hostelling in barranco, lima.

Strange things going from Cusco to Lima this evening. We came from the Southern Comfort Hostel in Cusco — where everyone was up and about all the time, all evening — to this hostel in Barranco, Lima. It’s a SOMEWHAT happening part of town, I believe, but practically everyone went to bed before it was even midnight. Da feck? It’s the Bohemian District, but we have to leave at 11:30am-ish tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll have some time to actually explore the godamn place.

For the two and a half weeks we were in Trujillo, spending money was lax and it seemed plentiful. As soon as we got over to fucking Lima and Cusco, though, money just went away like a MOTHERFUCKER. This trip is turning out to be much more expensive than anticipated.

In other news, Mihae left her camera in a taxi tonight. ~__~ Hopefully it gets found ASAP. Fingers crossed.

Tomorrow we head out from Peru to Mexico City for an evening, then back to the States. Is it over already? The first few days went by so slow, but now things are going by so fast… time… it’s many a trippieth thing.

Massive journal entries to come. I’ve basically been writing them down in notebooks here, there, and everywhere (actually, that’s a lie, because it’s all in the same notebook), waiting for the proper time to type them up properly. (I’ve decided I really like when Brits say “proper”, and that I’m going to work “proper” into my daily or somewhat daily quotes.)

machu picchu, day two.

Machu Picchu was cool and all, but I rather do not believe it was worth the $40 USD ticket and the painful expensive prices (relatively speaking) of everything in the small town closest to Machu Picchu (Aguas Calientes). Tourist trap in the biggest sense that I have EVER seen. But for all who ARE going to Machu Picchu and Aguas Calientes: there IS cheap food. You just have to cross the bridges near the artisan markets and go to the area where the “real” people live… then prices are on par with prices in a town like Trujillo — 3 soles ($1 USD) for a lunch menu meal including an appetizer, second course, and dessert. You just have to know where to look. PASS IT ON. Lonely Planet isn’t going to tell you this shit, sucka.

More later.

escribo español como un idiota.

Estoy pagando para una media hora de internet. Cuesta 1.50 soles aka 50 cents USD. Estamos en Aguas Calientes ahora. Es un pueblo muy pequeño cerca de Machu Picchu. Porque esto es, es muy, muy, MUY caro aquí y precios son como precios en los Estados Unidos… en partes, son mas caros del mismos cosas en los Estados Unidos! Es increíble! Es muy difícil a utilizar esto keyboard porque tiene muchas caracters y no se como debo usarlos. Pero, puedo usar esto… ñ… y estos… áóíú… y estos son bastante buenos.

Mi español es muy, muy teríble, pero me gusta lo usando aqui. Estoy aprendiendo — o recuerdiendo — mas rapido, pero uso muchas palabras que no son palabras… este noche usé la palabra ¨comfortable¨, que no existe en español. La palabra es ¨cómodo¨. Oops.

Anoche solamente dormí una hora porque muchas personas del hostal en Cusco fuimos a la discoteca. Discotecas en Cusco son muy, muy, muy, MUY horibles, y la música es de los ´90s y ´80s. Es teríble. Fue un poquito divertido ayer porque es solamente un noche, pero para personas que le gustan musica, es una broma. Una broma grande. No hay musica reál en Cusco… o no hay muchas… solamente hay musicas para turístos (y todos personas saben que turístos no saben nada… pienso que esto me incluye tambien).

Mañana voy a escribir más, sobre mi computadora, si tengo internet. Pero estoy usando mi cuaderno y escribiendo todos de mis recuerdos. Luego voy a… type them.

Tengo fótos pero no tengo una cord para la computadora!!

No puedo hacer SMILEY FACES con esto keyboard. AAAH!!

cusco, day two.

The next day at Cusco consisted of waking up, meeting the new hostelmates, and heading out around… 11:00am? We started off by wanting to go to Saksaywumun… but decided to take a cab further up PAST Saksaywumun to _______ and then walk down. After shooing away cab and cab again, we got one for twelve soles, and then it turned out to be a bit of a dick move, really, because the place was actually pretty fucking far. All upon insistence of Sarah, our new hostelmate, I guess. She’s this dreadlocked girl from Montreal. Really cute, has funny teeth, and speaks English funny. Haha. Anyway.

We took the cab to _____ and discovered that Cusco has this super lame thing where if you want to enter one of the sites, you have to pay for a one-day pass of 70 soles ($23 USD), OR you can enter all the sites in the area (I think there are around 10?) for eight days for 120 soles ($40 USD) or something. I suppose if you’re not traveling cheap and actually have enough time to go to all the available places, that deal is kinda rad, but if you’re a poor backpacker, that shit sucks ass, son (so it sucked for us, naturally). I personally woulda paid but Mihae and Sarah didn’t want to, so I didn’t push it. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t super worth it anyway. If only we were students. Students get massive discount action.

The walk down was fun cause it mostly consisted of farmlands and stuff. I’ve realized that our experience in Trujillo was rather really unique, because we saw the REAL city of Peru and more real poverty in El Porvenir instead of touristical facades people see in Cusco, for example. I think most people never really saw a lot of what was real Peru, particularly those people in Cusco.

On the way down, we stopped by Puka______, because it was a free ruin, but it wasn’t super exciting. It was Incan, as were most things in that area. Puka means “red” in Quechua (I learned this from eavesdropping on a Spanish-speaking tour guide).

Being with Sarah was in some ways rather awkward. Although she seemed fairly happy and friendly initially in the hostel, she wasn’t all that talkative and definitely was cheap and the type, I think, who likes to “know” where she’s going even if she doesn’t. For example, she scoffed when taxi drivers told her how much it would cost to go to _________ (15 soles), even though she had honestly no idea where it was and after seeing how far it was, agreed that the price was decent. I wonder if it’s too harsh of me to come to conclusions such as this after knowing someone for only half a day or something? NAH!

We walked for quite a while and were talking about sneaking into Saksaywumun because when we had driven by initially, we had seen a place where we could sneak in through the bushes. Unfortunately for us, we got side-tracked and tried to take shortcuts, which were in fact shortcuts, but didn’t take us to the area where we could sneak into the site. :[ We basically waded through this area with tons and tons of horse shit in various incarnations, from juicy ones from that day to some that had been broken down into what was practically hay (could make paper out of it!). Mihae did a party foul and freaking wore FLIP-FLOPS although she knew we were somewhat walking / hiking. PARTY FOUL ACTION! Needless to say, her feet were like, covered with poopies to a degree. Luckily it’s not the more juicy kind, but nonetheless. Good thing her flip-flops didn’t break, cause that REALLY would have been a SHITTY situation. Har har.

Anyway, by the time we walked down shitty mcshit path, we were fucking starving and opted to eat on this one street that didn’t look at all very touristy. We stopped by one place cause Sarah hadn’t eaten any Peruvian food yet essentially (even though she had been there for like, two weeks?) and she wanted to try chicharron. They had it. Made a big mistake, however, in not asking for the fucking menu price beforehand. The lady bitch ended up charging us 10 soles ($3.33 USD) for a super sub-par one course lunch in the middle of nowhere (in stark comparison to the really delicious three course vegetarian meal we had eaten the night before, in a more busy part of town, for only 3 soles ($1 USD). BITCH!

It wasn’t even so much about the money asd it was about the disappointment in the fact that she would rip us so hard. >__> And I’ve had chicharron two times now — of fish and chicken — and neither of those chicharrons were at ALL representative of what the fuck she gave us that day, which was this really hard beef that was almost like beef jerky. it tasted okay, but it was weird. There were also two cats and one dog that kept hanging around our table, trying to get us to feed them things (I gave them some nasty cholo — aka giant maize — but Sarah freaking gave one cat and one dog giant pieces of tendon!). The cat ended up pawing and gnawing at the piece of tendon forever but finally ate it. I can’t imagine that was all that good for it.

So, the meal sucked, and then we moved on, pissed. Stopped by this White Jesus (Christo Blanco) on the way back, hung out a little, and then walked down to Saksaywuman to disappointingly discover that it’s one of the 70 or 120 soles to enter places. >__> And like I said, we didn’t find the area where we could sneak in again. Tan triste. We didn’t go into that, even though people had said it was uber awesome. I hope we can go back later. Some horse corral man stopped us and told us if we did a horseback tour with him, it’d cost 40 soles AND include admission to 4 sites. I look forward to seeing if that’s actually true.

We walked back down, did some lame shopping, then went to the central market, which somewhat entertaining (always love markets… food markets, that is!!!). Outside of the market was this group of three people doing slapstick improv comedy which I didn’t quite understand at all. All I got out of it as that the lady enjoyed yelling at and beating on one of the funny-voiced scrawny men a lot. Some phrases included, “Why don’t you just get a job?!” followed by slaps across the face. Yeah, don’t understand.

After that, we rested a lot and people were talking about clubbing at night, so we put that on the list of things to do. But first! We went to the supermarket down the street and bought some ingredients to make some mothafuckin pasta, son! Mixed funny-tasting tomato sauce with tuna and a tomato (which Eric, a guy from SF, lent us). He also lent us parmesan cheeses! Yay! Let me tell ya — the addition of the tomato made a BIG difference because otherwise the sauce (owned by Nestle, like everything else here) is super sweet and has the consistency of like, ketchup. No shitting. WOOT.

That night, we waited around for a while as people randomly got drunk in the hostel. Rather amusing. A guy from Holland, Ronald, injured his arm while renting a motorbike the previous days but refused to get his shoulder popped back in the socket because he was waiting for his brother to come and didn’t want to risk some more serious injury. Kind of strange. The doctors in Peru told him that the arm would just pop back in itself, which is odd. I always thought people could just pop it in real quick and be done with it, but I didn’t want to argue with him. He got slightly drunk and then got really emotional talking to me about how his brother, who is slightly younger than him, and him were really close and did all these things when they were growing up together, but that he lives in Australia now and his brother lives halfway across the world in Costa Rica. He really seemed to miss him, and seemed conflicted talking about it, saying that it might sound stupid to people that he would not fix his arm because he is waiting for his brother to come… it was really kind of sad and he damn near cried and I didn’t really know what to say, and we were in the common room full of people, too (granted, no one else was really paying atteniton to his story because they were talking to themselves). Bah. He then said how he has an older brother who lives really close to him, but that the relationship is just not the same with that older brother. Bah bah.

Oh well, though, he was super freaking hilarious, though. Very goofy and stuff. He did this thing where he’d lick his fingers then push back his eyebrows… and he would flip his hair… both things to convey some kind of sexiness that was not really there because he was tall, gangly, and fucking goofy as shit. Hilarity. He looks like a less handsome Lars to me, but yeah.

There was this other guy, Caio, who had lived in Taiwan for five years and speaks some Mandarin — enough to hold a conversation certainly, which is quite impressive enough. I don’t think I’ve had a conversation with a white person who can speak Chinese since college, and he is only the second white dude (second non-Chinese person ever, really) who has been able to hold a conversation who I have met. Very cool.

Anyway. That girl Sarah, who had gone out with us earlier in the day, had been saying how she liked Caio and thought he was really cool, but I didn’t think she meant REALLY liked him. Soon, though, she proved that she REALLY liked him by making out with his face in front of everyone. It was funny though. She was super quiet and chill when sober and super loud and flirty when drunk, kinda. Hilarious. Oh well.

So we kept talking about going out and by 11:00pm, we were still there in the common room, with people getting drunk off their asses. The hostel had a lounge with a bar based on an honor system basically, and the hostel workers were barely ever manning the bar, so Sarah was manning the bar for them, even though she didn’t work there. Hah. It’s funny — all these people in Cusco, and especially this hostel, live in the town for fucking ever, and it’s a town with SHITLOADS to do, but none of them do ANYTHING except for go to Machu Picchu once. It’s like nothing else really matters. It’s really fucking weird to me. Like, Sarah going out with us was the first time she’d really been out to the sites (she would spend time hanging out and partying), and the same applied to many, many other people.

Anyway. We woke up the roommates Melanie and Caroline to get them ready to go out… or Mihae did, anyway. Melanie bust out this bottle of wine that was Peruvian. She had bought it specifically because it was Peruvian, but Peruvian wine is not known for being particularly great, mind you. It ended up being super fucking sweet and kind of sigusting. Because we took so long to leave, Mel just ended up drinking and then passing the fuck out after throwing up.

We finally ended up going out around 12:00am or later. It was interesting. Tonsa people from the hostel went, but in general, the group who I hung with was me, Mihae, Caroline, and Maya. We headed straight for the bar. Sam had picked the place (he is an Aussie who works at the hostel and had decided to go out with us that night, even though he had been bithcing to us like an hour beforehand about how godamn awful clubs in Cusco are and how bad the music they play is… like a godamn elitist grouch, really, although in a funny way). We went to Mythology, because Mythology is one of the four clubs with super aggressive workers standing outside it, trying to get you to go into their club with free drink flyers and lots of harrassment in English.

We went in, headed straight to the bar (I didn’t drink), and immediately saw four shirtless men dancing on top of the bar! One super chubs Peruvian man with kinda (I don’t want to say SEXY, but AMUSING, maybe) interesting moves, and three gringos. One gringo got his pants pulled down and his penis was hanging out. I didn’t see it because heads were in the way.

Then there was dancing, to uber HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE ’80s and ’90s American and non-American music (like Abba, Snow, Ini Kamoze, etc… lots and lots of badness, or kitsch goodness, I don’t know). The music was without a DOUBT targeted to UBER gringos. So very bad. I think Pervuians think this is what Americans (?) honestly listen to. Horrible.

To make it worse: The DJ SUCKED! He did NOT know how to mix, like, at ALL. For non-techno songs, he would just kinda lay one song over the other without beat-matching. Awful. For techno songs, “mixing” by the DJ consisted of turning the volume down and then back up again to simulate fading out…

The Euros super liked the techno, and I must say that I was really fucking excited to hear techno, too, even though it was CHEESY as SHIT techno. >__> Boo urns! I was even excited to hear ABBA, man. That’s how bad the music was. LOL.

There was this ongoing joke between Ronald and Caroline (Ronald REALLY really wanted her) about how he was a Dutch Euro who loves dcorny dance music and hated American hip-hop).

The worst, to me, though, was when they started playing like, Peruvian Kumbia and like, Regaton, cuz fuck, I can barely dance to hip-hop, much less to that fooking shite! Boo urns! So half the time, as some of the other girls were dancing and boogying down with Peruvian dudes who asked them to dance (even though they had no interest in them), I was: 1) Watching a video they started playing awkwardly, which promoted white-water rafting yet kept showing people crashing and tipping their boats over in the water, haha; 2) Telling Peruvian dudes that, “No, I won’t dance, because I hate this kinda music”; 3) Looking bored out of my mind and being asked by Maya over and over again if I was “OK”.

All in all a painful yet somewhat entertaining evening. MOORG.

fuck cusco / cuzco.

Cusco / Cuzco blows chunks. Super tourist mecca. Everything is fucking expensive. It’s kinda cool in that there’s a lot of international flavor, but it’s not really cool because there’s only a lot of international flavor because it’s targeted at gringo tourists with monies. Everything costs an arm and a leg. Also, there are these cool archeological ruins, but they don’t let you pay entrance fees for each additional ruin; you have to pay for all the ruins as a whole. You can either pay 40 soles (around $13) for one day’s ticket of 70 soles (around $23) for all of the archeological ruins. It might be not that much money to a tourist, but man, compared to how much things normally cost in Peru, it’s fucking robbery.

// EDIT: MAY 12TH, 2010. In retrospect, $23 is a super low price, and I think it was a bit hasty of me to write this at the time. I was quite very poor and unemployed at the time, so everything seemed exceptionally expensive. And everyone else’s mentality was that $23 USD for a day’s-worth of archeological sites was sOo expensive, so I got caught up in the mentality. Now that I think about it… $23 USD is really not that much, considering how much was included in the price. Also, the title of this post was a bit hasty and unfair. Sincerest apologies to any Peruvians I may be offending. (And read my comment below.)

Not to mention today we went to this random little restaurant in the middle of nowhere and this lady served us “chicharron” which I don’t really think was chicharron. We didn’t ask beforehand how much it’d cost cause we’d assumed it’d be like 4 soles. Turned out to be like 10 soles, pretty much only because the bitch ripped us off. What an ass. Can’t even believe that shit! First time a Peruvian has done did me wrong so far on this journey.

In conclusion, Cusco sucks. Tomorrow is Machu Picchu. I reckon, or hope, that Machu Picchu will be good, but it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to get into that fucking place, too. An arm and a leg is again in Peruvian money, as it is $20 USD, or 60 soles. BAHHH. I thought I wouldn’t have to take out more money, or exchange any, but it looks like I’m going to have to. Which sucks bawls. Cusco has made this trip quite very expensive

fun with taxi drivers & animals in lima!

On the plane right now, flying to Cuzco. The first place in Peru (other than @ the SKIP house, obviously) where I’ve heard other English speakers. Kinda strange-like. Nearly everyone on this flight is a foreigner; it seems uber English-speaking staff are on hand. I’m sincerely hoping we’ll fly over the Nazca lines.

BTW, Lan Peru is the best airline ever. Just saying. I think so many non-Peruvians have quite the perception that Peru (or all of South America, for that matter) is sooooo backwards but fuck, I don’t really think it’s all that bad. Granted, there are some really SUPER poor areas of unimagineable squalor and loads of bad infrastructure, but I think it’s quite obvious things’re changing for the better here. You can see construction everywhere, as well as loads of available jobs.

I sent my parents photos of Peru last week. My dad, for starters, didn’t even comment on my photos or my sending of them. He only said, “Don’t make phone calls; it costs $1.99 a minute,” because I’d mentioned that in Trujillo, my phone didn’t say that I was roaming and didn’t give me any extra messages about costs. It seemed to work like a regular local phone there, which was a bizarre thing. My mom, in the meantime, said, “Thanks for sending me photos; I would never go there.” Although gracious, the sentiment is ignorant as fuck. I think life in Peru, especially in places like Cajamarca, is VERY VERY very much like life in Asia — or at least in my parent’s home country of Taiwan — outside of the very central metropolitan area.

Anyway, I’ve ingested some altitude adjustment medicine I’d purchased from the farmacia (which is pronounced farm-AH!-cee-ah, not farm-uh-cee-uh), and although I’d looked at the box it was in, it was quite uber uninformative. No ingredient lists. Strangely, though, taking it on the plane made me pass out INSTANTLY. Which is super bizarre.

On the way to the airport, a taxi driver from Cuzco picked us up. He lives in Lima now because he has a family and a daughter. It’s exciting, though, to find my Spanish comprehension skills so drastically improved that now I can actually hold a conversation on every taxi trip. Super exciting. It was quiet initially, but then I asked him about Lima traffic, and then we talked a lot about how Cuzco is beautiful but expensive, and where we’d been in Peru. Good times.

Before that, we went to the Parque de Las Leyendas (Park of the Legends) in Lima. That alone made Lima somewhat interesting, because what we’d seen of Lima up til then was whatevers. It was basically a zoo / garden, and it had set up the zoo animals so that there was a Selva (Jungle) zone (ever reminiscent of Ever), a Costa (Coastal) zone (really weak), a Sierra (Mountain) zone, and an International zone. Pretty much dope sauces. Saw sloths, lots of cool monkeys, some other random shit… it’s pretty much the nicest fucking zoo I’ve ever been to, though. The attention to detail was extraordinary. Every fucking wall available was muralized gorgeously. It was ridiculous. The city of Lima / government of Peru must pay a fuckload of money to maintain that place, because everything, and I mean EVERYTHING — from the animal cages down to the plants planted — were fucking perfect. There was also this creepy ass taxidermy museum which would be cool had I not had been looking at LIVING animals for the past hour prior to visiting the taxidermy museum. That being the case, it just felt so WRONG. Especially where there was a whole jaguar skin. Like, WTF!! SO WRONG. (There were some cool leaf-bugs, though.)

The taxi ride there was also really fun, and the taxi driver played some awesome old funk music (in a CD mix, basically), and gave us his business card afterwards so that we could call him (although I don’t think that’ll be happening). And prior to that, we ate breakfast (kinda) at this super fucking expensive touristy restaurant in Miraflores (in Lima). And prior to that, the guy who drove us from the bus station to Miraflores was confused. See previous post.