G is for GPS Perú

We, okay Scott, carried around a Garmin GPS on our various travels through Perú over the last 6 months. I just got around to uploading the tracks into Google Earth to take a look. Here are some of my favorites:

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the GPS with Mary and Lisa on Lake Titicaca! Bummer.

By the way, the music is by Wachake from Huanchaco, Peru. A typical event at touristy restaurants are roaming music groups playing traditional music (pan flute and all) for tips. I usually ignored them, preferring my conversation over the music. But, for whatever reason, this group caught my attention. They took my request for La Llorona, even though only one of the members knew the tune. We bought their CD, which turned out to be a pretty good mix of the traditional music we heard in Perú.

p.s. If you’re looking at this in Facebook, you might need either go here or here to see the slideshow. It’s a YouTube video.

O is for Overplayed Bareto

I will never, ever be able to get this song out of my head, ever. Bareto is Peru’s most famous band. And this was their most popular song during our time there.

The song was even played on Cruz del Sur promotional videos. This is not a good song to hear just before trying to sleep on a long bus ride.

After the song, there was a short interview with two of the band members. They had just received a Golden Record for selling over 5,000 copies of their latest album. Stunning given the high rate of illegally copying and selling music there.

K is for Keiko Fuerza 2011

Peru’s incredibly notorious President, Alberto Fujimori, received a 7.5 year sentence for charges of embezzlement last week. This was his second sentencing in the 6-months we were in Peru. He received 25 years for human rights violations back in April.

The history of Fujimori and his family is long and complicated.

When I’ve asked Peruvians about him, they have all started with the good that he did for the country. (Squelching a super violent, domestic terrorist organization, stabilizing the economy, building schools, health clinics, and homes.) Peruvians also quickly follow this up by conceding that Fujimori also did lots of very bad things. (Bribing, embezzling, authorizing masked death squads and secret military courts, shutting down Congress and the Judicial system when they continually voted against his extreme measures, carrying out a forced sterilization campaign against poor women.)

Like I said, it’s long and complicated. Another complication to the story is the fact that, while President, Fujimori’s instated his oldest daughter, Keiko, as first lady after he had stripped the title from his wife… after the wife had announced that she was running against him in the next election. This propelled Keiko into the political spotlight.

While Fujimori was falling from favor, going into exile in Japan, returning to South America and being captured, and then being detained in Chile… Keiko went to business school in Boston. She returned and was elected to a seat in the Peruvian Congress in 2006. And now she is planning on running for President in 2011.

Here’s the kicker. Keiko is expected to be a major contender for President based the platform of pardoning her father. Peruvians are still yearning for Fujimori-esque social programs and reforms. It’s mind boggling that they would forget about the injustices, but this also makes sense when you peruse some of the living conditions in between and just outside of the tourist towns.

These big “Keiko Fuerza 2011” and “Fujimori Libertad” signs line the Panamerican Highway from Tacna to Tumbes, and follow the major routes inland to Cusco and Puno. Fuerza means “force” or “strength”. Libertad means “freedom”. (I never got a picture of them myself, so I had to grab this one from Flickr!)

This is Peru (or TIP).

Saying “T.I.P.” or “This is Peru” has been a coping mechanism of ours for the strange situations we’ve come across in the last 6 months. We got the idea from my sister, who served in the Peace Corp in Botswana and used the phrase “TIA” or “This is Africa” for the same reason. (Actually, Heather just moved back to Africa, this time to Lesotho, and had a TIA moment right off the plane.) We started using the phrase almost immediately after moving into our apartment in Arequipa and started settling in.

I should say that not everything that is TIP is bad. It’s just Peru. Life is different here. Envoking the phrase is a way of shrugging things off and moving on with your day. We use it in lieu of getting annoyed at something, or in lieu of sitting around gawking at a scenario for too long. It’s a form of recognition and acceptance of the differences in Peruvian and American lifestyles.

We have been out of Perú for a few days now, and I am already missing the complexities of Peruvian life. We learned a lot about the culture and lifestyles during our adventures. Although I am also realizing that I will never know enough about it to fully get it. And that is exactly why I travel.

(By the way, we’re leaving Quito today on a series of flights bound for Sydney, Australia! Our next adventure for a few weeks before returning home to Seattle on August 9th.)

Here’s a list of some TIP moments I can think of:

• Unrelated product promotions. E.g. Selling a precision screw driver kit with a bottle of wine.
• You ask a young kid selling stuff on the street where to purchase a wine bottle opener. He says that there are none available for sale in the city (which turns out to be true upon searching), but that he will personally bring you the one he has at his house.
• You trek to the only sushi restaurant in town and it is closed for no reason, with no hours posted on the door. You go back three more times, and get the same result.
• You get to the post office 30 minutes before they close and they tell you to come back tomorrow.
• You get to the police station to find everyone sitting around. They tell you everybody is busy right now and to come back in 2hrs.
• There is a high end fashion show on the train back from Machu Picchu.
• You take a taxi ride across town and the driver has zero change. (We’re talking, trying to pay for a S./5 ride with a S./10 bill.)
• You pay for a meal at a fancy restaurant, and the staff has to run up and down the street looking for change.
• Stray dogs, everywhere, barking and often times humping.
• Showing bootlegged movies on bus rides.
• Showing very violent movies while you’re trying to sleep on late night buses.
• Showing Christmas themed movies on the bus in the middle of June.
• Trying to sell you sunglasses when you are wearing a pair on your face.
• Daily fireworks.
• Public urination.
• You’re backpack is stolen off the bus right in front of you. Sneaky!
• You order a glass of wine after surveying the bottle. The server goes behind the counter and pours your glass out of a box.
• Hoarding napkins.
• Guys walking down the street/beach with soccer balls strategically pushed up their shirts and down their pants so they look like an extremely curvy woman. (We’re seen this at least a handful of times in different places, and have no idea what it’s about. A traditional payment after losing a bet?)
• Soccer fans sitting on top of their trucks and climbing the trees outside of the Municipal stadiums to get a look at the game.
• Grocery shopping with your entire extended family.
• Stationing one family member in line at the grocery store (because the lines are huge and slow) while the rest of the family shops. Sometimes the family returns with two completely full grocery carts.
• The women in the family taking care of the shopping and handling of the food at the grocery store. The man pulling out his wallet at the end of the transaction to pay.
• Divvying up your huge grocery bill (there are big families here!) to pay between two different credit cards and cash.
• Ordering your bus tickets online, but having to pay in person at the local grocery store.
• Paying your electricity and water bill at the local stationary shop or random pharmacy.
• Tour boat breaking down mid-trip. A group of boats working together to fix it with spare parts.
• Frantically running around a small town looking for an ATM with cash in it. (We tried at least 5 different ATMs in Máncora last week!)
• Taxi drivers stopping to ask for directions, and ending up in long, friendly conversations as if they’ve known each other for years. (Directions are sometimes and sometimes not included in the dialog.)
• Using just one glass and rotating it with one beer bottle at parties.
• Greeting everyone in the room with a kiss on the cheek. Also done when leaving. (I love this. It’s especially sweet coming from little kids.)
• Discovering that your landlords have a pet peacock because it crash landed on your room at 7am.

W is for… Um, there are no words that start with the letter “W” in Spanish.

I wracked my brain to find a Spanish word starting with the letter “W” for this post. I even filtered through the Wordreference.com dictionary and forums, but couldn’t find anything that really felt truly Spanish.

I decided to go to the definitive Spanish language source, the Real Academia Española, to see what was up with the letter W. One simple search for “W” gave me the explanation I was looking for…

There are no purely Spanish words that start with the letter W. Any word in the Spanish dictionary that does start with the letter W has been imported from another language.

This makes sense why some words in Perú were spelled with “hua” or a “w” interchangeably. For example, huanca or wanka. Huanca would have originally been from Quechua.

p.s. Scott wanted me to do this post on Wi-Fi, and finally admit to the world how addicted I am to the internets. As if you already didn’t know! The search for open Wi-Fi internet access has been a major theme for us in Perú, though. Wi-Fi is also called “inalámbrico”, which means “cordless”, but can also imply a “cordless telephone”. It gets confusing and is better just to go with the imported word Wi-Fi.

Smooth Peru Departure, Bumpy En Route, Rough Quito Arrival, No Freak Outs

Smooth Peru Departure

We hired a travel agent to escort us across the Peru/Ecuador border. I wouldn’t have normally gone to this extreme of handholding, but (a) we’ve had issues at borders in the past and (b) I was not officially stamped into Perú because my initial passport was stolen. I had my new passport and the police report with me, but wanted some extra help to make sure we would be able to abort the Perú mission before our visas (well, Scott’s visa, since I didn’t have one) expired the next day.

The agent ended up ushering me through the entire process. To my great relief, all I had to do was sit, smile and nod. She was a feisty, short, built lady with a sweet smile. I cut in lines at her insistence. She knocked on the desk of the man who was hemming and hawing at my case, and told him to hurry up. It was great.

Next we were bused to the way out of the way Ecuador immigration office and stamped into the country. Then the agent took us back to the city and put us on a bus to Quito. A little hectic, but easy!

Bumpy En Route

The bus ride should have only taken something like 8-hours. It ended up taking 12-hours. Part of the delay… we were stopped every few hours for random checks by different branches of Ecuadorean military and police. After the first two, we started to wonder if something was going down in Ecuador that we didn’t know about. The locals seemed to take it all in stride though, so we went along with them. At each stop everyone would have to offload. An agent would typically get on the bus and look around. And then open the storage underneath and poke around some more. At one stop the police patted down all of the men. Women, especially the half asleep and pitifully harmless looking ones like me, were let be.

The bus also stopped to pick up straggling passengers whenever it was hailed down from the side of the street. Every time the bus did this, the lights would flick on to help the new passenger get to an open seat. Then the baby in the back would start screaming, and we’d start the process over again, trying to sleep in seats with no safety belts as the bus sped over bumps and around curves.

Rough Quito Arrival

The bus arrived in Quito at about 6am. So it turned out to be a good thing that it took 12-hours, because other wise we would have arrived at 2am. Not fun. We were still jolted out of sleep upon arriving at the station. Scott and I were not prepared to get off, and needed some time to unlock our bags (which were locked to the seats in front of us) and pack up our pillows.

We were the last people on the bus. The driver kept yelling at us to hurry up, and finally just started to drive off. He had already dropped off our larger backpacks, which had been stowed underneath the bus, on the curb and was leaving them behind unattended. Great. We flew off the bus, forgetting our bag of liquor and food. Gasp.

We were able to run back to our backpacks, which were being looked after by a nice New Zealander who noticed we hadn’t picked them up. Then we realized that our bag of sustenance was missing. Scott went on a search for the bus to see if he could retrieve it.

No Freak Outs

I was not there for this, otherwise I would have had a major freak out on two bus drivers. Apparently, when Scott tracked down our bus in the departures area of the terminal, he asked about the bag and the driver and his counterpart insisted that there was nothing left on the bus. Scott persisted and was able to get on the bus to look around. The bag had been moved and strategically hidden behind the front door. ¡Ratones! You have to give it to them, though. That bag was holding some awesome tequila, cream pisco and chewy strawberry candy. I was happy to get it back! And happy to have arrived in Quito with no freak outs along the way. Just as I’m getting used to being on the road, our adventures are ending!

R is for Ruinas

I almost got my fill of ruins during our time in Peru. Almost. Ancient stomping grounds are fascinating to me.

One common theme I’ve discovered in visiting ruins is how little, really, is known about the Incas and probably other ancient civs as well. Tour guides typically have compelling stories though, even if parts of them are historical fiction.

I put together a quick** slideshow with one photo from every set of ruins we’ve visited. Machu Picchu is in there three times because we visited three times! It’s definitely the best of them all. My next favorite would probably be Chan Chan and the ruins in Northern Peru, just because they are so different from everything else I’ve seen.

** I spent the last two days trying to find a good, free, slideshow software to put this together with little luck. The software and online services are out there (Slideroll.com, for example) but I couldn’t get any of them to work nicely on my computer either because of internet slowness or Windows 7 crappiness. I went with the boring, but quick and easy, Flickr service instead… Sadly, I could not include music! I have some good traditional Peruvian music to share.