Perú Part 8: Time mojitos

It’s a bad play on words, I know. But before you judge me, allow me to explain (and be patient, this takes some backstory):

At the beginning of the semester, we were given a two-page schedule of every class, trip, and event we would have for four months. Back in January, it semed daunting, but today, I flipped to the secon page. That means I have 5 weeks left in my program and 6 weeks left in Peru. Of those 6 weeks, about 9 days will be spent in Arequipa, Tacna, and northern Chile, 4 will be spent on the Inca Trail, and the last week will be spent in Lima and hopefully visiting Tupe. Suddenly I feel like I’m running out of time.

I also had this realization that by the time I get back from Hong Kong in August I will have lived in four different countries (USA, India, Perú, China), three different continents, and four different ‘sectors’ of the world (North America, South America, Indian Subcontinent, Far East) in one year. And not just visited, like… lived for a minimum of 2 months. That’s crazy to think about.

Which brings me back to my original point: the title of this note. Originally, I was going to call it ‘Time Flies’ but recently I have had far more experience with mosquitoes than flies (as you will soon see) and, as Murray pointed out in his recent note, ‘mojito’ and ‘mosquito’ sound quite similar. Since ‘mojitos’ improve the world significantly more than ‘mosquitoes’, it makes a better title.

It’s doubly appropriate since this note actually corresponds to March 8-15th… I kept forgetting to post it.

Now on to what’s truly important here: my life, doings, and perspectives here in Perú

Last Wednesday (the 10th) we visited the Cathedral and Qoricancha with classes – two places of historical and artistic significance in Cusco which are well worth seeing but are not included in the Boleto Turistico. We weren’t allowed to take pictures in either place, but they were both awesome. The Cathedral is absolutely brilliant, and you can rent those head-phone audio tour things for free, which is nice. The main sanctuary has such wonders as a choir completely carved from cedar with dozens of patron saints (one of which is beheaded and holds his head on a book), two identical silver organs, a smoke-darkened carving of Christ called ‘El Señor de los Temblores’ which is paraded around the city during Semana Santa, and my personal favorite: a rendition of The Last Supper but with several differences from Da Vinci’s (1) They seem to have missed the significance of bread, since it’s not native to Andean cultures, and the main course is cuy (guinea pig) which is served at special occasions here. (2) in Da Vinci’s work, every disciple has his own wine goblet; there is no holy grail, though in this one there is. (3) Judas was painted to look like a Moor, which makes sense if you think about Spanish history.

I’d visited Qoricancha several times before since in the evenings there’s often live music/photography/painting/other exhibitions, but it was nice to be able to focus on the architecture and history, and to be able to explore without the added pressure of being discovered and kicked out. A modern church, convent, and museum have been built on top of the former capital of the Inka empire.

Class ended at 11:15am, and then the fun began. We didn’t have class Thurs-Sun since we were supposed to go to Machu Picchu, which is obviously closed because of the rains, and reopens on April 1. 

So we went on an adventure.

First off, in the US, if you want to go somewhere about 300 miles away, you hop into a vehicle and arrive in either 40 minutes or 5 hours depending on your mode of transportation. Here, however, we had a multi-city, multi-bus terminal, washed-out road filled journey from our lovely base in Cusco to the small beach town of Paracas on Perú’s western coast, just outside a national preserve.

No one knew what exactly was going on Wednesday. We needed to buy eight bus tickets to somewhere (though we didn’t know the right route to Paracas yet) and enough food to feed 6-8 people for 4 days, and several of us needed to change money and make last minute purchases. Oh, and pack.

Generally, packing for a 4 day trip takes some level of thought and deliberation. However, seeing as I brought about 20lbs of stuff from the US to spend four full months here, packing for 4 days took all of 15 minutes, most of which remembering those random things (toothbrush?) which everyone has to buy on vacations. The rest was spent shoving clothes into the bottom of my backpack to make room for food.

Anyway, since we had so much to do in so little time, we did the logical thing and split up: one group went to the bus station to figure out ticket information, while Avery and I confirmed a list of food (yay or nay, majority ruled) and went to a local market. (Mom, since I know you will ask, diet included bananas, oranges, pasta, rice, oatmeal, dried fruit, garlic, onion, sugar, bread, juice, cheese, carrots, broccoli, spinach, and we bought eggs and cheese there… oh, and a watermelon. That was hilarious actually. I was bartering apples from 3 soles/kg to 2 when I turned around and see Avery cradling this watermelon like it was her baby. She carried it through our bus adventures, and when Lauren tried to share it a disgruntled passenger sternly told her to ‘control her fruit’)

This was all very well and good until around 2:30 I got a call from a payphone saying that our bus would leave at 5:00, not 6:30 like we’d thought. Why a pay phone? Because our phone company HAD to choose this day to stop working. We couldn’t make calls… so how to communicate the time change to everyone else?

Although I’m still not sure exactly how we managed it, all 8 of us got to the bus station on time, and had our tickets from Cusco to Ica.

16 hours later we were in Ica. Yeah, I know, 16 hours. That’s how long it takes to fly from Chicago to Delhi. However, this bus was amazing. It was more comfortable than any plane I’ve been on. Though breakfast and dinner were both included in our fare, they were backwards. Dinner was a juice box and a granola bar while breakfast was fried fish, rice, pineapple juice, tea, and a fresh salad. My stomach and brain were equally confused, even though I knew it’s not unusual for Peruvians to eat an extremely small, light dinner, if they eat one at all.

In Ica, we met Ernesto, who is somehow related to one of the host families here. He helped us find the bus station from Ica à Pisco (home of Pisco and the pisco sour, not that I’d know anything about those). An hour later, we arrived in Pisco and took a taxi the last 20 minutes to Paracas, the final destination. Total travel time from the Cusco Terminal Terrestrial to walking in the hostel door was about 20 hours.

You may remember that last week I was extremely skeptical about spending so much time and energy to get to a beach. It’s definitely the mark of an arrogant Floridian, I admit it. But this beach was in the middle of a national preserve which was in the middle of a desert. There was a beach in the middle of the desert. If that makes any sense at all.

Like you’re driving through sand dunes feeling like you should be looking for pyramids (or that you’re about to get attacked by mummies that some nutcase rose from the dead) when all of a sudden a streak of blue appears on the horizon and grows into the Pacific ocean. Plus, it’s a peninsula, so you can still see the dunes on the mainland from across the water. For the first couple of hours, we were alone which was great, though just like in Florida soon enough the real tourists flooded in. It seemed to be especially popular among Bolivians and Argentinians, though there was the odd gringo.

**Aside: It’s quite interesting to hear what people have to say about whether or not I should be classified as a ‘gringa’. ‘Gringa/Gringo’ (F/M) is jerga (slang) for Americans and Europeans. It has a white stereotype, but since my family and I live in the US, I speak English with an American accent, and since the US is the country I am the most familiar with, I fit the bill. However, I also can speak Hindi, and am brown, not white… so far opinions are split about 50-50. ** 

Our taxi looked like it was fall apart that day… it had a cracked windshield, lacked seatbelts, a horn (almost as dangerous in peru as it would be in India), locks on doors, one backseat door handle, and cranks for the windows. The driver also tried to rip us off which pissed me off since he questioned my spanish. (Like everyone who questions my understanding of the verb enseñar ‘to teach’. Yes, I will be teaching physical sciences this summer, yes, I know I’m studying psych and linguistics. Yes I am qualified. Go away.) Anyway, he told us 30 soles ida y vuelta (hostelàbeach and back) and then told me I misunderstood and he meant one way. Bull crap man! I asked like 4 times “en total, ida y vuelta” so we ended up giving him sol/40 rather than 30 so we wouldn’t get stranded in a desert… but it was still annoying.

Also, if you keep going along that beach, you also find what is possibly the funniest bathroom I’ve seen so far. Which is a cave with ‘Baño’ written over it in red letters with an arrow. That’s also kind of gross if you think about the tide coming up… It was also weird because if you didn’t already know it was there or randomly decide to climb over a bunch of semi-slippery rocks over the ocean, you’d never find it.

A question for anyone who is reading this: When was the last time you saw a mosquito at the beach?

Ok, now when was the last time you saw a mosquito in the desert?

So what the hell were several bajillion mosquitoes doing on a beach in the middle of a desert?!?

Both nights we battled the mosquitoes with whatever we could find. Most of us have battle scars and the walls of the hostel look like they have the chicken pox. Gross? Maybe, but definitely annoying and painful.

After bumming around on/near the beach for three days, we headed back. That was almost more of an adventure than going since we had no help. I discovered that there were combis from Paracas to Pisco, so we did that, and then spent 30 minutes finding the bus stop and hopped on a bus from Pisco to Ica. From there, we had to search bus companies to find a bus with 5 seats (one of us came back early, and two stayed an extra night, leaving 5) which was actually affordable, and which would leave later. Finally, we got one, and were on our way by about 7:30pm. The bus we got was a double-decker beast which I’m sure had more square feet than the average apartment in Gainesville. We tried not to think about how we got through the narrow mountain roads in the middle of the night on this moving house… 

But, we all got back alive and in one piece, and in time for classes on Monday morning. Isn’t that exciting?

In other news, I recently realized how awesome UF’s research portals really are, especially when coupled with the amazing resources of the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas (CBC) where I’m studying. I got the USP grant again for the 2010-11 school year, and am super excited to start writing and actually applying everything I’m doing here. Plus, after all my academic commitments last fall, adding a 10 page paper to the my normal course work doesn’t seem intimidating at all.

I also need a hair cut…

Speaking of hair, I’m not sure I ever explained how showers work here. So in the US hot water heating is centralized; there’s a big tank somewhere in the building that heats the water before it’s pumped through pipes to faucets all over. In India, there’s a geezer (a small water heater) in the actual shower through which water passes on its way the the shower head, and you you manually turn it on and off. Here in Perú, the shower heads themselves are electric, so before you shower, you flip a switch that sends an electric current through coils of wire in the actual shower head, and the water is heated as it passes through. The higher the water pressure the colder the water is, since it has less time to heat. With practice, one finds the optimal balance between pressure and temperature. Of course, this also means that if you happen to stretch in the shower and accidentally touch the head, you will get zapped. It also means that being in the shower during a lightning storm is probably completely fine. Does anyone know if there’s a mythbusters on that?

To all UF-associated people, I hope you had a great spring break, though my wishes are a bit late. And to all non-UF people, I hope all’s well wherever you are.

-Geeta