Month: July 2008

Oh. Did I mention that you can buy any drugs you like over the counter here? There’s none of that time consuming “getting a doctor to write you a prescription” lark that we have at home, you can just wander into a pharmacy and ask for whatever you feel like. And then they sell them to you.

For the Inca Trail, for example, we prescribed ourselves some pre-emptive antibiotics, to avoid any potential awkward situations, and one day, after a particularly tough night in cramped seats on an overnight bus, Sal popped out to pick up some Valium for use on future journeys (well, the lady offered us a choice between Xanax and Valium, but we bought the Valium as it was a quarter of the price, at just S/.1 a tablet…)

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With cheap laundries in every town, we quickly gave up on the concept of hand washing and have been dropping our stuff in to be washed and dried at regular intervals. This has had the interesting effect of gradually making all my clothes shrink. Every time they come back, my T-Shirts are marginally smaller than they were before, so presumably by the end of the trip I’ll be able to get so much more into my bag, as I’ll be able to squeeze my entire wardrobe into the side pocket.

One question remains, though: we’ve spent a significant proportion of the trip so far at altitudes above 2,500 metres, and all the laundries charge by weight. Is it more cost-effective to do your laundry at altitude, or do the laundries up their prices to compensate? Should I save up my dirty clothes for the next time we go up a mountain?

So after arguing the toss about exchange rates, and before heading south to Bolivia, we decided to blow the budget by heading to the Amazon. We’d read about this place called Inkaterra in the Indie travel section, so, Malaria pills in hand, we decided to hop over to Puerto Maldonado, on the Madre de Dios river in the Amazon basin, for a few days of luxury.

There are two ways to get there from Cusco. It’s either a tough eighteen hours on the back of a truck on unpaved roads, or a 30 minute flight that costs about $50.

No prizes for guessing which one we chose.

Buying the tickets was another interesting exercise in internet travel planning, though. When Lan.com refused to accept a UK credit card, we had to choose one of the “alternative payment options”, and these turned out to be the supermarket. Which is apparently a perfectly normal way to pick up a couple of plane tickets round here. You just take your code from the website, pop over to your selected supermarket chain, and join the queue at the checkout. Everyone else might be picking up a loaf and some milk, but they were more than happy to sell us two ida y vueltas to Puerto Maldonado. I think I’ll keep the supermarket till receipt that was ultimately our ticket as a souvenir.

We weren’t totally sure if it had worked, but a few weeks later they let us on the plane at Cusco airport, and after a short flight in the company of some moderately annoying and/or clichéd Americans (sample dialogue between the guy next to us–complete with thick noo yawk accent and waving a hat around in the general direction of the overhead compartment–and the steward: “hey Luis! Luis! You got room for this sombrero up there?”), we arrived in the ramshackle dusty town of Puerto Maldonado. It’s a town on the edge of the jungle, where the roads are mostly only wide enough for the motorbikes and tuk-tuks that are everywhere, and it instantly made me feel like I was back in Asia somewhere. And when we got to the “port” (a small wooden platform on the edge of the river) and boarded a long tailed boat for the 45 minute trip along the river to the lodge, it felt like we’d stepped onto the set of Apocalypse Now (this illusion was completed later that evening when the area around the lodge was illuminated with lines of candles and a raging bonfire). Still, we had hypo-allergenic pillows and complimentary bathrobes in our suite, and free Pisco Sours, so the choice not to go native wasn’t that tricky after all.

After the Inca Trail, we spent a few more days in Cusco. Tennille and Matt were in town, for one thing, so we spent a few days just hanging around with them.

Cusco starts to drag you down after a while, though. On the one hand, at least while we were there it was a town permanently in the middle of some kind of celebration. You could barely move for dancing kids in traditional costume every time we ventured even vaguely in the direction of the Plaza de Armas.

On the other hand, it’s a place so dependent on the tourist industry that you can barely move without having to fend off a tout of one type or another, be they selling tours you’ve already been on, or paintings or postcards you don’t want, or woolly hats (even though they can see that you’re already wearing one) or sunglasses (even though you’re also already wearing them). When a shoeshine boy approached me in the square offering to shine up my trainers we figured it was probably time to move on…

We foolishly opted to buy our tickets to Bolivia by going down to the bus station ourselves (even though it turned out that we could have bought them from an agent in town for the same price). It’s away in a dodgy part of town and turns out to be a huge room in which people behind desks shout place names at you really loudly, as if you might pop in there to buy a bottle of agua sin gas from one of the stalls, and end up with a ticket to Lima, just because a man shouted it your general direction…

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Oh yes. I can’t move on from Cusco without a brief postscript to the Inca experience. We did have a couple of slight snags that deserve a mention. Our agency, Pachamama Explorers did a generally great job, with the exception of deciding to subtly raise their prices at the last minute before we left, and also leaving us semi-stranded in the middle of nowhere at the end. The bit in the middle might have been good, but unfortunately it was book-ended with the problems that I will inevitably remember…

The way back from Machu Picchu is by train, and Peru Rail likes to keep ’em separated: the super rich tourists (the Bill Gates and Clintons of the world) go to Machu Picchu on the Hiram Bingham, a luxury service with a free bar that’s a snip at just $588 for the 3 hour journey, while the regular tourists catch the Vistadome, which has panoramic windows to give them a great view of the beautiful scenery that they’re not walking through.

At the other end of the scale, after getting us up for breakfast on the final morning of the trek, the poor porters have to pack up all the gear and the tents and run (yes, run) from the campsite down to the station to catch their train, which leaves at 5:40 am. After our time at Machu Picchu is over, us backpackers catch a train called appropriately enough The Backpacker, which takes us back to Ollyantaytambo, about a 90 minute drive from Cusco. Finally, the guides catch a slow local stopping train (at a fraction of the price we pay and strictly for Peruvians only) that runs behind the backpacker. It is, as our guide Odon told us, “the system”.

It is also “the system” that all the agencies send transport to the station in Ollyantaytambo to collect their tired trekkers and take them back to their hotels, and we were told to expect a guy with a sign saying Pachamama to be waiting for us there, but apparently this bit of the system doesn’t work so well if the train is late, which is why we found ourselves wandering up and down an empty dusty street in the tiny middle-of-nowhere town with no lift in sight. When I eventually got hold of the lady at the agency (after paying some locals to borrow their mobile phone) she told me that they “never have problems with transport”, which is of course just what I wanted to hear after spending the previous 30 minutes wondering how exactly we were getting back to town. A few minutes later a bloke popped up from nowhere, pointed at us and said “Pachamama?” and went off to grab a guy who was standing next to the train station and was conspicuously not holding a sign saying Pachamama.

Tried and annoyed by this point, I threw a small gringo hissy fit as we walked to his waiting car. “How was I supposed to know that this was the guy?” I asked the pair in ungrammatical Spanish. “He has no sign!” It was only much later that it occurred to me that the reason that neither guy seemed to be able to answer this question (expect to say cryptically that “he didn’t know the name of the agency”) was that he probably wasn’t our original driver at all, and I had directed my anger at the wrong person. Oops. Sorry random taxi driver. At least we got home in the end; we just had to wait a bit longer for that first post-trek shower.

The other snag was when we went in to settle our bill on the day before the trek. When we’d booked the trek back in February, Pachamama had, like all the other agencies, quoted their prices in US$, but had asked us to pay in Peruvian Nuevo Soles. Which is fine, except that they had decided to fix the dollar/sol exchange rate at 3:1, which doesn’t quite match up to reality (at the time it was about 2.8 Sol to the dollar, which makes quite a difference when you’re paying almost $1000 for a tour and you’re trying to budget for a four month trip…)

It seems odd to me to run a business where the vast majority of your costs are in one currency but you set your prices in another. You could argue that the agencies price in dollars because the US is their major market, but if I was being cynical, I might suggest that the trekking agencies really do it because it’s traditionally been a strong currency and they can therefore subtly benefit from any increase in its value between the time people pay their deposits (which is months in advance for the inca trail), and the time they settle up. They clearly weren’t anticipating that the dollar’s value would drop so dramatically, but it didn’t seem quite fair for them to try to have it both ways by fixing the exchange rate at a level entirely unrelated to reality.

“I didn’t want to raise the prices” said Debbie from the agency, during our lengthy discussion on the subject, even though that’s effectively exactly what she’d done (as the amount we were now paying in Soles would now buy about $60 more than the amount we theoretically owed in dollars).

I was going to suggest that maybe she should consider hedging her currency risk, but she offered to meet us half way (probably more to shut us up than anything else) so I kept shtum.

We had better seats on our night bus to Cusco, and so I was fast asleep in the morning when one of the other passengers tapped me on the shoulder to let me know that we’d arrived. We stumbled out of the bus into a particularly dusty yard where a guy from the bus company was throwing bags from the bus towards a crowd of people. We eventually got ours, and then a taxi and a hotel and some proper sleep.

When we emerged from the hotel, we found ourselves some breakfast up one of Cusco’s dauntingly steep streets, and went to sit in the Plaza de Armas. And just as I was saying to Sal that we’d probably see someone we knew at any moment, the Canadians we’d met in Lima and again in Huacachina walked right in front of us. Without really knowing what we were getting ourselves into, and still feeling the after effects of the overnight bus journey and the increased altitude, we joined them on a seemingly never ending bus tour around the city and up to the archaeological sites above it.

At the start of the tour, we passed a local with an old camera who was frantically snapping away in our direction. It was only later, when the same guy pursued us half way up the mountain to try to sell us postcards with our pictures stuck on them that I realised why. Of course I didn’t buy the blurry picture of me not looking at the camera, but I did realise that the next time I see someone pulling that trick I should tell him that it’s S/.5 for the photo of the gringo…

Oh, and I had to laugh when the tour guide started telling us all about how old Cusco is–older than nuevo york and washington dc… Well that sort of thing might impress the Americans on the bus, but if we’re having a “who’s got the oldest city competition” then I’ll see your 800 year old Inca civilization and raise you some Vikings and Romans. Stuff New York, what about Old York?

But of course we didn’t come to Cusco just to go on an average bus tour of the city and its associated Inca ruins, we came, like everyone else, for the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu.

They say that the Inca Trail is being “loved to death”, and it’s certainly true that, even limited to 500 people a day, there are lots of other gringos treading the same path as you. Luckily we’d booked our trip through an agency that was happy to send us off in a small group. Well, in fact a very small group, as it was just the two of us, and so this meant we could take our time, letting the other groups rush on ahead, and for the most part we had the trail to ourselves, with just the occasional porter speeding past. I did feel moderately guilty that it took 5 people just to get the two of us up and down a couple of mountains (that’s one guide, three porters and a cook), though. The porters truly are amazing. In the old days there were no restrictions on how much the dodgy agencies could give them to carry, but now they’re restricted to–just–the thirty kilos each. They run past you up the mountain barely breaking a sweat as you huff and puff up the hill (and on the second day, which is the toughest, when the tourists finally make it to the campsite having struggled up the delightfully named “Dead Woman’s Pass”, the porters give them a round of applause, which is surely the wrong way round…)

On the night before reaching Machu Picchu, we had the “tipping ceremony”, and of course as there were only the two of us in our group it fell to me to handle our part of this. I’m not sure I’m very good at that sort of thing. Adding something onto a restaurant bill is one thing, but actually physically giving someone money is just something I don’t know how to do. I think it’s a British thing. I’m sure the Americans get trained at birth on how to slip a $10 bill to the guy who’s just carried your bags to the hotel room or the Maître di at that fully reserved restaurant, but I’m never quite sure how to do it, or how much I’m supposed to give. At least this time we’d been briefed in advance on the going rate, and having seen how hard they work there was no question of us not tipping at the top end of the suggested range… They seemed happy enough, anyway, after I’d stumbled through some words of thanks and attempted jokes in my schoolboy Spanish (to the Quechuan speaking porters…) and passed them each the S/. 50 notes I’d been saving in my wallet…

(And this was after two amusing conversations with the porters: they’d asked how old I am, and had responded to my treinte años with “oh, we thought you were older, because of the grey hair…” and when we’d been discussing our families with Odon, our guide, who comes from a family of 7 brothers, we told him that we were from families of 2 and 3. “Oh, he said. What’s wrong with your fathers?”)

I think we both enjoyed the trail more than Machu Picchu itself, which was even at the early hour of the morning when we arrived there, already full of fresh-faced and clean tourists who’d just caught the train from Cusco… When we finally made it there, after a 4AM start, a wait in the queue to pass the final checkpoint at the campsite, a 50 minute walk to the sun gate and another hour to the site itself in time for sunrise, we were both too exhausted to do much else. They say you should climb Winu Picchu for the best view of the site, but when our guide finished our tour around the site, we just sat down for a long time.

Still, it was all in all an amazing experience, and certainly something my knees will never forget…