his rucksack.
We met up, had a bite to eat (including 'stuffed potatoes' for Jacob, fantastic things which seem to be a load of mince, onions, olives, raisins and spices clad in stiff mashed potato then deep fried), then Kirsty, having scrounged Jacob's jumper out of his bag, ran off to check that something she had wanted to buy him that morning would fit. All present and correct (ha ha ha), we got ourselves onto a bus back to Cusco. Now, we have mentioned before what Peruvian bus drivers are like, but the guys around Cusco seem pretty special. Overtaking the bus which had just overtaken us, uphill, on a blind switchback mountain bend, into the path one of Peru's ubiquitous home-welded tricyles. On the other side of the mountain, the driver adopted the curious technique of trying to handle the bus like a motorbike, tyres sqealing as they threatened to let go through the hairpins. Nutter.
Back in Cusco, we dropped off our bags at the now mercifully child-free hostel and went out for a wander. We got some little kebabs of bits of sausage and stringy meat of dubious provenance topped with a cold potato from a street vendor (every bit as delicious as it sounds), then went to find something proper to eat. We went back to the place where we'd been on the first night, where, halfway through the meal, a small scruffy child came in, stood by the door and tried, badly but only just audibly, to play along on his panpipes with the 'Popular Western Music Played on the Bloody Panpipes' album which was playing in the restaurant. Eventually the waiter chased him away. A little later, after a couple more diners had arrived, he returned. This time the waiter asked us if we wanted him to stay. The others seemed quite sympathetic, but we said no. We were asked why, to which Kirsty responded with beautiful incredulity "Well, because it's panpipes." Quite.
We intended to get online when we returned to the hostel, but there was someone sending out their monthly 'everything I've done since the last e-mail' e-mail, so we nattered with a Dutch guy and some Germans for a while, listened to their "The Dutch are crap!" "Yeah, well, how many races have the Dutch tried to exterminate in living memory, eh, Deutsche Boy?" banter for a bit, then headed to bed.
We had decided to treat ourselves, it being Christmas, to a stay in a nice hotel. Well, a nice hotel by our standards is one in which the shower works without having to fiddle with the boiler on the wall behind the fire escape. A building which has carpets, that sort of thing. Kirsty's logon to the NHS staff discount website still works, despite her having resigned from the NHS, so we booked online and got a big ol' reduction. The hotel was a short walk from the hostel, but Kirsty managed nearly to break her ankle on some steep steps as we transferred, so, hot, bothered and limping we checked in, and were promptly handed cups of coca tea.
We checked out the telly, bounced on the bed, wrapped each other's presents, stuck our valuables in the safe and went out to see the Temple of the Sun. We stopped by a little bakery, picked up some empanadas (little pasties, usually of spicy pork and boiled egg), and sat on the wall outside the temple, watching Americans paying a few Soles to women in traditional dress in order that they be allowed to cradle a small sheep in their arms whilst being flanked by said Peruvian women, thus creating the quintessential Peruvian photograph: a Spanish catholic church built on the site of a ransacked Inca temple, women in stripy clothes, bleating animals and Americans shovelling in the funding. Kirsty, realising the mistake she had made in getting a cheese empanada (imagine a fried squash ball baked in flaky pastry), set about sprinkling pastry crumbs onto Jacob's shoes to get the pigeons to bite him. Time to go into the temple.
The Inca 'Qoricancha' ('qori' meaning 'worked gold'; 'cancha' meaning 'walled or fenced enclave') or 'Temple of the Sun' was geographically and politically the centre of Cusco, which was known to the Incas as 'the navel of the universe'. A pretty important place then, full of gold ornaments, the walls panelled with gold and silver plates...so when the Spanish invaded, they nicked it. They stripped the gold and silver, melted it down (apparently it took three months to get it all out), and built a Roman Catholic cathedral on top of it. The church of Santo Domingo is still there today, a strange mix of colonial and Inca architecture. Some of the stonework is exceptionally smooth, with pristine straight edges, looking almost like modern moulded concrete blocks, whereas the rest is much rougher and more rounded, looking far more hand-made. The primitive sun-worshipping heathen savages were responsible for the former, the advanced, civilised Europeans brought in the rough hewn latter. Hmmm.
As an interesing aside, Cusco, the capital of the sun-worshipping Inca empire, is the spot with the highest ultraviolet light level anywhere on Earth. That wasn't known until 2006...
After the church, we went to an Aussie-owned coffee shop which should have been really nice: a decent but quirky menu, big sofas everywhere, stacks of books and magazines to read, Bob Marley on the stereo, a vast gaping void where the atmosphere should have been. Aussie owned, it was locally run by people who unfortunately didn't give a damn. They stood sullenly in the way when Kirsty tried to peruse the books, they cranked up the volume of their favourite songs until they distorted and nobody could be heard, they just...didn't care. Their 'how to run a coffee shop' crib sheet was unfortunately missing "be nice to people". Shame really.
We gave up on the coffee shop and went to gather urgently needed supplies for the following day. We would be in an hotel with an expensive bar, so we got ourselves a bottle of Peruvian rum (for about £2.50), which even came with a serving suggestion: a two and a half litre bottle of Coke crudely taped to it. Nice. We also got ourselves a bag of limes and some Pringles. The essentials of a good Christmas.
Fighting our way back through the Plaza de Armas (the name of every Peruvian town square) again, we became aware that the vast sprawling market which had sprung up and appeared to cover every last inch of it sold nothing at all that anybody could possibly want to buy. Every stall dealt almost exclusively in sods of turf, bundles of dried reeds, chunks of moss, little bags of unlabelled brightly coloured granules (mostly green), crudely split lengths of cane, and stacks of a particular kind of wood which everybody was burning, producing an odd, sweetly aromatic thick grey fug of smoke. Gradually, we realised that these were the materials for making nativity scenes. There were people nailing together frames of sticks, lashing bundles of dried grass to miniature pitched rooves, sprinkling the insides of rickety stables with the mysterious lurid green flocking, but not a single one of them had an old shoe box painted with brown poster paint. Honestly, what do they teach in primary schools nowadays? The entire city appeared to be there (cordons of armed police and everything), buying dead twigs and chunks of dirt which anybody could have dug up out of the ground.
Back at the hotel, we put the coke in the fridge and the rum and limes in the freezer (told you it was a posh hotel), and went out for an absurdly cheap meal. Two and a half Soles a head for a three course meal. Six Soles to the Pound. Not exactly haute cuisine - large bowl of soup which was probably the previous day's leftovers boiled up with chicken bones, ladle full of stew with rice, dollop of hardly set jelly and a cup of coca leaf tea - in a shack down a back street, but filling, and probably one of the best value meals either of us have ever had. Shame there was a string of muscial fairy lights nailed round the door, its music chip clearly on its last legs, whining a variety of off-key carols. Shame also about the awkward baggage who served us: we asked for drinks, and she grunted, shook her head and continued watching telly. We tried a few more times, with similar results, then Kirsty pointed to the picture of a Coke bottle on their menu, which still didn't work. It was only when Kirsty made to leave and buy a drink elsewhere that the woman sprinted past her and returned with a couple of litres of warm Coca Cola. Once we'd prised off the crown cap with a knife and set about drinking it, she brought us the cups of tea which we hadn't known (and she hadn't bloody told us) were included in the meal we'd ordered. Ho hum.
Back at the hotel, we drank rum and coke with chunks of frozen lime, watched telly, then went to bed, wondering what sort of chimney our hotel room was fitted with. Couldn't quite see Father Christmas squeezing through the central heating pipes somehow.
Christmas morning!
Breakfast was nothing to write home about: a disappointing buffet of the locally sourced equivalents of big name breakfast goods: fatty chunks of porky bacony stuff, salchicha sausages (like frankfurters), chips (umm, sauted potatoes maybe?), eggs from one of those joke-shop rubber chickens, that sort of thing...and olives. Almost everything was at the wrong temperature: warm yoghurt, tepid coffee, cold scrambled eggs. Still, it was plentiful and paid for, so we set about it with either vigour or gusto - neither of us is quite sure which.
We popped out to make phone calls from the international phone call shop, the first time we'd spoken to our families since leaving, so that was nice. Then came the presents!
Jacob got an alpaca wool sweater, a cool kind of hippy satchel and the pair of green stripy trousers he'd been eyeing up at the market; Kirsty got the rainbow fingerless gloves, an alpaca wool scarf, a bag of fancy beads (making stuff for the use of) and a big orange bag. A kind of hippy satchel thing. We're creatures of similar taste really.
A large portion of the remainder of the day was spent listening to music, playing card and dice games, drinking rum, eating Pringles and setting about Jacob's new trousers with scissors, needle and thread and an old bed sheet which had seen better days and the hotel had been chucking out (patch material - very enterprising), as he is, as was mentioned before, an awkward bugger for whom to buy clothes that fit. Long enough in the leg, which is some kind of minor miracle, but years of cycling, swimming, walking and climbing (and centuries of big-legged genetics) have left him somewhat too large of thigh for Peruvian trousers.
We popped downstairs for cocktails, which led to staff phoning around the various bits of the hotel to track down some tomato juice for Jacob's Bloody Mary, then went to the restaurant for dinner, which was pretty tasty, but not exactly traditional. Kirsty had trout (the area is known for its trout), Jacob had pork fillet. Pretty good, but somewhat marred by the waiter telling us that he was about to finish work, so could we pay up please. No offers of coffee or dessert, no attempt made to, as is pretty standard in hotels and restaurants, wait for the diners to finish their meals, but a definite mention made that service was not included in the bill. When we just paid the price quoted on the bill, he hung around and said "My tip please?"
We have mentioned our attitude towards tipping before. A waiter hurrying us up so he could close then panhandling for a tip is likely to gain him little more than a smack in the back of the head. We gave him a Sol, about fifty Soles more than he deserved, at which he tutted, but didn't push his luck.
Before leaving the UK, Jacob's erstwhile colleague Paddy had presented us with sachets of hot chocolate and plane-friendly (plastic) miniatures of brandy, with strict instructions to consume them on Christmas day, which we duly did. Cheers Pat.
More rum, more cards, but no more tailoring...and so to bed.
Another morning, another breakfast, and out into Cusco to sort out train tickets for the onward journey. There are two railway stations in Cusco, which handle trains heading in different directions. We went to the appropriate one for the Machu Picchu train, and found it to be closed. There was a sign up with some opening hours, outside of which we found ourselves to be, so we went off for a wander, whereupon it began to chuck it down so we hung around the market opposite the station, killing time. There were a group of people loitering on the station steps though, so we wandered across the road, where we realised that the reason they were hanging round on the steps was...well, because that was their day job. Some of them appeared to be working from home.
The opening hours were, on closer inspection, for the cargo office, not the station itself. After a poke about the freight entrance, a guard told us we had to go to the other station. No, we're going to Machu Picchu: trains go from here. Yes, the trains do indeed go from here, but the ticket office is in the other station. The one on the other side of the city. Our incredulity at such nonsense was matched by his incredulity that we should find anything at all odd about this.
A taxi ride, a queue to be given a ticket for the information queue, and the eventual news that the next day's trains to Machu Picchu were all sold out. As were the next day's...and the next. We wouldn't be able to leave Cusco for at least a week. We had already booked a hostel in Aguas Calientes (the nearest town to Machu Picchu) for the following night.
Bugger.
Change of tack.
Across the road from the station are the travel agents whose fault it is that all the trains were booked up, so we thought: package deal! We fairly easily booked return tickets to Aguas Calientes, buses to and from the ruins and a place on a two hour tour which, once ended, gave us as much independent wandering and photo time as we would want. We tend not really to do tours, but given its inclusion in the price and the fact that we knew pretty much nothing at all about Machu Picchu, it seemed like a pretty good deal. The only small snag was that the train would be going from Ollantaytambo, which is quite a way from Cusco, but they'd be taking us there to meet the train, so that really didn't matter.
Having set off from the station, we realised we had forgotten the other other half of our railway station errand: after returning from Machu Picchu, we wanted to carry on to Puno, the southern Peruvian city on the shores of Lake Titicaca, so, about turn, back to the station for Puno tickets. Another queue for a ticket for the information queue, confirmation that tickets were available for Puno, a ticket for the ticket sales queue, and finally, tickets for Puno. Queuing, it is said, is a favourite British pastime. That is because we are good at it. We know that when we get to the front of the queue, the clerk can tell us when the trains are going where, and sell us tickets! We don't queue because we want to get tickets for another queue, at whose head we will receive a ticket to go and join...you get the idea.
We walked back to the hotel, packed our stuff ready for the following morning, and went out to investigate 'Gringo Alley', a street lined with restaurants and bars of various international themes which cater largely to tourists. We'd been eating in little local places down backstreets and picking at bits from street vendors quite a bit, so we thought we'd take a look. We chose a Mexican place, had some miscellaneous dishes of tortillas wrapped around bundles of spicy meat and beans, and went almost crazy to the sound of a string of musical fairy lights, behaving largely as the one in the backstreet eatery on Christmas Eve had done. The waiter disappeared for a while so Kirsty went to look for the switch, but to no avail. Fortunately, upon his return, the waiter seemed happy enough to turn it off. Honestly, does anybody really like those things?
Back to the hotel where we finished the rum, and crawled into bed.
Next stop, the ruined city of Machu Picchu...
