And For My Final Trick…

…I’ll direct you to the New Blog, because I’ve run out of space to upload the promised Santa Catalina Monastery Gifs (which were going to be my Final Trick) here! It’s been a fun ride here at ollieinamerica, and I actually considered upgrading to a paid account this time to keep the good times rollin’, but it was still just a little too expensive for my taste.

So I’ve added a blog component to the LAZYAC portfolio I unveiled back in December, and have kicked it off with what are perhaps the Best Gifs of All Time — some very important people told me that they have, in fact, Made Gifs Great Again. So yeah. Check ’em out.

Greetings from Dystopia City!

(As scrawled in a newly-exposed piece of street art we encountered on our walk yesterday.)

Re: the walk–
We took advantage of the wonderful weather and lack of other plans to join roughly half a million (at least? I feel like that’s not a bad estimate?) others at the Tidal Basin yesterday to witness the practically-peaking cherry blossoms. Even though it’s soooooooooooooo HashtagTouristy, the trees Japan gifted to us 104 years ago are undeniably picturesque and are a quintessential symbol of Spring in the City. Google Maps tells me we took a 2.9 mile route (one way), so I was able to snap pictures of a number of other (generally Spring-y) things along the way and back, to include newly-exposed pieces of street art. Also there are some particularly ace shots of Ollie in the mix.

(Also pardon my bad-itude right now… I’m still coming to terms with our dear Hoos getting knocked out of the NCAA Tournament :(.)

are you there Dog? it’s me, ollie.

we told ollie he couldn’t come but then he looked at us like this and scared us into reconsidering.

^^^ The namesake piece of art of this post! I’ve been on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster regarding this! When we neared its intersection yesterday, I got excited, because I knew this piece was here and I’d always wanted to photograph it. Part of its aesthetic, however, was an awning extending from the building that read “WHAT IT IS,” which no longer seems to exist. When I peeped this yesterday, I was actually under the impression that it was a new mural with the same character and new commentary on all the destruction/construction around (which saw the demise of the “WHAT IT IS” awning).

However, the only photos I’ve been able to turn up of the missing awning show that the piece on the wall actually remained unchanged! And it was only in the adjacent building being torn down that the dystopian greetings were revealed. Also, said photos are from this anonymous blog on the website of one of the UVA a cappella groups, so basically everything’s just coming together in weird ways right now.

Update: When I zoomed in on my photo I noticed it was signed and so learned a bit more– Antarah Crawley painted it in 2011. He hasn’t tweeted in a year and a half, but when he did, sometimes it was in the form of pointed haiku. (And yes, while my basketball-fueled bad-itude has me being tongue-in-cheek and hyperbolic about the tragedies of missed photo opportunities, I do realize that there are far greater implications and consequences of the vast stretches of buildings that are being torn down in DC than the Instagram-That-Got-Away…)

Anyway. Back to all-cherry-blossom-everything…

Actually… not quite to the cherry blossoms yet. We got sidetracked by some food trucks, and while Marlon was back at his food truck of choice trying to figure out why his falafel burrito a) had no falafel and b) was so poorly wrapped that it barely qualified as a burrito, I entertained myself by taking photos of Ollie.

That last one is funny as a gif, but this still is probably my favorite picture I’ve ever taken so I’m making sure it gets the appropriate attention.

so as you can see, we had the place to ourselves.

On this decidedly dystopian day, the worst part was not the crowds, or falafel mix-up, or the grossly overflowing trash cans, or the fact that Caps fans on every corner were trying to touch my dog; but rather how hard it was to find ice cream on our way home, and the fact that we ultimately had to stop in at a Walgreens to get some.

the sunset matched the elizabeth taylor mural at dacha PERFECTLY.

We wrapped up the day with gimmicky cherry blossom beer (AND BASKETBALL, BACK WHEN BASKETBALL STILL MATTERED TO ME) and also I took some polaroids. The end!

Santa Catalina Monastery

Okay wow. Been home nearly 2 months… I think it’s about time I finished up with all this! (Except this won’t even technically be the last post because I’ve got some SuNsEt GiFs I’m still working on…)

The last thing we did in Arequipa was visit the Santa Catalina Monastery, which our hotel was situated just across the street from. It had a ~$12 (40 soles) entry fee, and you were expected to use and then tip out a guide, but it was worth it. The monastery– still functional, though on a much smaller scale than when hundreds of nuns used to reside there– was like a small village in its own right, with its own streets, and gardens, and courtyards. Our guide, Ada, was pretty funny in her sometimes irreverent telling of the history of the monastery and its customs. She capped off the experience by offering us a deal on the pisco she sold on the side, but which needed to be kept on the low down because obviously that was behavior unbecoming of a monastery guide. So we winked and nodded when she offered to “direct us to an ATM” after our tour, and followed her to the courtyard of the restaurants across the street after she’d secretly procured the liquor from her locker in the monastery. We’d been meaning to get a bottle anyway, and she had one with a cool bronze label, and we actually couldn’t think of a better way to come into a bottle of pisco.

Then we got a cab from the hotel to the Arequipa airport, which offered us really fantastic views of the Misti volcano we’d caught peeks of throughout our stay.

the commentary for this one was something about women being neither seen nor heard? basically all the nuns were milford men.

our girl.

misti

pisco deal goin down.

¡adios, peru!

Oh right, then we flew to Lima, where we drank minibar beer and watched Making a Murderer, then slept and got up and went to the airport and (after a three hour delay) flew to New York. When we were scheduled to get in at 9 pm it seemed like a good idea to go see our friends in New York and sleep for a few hours on a couch before heading back to the airport for our 7 am flight to DC, but when our arrival got pushed back to midnight that plan seemed less sensible. So we spent the night in JFK and it was pretty miserable. Part of it we spent at the diner there, which was allegedly 24 hour, but which claimed to be closed for the first two hours we were there. When they finally let us in the service was almost comically bad, but the booths proved more comfortable than the floor we were on previously, so it was still an upgrade. Then our flight was delayed for nearly an hour– after we’d already boarded the plane. We were so happy to finally make it home, and Mops and Poppy even brought Ollie home to us that very day!

oh right, and then a few days after we got back we found cereal with an alpaca on it and said, ‘AWWWWW, PERU!’

¡Arequip-Arequip-Arequipaaaaaa!

(As I’m sure you remember from the end of my last post, in the Puno bus station the ticket salesmen-and-women had a cute [and/or annoying, depending on how long you were in the station, I suppose] habit of singing the destinations their booths serviced. ‘¡CUSCO-PUNO-CUSCO-PUNO-CUSCO-PUNO-CUSCOOOOOOOO!’ was another big one, I want to say.)

So we took the afternoon bus from Puno to Arequipa after returning from the lake. This was the place so highly recommended by the Austrian couple we met briefly in line for the bus back down from Machu Picchu. They said it was the most beautiful city they’d been to in Peru. That (plus the write-up it got in our Fodor’s book, and the fact that a Peruvian friend said she hadn’t been there but had heard it was nice, and the fact that we were really ready to be done deliberating over how to finish the trip) was all it took!

We rode Cruz del Sur again, though an agent in Cusco had told us Cruz del Sur didn’t operate between Puno and Arequipa haha. (We learned at some point or another to take almost everything we were told by anyone with a certain amount of skepticism.) Marlon upgraded us to VIP this time (for <$10 a person) so we had nice, roomy seats in which to watch Ant Man.

We stayed at the Hotel San Augutín Posada del Monasterio, named for the Santa Catalina Monastery across the street. We arrived quite late but hungry, so we found some nearby pizza then got some really great sleep. Aside from the nights of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day (when we had back-to-back nights in Cusco), our time in Arequipa would be the only time on the trip we spent consecutive nights in any place, and we were really happy to have a home base for a couple days.

It really was a beautiful city, with beautiful architecture and Europe-reminiscent plazas and just generally a lot of character. We spent the first morning wandering the area around (you guessed it) the Plaza de Armas; checking out the fantastic Basílica Catedral, and then the smaller Iglesia de la Compañia de Jesús, impressive in its own right on account of its age and intricate carved exterior. The neighboring cloisters have been converted to an outdoor shopping center while remaining quiet and tasteful, so we spent a good amount of time there too.

you can tell how late i am in getting this posted by the christmas tree that still adorned the plaza… (it came down while we were there, though.) for reference, this was january 6.

We wandered around a bit more then got lunch at Istanbul Lounge Bar before heading back to rest up for the afternoon/evening (read: we started watching Making a Murderer— available on Peruvian Netflix!). After a couple hours we convinced ourselves to get up and find some food, and then we got another good night’s sleep.

i time lapsed this and will hopefully have the coolest gif ever soon.

The next day we did more walking around and checked out the mummy at the Museum of Andean Sanctuaries. Except we didn’t see the main mummy that’s usually there, Juanita. We saw Sara, because they get swapped out every now and then for restoration purposes. They were child sacrifices to volcano gods in the 15th century. Lunch at a place that boasted vegetarian rocoto relleno back in the cloysters; more walking around; pisco sours at a bar with good views of the nearby Misti volcano; more Making a Murderer; then a sort of hilarious but frustrating excursion to find somewhere to have our last meal, where NoThiNg WaS aS iT sEeMeD¡!¡!¡! But we ended up at Casona del Pisco where I got some great ceviche and Marlon finally tried an alpaca steak (he said it was a lot like regular steak. He also never tried cuy while we were there, if anyone was wondering).

seems wrong…

old yeller?!

We had nearly another full day in Arequipa before flying to Lima the night before we came home, and we spent a good portion of it at the Santa Catalina monastery across from our hotel. But I took a trillion pictures so. This’ll just be the penultimate Peru post.

Lake Titicaca & the Uros Islands

So we took the overnight Cruz del Sur bus from Cusco to Puno. We left at 10:30 pm and got in at 5:30 am. The reviews made it sound like it’d be a pretty comfortable, pleasant experience, but I’m truly not sure if I slept at all.

In spite of the early hour, German, the representative from Titicaca Tour, through whom we were doing the Tour Uros Vivencial, was waiting for us at the station. He walked us through our itinerary for the day and night we’d spend on the nearby Uros Islands— artificial islands just off the shore constructed entirely of reeds. But! Things didn’t kick off until 9. So we had three excellent hours to spend in the Puno bus station which… is not the fanciest place in the world. And we weren’t feeling great after the bus ride and were wary of everything they served us in the sketchy restaurant. Not the highlight of the trip, really.

But before we knew it it was time to go. Had a quick tour of downtown Puno as we picked up a couple other travelers, then hopped on the boat to the Uros Islands, just five kilometers off shore.

A few things about the lake and the islands:

• Lake Titicaca falls directly between Peru and Bolivia, and is split between them. The “titi” is for Peru, and the “caca” is for Bolivia. …Get it?! [laugh/cry emoji forever!] We were first treated to the joke by Danny, when we were hanging with him and Jess in Lima, and then we also overheard a guide telling it to his group in Machu Picchu. You’re welcome for passing it on.
• Lake Titicaca is high. Higher than Cusco, even. You might even say it’s the highest navigable lake in the world. We maintained our chlorophyll and altitude pill regime and for the most part continued avoiding any real elevation sickness. (Yes, chlorophyll!) (And for reference: Cusco is 3399 meters high. Lake Titicaca is 3810 meters. Machu Picchu, by contrast, is only at 2430 meters.)
• I’ve seen figures in the forties and sixties online re: the number of Uros Islands. We were told there were 93. Each island has its own president; presidents can be male or female.
• Speaking of presidents, one of the current Peruvian presidential candidates is Keiko Fujimori. Her father, Alberto Fujimori, was the Peruvian president from 1990 to 2000 and was responsible for getting solar panels set up on the islands.
• Rather than Spanish, or even Quechua, the islanders’ first language is Aymara (though they do learn Spanish in school). There is a primary school within the island community, but at eleven or twelve the kids must travel to Puno by boat every day to attend school.
• Tourism is their main source of income. I saw a lot of reviews (thankfully after the fact!) saying the island visits were huge tourist traps and inauthentic. I can’t speak for the other tour options, but I really enjoyed our experience and (despite having souvenirs hawked to us a couple times) found it plenty authentic.

Our first stop was at Isla Mama Q’ota.

uros island life depends on these reeds, or ‘totoras.’

demonstration the island construction. first, cut the masses of reed root into squares two meters deep. then bind a bunch of them together with stakes and rope. cover that with dried reeds until they’re about another two meters high. build some huts out of more reeds. get a big rock on which to put your kitchen hut so as to not burn down your island, then bring your family to (or start one on!) your island.

local textiles

inside a hut. i think the girl said five people slept there?

playing dress-up

uros lady

360 degree panorama of isla mama q’ota.

watching for bandits.

they called their ornate boats mercedes benzes. (as opposed to the simpler ‘love boats,’ where it sounded like certain courtship takes place?)

Then we stopped at Isla Santa Maria for quick refreshments, then Marlon and I were whisked away from the rest of the group for our stay on Isla Kantuta. (Cantuta being Peru’s national flower. Oh snaaaaaap, but also the name of a university in Lima/a massacre named after said university, on none other than the aforementioned President Fukimora’s watch! He gave solar panels to the Uros but was also convicted of human rights abuses! #themoreyouknow)

Anyway, we had the honor of receiving another run-down of how they construct their islands (this time in Spanish) from none other than the president of Isla Kantuta himself: Nestor. After a much-needed nap considering our sleepless night, we got to accompany Nestor and his twelve-year-old son Royal on their afternoon fishing and trap-laying trip. They fish with nets, and construct a sort of noose from– what else?– reeds (+1 piece of string) in hopes of catching a duck in its unique path. According to Nestor, every duck takes the same camino every day, and he doesn’t like other ducks in his camino. I’m not sure exactly how, but Royal was able to identify said paths and lay the traps.

we got a LITTLE suckered into paying 10 soles for a ride on the mercedes benz (but that’s like $3 so whatever)

reynaldo: the youngest of two sons in nestor’s family

our bathroom boat (we never actually witnessed the bathroom facilities on the island, but they’re assumed to not be up to snuff for foreign guests so they leave a boat with a toilet haha. but… no toilet paper.)

mar gearing up for the fishing trip with nestor and his son royal.

laying the fishing nets.

the flowers at the tops of the reeds are used as a medicinal tea.

motioning to where he wants to set a duck trap.

duck trap! the duck swims through and gets… strangled.

we were told we shouldn’t actually eat it as our stomachs weren’t accustomed. little did nestor know that at the first island we’d been served some with no such warnings… (no problems followed, though.) it was a little like a coconut/banana cross, but not so sweet.

royal, cheeks stuffed with reed, showing us how it’s done.

Then we hung out with the family while Nestor’s wife, Anna, prepared us dinner. The youngest boy, Reynaldo, who missed the fishing trip, was exceptionally cute and funny (and played with all manner of questionable items, as you’ll see). The kids all got a kick out of our cameras (ESPECIALLY my Polaroid [Well. Fujifilm Instax, but. Is not every tissue a Kleenex?]), and while Anna cooked, Nestor created little souvenir boats out of reeds for us. We were a little abashed to receive six fish each to the rest of the family’s one or two, but after a long day with few meals they were very welcome (not to mention delicious! Not sure I needed a full six, but better believe I ate them…).

juana, we learned, was actually anna’s grandmother. (also she requested a tip after i took this pic haha.)

i… feel like it’s fine.

the boys would fish through a hole straight through their island for fun! they used pejerrey meat to fish for pejerrey. it reminded me of ice fishing a little.

pejerrey from the lake and potatoes grown on the island.

I FEEL LIKE IT’S FINE.

We went to bed (in our own private hut, with blankets galore. Anna was kind enough to fill up hot water bottles for us to take to bed too.) when the sun went down, which was probably around 8:30 pm haha. We didn’t really sleep the night before, remember?! Got an amazing 10 hours of sleep before heading out at 7 to see if the nets and traps had turned anything up. (Spoiler: They did!)

they caught mostly kingfish, or ‘pejerrey,’ the same as we ate the night before.

the day’s haul. they said this was a good one for them and that we must be good luck!

did he catch a duck?!

stone cold royal.

Then we went back to Isla Kantuta to say goodbye to/take pictures (in local garb! [They instisted! We weren’t appropriating their culture!]) with the family. Then Nestor took us back to the mainland by the same route Royal goes to school every day. We got dropped in the center this time, where we found a café in which to post up until it was time to head back to our favorite ol’ bus station. We had a couple more hours to kill once there, then it was off to Arequip-Arequip-Arequipaaaaaaaa (as all the bus ticket salesmen were so wont to croon).

Traveling Back from Machu Picchu and Final Hours in Cusco

One last quick post before getting to the behemoth that will be our stop at Lake Titicaca…

We arose in Aguas Calientes before dawn to catch our train back to Ollantaytambo, on which I took a couple more photos, but this time through an open door or window (to slightly better results).

¡adios, peru rail!

We, like everyone else, got bombarded upon our arrival to Ollanta by taxistas offering us what we noticed to be better prices back to Cusco than what we’d paid in advance for a spot on a minibus. Still, we had paid for a spot on a minibus, and so dismissed all the drivers that approached us. Finally, one lingered around long enough to ask us more information about this supposed minibus. We told him, and he assured us that that bus only came around in the afternoon.

After a series of phonecalls to the agency back in Cusco, it was determined that the lady who booked our trip on New Year’s Day had in fact erred, so the agency would just pay the taxi to drive us the hour-and-a-half back to Cusco. We made mention of the fact that we’d paid the agency more than what the taxi would cost (and had now been inconvenienced), but those appeared to be moot points.

“At least we get this whole taxi to ourselves instead of being crammed in that minibus!” we thought, until the driver stopped in the square on our way out of town and picked up another couple (who looked none too pleased that they’d be split up between the front and back seats, as Marlon and I were occupying two of the back seats already). The girl sat next to me, but didn’t seem too interested in conversing or otherwise interacting, so a good portion of my ride was spent trying not to lean into her as we made our way through the windy mountain roads.

haha, this picture yielded one of my attempts to talk to my neighbor. i asked her if she thought ‘cuña’ would be a good presidente, and she stared at me for a couple seconds, and then just said, ‘acuña.’ because the presidential candidate’s name is acuña, but the first letter got cut out of my picture, see? apparently she felt politics was a private matter.

When we finally arrived we still had just about a whole day to spend in Cusco (where we’d left the bulk of our stuff up at Jay Jay’s) before catching a sleeper bus to the Lake. We finally got breakfast at Jack’s Café (the line had been insane when we tried going on New Year’s Day. But also it was so good! Go to Jack’s if you go to Cusco, even if the line is really long!), went up to Jay Jay’s to change, then did a victory lap of the Plaza area to take care of some last minute shopping. When we tired of that, we hit up Qucharitas one more time (indulged in some quinoa ice cream! That… was very much like normal vanilla ice cream haha), then, realizing the ‘Skins game was on, popped into Faces of Cusco where they were having a proper NFL Gameday, complete with a fridge full of Peruvian craft beer. Not a bad way to pass the last of our time.

Then we had to pack up and ship out to Puno on said sleeper bus. More on that later. (Spoiler: we did not get much sleep on the bus…)

the cutest coffee set at jack’s

the cutest bb eating quinoa ice cream at qucharitas

one last plaza shot.

Machu Picchu

Then finally it was time to check off one of the most anticipated items on our itinerary: Machu Picchu. As you might imagine, it’s a bit of an ordeal to reach the remote former Incan capital. From Cusco, we had to take a one-and-a-half hour minibus to one of the main hubs, tiny as it may be, of the Sacred Valley: Ollantaytambo (I knowwwwww, what a mouthful, right? Thankfully many people shorten it to “Ollanta,” which is how I learned to think of it more as “Ollanta. Y. Tambo.” #protips). From Ollanta, it’s a three hour train ride to the town of Machupicchu, more commonly known as Aguas Calientes (apparently so-called for an actual hot spring on the north side of town, but we never made it there).

touched-up google map of the route…

larger map for scale

If flying over the Andes into Cusco was spectacular, then riding the train through them to Aguas Calientes was… also very spectacular. We rode Peru Rail, with the other choice being Inca Rail. What’s the difference? I don’t know, but it sounds like this guy does. And as I confessed in my LA post, where I committed the same crime, I couldn’t help but take some photos through the scuffed up, glare-y windows.

coffee and coca tea. though machu picchu, and ollantaytambo even moreso, are lower altitude than cusco, we continued partaking of one of the preferred elevation-sickness remedies in peru.

there was sooooo much campaigning being done on the city walls everywhere we went! though this could possibly just be some love graffiti. HUMBERTO Y ELVIS POR SIEMPRE!

adding to the dogs-in-peru collection

Though taking a bus seems to be by far the more popular means of going from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu, we opted to hike. The bus ride may be only twenty minutes, but we were warned (and believed, as soon as we saw it) that the line to get on it could take up to an hour. As the hike was only supposed to be around an hour/hour-twenty itself, and the weather was so fantastic, we decided we might as well stretch our legs after the long train ride. It’s a steep (largely stair-bound) but easily-navigable trail; I’d definitely recommend it. Plus we saved $10! Each!

zoomed in on people up on huayna picchu

huayna picchu in the distance

(And the answer is… Yes, we’re both wearing the City Sports shirts we bought at the Chinatown store’s going-out-of-business-sale [*pours some out*]. I’ll let it be known here that Marlon had packed his overnight bag first, though I wasn’t aware of his choice when I packed mine. #coupletwinning!!!)

Before exploring the actual ruins of Machu Picchu, we decided to continue our ascent to the Sun Gate. (Which… ended up requiring another steep, hour-long hike. Whoops! Yeah, keep that in mind ahead of your bus-vs.-walking decision, I suppose…) The views and our weather were so phenomenal the entire time, but we could see that clouds were collecting in the distance, and were told that there were two storms about to converge basically right above our heads. Huayna Picchu, the even taller peak whence you get the absolute best views of Machu Picchu (but which is actually just dangerous to ascend at this point and so is about to get shut down for maintenance work), got evacuated. Ultimately we just ended getting sprinkled on ever-so-slightly at the very end, though.

Fun facts: though I’ve spent my whole life saying “mah-chu pee-chu” (and, let’s be honest, still totally say that), notice there is an extra “C” in “Picchu.” It’s really supposed to be said “peak-chu“! And also, while still magnificent, while still impressive, the ruins are actually much less old than I was thinking: the Incas built the city around 1450 and abandoned it about a century later. The Spanish conquerors never knew of its existence. (There, I’ve summed up the Wikipedia intro paragraph for you. Read further, if you care.)

one more fun fact! hiram bingham, the man being commemorated in the top right plaque for [re-]discovering machu picchu in 1911, was the inspiration for indiana jones.

I GOT THIS FOR YOU.

LET’S EACH TAKE A SELFIE AT THE SAME TIME BUT ONLY LOOK AT OUR OWN CAMERA, OKAY?

Oh right and there were llamas at the end.

SPOTTED.

HI!!!!!!!

‘hey, what do you think of this one?’

Omg somehow I forgot to include the RUNNING LLAMA GIF.

Then we did take the bus back down to Aguas Calientes (as opposed to walking). While waiting in line we chatted briefly with an Austrian couple who very assertively said that Arequipa was the most beautiful city they’d visited in Peru. And with that, we more-or-less got the last leg of our trip planned.

But first– the unplanned night in Aguas Calientes. (We had booking issues the day before, remember? And couldn’t get on a train back to Cusco the evening of our Machu Picchu visit? So were forced to stay a night in Aguas Calientes and take a very early train back to Cusco, by way of Ollantaytambo, the following morning?) We stayed at TripAdvisor-approved Hotel La Cabana Machu Picchu, and ate at the Fodor’s-guidebook-recommended Tree House Restaurant for dinner. I’m happy to pass on the recommendations in both cases! In fact, Aguas Calientes as a town surpassed my expectations (we’d been told it wasn’t worth staying at). It was a pretty quintessential backpacker town, in a beautiful location, with lots of good-but-affordable food and lodging choices. Definitely worth at least one night’s stay– next time, maybe the night before the Machu Picchu trek, so as to do the sunrise tour.

New Year’s Day in Cusco

We spent all of New Year’s Day in Cusco as well (as it turned out, the nights of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were the only two consecutive nights we’d spend anywhere on the trip until reaching Arequipa, at the end). We had a leisurely morning searching for a place that was actually open for breakfast (and only reaching/settling on Paddy’s, “the highest Irish-owned pub on the planet” by lunch time). Then we did some shopping in the Plaza de Armas area, including a stroll through the huge market on Calle Santa Clara.

sid vicious, the dog. (no but they actually had very expensive suede dogs for sale in the airport that looked just like this…)

leftover yellow from the NYE celebrations

nativity parades include blackface in peru!

the main photo in the mirror is allegedly the winner of a mick-jagger lookalike contest in the peruvian jungle in the 70s, but i’ve found no record of it…

prickly pear, aka cactus fruit or ‘tuna.’ (the lady selling it told me it was called tuna.)

iglesia de san francisco and the carnival being held outside

marlon perusing the market. leftover new year’s eve yellow still for sale!

so many kinds of corn in peru!

yep! tupac amaru shakur was named after a peruvian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%BApac_Amaru

king of the streets.

Then we went to buy our train tickets to go to Machu Picchu the next day and, surprise! It’s *super* popular to go during the New Year and there were no return trains available [that day]! So we booked a night in Aguas Calientes (the town whence you reach Machu Picchu) and it ended up being way less big of a deal than it seemed in the moment!

After recovering from the horror of having to change our travel plans (in South America! Of all places!) we grabbed some ice cream at Qucharitas– highly recommended by Jay Jay, our AirBnB host– and a road beer for the sunset trek back up the ‘mountain’ to our place. We ran into Jay Jay while snapping pictures of the stunning Mt. Ausangate in the distance. He made fun of us for looking like such tourists (NO BUT SERIOUSLY THE MOUNTAIN LOOKED SO NICE), then invited us to join him and his friend for dinner. We dropped our things off and went to join him. The two places he said he might be were both closed, but the staff at the second place (which was just in the process of closing) knew who he was and sent us in the right direction. We finally found him at Korma Sutra, a delicious Indian restaurant right in our very own Plazoleta de San Blas, had a great meal, and then went to get some sleep before setting off to Machu Picchu early the next morning.

austin déjà vu… https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=645390605527920&l=7433e2860a

I TOLD YOU IT WAS NICE

mar and jay jay. fake $100 for good luck in the new year!

New Year’s Eve in Cusco

Many of you are probably aware by now that the trip from Lima to Cusco (on December 30) had a slight hitch in that we didn’t exactly make it to Cusco on the first try. Or rather, we didn’t exactly land in Cusco, but we had a sweet flyover, and then, some time later, right after Marlon and I had mused to each other that there sure were a lot of clouds still around us, the pilot made the announcement that we’d be landing back in Lima in forty minutes. We had noticed lightning in the distance right before admiring the Cuscan rooftops, so we’ll trust in their claims of bad weather, but it was still frustrating.

sunset through the plane window as we descended to lima

We were informed that we’d be put on the 8 am flight the next day, that we needed to be to the airport at 6, that they (LAN Airlines) were putting us in a five-star hotel, and that they were organizing all necessary transport as well as a meal at the hotel. It took two hours in the notorious Lima traffic to get to the hotel (for reference, it took only ~twenty minutes to get back to the airport in the morning), so we were cranky and hungry and wishing we had more than 5 hours to sleep in the cush hotel bed before it was time to set out again, but whatever.

The next morning went just fine [thumbs up emoji] and the flight into Cusco through the Andes was once again spectacular. I… didn’t have a window seat, though. Nor do I have the permission of the stranger featured sleeping in his window seat in the gifs to share them. But voilà.

We arrived!

Then went against our soon-to-be-host’s advice and paid way too much for a cab to the AirBnB we had on the north side of town, in Jardines del Inca, just up the mountain from the Plazoleta de San Blas (which is right under the unfortunately-situated “16 min” tag on the below map). As in Lima, the main plaza in Cusco was the Plaza de Armas. We got situated in our room, which had an incredible view, and acquainted with our gracious and gregarious host Jay [Jay]. We thankfully didn’t feel too affected by the altitude (11,152 feet, or 3399 meters), so decided to make our way to the Plaza de Armas, by way of San Blas, with just one or two wrong turns in the narrow, labyrinthine (David Bowie reference! Drink!) streets.

art in jay jay’s living room

view from our room

screen-shotting a google map. #travelwoes

the bell tower of iglesia de san blas

i really DO always look upset about something!

marlon always catches me at my best. chowing down on a veggie burger at http://www.themeetingplacecusco.com/

nice, big sidewalks

#cheesy

yeah, totally

stumbling on this was a result of one of our wrong turns.

ended up having to pay for this

my model bf

p l a z a de a r m a s

sacsayhuamán. or as americans were so wont to say, ‘sexy woman.’

i guess this was controversial or something: http://www.cuzcoeats.com/2012/08/inca-statue-raises-more-controversy-one-year-later/

our new family.

heading back to jay jay’s

When I said “up the mountain” earlier, I wasn’t exaggerating. Not only were the streets narrow, they were extremely steep, and the 1.1 km cited on the above map was almost entirely downhill on our way to the Plaza. Meaning that the 1.1 km return trip, with our lungs still adjusting to the thin air, was a little bit brutal. It got better over the couple days we were there, but we feel like we got plenty of exercise during our time in Cusco.

As the title indicates, our first day in Cusco was also New Year’s Eve! After the short night and busy morning/afternoon, we intended to get a nap to rest up for an eventful evening. Instead we trudged through the Jessica Jones pilot on our spotty wifi til it was time to get ready. Jess and Danny had told us how fun, though hectic, the celebrations in Plaza de Armas would be, so we wanted to get dinner somewhere in the area. After checking a few places’ menus, we opted for Mutu, which was serving a three-course Peruvian prix fixe menu and had a live band. We ended up being very happy with this decision. We wrapped up at about quarter to midnight, then moseyed over to the jubilant plaza. Fireworks were already being shot off in every direction (a little unsettling at times, tbh), and the Plaza was brimming with people decked out in the yellow accessories that are traditional in Peru. We kept to the edges, rather than getting sucked into the swarm in the center, but it was such a fun way to ring in 2016 (and we have the gif to prove it!).

Lima

No sooner had I arrived back from California than it was time to set out once again, this time to Peru, and this time with ol’ Marlon by my side. (Alright, it was actually a full week that I was back, during which little things like Christmas happened. I actually [nerdily!] just went back and made a Christmas post because we’d taken a family photo and even made a cute video and I realized I hadn’t posted them [blush emoji forever].)

We flew overnight on the 28th from Reagan to Lima, with a brief layover in Miami. (UGHHHH THEIR SKYTRAIN DOESN’T GO BETWEEN EVERY TERMINAL AND WE HAD TO WALK FOREVER TO GET FROM D TO J AND THE STAFF EVEN SEEMED TO GET SOME SICK PLEASURE FROM CONFIRMING THAT WALKING WAS THE ONLY WAY TO GET THERE. STEP IT UP, MIA.) Some free international-flight wine and Trainwreck got us through the 5.5 hours to Lima, and we arrived at 6 am totally awake and ready to go. (Peru, though located on the west coast of South America, is still in our Eastern time zone! No jet lag! Geography is wild!) (But also “totally awake” is still a gross exaggeration.)

reagan national still decked out for christmas

marlon was STOKED to be one of those couples taking an airplane selfie!

Our AirBnB was in the happenin’ Barranco district, about half-an-hour from the airport by cab. We checked in, showered, then went exploring. A few blocks from the apartment we found a little café we deemed suitable for our first meal in Peru: a chicharrón sandwich for Mar, a pejerrey sandwich for me, and lemonades we approached very timidly after being struck  by the possibility that they may have been made with tap water. (Ordering my sandwich was also kind of funny– Mar and I both have a decent command of Spanish, but didn’t recognize many of the sandwich fillings on offer. I asked the waitress which sandwiches were “sin carne,” and the first thing she mentioned was that the pejerrey was a kind of fish, which I was alright with. She then proceeded to list almost every other sandwich on the menu, including those with very vegetarian unfriendly sounding names like “salchicha” and “sangrecita.” It later dawned on us that she must have intended carne to mean “beef” only. In any case, stay tuned for later in the trip when we became VERY acquainted with pejerrey.)

After lunch we continued wandering until we found ourselves at the gorgeous murals near the city center (or “Plaza de Armas,” as we found the main square of each of the Peruvian cities we visited to be called).

little pejerrey tails

http://jadeuno.com/

i volunteered at the smithsonian folklife fest last summer, which featured peru. elliot tupac had a work on display there, too! https://www.instagram.com/p/4rOA2Fl2vR/

I’d been in touch with Peruvian-Friend-Jess for insight and ideas during much of the trip planning, and it just so happened that our day in Lima overlapped her and Danny’s final day of their Christmas visit in the country. We didn’t have a reliable way to stay in touch, but loose “plans” had been made to meet up at our AirBnB at noon, so after taking in the murals we headed back. 12:30 rolled around without any sign of Jess and Danny; we decided we needed to maximize our time in the area, so I sent her a Facebook message saying to try meeting us in front of some museum at 2.

But what luck! As we entered the lobby on our way out, there our friends were: sweet-talking the doorman (read: exchanging two words with him, then being granted full access to the guest log, complete with full names and passport numbers), who had told them that we’d already left for the day.

With a local-friend on our side, we were easily able to hop on what would have otherwise been a very intimidating bus to make the short trek to Miraflores. Specifically, Kennedy Park in Miraflores, also known as “Cat Park,” because, oddly enough, it’s full of feral cats. We checked out some shops, then decided to get some drinks (Chilcanos/Pisco Sours, followed by coffees) on a leisurely trek to el Parque del Amor.

From there we made our way to Larcomar, a big shopping mall built into Miraflores’ seaside cliffs. I’ll admit to not having been terribly interested in Larcomar as a Lima-attraction, but it ended up being the perfect place to indulge in another perfectly Peruvian meal at Mangos (causas and ceviche) and watch the sun set.

how many cats can you spot?!

the best place to come see people making out, according to jess and danny. http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g294316-d550142-r123805490-El_Parque_del_Amor-Lima_Lima_Region.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Beso

From there we went back to Barranco, where we checked out the plaza and grabbed one more round of cocktails before it was time for Jess and Danny to catch their ride to the airport. (The causas and ceviche apparently didn’t stick to Mar’s and my ribs, so we went on a mildly entertaining late-night excursion for American comforts like frozen pizza. We learned the hard way that the frozen pizza phenomenon has yet to make its way to Peru, so instead got a sub-par bottle of wine from the grocery store and a sub-par pizza to-go from a late-night pizza place.)

Our flight to Cusco was at 4 the next afternoon, so we had what ended up amounting to too much time to sort of aimlessly wander around the Barranco district again the next day. We saw some more murals, popped into the Electricity Museum, switched up our intake of South American cuisine by opting for some Venezuelan fare at Arepa Café, wandered around a bit more… Then we were off to the airport, thinking we’d be bidding farewell to Peru’s capital for at least a week. As many of you already know, we were wrong, but I’ll get to that next time.