Word of the Day: cuy- guinea pig. Food here, but I never got around to trying it.
We awoke to an excellent breakfast of bread, jam and real coffee(!!!!!!!!!!!!) and headed out to see a bit of Lima and attend to tasks such as buying groceries and changing money to soles. Thank goodness I had american $$ with me: the rate between Chilean pesos and Peruvian Nuevo Soles was slightly ridiculous- they wanted 650 peso to the dollar, when the real rate is something like 500 to $1. I wonder if this has anything to do with the two countries animosity or more to do with the fact that they produce relatively similar goods and may not actually have very high levels of trade despite their proximity.
After some grocery store adventures in something that seemed like a Peruvian version of Whole Foods, we walked through Miraflores, the part of the city where we were staying to Huaca Pucllana, an ancient ruin right in the midst of a residential neighborhood. It was built by people from the Lima culture, in 200(?)AD, from mud bricks. Much of it has been restored now, because until recently it was essentially buried and the space functioned as a garbage dump/soccer field for the community. Our tour guide estimated that it could take up to another 20 years for them to finish unearthing the ruins and restoring it. Nevertheless, much of the site has undoubtedly been lost because it was destroyed in the urbanization and expansion of the neighborhood. The construction of the site was very interesting: to be earthquake proof, the layers were built with triangles included to provide flexibility. The people of the Lima culture were believed to have had a very female-centric culture due to finding of female human sacrifices on the site: usually cultures that practiced human sacrifice offered up the best to the gods.
We then headed out to the bus station to embark on our 22 hour journey (Only $30 US!) to Cuzco for the next leg of our journey.
Have to say, Lima really wasn't that pretty or special, at least my impressions of it up to that point. I really wanted to like it because travelers are generally said to have the same reaction as mine, but for me it was hard to like a city that was so decentralized, lacked public transport, was dangerous to walk due to lack of stop lights or stop signs and was in many areas devoid of the art and graffiti that make Santiago so vibrant. Occasionally in Miraflores there was some colonial architecture, but not a whole lot, due to its relative newness.
My reaction to the Peruvian desert was also somewhat similar. Kind of bland. I started to realize how little I really knew about Peru though. This was the first international trip I had ever taken without semi-extensive academic study first: I'd touched on Peru in a few classes, but very specific topics that weren't especially relevant to where we were going, such as civil society under Fujimori, the Shining Path and Afro-Peruvian culture.
Everything was way more rural and much poorer than I had expected: outside of the city, there were almost no houses that reflected a higher standard of living. Nevertheless, I've gotten more used to seeing what rural poverty in Latin America looks like, which is kind of disconcerting. I don't like the fact that the existence of such a particularized difficult lifestyle has stopped shocking me so much: I feel a bit jaded that I've come to expect it.
The ride got more interesting at night although not for good reasons, once we started on high altitude curving roads. I hadn't wanted to risk bringing coca leaves on the plane; having seen too many episodes of "Locked Up Abroad," I just didn't want to have to have someone mistake them for any other sort of leaf. Since these were pretty much the only thing that help me, I was kind of in a bind. I kind of lost track of how many times I threw up in the bus bathroom: needless to say, not a good night. I was glad for the group that I was the only one who was vomiting, although we were all affected by the lack of air. I will say this about my study abroad trips: it's making me much more flexible and better at coping, because when stuff goes wrong while traveling, there's nothing I can do but wait it out or solve it on my own.
They also showed quite an awful bunch of movies, including a ridiculously violent kungfu movie, "The Descent", a terror movie about spelunkers and "The Bear" which was sort of like a nature movie with fictional characters and exceptionally bad dialogue and plot line and finally, (twice!) "The Boy with the Striped Pijamas," an exceptional downer of a holocaust movie.
On the positive side, once we "woke up" (I hadn't really slept), the scenery was gorgeous. Mountains, gorges, rivers, winding bends: it was impossible to take fotos because we were curving so much but unforgettable. Around noon, we finally pulled into Cuzco, dusty, terracota colored, but stunning in its own way.
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