This Summer has been a doozy, like most of them are when
your main job is Summer orientation. We’ve seen just under 2,000 students this
summer in 20+ orientation sessions, so I am ready to kick my feet up come Fall…
No excuses though, I will get better about blogging! So,
here’s a post for everyone who cares about cities 2 and 3 on our Peruvian
journey: Puno and Arequipa!
I left off with saying we woke up early the day after our
Incan Trail trek finished to get on the bus to Puno. We chose to take a “non-tourist”
bus to Puno. When we booked it, I thought it would be like the buses I took in
Argentina where Argentinians used them to travel throughout the country. But
this was definitely a company for tourists aimed at getting between cities. The
reason it wasn’t a “tourist bus” is because it didn’t have a guide who pointed
things out. Mike and I used the bus time to complete our final few assignments
and sleep. (Okay, I slept. He did more homework and watched subtitled children’s
movies).
We arrived to Puno in the early afternoon. It was by far the
least pretty of the three cities, but it’s also the least touristy. Puno is the
largest city on Lake Titicaca, the highest altitude lake navigable by boat.
Lake Titicaca is the birthplace of the Inca and it rests on the border of Peru
and Bolivia. We initially had plans to stay on an Uros Island – an island made of floating
reeds - and kayak the next day. We went to leave our bags at our hotel for the 2nd
night, and we made our way back downtown. By the time we got back, the ferry
had stopped running for the day, or at least its what I gathered from my broken
Spanish. Someone offered us a ride in his boat, but I was translating for Mike
and getting really confused. At one point, the “guide” asked us how much money
we had (you do negotiate taxi fares before accepting a ride), and Mike and I
decided to abandon our efforts. We also got lost on our way to the Plaza de
Armas (literally because we didn’t walk far enough). With all the frustration,
we gave up and went back to our hotel where we’d left our bags, and they
graciously gave us the same rate we were paying for the next night.
On our first night, we taxied into town and got dinner (we
seriously rode taxis all over because our hotel was technically outside of
Puno-proper) and checked on our kayaking reservation for the next day. Mike was
concerned because initially they knew we would be staying at an Uros Island, so
he wanted to make sure we could get on the kayak tour with our change of plans.
The night was quite uneventful after all the miscommunication and frustrations
for the day.
We woke the next morning and took a taxi to the docks where
our tour would leave from… Mike totally understood the company’s explanation
the day before, but I must have been too tired to get it. I thought everyone on
our boat was kayaking with us but they were getting a tour of an island in
addition to the kayaking, and we were the only ones just kayaking. No. We were
the only ones kayaking and everyone else was staying on the motor boat and
touring island. Oops.
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| Waiting for it to warm up a bit and looking like a Columbia Sportswear ad. |
We got off our boat (people thought we were insane because
it was still quite chilly) and walked around the peninsula for a bit while we
waited for the sun to warm the earth up – thank goodness our guide suggested
that. Everything at Lake Titicaca was so lovely! The water is just so clear. We
could see across the lake to mountains in Bolivia, but photos don’t really do
it much justice. (I’m surprised my eyesight it better than our camera, but it
was just a point and shoot!)
We kayaked for about an hour or an hour and a half. It
honestly didn’t get us too far, but each time I looked back we were farther
than I thought. Our guide told us we were the first kayakers he’d had for the
season. It was the beginning of May, at this point, which is Fall for them, so
that surprised me a bit. The lake definitely threw off my depth perception
because I kept thinking we would make it to this large island on the lake, but
the guide informed me that it’s about a 2.5 hour kayak trip one-way. Oops! Mike
and I shared a tandem kayak while our guide was in a single. The peninsula we were
on was a small town, and their shaman and head official was the most supportive
of tourism to their land, so he also acted as our safety in a little motor
boat. He followed us around and kept other boats (of which there weren’t many)
away.
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I paddled some, but also had the important job of being the vacation photographer!
These pictures don't take themselves, you know... |
When we finished kayaking, our group met up with us back at
the peninsula. There, there shaman and another woman from the area, opened our
lunch for us. They’d roasted chicken, salmon, potatoes, corn, and other native
vegetables in a pit in the ground. We each had a large serving of food. I’m not
going to say it’s the best meal I’ve ever had, but I did appreciate learning
about how it was cooked!
After we all ate, we got back on the motor boat and went to
tour an Uros Island together. Mike and I found the history and the lesson of
how they are built quite fascinating. I think we both had a hard time reconciling
the fact that people literally live off of the tourism now in such a way that
their lives revolve around being able to sell us souvenirs, etc. It’s kind of
like selling your culture. I’m not sure it’s such a good thing, but I’m also
not one to say if they need to do it to survive or not. The island we visited
had electricity in the form of solar panels, and they told us they need them to
be able to make their handcrafts that they sell when tourists visit. All the
women came out of their homes wearing traditional clothing and did a dance and
sang a song. I really tried to appreciate it without feeling like I was
devaluing their livelihood… it’s hard to be a tourist sometimes, I think.
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A little girl wearing her traditional clothing.
A demonstration of how the island is built is
behind her. |
One good thing out of the whole fiasco the day before is
that I learned staying on an Uros Island would be been a really bad idea in
that I’m allergic to grass and the reeds they make the island from must be
similar because I was having some allergy issues! Spending a night in a house
of reeds, on a bed of reeds, on an island of reeds… well, it might not have
ended well!
After the island, our whole tour group headed back into
town. Mike and I walked around some, went back to the hotel to change, and went
downtown to dinner. I was feeling a little off, so we went to a pharmacy and
got some medicine and called it a night. (Seriously, we went to pharmacies a ½ dozen
times in the 2 weeks – it’s an experience! You can’t even get cough drops
without it being from behind the counter, so having the Spanish Dictionary app
synced wirelessly to my phone was crucial!)
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| Getting ready to go on a reed boat ride! |
We spent so little time in Puno, and I think we would have
found more to do, but with our limited Spanish skills, it would have been hard
to stay. Because it was the least touristy location, we were struggling a bit
with getting around, feeling safe, and general translation. But it was also the
cheapest of the three places we stayed! So, there are pros and cons to every
place. It was one of the more relaxing parts to our trip, so I would definitely
not have cut it from the itinerary!
The next day I woke up and REALLY didn’t feel good. We were
taking a tourist bus to Arequipa, so I did get some sleep on the way. This bus
stopped 2-3 times and let us get off for lunch or showed us different things
(like llamas and flamingos, etc. nothing really worth any additional cost, I
think). We arrived in Arequipa to our boutique hotel in the Plaza de Armas. It
was gorgeous, but the room was small for sure. Because I wasn’t feeling well,
Mike and I sought out our tour company to change plans once again. Initially we
were booked for a 3-day, 2-night adventure package. We
had the choice of camping or staying in homestay-like situations, and we had opted
for the camping. Fortunately, we were the only people doing this excursion
package, so they let us change to getting picked up and dropped off from a
hotel each day.
I have to say, I loved the flexibility of scheduling – like technically
we were supposed to have paid in full prior to arriving to Arequipa (this was
the ONLY company that asked for that, all others wanted some upfront and the rest in cash on arrival), but
we hadn’t done anything except 50% down. So we paid and changed things up. Mike
is a bit more of a planner, so although he was happy we could make some
changes, it frustrated him that Peruvians were really laid back about everything,
including timeliness. He’s a man who loves a good watch, that Mike…
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| The Plaza de Armas in Arequipa really captured my heart. I love some colonial architecture & palm trees. |
We ended up needing to switch hotels since we’d only had a
reservation for 1 night. We went a few blocks away from the Plaza, which wasn’t
bad. There apparently was a large convention in town, so a lot of the nicest
hotels were booked – I didn’t mind our new one, although it wasn’t the best.
The courtyard area to it was so lovely!
Our first day in Arequipa, we just walked around exploring,
eating, and window shopping. We’d picked up very few gifts, so we had to figure
out what to bring back our family and friends. The second day we had a
partial-day excursion of white water rafting on the Chili River. The river was
aptly named because it was QUITE cold! We had to wear wet suits while rafting, which
is a first for me. Our guides were two brothers and our companions were 2
Peruvian college students, one of whom was researching extreme adventure tours
and different information about them – so she went rafting to understand why
people would want to go! It was a good time… not much work, as the current
pushed us the most. We had some nice rapids to work through, but we mainly got
to hang out and enjoy some scenery. We stopped along the way to jump in the
water where it was deep enough (did I mention the cold?!) and take some fun
photos! Our camera is waterproof, so we alternated having it vs. the girls
having it, so we could get photos of us rafting.
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| More fun than work was involved on this rafting trip! |
The second day was the day I was most amped up for! We were
going mountain biking down Misti Volcano! I had visions of the volcano spewing
lava and me biking to save my life – it was going to be epic. Instead, the
control freak in me hated every minute of this full day excursion. I was livid
by the time I got back to my room. Biking down the volcano didn’t take long, as
you can’t go all the way up it in a car (there are hikers who do it, and we saw
some starting out – so that is a possibility). But the path we took was almost
all sand, and it was hard to have much control over your bike. Also, our bikes
were really not in the best condition (mine liked to change gears randomly when
I was pedaling vs. coasting). After that, we got back in the car and drove up
another mountain to bike down the road we’d come up. We changed elevation
rather rapidly, and when I started biking it only took about a ¼ a mile before
I was back in the car because my vision was a bit thrown off, likely due to the
altitude change. Our driver for the day was such a sweetie though. He helped
keep me calm and chatted with me about what life in Oklahoma was like, his love
and hate for Arequipa, my time studying abroad, etc. He actually made me feel
like my Spanish wasn’t so bad after all (thanks, Memrise app!)! When I felt
ready, I got back on my bike and continued the long coast downhill. Our guide
told us to watch out for small rocks… and this road was literally paved with
them. There was no avoiding them, so it was a choppy, butt and jaw aching ride.
I rode my brakes the whole way. Our driver was behind us because it also was an
open road, and we were passed by cars and semis carrying construction
equipment. Overall, I didn’t feel safe at all and I was ready to be done. We
had a Japanese man with us on this day trip, and he loved it and wanted to
continue – he’d mountain biked across India, apparently! I was fed up though. I
went down for a few hours, but with a few miles left, I threw in the towel and
got back in the car. I couldn’t handle my bike randomly changing gears when I
was trying to ride. I mentally wrote a scathing TripAdvisor review, but I’ve
never posted it…
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| Misti Volcano and the super sandy path we rode down. |
Anyway, with the terrible, no good, very bad mountain biking
experience out of the way, we could move on with the trip to sandboarding! I
was really excited to try sandboarding for the first time. I love skiing, I’ve
been doing it since I was 6 or 7 years old, but I’ve never tried snowboarding
before, so I was nervous. It turns out, you don’t have to actually stand up to
sandboard! Our guide (same one as the mountain biking from the day before)
picked us up and hour earlier than he initially intended (and thank goodness,
the sand got hot quickly!). We drove for about an hour out to the desert, and
he showed us how to sandboard. He had us start by laying on our stomachs as we
rode down the dunes. I ended up sticking with this method, as my one time
trying to stand was slightly terrifying. Mike switched to the standing method.
The sandboards were actually just wood with Velcro straps on them and glossy
bottoms. We were given wax to use for each run to help us keep speed. We
practiced on a small dune for awhile – walking up in between each short run.
Then, we got back in the Jeep and went for a drive to a taller dune. I liked
the driving better than the sandboarding – less sand in the face! We went down
some tall dunes a few times, changed location, and repeated. The craziest thing
was how no matter where we were in the dunes, there were hundreds of flies
attacking the car. It was nasty! We got away from a few of them, but a bunch
had already gotten into the vehicle and stuck with us for the duration of the
trip.
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| Best construction job ever! |
When we made it back from sandboarding, we arrived to our
hotel (which we’d already checked out of) and paid a few additional dollars to
get a chance to shower. Sand covered ouR bodies - it was in our ears and everything! Mike heard from one of the
Incan Trail trekkers about a chocolate making experience, so we’d signed up a
day or two prior. After our shower, we headed out to make our chocolate. I
learned a lot through the experience, but the biggest thing I took away is that
I don’t like real chocolate – I like the sugar added, fake chocolate, Easter
egg/Hershey’s kiss “chocolate.” Oh well! At least I tried it! We got to make
chocolates to take home with us… which 3 months-ish later, I still haven’t
touched!
Our trip home was that night. We had a late flight from
Arequipa to Lima, a long layover there; a flight from Lima to El Salvador with
a shorter layover, and then to Dallas. We got home the next afternoon
completely spent. We napped for 2 hours and then went to see Captain America:
Civil War. We’re super ridiculous and purchased tickets before we left! It was
an awesome trip, and I made memories I’ll never forget. But next time, I am
looking forward to parking my butt on a beach and not moving for a few days…
