One thing you should know before going to Peru--something overlooked by all the guidebooks. You shouldn't expect good coffee. Seven days out of nine, I was forced to make do with instant, which, for a man with no religion, is perhaps the closest I've come to dealing with heresy. Ignorant American that I am, I expect good coffee in South America. You also can't flush the toilet paper. And in many places, hot water is a scheduled part of life. But such is life.

You'd think that with a couple of people who profess to be writers, we'd have copious notes, reams of pages from travel diaries. Lucky for all involved, no such thing exists.

But there is the matter of over 500 pictures that I've managed to edit down to fewer than 300. (I'd like to take a moment to thank Yahoo for improving Yahoo Photos... and by improving, I mean totally screwing up a perfectly simple system. Jackasses.)

And Susan did faithfully write down all of her meals for her blog. Just keep scrolling and scrolling.

At any rate, Susan and I left for Peru on Saturday, Sept. 23. We flew from JFK into Lima, arriving at 11 p.m. or so. We were met at the airport by Percy, the humble and polite cab driver who whisked us off to the B&B Tradicional in Miraflores (sort of like the Soho of Lima). He took various backroads and side streets through various neighborhoods, none of which would be described as attractive. But we arrived safely and had a good night's sleep.

Lima (the city, not the bean)
Sunday, we had a bit of time to kill before catching our flight to Puno, on the shore of Lake Titicaca. So our helpful hostal host, a fine gentleman despite having lived in Staten Island for a time, gave us a couple of suggestions and off we went to a couple of spots in Miraflores: the Parque del Amor and the pre-Incan temple at Huaca Juliana. Parqe del Amor is all romantic and such and I'm not that into tiles and big sculptures of people kissing, so go check out the photos (and don't bother looking up her skirt ... there's nothing there).



I found Huaca Juliana fascinating. Then again, I find most ruins fascinating.



If you look at the photo, you'll notice the construction is quite a bit different from the Incan ruins most people associate with Peru. The adobe bricks are stacked like books--apparently done to earthquake proof the joint.

The Trio of Ugliness
While on our tour of the site, we came across a corner of the temple and in the distance I spied a hideous creature approaching us and felt fear tugging at my heart. It was mostly black, with a bit of red and had a bit of hair. It appeared to have been in a struggle for its life. But our tour guide assured us it was a harmless Peruvian Hairless dog and was quite friendly. In fact, he was quite friendly and was part of a trio that seemed straight out of a Disney movie. He was the dopey young one in a group rounded out the by the fat grumpy one and the alpha male. Still, I didn't touch him. Cuz he was too ugly for words.



To Puno, the floating islands and beyond
We had little time to spare in Lima and, after some helpful advice about handling the altitude at Lake Titicaca from our host (take it easy, chew coca leaves), we headed off by plane to Juliaca, where we'd transfer to bus for Puno. LAN provided us with a great flight and we were in Juliaca, sucking wind and wishing for thicker air, in no time. The shuttle ride to Puno was uneventful and soon we were set up in the Hostal Los Uros, which bragged that it had 24-hour hot water (but you still couldn't flush the toilet paper). We took a quick tour of the very small tourist area, bought some finger puppets and ate at the Restaurant Internacional (or however you choose to spell it). I had the alpaca. While it was seasoned well, I must say the meat didn't have much characteristic on its own. It had the texture of beef and the lack of flavor of white meat chicken. But it was meat. The dish came with mashed potatoes, the first of many, many potato dished we'd come across in Peru.

The next morning, we were off for a long boat ride in Lake Titicaca, which would entail a ride to the floating islands of Uros, an overnight stay on Isla Amantani and trip to Taquile.

I like to call this one "Moonlight in Los Uros"



I did manage to write some notes while on the boat:

I don't get to write this very often. Location: On a boat in Lake Titicaca. We've just left the reed fields and have moved into open water. The engine quit (again), but they managed to get it started (again). Earlier we were in the Uros islands. We stopped at two, the first called Chumi, home to four families, a cormorant and a very persistent heron who kept interrupting the tour guide's lecture.



We rode from Chumi to a second island on a twin-hulled reed boat with puma faces.

Or a catamaran, if you will. HAHAHAHA. Get it?




Candle-lit dinner for two
A three-hour ride landed us on the island of Amantani. As luck would have it, I was feeling extra ambitious and wrote a few notes there as well:

6:06 p.m. Writing by candle light in the domicile on the island of Amantani. It's, uh, dark. Really, really dark. It's just started to drizzle, which might prevent us from going to the dance. I don't know if that upsets me as the walk up to the house from the harbor was enough to kill us. After that walk, we were fed a late lunch of quinua soup (pretty damn tasty considering it had no meat or meat byproducts in it), which was followed by a dish of squeeky cheese and two different kinds of potatoes. (Depending on who you ask there are anywhere from 210 to 360 different kinds of potatoes in Peru).



The food was cooked by Vivianna, our hostess. She lives with her husband (didn't catch his name) and two young children -- Jose and Melissa (neither of whom speak Spanish). Some sheep and some mean-looking roosters round out the family. The home is a primitive setup situated around a courtyard, with a detached kitchen and an outhouse that can't even boast a board or a box to sit on. It's simply a hole in the ground over which to squat. (Geniuses that we are, we neglected to bring a flashlight and Susan decided that she's not drinking any more liquid for the evening in hopes of avoiding a midnight walk down the steps, through the courtyard and into the darkness of the outhouse). The family lives in two separate rooms downstairs. Our room houses three beds, a kitchen table, three chairs and a couple of night stands. It's low-ceilinged, but spacious. The door is under five feet high--which makes me feel quite tall. Calendars from 2001 line the walls. A working clock--obviously battery powered as there's no electricity on the island--ticks away the seconds. A poster of the Sacred Heart of Jesus looms over my left shoulder.



Oddly enough, the place--from the smell of chickens and dirt to the creepy religious paintings to the chamber pots under the bed--reminds me of my grandmother's house. Of course, she had electricity and running water. Still, I spent plenty of time running barefoot through chickenshit.

After lunch, we hiked through the village and up to a stadium that looked as out of place as a polar bear in a nursery school. It had a certain Planet of the Apes feel to it--this large concrete structure in a mud-brick village. The we hiked again, this time to the top of the island and the temple of Pachatata. The climb was killer and I didn't know if Susan would make it, but she did.

It's raining harder now.

7:20 Serious thunderstorm, complete with hail. Glad we have this one candle.

For those interested, we did end up waking in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. We used the display screen on my camera as a flashlight, a trick I remembered from the great blackout of 2003.

Mr. Taquile Toes
Obviously, we survived the night. The next morning we headed off to Taquile, an island similar to Amantani but a little more advanced in terms of tourist trade -- or in terms of asking for money from tourist. It was another day of hike-hike-hiking. We saw some cows and some sheep and some young-uns and old ones. We also ran out of soles (Peruvian money) at lunch, but David and Lee, two Australians we met on the trip, were kind enough to spot us a soles--(so we now owe them 35 cents or so).

The other folks on this tour, despite most of them being European, were quite nice. In fact, the only annoying thing about them was their habit of saying things like "Well, this is only our third week here" and that look of horror that came across their faces when we explained that in America, one typically received two weeks of paid vacation a year.

On top of all of this, we got a first-hand look at what years of scrabbling over rocks in sandals and having minimal access to showers (and apparently minimum interest in cleaning despite living on a lake) can do to a man's feet.

This is the guy, but we didn't get a close-up of his hooves:



Then again, after two days of hiking, we weren't ones to talk about hygiene. On top of that, after a gajillion-hour boat ride back to Puno (the engine kept stopping), we were scheduled to take an overnight bus to Cuzco without time (or place) to shower. Yes, we smelled ripe.

I have notes from our first day in Cuzco as well.

Oct. 27, 2006. 12:31 p.m.
Sitting outside of Church of San Blas in Cuzco. We arrived at 5:30 this morning via the Worst. Bus. Company. Ever -- Etra Sur. Ghetto-ass double decker thing. Coach smelled like cat piss, but lucky us were living in style in first class, where the seats didn't work properly. Despite all the promises on the ticket, there was no music, no video, no food service and, to top it all off for an eight-hour bus ride, no bathroom. These people need to take a trip to Brazil to see how buses should be run. Damn thing left over an hour late and made entirely too many mystery stops. At one point, we stopped in the middle of a field and dropped off a woman who walked off into the night. An older guy got on the bus at Juliaca and commenced to snore and slobber all night. Of course, none of this was helped by the fact that we were filthy from our trip to Amantani and Taquile.

Still, we arrived safely and a cab deposited us in Plaza de Armas at sunrise.



We ate breakfast at a place on gringo alley. Finally, we met our host, Manfred, at the Spanish school. Our host patron turns out to be the part-owner of the school. We walked to his house, where we met his house-helper Vicky, his young daughter Sofia, and his wife, Patricia.



Cuzco is, what's the word, charming. Decidedly cleaner than Puno and with approximately six million more tourists.

Also, lots and lots of dogs. Dogs in the streets. Dogs in the alleys. Dogs just hanging out. All of them seemed healthy and none seemed to particularly belong to anyone. They were almost catlike in their behavior: They moved about the streets largely indifferent to the humans around then, just doing what dogs do.

I kept no notes after that morning and already it's starting to blur the way vacations do. Mornings we spent traipsing about Cuzco, afternoons we spent in one-on-one Spanish lessons. Susan, since she's actually an advanced student, got to spend some of that time walking around having conversational Spanish instruction. I spent my time in a four by eight room learning nouns and present tense (but I was told I'm a most excellent student).

One night, all of the students gathered at one woman's house (turns out the woman was Dina, mother of Patricia, our hostess) for a cooking class. And by cooking class, I mean she had us do the prep work. Folks were most impressed with my mad onion-cutting skills. My only regret is that she didn't ask me to dice them. The dish--I can't remember what it was called--was an alergist's nightmare that contained both dairy and peanut products. Still, it was tasty and, like 90% of Peruvian dishes, was served over potatoes. Did I mention that Peru has well over 70 million different kinds of potatoes?

Sexy woman, Breakfast and Napoleon
Our second morning in Cuzco, we rose early and stopped in El Buen Pastor bakery for a piece of fresh bread, a chocolate donut the size of my face (which, to my undying shame, had to be eaten with a fork and knife), and some coffee that wasn't instant. Susan, who I think is now inches away from a cocaine habit, drank Mate de Coca again.



After that, we headed up to the Incan ruins of Sacsayhuaman, which is pronounced sexy woman, which, in turn, makes it a really easy name to remember. We weren't in the park area more than ten seconds when we were approached by what appeared to be a guide. But he wasn't offering just to walk us around the site. Oh no. He was offering a horse-back tour of the area for $15 Soles (that's about three bucks). We could have done the entire sacred valley, but we didn't have the time, so we settled on a one-hour tour and headed off into the hills on our trusty steeds Breakfast and Napoleon, and our guide Willy.



The horses were docile and Willy seemed to know his stuff. According to Susan, he's in training to be a tour guide, which pays pretty good wages, I assume, if the guide can speak English and Spanish. Willy took us up into some of the "caves" that were used by the Incas in one of their last desperate fights against the Spanish, who were trying to wipe them out (something to remember next time some La Raza person tries to lecture your Anglo ass about imperialism and colonization). These caves weren't long, but they were small. And it occurred to me at one point, as I followed Willy around a turn that took us out of the reach of the sun and into pure blackness: "I don't know this guy. No one knows where we are. He could be waiting in the dark with a knife ... or worse, another fricking potato dish. We didn't even sign release forms for crying out loud. RELEASE FORMS!"



But Willy didn't lead us wrong. And he had us back in an hour, at which point we were left to scramble like little mountain goats over the most excavated parts of Sacsayhuaman. Maybe I should have gone to school for archaeology, but this sort of site I can spend days at. Hell, forget archaeology. It's simply the inner boy in me wanting to play fort and war. Massive stone fortifications, complete with a zig-zag wall that the guides will tell you had some sore of religious, hocus-pocus meaning, but which also had a defensive purpose--invading armies can't attack one wall without exposing their flank to another. Secret passageways. A rock slide! Yes, a rock slide. Fun. Fun. Fun.



Alas, we couldn't spend the entire day there and I was dragged off to do retardo things like shopping for the 500th pair of alpaca gloves.

Machu Picchu, the limits of Neruda and the wonder of Francisco
And then it was time for Machu Picchu. Because we'd opted for Spanish lessons, we didn't do the Inca trail, something I regret now, but something that gives us an excuse to go back. Instead we took a train up to Aguacaliente and then a bus up the side of the mountain. The train took an hour just to get out of the Cuzco area because of numerous switchbacks--forward, then backward; forward, then backward; forward, then backward. But I occupied the time of looking out the window at the dogs and the people and the rooftops and taking photos ... of my reflection in the window. The scenery was amazing as we climbed down from the heights of Cuzco to the lower area around Machu Picchu's environs. We went down, the mountains went up. We passed adobe houses, fields of corn and potatoes, grazing cattle, working donkeys and rushing rivers carrying plastic bags and water bottles to their proper home in the Amazon.

A friend had suggested we read Pablo Neruda's "The Heights of Machu Picchu" on the train ride up, but to be honest I found it insufferable. Partly, I blame the translation. I don't know much Spanish, but what I could make out seemed better than the English on the opposite page. But Old Neruda deserves his own share of the blame what with the "death" on every third line and "plunging hands" and so on. I forgive that sort of thing in morbid 18-year-olds, but come 'on. Susan took over and said that reading the introduction really helps. Not to go off on a rant here, but the first rule of any creative writing workshop is that you have someone there to explain what you INTENDED the piece to say. The piece has to say it. I'm not familiar with Neruda's work, but I suspect a wee bit of nationalism there. South America needed a poet they could call their own and he was the best thing going. Well, at least he was a better poet than Che "I shot a man just to watch him die" Guevera was a revolutionary leader. Then again, Pablo doesn't have his face plastered all over the t-shirts of uneducated American college students.

Anyway, the bus ride up the mountain was the sort of thing not meant for phobics of any sort, what with the lack of guard rail and other buses rushing down the dirt road in the opposite direction.



And then we were there, at the fabled Machu Picchu. And so were approximately 72 million tourists (that's 2 million more than the types of potatoes in Peru), most of whom were German and, not coincidentally, annoying. No worries, though, as we were in the capable hands of our tour guide Francisco, who possessed a good voice, good English, a robust vocabulary and a way of blowing off that one person who is in every tour group who just has to prove his own knowledge of all things Incan with very loud, very long questions that really have no answer. "Wouldn't you say that the placement of the stonework blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah?" To which Francisco would respond, "No. That is incorrect." And my heart would skip a little beat as Francisco laid some educational smack down on some sunburnt Euroweinie in a funny hat with a walking stick.



At one point Francisco, while pointing out the flag of Cuzco on a neighboring peak, explained to us all that they were considering changing the flag's design. Cuzco's flag, you see, is a rainbow pattern and, more and more, it's getting confused with the "homosexual movement" flag. "Well, you wouldn't want that kind of confusion, I guess," said one of a group of Texans (two white, one black, all seemingly dorky engineers of some sort). Francisco shrugged and shook his head as if to say, "I don't know who to blame more for this sad thing ... the gays or you silly gay-haters."

And we moved on.

One thing I found striking about old Machu (as I've taken to calling it), is its sheer size. That famous photo you've seen of it? It doesn't do it justice. That perspective tends to flatten it out and all you really see is the top edge of the walls. From lower vantage points, you can see the multitude of terraces and homes that were there. And the llamas, too. Crazy-ass llamas, all rolling in the grass to scratch their backs. Boy, I tell you.

Anyway... one highlight was that Francisco pointed out the most important house in the settlement. How do we know it was the most important house in the settlement? Because it was the only one with a toilet. I'll assume that even they couldn't chuck their paper (or corn husks) down the hole after wiping. Still, I couldn't resist this particular photo opportunity.



The Night of the Cuy
We returned to Cuzco that night exhausted. We had booked an actual room in an actual hotel for this last night at the Hostal Amaru. We got a mack-daddy of a room and both showered before heading out for our last meal. I'd had alpaca, now it was time to have some Roast Cuy (that's guinea pig to the rest of you). I'd thought the big pile of stacked Cuy carcasses I'd seen earlier that day in Aguacaliente were a good omen ...



... but alas. We got out late and things were closing down. We ended up at this sorry establishment down gringo alley and were the only two in there. I ordered the cuy, Susan ordered an enchilada and sangria (made with Fanta!) and we waited.

To say I was unimpressed would be an understatement. The entire meal was sort of repulsive, and I don't level this charge lightly when it comes to meat. I'm not going to blame the poor little Cuy, though. I imagine in capable hands, it can taste quite nice. But capable hands didn't seem to be present. Firstly, the presentation was awful. Yes, I expected to receive a rodent size animal with a head attached, possibly split down the middle for easier gnawing. What I didn't expect was to recieve halves of two different animals. It didn't take a CSI cast member to see that one half head was much larger than the other and that the dental records didn't even come close to matching. Oh, and they were both right halves as well ... perhaps they do this to prevent people like me sickos from trying to reassemble the critter for a photo shoot. On top of this, one of the animals have died by blunt force trauma, by which I mean it appeared to have had its rib cage crushed with a hammer. Who knows? Maybe he'd tried to escape.

But unattractive presentation has never stopped me from eating a piece of meat. I eat squirrel, after all. And if you ever see what chickens look like when they're alive... well, anyway. But the outside was rubbery, the whole thing was cold and it was seasoned with too little salt and too much of what I'd call, "I Do Believe This Is Rancid." But, and not to sound like a t-ball coach, at least I tried.

Going, going, gone
And the next day, we left. We flew back to Lima, where we had time to kill. So we toured around Miraflores a bit. We saw many things.

A monkey in the park ...

Some American football ...

And a Hooters!



I'd actually been told the Hooters contained the hottest women in the known universe, but I poked my head in and saw the usual tramps running around in tight orange shorts, carrying wings to horny teens and that one weird family that always says, "What?! It's a family restaurant." Hell, the girls were wearing jackets so I couldn't even see their hooters.

And, that, my friends, is pretty much to end of it. As they say, "A good time was had by all."

We hopped a flight back to the states where, upon our arrival we discovered that we'd come into a large sum of money and we'd never have to work again. Instead we could travel the world, writing, drinking, eating--living a life of luxury. We found our true selves. I woke up every morning with a smile and a pleasant word we showered, flushed some toilet paper down the toilet because we could, went to bed and woke up the next morning to go to work and resume the every day crushing of our souls.