We travelled back to Cusco and from there went to Arequipa for a few days. We stayed with Alexandro in Hostel Mi Casa which was lovely, warm and had hot running water! Bliss. From there we explored the Santa Catalina Monestry, the Cola Canyon (we saw condors and lots of Llamas) and went to a museum displaying frozen child sacrafices which to be honest disturbed us slightly. (Only slightly disturbing as I have worked for Stoke on Trent City Council Social Services Department, for Emma this was extremely disturbing). We were under the mis-apprehension that Inkas didn´t sacrafice anything except llamas, we were told this by Elvis our Macchu Piccu guide, who claimed to be decended from the Inkas but knows as much about them as he could recite from a guide book! Unfortunatley it was in Arequipa that Emma consumed a rogue Pineapple juice which proved to be upsetting for not only her stomach but also the Dutch couple who witnessed 6 hours of vomitting into various carrier bags on the way to Puno. Note: if one gets struck down with food poisoning the day of a long bus journey, stay at home, dont take Diarrhea medicine and hope for the best. Your body will get rid of the offending substance one way or another.
Emma- I´d just like to thank Roo, publically for being ´there´for me during the 6 long, interminable hours, on that fateful bus ride to Puno. She was indeed a ´brick´and if it had been the other way round, I would have joined her in needing carrier bags and would have been completely useless. She even disposed of the offending carrier bags whilst taking advantage of a short pit stop somewhere in Southern Peru. I´d like to apologise to the Dutch people and their familes for any trauma they experienced - they were green by the end of the journey.
When we arrived in Puno, we couldn´t have been more happy! It didn´t show on my face, as I was still contorted with stomach cramps and had to be helped to the pavement side by Roo and the cab driver, who looked concerned about taking the fare at all. We stayed at Inca´s Rest, and they looked after us so well. Coca tea, is the cure for everything in Peru and duly we drank some, as we were both now contending with severe altitude sickness too - the joy of travelling! We have made a note of various observations we believe relate to the effect of altitude on one´s body (look away now if you´re squeemish)
1. Heart palpitation, accompanied by difficulty breathing.
2. Change in consistency and frequency of bowel movements
3. Boggies - lots!
4. Wierdy dreams or annoyingly, insomnia
5. Malaise
6. Nausea
7. Lack of appetite
8. Inability to walk more that 5 steps without thinking how useful a wheelchair would be.
Whilst in Puno, we visited Uros. Fascinatingly, Uros is a series of floating Islands, constructed from reeds, found on the shores of Lake Titicaca (which makes Roo and Joe laugh hysterically everytime the word is mentioned, that´s what comes from a university eductaion!). The Aymara people of Uros constructed the floating Islands to avoid the Spanish, who we have become indoctrinated to dislike during our time in South America. The people of Uros have to add a top layer of reeds to their Island, every 10-15 days as they are continuously rotting from the bottom. The islands are all joined together by ropes and the series of islands are anchored to the bottom by rocks. Unfortuantely, the whole place is over- commercialised and you feel like you´re off to Disney land or something awful like that. As a consequence of the amount of tourists, the water is so polluted the islanders have to travel over 1km to collect fresh drinking water. The people there make a living by selling handycrafts to tourists and overcome with gringo guilt, we ended parting with 100 soles (25 quid) on a crosstitch! Yes, a crosstitch, Roo likes it however, so that`s OK.
Roo- We also visited Tequile which is an Island which takes 2 hours to visit by boat. Here the men wear funny nightcap type hats which indicate their current availability to the ladies.
Red hat = ´Im married, hands off´.
White hat with a red band = ´wink wink nudge nudge´.
The positioning of the hat is also important. Boys younger than 14 wear their white hats floppoing behind which means, ´I´m too young to be interested in girls´. Worn to the left means ´I´m avaiable and interested, how about it´. Worn to the right means ´Im dating but not married, so don´t rule me out´. We arrived during the festival of Saint James and semed to interupt some local dancing which involved skipping around in a circle for a few hours to a loud, manic combination of drumming and pan pipes. It was here where I ate trout from Lake Titicaca hehehe. Delicious and amazingly this didnt make me sick.
After Puno we travelled around Lake Titicaca (hehehe) crossing the border into Bolivia. We travelled for 2 hours to Copacabana (not THE Copacabana, thats in Brazil). The border crossing was the easiest Border crossing yet and involved handing a man in a hut my passport. Obviously Bolivians arent fussed about what you could smuggle into their country. I could have quite easily walked in with a large bag of cocaine and noone would have noticed, in fact they would have helped me carry it. Bolivians are friendly like that. We stayed in a hostel that cost 4 pounds a night which was actually over priced for what we got, again we stayed for 2 nights somewhere with no hot water. It was also freezing, so whilst we sound like we are moaning we have been cold and dirty for the best part of 3 months. This is no change for Emma but a dramatic change for me! From Copacabana we traveled to Isla del Sol, a lovely, less touristy Island on the Lake where the Inkas belived the Sun God, Indie, and his sister wife, were born (weird). The Inkas suffered from heamophilia caused by interbreading.... people of small Welsh villages beware. Anyway, it was lovely, we did some walking, saw some donkeys and some ruins. We walked up the Inka escalator which I was devastated to discover didn´t acctually move so I had to use my legs and walk up combating the effects of altitude, discussed above. Overcome with Gringo guilt once again we had to buy another handicraft from a local lady.
I must mention an American woman (lets call her Barbara) who thought it appropriate to sit in a families front garden and chant some ridiculuos song to the Inka Gods at the top of her voice right next to where a poor woman was trying to sell her wares. Barbara was about as Inkan as I am. I couldn´t stop giggling as children danced around her and their mother looked on awkwardly. Babs was sat behind me on the boat back to shore and I was in a constant state of anxiety incase she decided to blast out another rendition of chanting right in my ear. She didn´t thank God and we were brought closer by witnessing the second vommitting incident of the week. A small Dutch girl seized the opportunity to take revenge on Emma on behalf of her fellow countrymen and projectile vommitted right next to her. Fortunatley, due to our previous experiences, we were armed with toilet roll and holeless carrier bags and managed to contain the situation.
Emma - From Copocabana, we travelled to La Paz the capital of Bolivia. By now we were blaze about travelling in South America and duly pitched up at the central square ready to haggle with any bus driver brave enough to take us on. What we have noted is that we are either the ONLY gringos on the bus, or its a bus full ONLY with gringos. The former are cheaper and more exciting. When I say exciting I mean, things fall off them at speed and the armoa is more intense. There are also big unidentifiable bags of things, which may contain small children, or cocaine, who knows, loaded either on the top of the bus or underneath with the door flapping open, just by our rucksacks :/. When we arrived in La Paz, 8 hours later, we went to Rubens place who saddly had no room because there was a dutch party already booked in. What is with the dutch, has something happened whilst we have been here to cause this mass exodus from Holland to South America. Disspointed and exhausted we ended having to stay in Milenio (I´m not sure which Milenia the facilities were first installed in, but it was NOT this current one). Roo, bless her, was beginning to fade again. It all starts with ´my tummy feels funny´. This sends a bolt of electricity to my brain as I now know what that is code for. Another 18 hours of diarrhea followed. The poor, poor wee thing. I worked out whilst looking after her, that she has spent 10 days solidy on the toilet in 3 months. She derserves a medal. On this occassion, it is a mystery as to what caused it, she just seems to be allergic to Bolivia as a whole. I did wonder, out loud, to public ridule, if you could catch diarrhea through your feet as that was the only possible source of contamination, but apparently you cant. So here again, I was fine, Roo was dying, her tongue and poo turned black and stayed black for 3 days (we will explore this further later). We never intended to go to La Paz at all, and ended up staying for two nights, wise from our previous experiences to postpone our 8 hour bus journey to Arica.
Roo- I eventually recovered, well my bottom stopped falling out, and we were able to catch the bus to Arica at 6am. Frozen and literally starving we huddled under three blankets with hats, scarves and all the coats we could find. The 8 hours journey passed relatively quickly and the border crossing from Bolivia to Chile was without issue (luckily the guards didn´t discover the vast quantities of pure heroin Emma had stuffed up her jumper!). We arrived in Arica and by some stroke of luck managed to jump on a bus to Santiago that was pulling out of the terminal. It´s as if we were organised and planned the whole thing! We even managed to haggle the price down with the woman on the desk! Emma was all in a flap and was moaning that she needed time to prepare for the journey...moan moan moan. I think M´s particularly bad mood was due to the fact we hadn´t eaten anything properly for over a week, or slept for three weeks due to altitude induced Insomnia. We stopped randomely throughout the journey and had to follow the lead of the ´locals´who seemed to instinctively know if this was a driver swap over or a more elongated fag break. On one occassion, everyone got off with all their bags, we sat there for a while on an empty bus, until the attendent Jose shouted, ´vamos´, and so we did. We were faced for the fourth time in 3 months by a PDI Chile bag inspection. We hauled our rucksacks out of the luggage hold and stood in a line waiting for the half frozen PDI inspector to interogate the passengers thoroughly. We´d seen this in Chile before and unlike Bolivia where there is a certain expectation that you´ll smuggle something in or more likely out of the country, so what the heck, go for it, Chile is different. Or so we thought. Conscientiously, the PDI officer searched all the bags of all the locals and then arrived at us, I was already dragging every item of dirty clothes from my rucksack. He then said to me ´nationality´ Inglesa, I replied, trying not to look guilty. Ýou can go´ - just for being English. He got to Emma and asked, ´Do you have any drugs?´, ´no, just dirty pants´, as she laughed, alone nervously, and that was it. We escaped a false imprisonment in South America again!
28 hours later we pulled in Santiago. Not our fav place! The smog here is so bad it burns our throats, eyes and noses! We jumped into a taxi which dropped us off in the middle of downtown Santiago, where we were met by hoards of young people armed with pots and pans. We later discovered that these were students demonstating about cuts in the education budget... so we were less confused, we had thought that the people of Santiago were just extremely freindly and had arranged a gigantic welcome party for us. Unfortunately the first person to actually speak to us was a crazy homeless man who was frothing at the mouth, and shouted some sort of made up language at me. I promptly ran across the road which was a bad idea as I was very nearly run down by a number of taxis driving the wrong way down a one way street. So, we have been in Santiago for two nights and ventured out just to get food (egg, chips and sausages was the first meal we had eaten for days and was sooooo delicious!) Its cold here, and now raining. Emma wants to go on a walking tour of the city at 3pm but I´m not convinced due to the weather and the fact that the burning smog makes my eyes run like mad! My poo is still black (for those of you who are intergued) due to the Pepta Bismol I took for my stomach, not due to the altitude, which is what we have been blaming for most other ailments. This little known side effect should be noted on the packet as not to worry people unnecessarily- I shall write to the manufacturers.
Emma- So that´s all really. This is long and I won´t make it any longer. We´re off to NZ in 24ish hours time, where it´s currently snowing. Hoorray! Thanks for reading and keep in touch, we love to hear from you.
Love, Emma & Roo.
Bloody hell, is there room for a little one, sounds like rings a lot better than here at the mo minus the blak poop x
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