Lima to Cuzco

I was kind of tired from the trip from San Jose Costa Rica to Lima Peru. All the drinks I downed and food I ate just made me want to go to bed early. After I got checked into my hotel I sent out some emails to my family and walked around the neighborhood of my hotel for a short while before going back and watching tv and killing the night in bed alone. The one thing I did notice though while walking around was all the grilled guinea pigs in the restaurants as I walked around town. Peru and Ecuador both eat a lot of guinea pigs. Like people always say, it tastes like chicken so why not just eat chicken. Myself I just ate some potato soup and had a beer.

The next morning I went on a city tour of Lima. A bus picked me up at my hotel and after we picked up all the passengers we went to the main square and walked around looking at the government buildings and the architecture around the square. I liked the balconies with all the woodwork that looked almost like lace. It reminded me of Indonesia. Then we all piled back in the bus and went down to the ocean. There were some fishing boats circling around a big school of tuna just offshore. They had the helicopters and the spotter planes working the school too. The planes are spotters that direct the boats to the general area then the helicopters direct the traffic close up. The boats circle the school with a big net and then pull it in. It is a big operation with high revenue coming from the end product. Usually the fish are further offshore so we were lucky to see them working so close to shore. We stopped at a few more local tourist highlights that I will skip over, sorry but city tours all are starting to look the same to me. I must be getting jaded from seeing too many of them. We saw the cathedral, museums, main suburbs and drove past the rich and the poor areas of town to get a good cross section of how people live here. We saw a lot of indigenous looking people compared to other countries I have been to. The colorful clothes the indigenous people wore made them stand out. Personally I like all the hats they tend to wear here in Peru, usually too small of a hat at that. The guide explained that different groups wore different colors and styles so that you could easily tell where someone was from by their dress. The tour was in Spanish but I had no problem with the guide's explanations of things in Spanish. He also spoke some English and we had a few short talks about this and that. We stopped for a lunch that was meant to be a typical lunch. There were lots of different potatoes of course, some of which were stuffed with various things like meat, some quinoa grain, lots of colored corn, creole dishes with hot and sweet chilis, rice, soups, chicharon, empanadas, tamales, ceviche, grilled fish, guinea pig, chicken, and of course lima beans in salads and soups or as a side dish alone and then more foods that I did not know the names of. We washed it all down with local beer and a shot or two of pisco sours. I think the lunch was the highlight of the tour for me. I hung out with a Columbian mother and her daughter during most of the tour. I think mom was trying to set her daughter, who was about mid twenties, up with me but I never bit on all the cues she was dropping at me. I played ignorant. We had a good time talking and tasting all the different foods though. I bought them some rounds of drinks and they started acting like they were loaded but I am pretty sure it was just an act.

The tour ended mid to late afternoon and I was dropped off at my hotel. My guide called me almost as soon as I got back to my room to make arrangements for the next day. I was flying to Cuzco in the morning with my guide. She told me that usually they would have just met me in Cuzco but that she wanted to go to Lima to see some family so they had her meet me at the airport. She was sweet and fun to hang out with. I had another early night. I have some mobility problems and high chronic pain that things like airports and tours just seem to make my pain problems even worse so I need to rest. I don't sleep much but I rest in my room. I had a nice shower and then a warm bath to help soothe my sore body. In the morning I was escorted to the airport and we flew to Cuzco. The flight was very easy with no problems. The visibility was great and we could see all the mountains as we flew over them. I had to think about the plane load of people that crashed up in these mountains and ended up eating each other to survive. I was going from sea level to over 11,000 feet or 3,400 meters. That can be quite a shock to the body. To ease the shock there is coca tea everywhere around the airport and in all the stores and hotels and restaurants. There are also coca leaves that can be chewed but they were kind of bitter tasting to me. I could and did drink a lot of the tea. I think it helped me adjust to the altitude like it was supposed to do. After checking into my hotel, the next morning was scheduled for another city tour of Cuzco and the surrounding area. My guide and I went out for a few drinks after checking into our hotel and cleaning up. Cuzco was much smaller of a city than Lima had been and almost everybody looked to be indigenous. I was getting kind of a speedy buzz from all the coca I was eating and drinking. I had no problems from the altitude so far. I was warned by my guide that some people suddenly get very sick after seeming to be unaffected by the altitude. She kept encouraging me to do more coca. I asked her about cocaine and she told me the authorities were very tough on all illegal drugs so she advised me to not even talk about them or I could get in serious trouble or end up in prison. The general attitude so far in Peru was that the people all seemed very straight and serious. I was not seeing very much fun and laughter around town, even in the bars we were hanging out in. The people seemed contented with life, they were just not laughing much. My guide and I were doing our share of having fun together, she could sure laugh and we did.