The Road To Titicaca

We left the campground at Las Mercedes in Arequipa before nine o'clock yesterday and Google figured we’d be close to the lake by 3:30.

However we soon discovered no way were we going to cover the 140 miles, because Highway 34A is awful.

It’s hard to see in photographs but the pavement is patched to death, unevenly in a way that makes a heavy van bounce. All day long. It was exhausting. 

The scenery was very nice and all but this is a major artery between the coast and the interior. Technically it’s called the Inter-ocean Highway connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic across Peru and Brazil. 

The amount of traffic on a Saturday was amazing and it was mostly heavy trucks which will also explain why the asphalt is so badly wrecked. 

In rainy season you can get mist (“neblina”) in these highlands. Arequipa is at 7,400 feet and the road here topped out at 14,600 feet. 

They call this area the high plains (“altiplano”) and it’s an area that stretches riches from here south across Bolivia, indeed most of that country is between 12,000 and 14,000 feet.  

It’s a rough place to make a living. Temperatures drop to freezing pretty much year round at night.  We’re far above the tree line and though we’ve been lucky so far it can be unbearably windy. Other than that it’s lovely.

This was the first time we’d seen vicuñas. The animals you know as llamas (“yamas”) are really broken down into four so called camelids, inasmuch as they are rebated biologically to camels. In a continent devoid of horses they were quite handy before Spaniards introduced horses.  

Thus far we had met llamas, taller with fur in shades of black and brown, and the dbler white alpacas with the soft coat that you wear, and down south the burly guanacos in Patagonia. And now these gentle deer-like dainty vicuñas. They are said to run fastest of all. 

It’s a protected reserve for them but we drive through a small town or two up there in the high plains of the vicuña. 

The town of Imata on the River of the sand band next to a bridge called…Imata. 

They will fix your bike and charge your batteries here. We had a pretty decent phone signal up here which surprised me. It didn’t last of course. 

A hotel (“hospedaje “):

A cone but no police; we breezed on through. There was also supposed to be a fruit checkpoint but that wasn’t staffed either. 

If you need a toilet this town is for you: 

And here you can get fried alpaca chunks. A street vendor sold us a bag of meat chunks, nicely spiced with a boiled potato and boiled corn in a plastic bag. It was delicious d Pugh I forgot to photograph it. 

But the meat chunks were wrapped around suspiciously small bones. It was not at all handy and could have been beef but I am pretty sure it was alpaca. It seems odd eating these animals but it’s a case of what you are used to. And they live well. 

The altiplano: 

Bolivia is off to the right in the map below.  The Pacific Ocean is off the bottom and Lima the capital is a long way off to the left. 

Laguna Lagunillas: 

There were a couple of iOverlander spots on the lake but one was a goat track for bicycles and the other looked great but campers were not wanted obviously:

Not clear in the photo is the Eire across the entrance. We drove on. 

We went through an inhabited patch with farmhouses, men and women and their dogs by the road doing things that looked like hanging around waiting for a bus to me. 

I can’t imagine enjoying living in this wilderness but just to make it better we drove through a critical zone. Actually the road was no better or worse in this area where flooding had torn down the hillside. 

14,000 feet, 60 degrees and sunshine dappling the hillsides. Despite me getting grumpy about this crap road we both appreciated how specialist strange landscape really is. 

We found another place to stop, and even though it was 2:30, three hours to total darkness we were ready to take a break for the night. We were 86 miles from the place wanted to camp on the lakeshore but on this road that could be four hours of exhausting bouncing.  

Access was via this rather splendid “temporary” bridge installed in 2016. The car below is on Highway 34A.

We rumbled up the hard packed dirt track and in a few minutes we were parked on level ground. 

Rusty and I went for a walk among the strange tussocks of grass that the guanacos had vicuñas call lunch. They remind me of boggy Scottish landscapes minus the bogs and the heather.  If you see what I mean. 

He enjoyed looking around. 

So did I. 

This wild camp has easy access. 

I could see rain building in the distance and sure enough it fell on us later, not a lot but enough to make us feel snug as we ate Layne’s homemade pizza for dinner. 

We could hear the trucks a quarter mile away on the highway late into the night. 

Cerro Hermoso (“pretty hill”) behind our flat spot for the night. 

Rusty got roast chicken and hot dogs and kibbles for dinner.  He sat out for a while sniffing the air blowing across the altiplano. He snored deeply into the night filling GANNET2 with a sense of peace after that horrid road. 

Happy dog. He’s come a long way from South Florida and he loves the fresh cold mountain air. We love living with him on the road. 

Walking Cusco

I confess I did get slightly annoyed when they skunked me on my Machu Picchu tour as I don’t do well as a mass tourist. Then when I did get my courage in the sticking place to take on the most organized over crowded and over hyped attraction in South America they they said they had run out of room and I was no longer on the list. I got Peru’ed right there.  

So I ended up handing in my passport renewal application at the Consulate, a form and photos that needed no revisions so I am proud of that. And there I was at a loose end as it was Tuesday before lunch and I wasn’t scheduled to fly home until Thursday afternoon. The days stretched out like the prospect of torture. Me alone with no family, no van, no base. I love GANNET2, my cave, plus Layne is the best tour organizer so I wandered the downtown at random with my camera. 

Though I will confess right now the entire trip was one cock up after another, and even though I should never be let loose on a tourist town by myself, here I was in the ancient Inca capital of Cusco, surrounded by more English than Spanish speakers and I was getting constantly Peru’ed. It’s like magic, things just go haywire for me in this country with no effort on my part.  

I got up at five fifteen, got my hot shower at the campground, walked Rusty and met my cab at the gate at six o’clock. Aldo gave Layne a ride last year and she’s kept in touch and hired him for special rides like to the airport or to the dentist. He is totally reliable. 

It was a perfectly straightforward flight, an hour in the air instead of three days to drive. The plane left on time and arrived on time but Peru intervened. Naturally. 

I am not a fearful flyer but when they announced our descent for landing the plane suddenly accelerated and soared uphill pushing me into the back of my seat. Of course the captain came on the intercom and told us in two languages there was nothing to worry about. Sure we believed him but the plane suddenly went totally silent. I’m talking about a plane full of Latin American passengers who normally can’t stop their tongues wagging. 

The plane got above the thick black clouds and we circled for twenty minutes with everyone onboard concentrating real hard in continued total silence. When the captain had changed his underwear, finished his prayers and wiped his hands dry we had another go. This time we sank through the darkness and landed under the gray cloud cover. I was real glad when we rolled to a stop. Peru’ed again. 

The United States Embassy in Santiago makes it clear you will not be allowed in with your cellphone or any bags or even objects in your pockets. That seemed a bit much so when I arrived at the Condulsye in Cusco I was ready for similar treatment. However all they did was   wand me  with a metal detector but I could take my bag in with me. The waiting room had a door and two booths but both were busy. One had a woman dressed like a 29th century housewife with a squalling baby so I figured she was a Mennonite of something. The other window had a young woman who had lost her passport. I tried to cheer her up after she applied for an emergency passport. She didn’t hold back and told me she was adopted in Nepal a country she hadn’t seen in 25 years and is afraid she may get swept up in the deportations  and sent back. I hadn’t thought of that and had no idea what to say. The way things are at the moment I suddenly got a chill for her. I sat there and was glad to be simply renewing my document with no need to leave South America for now.

They saw me at 10:30 and I was out ten minutes later. When I get an email in a month or so I come by and pick up my new passport. Easy. 

The consulate is extra territorial so it’s not Peru so everything went smoothly. I felt like a waste of space standing on the sidewalk at ten forty-five with two days to spend in the city with no desire to be there. So I made my first mistake. Instead of calling my travel agent I took an Uber to the airport twenty minutes away. 

Naturally there was no way to buy a ticket over the counter at an airport. What foothills that’s how you fly in the 21st century. Me, I am that don’t so I called Layne and in minutes she had me booked in a flight at 4:20 that afternoon. We decided to abandon the $40 return flight on Thursday. I called the hotel and cancelled and they only charged us for one night at $20. Good to go. 

Traveling the normal way is so hard. I had forgotten all the details, the deadlines, the expectations. Aboard GANNET2 we get ninety days at the border to use as we please which suits my temperament. 

I got Peru’ed on my first attempt to leave the airport. If you walk out of the airport onto the street the price I discovered drops by half from $20 to go to the Plaza de Armas in the heart of old town. A brilliant discovery for one as inept as me when it comes to money. So off I walked, and the Uber that showed up left me walking as his car stopped working as soon as I sat in it. My force field  shut down the electrics right there. So I gave him ten bucks anyway as his day was going to shit most unfairly. The last I saw he was explaining to a cop why he was parking in a travel lane. When Peru strikes it doesn’t let up I’m telling you. 

In Spanish colonial cities the design was pretty much the same across their colonies and the center of their towns were the plaza where they could organize and train their soldiers under the fearful gaze of their unwilling subjects. Nowadays it’s where tourism reaches its frenetic peak and where a wanderer like me likes to start trying to figure what is most photogenic. Cusco is pretty stunning to look at. And corporate America knows that. 

Cusco has various acceptable spellings, sometimes with “z” but usually it is written as I have it here. Apparently the name is not Quechua but derives from an Aymara myth and is properly “qusqu wanka” which does not translate very well into English but supposedly means “rock of the owl.”  The story reminds me a bit of Romulus and Remus inasmuch as the Aymara founder sprouted wings, flew here and perched on a rock and thus was the city born.  

The Inca empire started here and that story is better documented and much more startling than a human owl choosing to sit on a rock. The Incas were just one more Andean tribe scratching a living here until in the 15th century they got it into their heads to conquer South America. In a matter of years they controlled ten million people from southern Colombia to the Atacama Desert in what is Chile. 

By all accounts the empire was a stunning civilization with clean water flowing across the desert, abundant agriculture with public storehouses filled by the government as proof against famine. Roads allowed messages to be sent and replied to within three weeks from the Emperor’s palace in Cusco to the furthest reaches of his empire. 

There were some drawbacks of course. From time to time young virgins, girls only of course, were selected to be killed (quickly by a blow on the head happily) to appease the gods and taxation was required of all able bodied men who had to donate several weeks work to the government every year. In compensation they lived at peace in a land of plenty. 

Until Francisco Pizarro showed up with a few hundred men in armor and with horses and upset the entire apple cart in a few years and laid the empire to waste. The Incas were enslaved and died from despair, overwork and disease. Their empire had lasted a mere century. 

Pizarro founded his capital Lima on a river down on the desert coast under those cold Pacific inversion covered skies and Cusco slumbered up the hill until Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Picchu in the twentieth century and let loose a tsunami of tourism.  And here we are in what I dare say is the most famous tourist center on this continent. 

All I heard around me was tourists talking, mostly in English but in other languages too but this is clearly where they all come to experience this country. Which is like going to New York City and saying you’ve been to the United States. 

English is spoken everywhere so don’t be shy, you will have better luck if you come in an organized way than I had on coming here in my random way. We will drive back and do the city properly. I needed shepherds pie for lunch, my way of  avoiding getting Peru’ed and finding a quiet place to sit for a while. 

I was going to get a Guinness but Paddy brews his own stout apparently  do I have it a go and I found it was lighter and more refreshing than Guinness.  Just what I needed at 11,100 feet.

Soccer was on the TV an upset victory in the FA cup from England which if I recall was won by Crystal Palace for the first time ever. However at the table next to me a group of American youth were sitting and loudly airing their grievances against Peru. I am not vet child aware and I suppose that is what you do when you are twenty and wavy to found sophisticated. But they did make my toes curl. They all drank water which I’m sure was much healthier than Paddy’s stout but I think they missed out on a good thing.  

They also mocked the notion of Shepherds pie in Cusco which led me to wonder why they were in an Irish pub. I was there precisely because they offered this weird Anglo Saxon and dish. It looked like nothing I had ever seen but it was delicious. Peruvians just know how to cook and put their own always surprising touches on food cultures. 

The panoramas, the mountains, the wilderness, the fauna, the food, to enjoy all that you just have to get used to getting Peru’ed from time to time. I am adapting. 

Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.  The Aymara myth of the owl and the rock got displaced and Cusco now airships gold. I cannot remember another place where I was so utterly swamped by trinket vendors. And they didn’t take no for an answer. It was exhausting. 

I’d like Peru to make an effort to be male to offer its citizens decent labor instead of this abandonment to  the whims of overwhelmed tourists. 

I might as well wish for the tides to reverse on my whim. An Uber driver I talked to told me there are two ways to make living here, in the mines or off tourists. Mining is bad enough but in Perú I did I eted there are unregulated illegal mines in the desert.  One can hardly imagine work conditions there. 

So endlessly wandering the streets selling identical dust catchers is preferable. 

I curvy had out one hundred Sole notes to all comers because I hate to see their efforts for so small a return in a country that offers no alternatives for ordinary folks who are content to raise a family if only they can. I didn’t haggle for this one, which discount home. 50 Soles ($13):

There is a rainy season here (which is about ending now) so there are open weird drains:

I love getting my shoes shined. I didn’t haggle and got 80 soles got my heavy duty steel toed sneakers made black again. They also set off the shark at the support do I still have to Ed off my shoes Dr security where no one ended does. 

Palace of Justice below. Hope I never have to darken its doors. 

Ancient construction techniques still in evidence: 

Key West style motorcycle parking:

These enclosed wooden balconies reminded me of similar I’ve seen in Türkiye: