Karaoke, Keulap and Kola.....Inka Kola
Trip Start
Dec 26, 2006
1
42
90
Trip End
Dec 25, 2007
Chachapoyas,
Peru
Friday, June 15, 2007
At 7am we climbed in the mini bus that was to take us the three hours to Jaen. As you can see this journey is not for those on a short timeframe as there is two days of travelling before anything really happens...although the journey there is proving half the fun, fish juice aside. Once again the powers that be managed to cram 20 people, including three children into the van at the peak of the trip leaving me to spend the rest of the journey with a 50 year old Peruvian ass staring me in my face, sometimes resulting in contact as we rode every single pothole on the wildly unpaved road. When I could un-wedge my face out of the ass I noticed the scenery kept changing. One minute we were in the cloud forest, the next traversing downhill through the mountains before finally settling upon a landscape that would not be out of place in Australia.
With Jaen reached it was time to take a pimp my ride tuk-tuk to the bus station, grab our next lot of tickets for Pedro Ruiz, jump in a cab to get us to the station, dodge the seemingly thousands of tuk-tuks descending upon us on masse before boarding our bus....a bus that contained leather seats twice the size of my ass (not hard I know), that reclined to nearly a 180 degree position and had more legroom than I have seen since leaving Oz (are you taking notes Qantas with your shitty legroom allocation in Economy class).
Unfortunately the journey was over before it began as the two hours of realtive luxury flew by as we hit Pedro Ruiz and another date with death...in the form of a crazy taxi driver. The words crazy, taxi and driver should now just be taken as a given. Little did we know there was a method behind the madness as he rushed to meet the 2pm deadline before the road was to be closed for rebuilding until 7pm that eveing. And as luck would have it, being 6 minutes late we found ourselves slowly heading back to Pedro Ruiz faced with a 5 hour wait, filled by more food, my first slurps of the sweet Inka Kola (for those in Oz think Creaming Soda but sweeter) and this is suppopsedly made from Lemongrass, hence the light green colour. As we wound up our game of dominos the taxi driver ushered to us to jump in as he had heard the road was about to be reopened. Which it was but not for another hour but hey, I could think of worse places to be stuck as we were surrounded by the sunsetting over the Andes with about 100 of our closest friends.
With the road opened and the sunset we headed the 90 minutes to our rendezvous in Chachapoyas. Sure the scenery would have been great in the day but just to hit Hostel Revash, feel the piping hot water coming out of those pipes and witness the decontamination of the fish packs as they came to be known made the journey worth it. In fact stage one of decontaminaton began with a thorough washing in the shower before being strung up outside on the balcony, hopefully relieving the stench from within.
Chachapoyas sits at 2400m on the eastern slopes of the Andes and was a pretty agreeable introduction to Peru. The whole reason we came here was to see Keulap, a pre-Inca walled city rediscovered in 1843. But more of that later. First there was the struggle to expunge fish juice, the experiment the night before failing to dent the beast. With the clothes in at the laundromat it was now the turn for Matt top squeeze lemon juice on the pack and see if that worked, Laura waiting in the wings to see the results. The next step was booking a tour and thanks to a chance meeting the night before with Fidel we had bargaining power. As we went from one agent to the next it was funny to see how often the guy from our hostal randomly popped up...each time dropping the price of his tour, as though we had a tracking device attached to us he just knew where and when to find us.
Fidel runs a language school in Chacha and after showing us through his school took us to meet his English wife Vanessa, before we agreed to put in an apearance that evening for the students karaoke session....never having heard me sing they were in for a surprise. And so it came to be that Laura, Matt and myself joined Vanessa and her class of 6 for Karaoke, tonights toons being "I´m Feeling Good" by the wonderful Nina Simone (apologies for butchering your song Nina) and "Wonderwall" by Oasis. And no, we were not doing these individually but as a class. Phew!! And then it came to be that we all explained a bit about the countries we came from for the students before heading back to our accomodation, the science lab where the experiments continued.
And as a footmaote I have heard the lemon juice worked for only a day before the pungent odour of fish juice returned. Laura has since managed to successfully exorcise the devil from her pack thanks to some deadly Peruvian cleaning products!
