Sa-Moorei Travel Blog: The highs and lows of Peru.....and no sign of Paddington

One of the strangest things that I learned in Peru was that Paddington Bear was real! Well, I mean, not precisely real - obviously he was a children's fiction character, but the Spectacled Bear (or Andean Bear) exists and lives in "deepest, darkest Peru".

Who knew!?

Lovely spot for dinner

Our trip to Lima started very early in the morning in Buenos Aires, but passed off without a hitch. Landing and collecting the bags then walking out we realised very quickly we were not in Argentina anymore. The atmosphere appeared to be a little more laid back....less busy perhaps.

Staring out over the Pacific

There are times in life when going cheap seems like a good idea. I mean come on, it's only for one night then another early morning flight up to Cusco.....what can go wrong? I suppose we should have learned from our airport hotel in Buenos Aires.

Looking north along the coastline

The hotel was in an area called Callao...which is certainly not the most salubrious place in Lima and in fact we found out later that you shouldn't be anywhere near the seafront after dark as it was really quite dangerous (if a cabbie won't drive there, there's usually a reason).

Georgina and Jordan had recommended that we head into Lima, just south of the tourist district to what they said would be a lovely restaurant on the sea. So we did. We asked the hotel to sort out a cab (you really didn't want to wander the streets there) and when it arrived....it was older than Julia, had flame decals over the wheel arches and a Miami Vice sticker at the back. Unfortunately, it was certainly NOT Miami, though Vice it screamed!

The waves came right up beneath us

YUM!

Our cabbie seemed a nice enough older gent though. In we hopped and began a 40 minute journey in what can only be described as an "anti-car"....."anti" because it really didn't seem to want to remain in its current incarnation as a car. At one point the driver also became apathetic and took a chunk out of a cyclist carting rubbish around on the front of his bike. A few traffic lights later he hops out to check and gets back in muttering about the front wing being dented! With these adventures, holidays are made, I suppose :)

Ceviche :)

The restaurant was, to be fair, worth it. We enjoyed some great food and some lovely Pisco Sours looking out over the Pacific Ocean at sunset. The restaurant organised us a ride back to the hotel and this time it was a much more enjoyable ride, with us learning a lot about Lima, Peruvian football and where we were staying.

Looks like the KKK are in town!

Next morning was an early start as we were flying to Cusco so we booked our transfer for 6am and went off to bed and .....a horrible night's sleep. Ho hum. Between the stray dogs barking outside the hotel and the generally weird noises out in the street and in our hotel, I don't think either of us slept much.

The journey to Cusco was fine....Julia had a window seat on the plane and aside from a wee bit of turbulence as we crossed into the Andes, we enjoyed some spectacular views of the mountains below.

These mountains are BIG and the plane was remarkably close to them

Cusco was the heart of the Incan empire. Or in actual fact, it was the Navel. Yup - the belly button of the marvellous yet short-lived empire that ruled from Quito in Ecuador down to southern Chile. Strange concept really - having a "belly-button" of an empire, but there you go. One of the things we learned out here was that depending on your guide, you'd get a different story or reason behind each thing you saw. The one I took away about Cusco was this:

Lungs of steel! Walking made us out of breath, I can't even imagine trying to kick a ball

Pachacutec

Main square at night

That it had been a sprawling city up until a gent named Pachacutec decided to stick around in Cusco and fight a battle his father ran away from. After this he ascended the throne. Then he decided that the Sun was a God to be worshipped and that the Incans needed to sort themselves out. So in came administration and great public works (including Machu Picchu). One of those works was to remodel Cusco....into the shape of the Puma.

Fountain in the middle of the square....with obligatory Incan King

They loved their Swan towels in Peru

The Puma holds great cultural and spiritual significance for the Quechua peoples (see below), mainly signifying strength and a link to Pacha Mama or Mother Earth, so he had the city shaped into the body of a Puma in mid-pounce. Pretty cool no? I can just imagine Boris Johnson telling David Cameron..."Yes Dave, I hear you, we do need to invest in schools, but I was thinking we could spend this money on making London look like a Sparrow. Wouldn't that be cool?"

Somehow, I don't think that would fly!

Does this need a caption?

"BAD Devil!"

Incan building below......lazy ass modern building above! It was incredible how perfectly they shaped their stones

A picture of the milky way...the Incans called the main part the great Llama in the sky

Nice view over Cusco

Anyway....back to our blog....Cusco was quite clearly a tourist Mecca. From the moment you get off the plane that much is obvious. Then when you get to picking up your bags you understand how regulated things are.....they clearly want to look after the tourists here...which is nice :) Our driver from the hotel was waiting to pick us up and drove us to what was to become our most favourite hotel in the world.

I know. I know. It's a HUGE call that one, but the Torre Dorada in Cusco was amazing :)

See what I mean about perfectly straight building blocks!

By the time we got to the hotel, Julia was already suffering badly with the altitude and to be honest I wasn't exactly doing somersaults either. Breathing was.....well actually breathing was easy, it was the efficiency of the breathing that was rubbish. No matter how hard or deep you breathed, you just couldn't get enough oxygen in your lungs.

The weather was beautiful while we were there

Between bouts of headaches and/or stomach aches, with spells of dizziness and nausea thrown in to keep things spicy, we kept a low profile that first evening. Not doing a hell of a lot seemed like a great idea. We went into town for a lovely meal on the first night and I had my first Alpaca steak. Here comes "Big Call #2" .....I want to replace lamb with Alpaca on most menus. This stuff is amazing - so tender and tasty, without the fattiness of lamb. Yum.

Some kind of keystone - funny how it came out in the picture

Incan plumbing

Once again Torre Dorada was golden - they have a 24 hour shuttle service back and forward from town to the hotel and so it was that Mario, driver number 2, picked us up from town and brought our tired and breathless selves back home.

These windows are perfectly aligned, 3 earthquakes and 500 years later....how?

Take that small stone out the whole place comes down!

Cusco is a place that is beautifully well kept and tries very hard to be accessible and enjoyable to tourists. Police are everywhere, street hawkers try it on, but not in an "in your face" kind of way. We had no trouble with thieves or pick-pockets and frankly it was all rather pleasant. Of course, if you go 4 blocks away from central town, it becomes a little more South American and 3rd world. According to Sergio, a barman we would meet later in the week, it wasn't the nicest town in Peru by a long chalk. To us tourists though it was lovely.

We kept another low profile up until about 1pm the following day. Chewing and swallowing breakfast was putting us out of breath, climbing the stairs to our room.....well....we needed a good lie down after that! However there were things to see and see them we would. So at 1pm we headed out for a city tour and learned some interesting things.

Quechua Cabbies ;o)

Us at Sachsaywaman

Kicks Stonehenge into the dust!

Apparently the Spanish, when they invaded and raped Peru......didn't kill anybody. No it was all Saint James aka Santiago. They even went to the trouble of renaming him Santiago Mataindiana....which means "Saint James the Indian Killer"! Now put aside your cynicism you Western snobs, Saint James the Indian Killer and his hordes of tame Angels were the people/beings responsible for killing any and all Peruvians that may or may not have died during the invasion. Fact. I wouldn't have believed it myself had it not been clearly described in many paintings and even written on the walls in the main Cathedral. Must be true then!

Now you can see how BIG this place was.....those stones are huge and the quarry 15km away over a mountain

Also, as a result of being made of Alpaca skin and human hair, the effigy of Christ on the Cross on the main altar of the Cathedral has turned black. Now this black Jesus is a miraculous thing. Every 300 years or so Peru suffers a big earthquake. Back in 1650 , Cusco was being destroyed by an earthquake and so the people brought out the black jesus and walked him around the square.....and the earthquake stopped.

Julia pointing out a flaw in the construction

The local indigenous people take their Catholicism quite seriously as well. Cynical old me might say that 500 years of being killed for NOT taking it seriously might breed a certain sense of self-preservation through piety, but what do I know? Anyway, they do love a bit of symbolism out here and so there are all sorts of examples in this Cathedral of how they have adopted the stories and trappings of the Catholic Church.

Which is all a bit of a shame really. Basically, the Spanish in the 1500s were busy burning everyone that wasn't Dominican as part of the Spanish Inquisition. You think we had it bad in Europe? Try the Incas. Whereas the Mayans got a much nicer bunch (the Franciscans) who kept alive the local traditions....the Incans got the Dominicans, who were basically utter bastards. At the time, 2 brothers were fighting for the right to be King and so having captured one, the Spanish gathered all the other Quechua people and attacked the other. Now I'm simplifying things a mite here, but in the next few years, between pestilence and naivety, the locals had been destroyed.

Lack of oxygen and this seemed like a good pose......oh dear!

Another problem was they didn't value gold or silver. Apparently, each day the Spanish would ask for more gold and in the end the people asked if they ate it...because they couldn't figure out what they were doing with it all! Poor sods. Well, this continued, with the Dominicans razing any Incan structures they could find to the ground, killing anyone that had any knowledge of the Incan skills and generally making sure that history had huge gaps where there should have been instructions on how to build big beautiful stone walls without any mortar.

That's us in the middle

And believe you me - it is beautiful to behold. These people, without any iron or steel, used green wood, other stones and a copper/brass mixture to hew the most incredibly large rocks and then drag them miles before they assembled them into a massive jigsaw puzzle. We still don't know what the monument was for at Sachsaywaman (or Sexy Woman to the Americans out there.....groan) and the current thinking was that "we'll build it because we can".

The largest stones in these monuments are around 128 tonnes. Many times that of the largest stones in the pyramids. Further, if you recall, there is no bloody oxygen up here! Imagine the volume of slaves required to shift these rocks? Well there you have another interesting thing about the Incans. They didn't use slaves. No, as a form of taxation, everyone had to donate 3 months of their lives to the "stone masonry" cause and build things for the greater good. From the Incan trail, to the various monuments, to the hill forts ....whatever.....if grunt work was needed, you turned up with a smile on your face and a nice strong back. In the meantime, the rest of the community cared for your family.

Banksy would have a field day here

Now though this all sounds wonderful, my basic inability to believe in the essential purity of the human spirit kind of stops me from swallowing this "we're all in it together" line, but the guides were all adamant this was the case.

Speechless!

We saw many things on this city tour and some of the most amazing was basically big boys lego. Seeing how these incredibly straight, perfectly angled and smooth rocks had been carved and then laid one atop the other, fitting perfectly to form walls that had stood for 500 years and withstood 3 major earthquakes......without any form of mortar....well, it boggles the mind. The Catholics had tried their best to destroy any trace of the masonry and beliefs, but even now, more and more walls are being found in Cusco that date back to those times. Walls that were simply plastered over by the Catholics.

Julia and her favourite cloud

Aside from their amazing and beautifully precise masonry, they also enjoyed a great line in astrology. We were told that the ladies of the empire had a lot to do with this work. Time and again we saw examples of how they would carve these ridiculously huge rocks and leave what looked like climbing wall handles sticking out. Almost like they had got bored and just left them. Actually, these stones are sun dials and calendars rolled into one. At Winter and Summer solstices they'll cast a shadow that will hit a particular point precisely, allowing the Incans to calculate the beginning of the wet and dry seasons.

Cusco Football Stadium....
Altitude? 3400m

In this part of the world there are only two seasons and knowing which is which is kind of critical if you are going to plant crops or begin planning for harvest etc. It was good to learn this because I have often wondered why these ancient civilisations cared so much about the solstices.

We learned that all the monuments, temples and roads were laid out on energy lines that stemmed from the main Sun temple in Cusco. For miles around these lines radiate outwards and though hardly any of the supposed hundreds of buildings have been found, it was another example of how crazily obsessed these Incans were how skilled they were (remember they didn't have GPS location systems or aircraft to position these monuments!). Think of the "ley lines" and you get the gist.

Time after time the guides hammered home how mean the Spanish were, which was a little amusing and in one place you could see how the Catholics really were shooting themselves in the foot. In the main temple that had been transformed into the Dominican Monks' HQ back in the day, they had uncovered ruins. Now of course it's not PC to sh*t all over the locals, so they have allowed tourists (only in the last few decades) to see these ruins.

How many men does it take to lay cobbles?

View from our window :)

and another

Bit of a dispraxic moment here trying to feed the phone

Hold your horses there old friend! Don't go thinking these Monks have gone soft...oh no. Just in case you were under any impression that they might be bad people, they went to great lengths to show how they were doing the world a favour....showing how one of the rooms of the temple was used for human sacrifice and even showing the altar upon which it was performed. Cue shocked tourists and gasps all round. Maybe the Incans were blood-thirsty savages?

Smile....your gonna learn about Pisco

Sergio our Pisco Sensei

Except of course, we all know they didn't conduct human sacrifice in that temple (there was the odd example in Incan history but nowhere near the Mayan penchant for killing people). No indeed, the delightfully truthful and Christian monks had dragged the top of an old pillar THEY themselves had carved and placed it strategically in this room and then re-branded it an Incan altar to human sacrifice!!! Classy. So now the guides seem to love pointing out not only how Peru had been crapped on and raped, but how their oppressors are still lying to this very day. Special.

You might be wondering why I spend so long on this, but there is a reason. There does seem to be a very special mix of cultures at play in Peru. Indeed, the closer you get to Cusco you get this tripartite struggle, between the Incan heritage, the non-Incan indigenous (standard Quechua) and the colonial. Even the guides of mixed heritage seem to struggle between being proud, hating the oppressor and then making excuses for the Spanish. Very weird.

They taste amazing...especially after the 5th!

2 other visits of note were made during our stay in Cusco.....we'll start with the Sacred Valley. First off - to anyone that is thinking of coming to Cusco a word of warning:

DO NOT FALL FOR THE "BI-LINGUAL" TOUR B*LLSH*T!

We awoke the day after our first tour and thought to nail the Sacred Valley as well. Unfortunately the "all English" tour turned out to be a tour with 27 people, of which 5 were English speaking. Now there is a LOT of information to impart and 27 people ask a LOT of questions.....do you REALLY think that the English language was going to get much focus? Of course not. So we were about to get done it seemed. Even if they DID repeat everything, it would mean (logically) that you only learn half as much as they need to spend twice as long explaining everything and there is only so much time on the tour.

Julia gets involved with a huge smile

BAR23 makes a comeback

Anyway - I bullied our way OFF the tour and we went back home having booked ourselves onto a very nice ladie's English speaking tour the next day.

Which was excellent. This time we saw so much more of the civilisation's massive organisational and planning skills. How they had basically been utterly driven to formalise a very sensitive and "quality-driven" approach to life. There is a symbol in their culture - the Chakana. Imagine a cross, one vertical line, one horizontal. Then place 3 steps between each point of the cross. Each step corresponds to a "virtue or belief". These are (thanks Wikipedia for making the below easy):

Worlds	Animals	Affirmations	Behavior
The Underworld	The Snake	I Live	Don't Lie
The Current World	The Puma	I Work	Don't Steal
The Upper World	The Condor	I Love	Don't be Lazy

The snake also represents knowledge....linked to the old (the dead/underworld) it represents the wisdom of age.
The Puma represents strength and work and community.
The Condor spiritual awakening, love and protection.

One of our guides put it beautifully (I paraphrase):

"We had a beautiful culture, a great civilisation with wonderful skills and capabilities. We had beliefs that were simple, but effective. In fact our beliefs were very similar to the Christian ideals. Instead....the Spanish tore all that apart and gave us what we have today. You try tell me we are better off!"

It was hard to argue this point with him.

The Sacred Valley

The local taxis....like a Tuk Tuk but different

The highest point we went to on the Sacred Valley tour was just north of 4000m at the church in Chinchero. Here we saw the lengths the Dominicans went to dominate the Incans. Wow. All the way up here they came and buried all the Incan monuments then built a church on top! Ridiculous. The views here were unbelievable ...truly astonishing. It was here that it really became obvious why the Incans loved this area so much. Amidst the harshness and difficulty of the Andes, the Sacred Valley was an incredible place. So high up (near their Sun God), protected from other people and beautiful beyond belief.

Beans anyone?

Pissac - honestly that IS what it is called

Terraces...used for cultivation, also used for support and to stop erosion

The other thing of note that we did in Cusco was to visit the Pisco Museum. Before you ask....no....this wasn't a museum. It's a bar...one dedicated to Pisco. Some things to note:

1) Pisco is like Grappa except it is made with the juice of the grape only
2) Pisco is a very complex beast
3) Pisco is wonderful

Simples.

Eye watering work here

What we might look like if we grow old in Peru

Tree Prison :(

This restaurant just looked surreal in its surroundings

Over the course of an hour or so, Sergio the friendly and very knowledgeable barman explained what seemed like "all there is to know about Pisco". I am sure there is more to know, but I doubt we need to know it. As a result of his great explanations, we enjoyed the rest of our time in Peru sampling the various Piscos on offer. We also learned that:

To the Batmobile!

Ollantaytambo.....it's just nuts what they built here

See the old man's face in the middle? With the two food stores either side

The Chilcano is a much better drink than the Pisco Sour for tasting the Pisco.

It is basically ginger ale and pisco, whereas a pisco sour is pisco, egg white and a special type of lime juice. The egg white in the sour flattens the taste of the drink somewhat and so you can't quite make out the quality (or lack of quality) in the Pisco.

Those terraces are not dug INTO the mountain, they are built OUT.....so much work involved

Happy to be going down again!

Apparently you build a tower for luck in owning a house...the higher the more luck

Random Donkey Picture, Courtesy of Alex Saroian's weird interest in animals

Either way, this is a great drink and we are both converts. Next time we host a BAR23 it is definitely on the menu :)

Strange carvings

High (and I mean very high) sierra

Lake at 4000 odd metres!

On our return through Lima we cancelled our last night's stay at the same hotel. Instead we upgraded to the airport hotel that was literally outside the arrivals/departures terminal! Amazing is the only word to describe it. Aside from a wonderfully comfortable room, a short hop to the terminal and a great dinner, we also met the chef and had described how they made two fantastic and local meals.

Nice cloud :)

Chinchero colours

The church at Chinchero

Sunset at Chinchero

It really was a perfect way to finish off our stay in Peru. This country has wormed its way into our hearts and after the battering our love for South American took in Chile, we were definitely back on track. Machu Picchu is coming in the next blog post (don't worry, we haven't forgotten) and between that holy of holies and the rest of the culture and country, well.....