Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Machu Picchu: Chapter 1, The Journey

The day of departure arrived.  I went to work with my bright pink school girl backpack, a bright pink fleece, bright pink shoes, and a bright pink water proof jacket.  I don't like pink.  The reason for the bright colors though was that I hoped in the case of my falling off a cliff, getting lost in the woods, or being kidnapped by the Shining Path, my brightly colored clothing would help the authorities a) find me or b) easily identify my body. 

Hard won wisdom I can now pass on to you, explaining this strategy to the salespeople at Sports Authority will only cause them to believe you are a deeply disturbed person and you may be treated accordingly. 

I left work at Metro Center at 2:00 p.m. for my 5:20 flight.  This seemed like plenty of time to take the metro to a bus and a bus all the way to Dulles.  Unfortunately, what I did not count on was pre-Memorial Day traffic, This meant I was able to experience plenty of the traditional pre-boarding all-consuming panic of thinking I was about to miss my flight and ruin everything. It's hardly a trip without that, after all.  

But the three of us boarded our flight together and breathed a sigh of relief that we would not miss the flight and our connection in El Salvador. 

Then we proceeded to sit on the plane for 1.5 hours,  As we were only supposed to have a 1 hour layover in El Salvador, this was Not Ideal.  There was a mild amount of panic from us and the other passengers, but soon after takeoff we were reassured that the time would be made up and everyone would make their flight on time.  They were true to their word, and when we landed in San Salvador we walked off the plane, wound 10 yards through a Duty Free store, and walked right onto the next plane and immediately took off. 

VICTORY! Not only had we made the flight, we hadn't even had to suffer any time in the San Salvador airport.  Because as my mother and Jessica pointed out, "If there is anything worse than the Miami airport, it is probably the San Salvador airport." 

We relaxed on the plane and watched things like the Lego movie. Some people slept. I did not, since as we know I do not sleep anywhere other than a bed and then mostly only ideal bed circumstances. At one point I asked a young man on his way to Colombia about his experience hiking to Machu Picchu. 

"It was rough. Haha.  I thought I was pretty fit, but by the end of it I thought I was going to die. Everything hurt.  The second day, with the stairs....it's just brutal. Here, have my orange."

We don't know why he gave me an orange. It was a kind and beautiful gesture. 

I never even knew his name.

We arrived in Lima at 2:15 a.m.  Our flight was set to depart at 4:25 a.m. so this gave us a reasonable window to collect bags, pass them through customs, buy some BOTTLED water, and continue on towards our gate for our final flight to Cusco. J2 and I settled in to a few chairs while J1 went to look for M, a friend of hers who was also traveling with us. J1 found her and brought her over, we had a lovely chat until around 4 in the morning at which point M's flight left.  We told her we'd see her about 20 minutes after she landed, in the baggage claim at Cusco. 

About 10 minutes after M left us, our flight was called, we all lined up, exhausted but excited to be continuing on, and boarded a shuttle to be taken to our plane.  We stood packed in with other passengers and their luggage for a few minutes, falling asleep standing up, when the bus lights suddenly went off and we were all told to get off the bus, the flight was not leaving after all--bad weather over Cusco made the flight too dangerous.  Annoyed, but accepting, we all got off the shuttle and went back to our seats to wait out what we were led to believe would be about an hour or two.  

After an hour or two, we were still sitting there, but other flights began leaving for Cusco.  These flights were on different airlines, so while we were annoyed, we did nothing more than grumble.  The others fell asleep on their chairs and at 8:30 a.m. after waiting 6 hours, I left them and made my way towards the Avianca airline desk by our theoretical gate.  

I found a rioting mob. 

We had been all the way in the back of this medium sized basement terminal and from our nest in the back corner I had been unable to see or hear the mass of angry customers who had begun to crowd around the desk and forming a threatening hostile circle around the two Avianca employees.  Everyone was shouting in Spanish and shaking fists over the heads of the people in front of them.  Spanish is not my best language, and 40 people shouting in Spanish was stretching my language limits, but I determined that a) people were VERY angry, and b) there was in fact no problem with the weather.  Many rageful passengers were shouting about how they were trying to get to their jobs.  One angry yet friendly man told me in English that what had happened was that Avianca had sent our plane somewhere else and then never gotten us a replacement and now there were no planes.  

Then, insult to injury to insult, other Avianca planes started taking off towards Cusco.

This seemed like a terrible business decision to me, and I stuck around a little longer watching the scene unfold and listening to the intense outraged shouting.  The second the next Avianca flight left for Cusco without us on it, the decibel levels of rage soared. At some point J1 and J2 came over to observe the scene.  I began talking with a guy around our age who looked more confused than angry and turned out to be Canadian.  Canadians don't seem to get angry.  We chatted freely for a long time about travel and jobs and South America until I realized we were chatting TOO freely and I became suspicious and I confronted him with "YOU'RE NOT AN ENGINEER ARE YOU????" and he became more confused and said "Yes....I am...." 

They're everywhere. He told me something very interesting that I did not know. That Canadian engineers all receive rings made of iron when they graduate because once a bridge fell down and killed a lot of people.  I immediately dismissed him as full of crap but when I returned home I looked it up and discovered that this is a thing.  You can read about it here:


Please note the bit about "The Ritual of the Calling" which as far as I'm concerned only cements my belief that engineers are a total cult of weirdos. 

The original friendly yet angry man who had done the explaining for me decided he was going to take the entire flight worth of passengers under his wing and get justice and started making some demands that did actually end up getting met.  He was that good.  The most important of these demands was a free lunch, so soon we found ourselves heading with our engineer and our loud demandy friend upstairs to a cafe that served us ham sandwiches which I carefully checked for offensive items like lettuce.  Convinced it was not about to kill me, I ate the sandwich and life began to feel like maybe it wasn't over.  Our loud friend was named Jan, and despite his fluent English AND his fluent Spanish, he turned out to be Turkish. He told us all about his life, which was a very exciting one.  Currently he is working as a tour guide in Miami, but has also lived in Japan, China, and somewhere in South America. In addition to English and Spanish and Turkish, he is also fluent in Japanese.  He told us about his time living in Japan learning how to be a sushi chef--he claims to be the first white sushi chef in Japan.  Well.  Sort of white. He talked a lot about the training--spending the first 6 months being made to make rice over and over and over until his teacher felt it was perfect. Only then was he permitted to move on. He gave us a lot of life advice about living adventure, but always having a plan. The engineer began to tell me about working in mines.

After lunch we all headed back downstairs to wait by our gate to see when our new plane might arrive.  We were told 2 p.m.  Remember that we had arrived at 2 a.m. Now it was about 10 a.m. We hung out in the chairs by the gate with our new friends which now also included a student at UNC on some kind of interesting several week trip and a couple from Spain who had been doing a semester abroad in New York City and were taking a Peru vacation before returning to Spain.  In between chatting we were signing forms and petitions and legal documents and being given instructions on how to sue for financial damages incurred.  It turned out the only thing I could sue for was the cost of the ham sandwich and since I'd already gotten that I was left with a lot of useless papers. I did sign a petition damning Avianca, but pretty much all the papers were useless.  

At 12:00 they changed our gate number, and we discovered that it was now upstairs in a different terminal so all of us made a massive trek together upstairs where we determined that our gate was in a locked hallway we could not get into in some special place sectioned off by big glass doors.  Airport employees gaping at us from inside this section would not let us in so one girl started shouting very rude names at them in English through the glass, and other passengers began general angry sounds and Jan led the charge in demanding assistance from the closest airport employee.  He was successful, and we were eventually let into our special section where we continued to wait until a plane pulled up to the gate. We got massively excited, right up until the plane left again 10 minutes later without us on it. 

Finally though, at 2:00 p.m., we all boarded that plane and headed off towards Cusco, where we had no idea what M was doing or where she had waited for us or for how long.  Additionally, we had sacrificed the day of acclimatization we had been told was so necessary to our well-being, which I had fought for and abandoned children at work for.   

Our future was uncertain.  

Questions we pondered:

1. Would we be able to find a taxi?
2. What was the Horny Llama going to be like?
3. Where was M?
4. Would we ever get to witness a Calling of the Engineers? What do they call them with? Whistles? The Pied Piper's pipe? Alien technology? 

Several of these questions will be answered in Chapter Two, coming soon.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Machu Picchu: The Beginning

Fortunately or unfortunately, things went pretty smoothly for me this time in South America. Fortunately, because for once I did not spend my vacation convinced I was going to die horribly and painfully in a foreign country.  Unfortunately, because my story from this trip is pretty straightforward and not all that exciting. 

Some people have asked why on earth I would return to South America after the Bolivia Experience. This is an excellent question.  What happened was, my friend who we will call J1 said "Let's go to Machu Picchu," and I said, "Okay."

In January when we made these plans for the May trip, I realized that in order to make a 35 mile trek through the Andes mountains at elevations of up to 14,000 feet above sea level, I would need to make some changes to my lifestyle.  For instance, exercise ever. Maybe eat some vegetables.  With the help of my friend who will called be J2, I made an exercise plan that involved the elliptical at increasing incline 3-4 times a week along with climbing 15 flights of stairs 4 times up and down 2-3 times weekly.  In 6 months I did manage to get on the elliptical a total of 3-4 times and I did climb those stairs 2 times. I failed in all ways to prepare myself physically for the trip and began to ask everyone I had ever heard of who had made the climb how physically challenging it was. 

"It's really difficult."
"I'm pretty physically fit but I had a tough time with it."
"The second day....I wanted to die."
"The second day...I thought I was going to die."

This made me nervous, and yet I continued to not train at all. Periodically I would call J2. 

"J2! What are you up to today?"
"I'm at the gym."
"Oh. That's nice. I'm going to get ice cream."

And

"J2! Where are you?"
"I'm on the fourth climb up all the stairs in my apartment building."
"I should do that. Instead I am going to lie down on this bed."

And

"J2! Let's do something tomorrow."
"I'm meeting with my personal trainer for three hours."
"I might stand up in three hours...maybe...."

On the vegetable front, mostly I ate a lot of Chips Ahoy and at least one doughnut more or less every day. Once, I am pretty sure I ate a tomato. I almost ate some green beans one Wednesday, but they disappeared out of the fridge by the time I got up the energy to go downstairs to find them. 

I did, however, make some important changes to my preparation process in relation to the Bolivia process. For one, I did not bother looking up what vaccinations I needed until about two weeks before I was scheduled to leave.  I did the same with visa requirements. Sometimes I would call my sister and shout "I CAN'T FIND MY PROOF OF YELLOW FEVER VACCINE. WHERE IS IT?" but this particular tactic never yielded any favorable results. 

Luckily though, it turns out Bolivia provided me with all the necessary vaccinations and there were no visa requirements so while that could have provided a fantastic story of total failure, I came out a winner. No one even needed my proof of yellow fever vaccine papers. Peru doesn't even care if you run all over their country picking up highly contagious diseases that cause your kidneys to hemorrhage. 

Additionally, legitimately concerned that I would, in fact, die this time, the night before leaving I found a travel/evacuation insurance policy that would repatriate my remains in the event of my death overseas.  As the subject of remains repatriation was a big deal in Bolivia, I emailed my friend from Bolivia to tell her that this time I had gotten the insurance. I was very proud of myself until I received her response, which read (translated): "Hahahaha i my darling, if something happens to you in Peru there won't be any remains."  I found this troubling, but there didn't seem to be any good course of action besides immediately going to bed and pretending I had never received her message. 

I started packing two entire days before the start of the trip.  This is a Huge Deal in my packing habits. One reason for this is that by this point I had decided my only chance of survival on this trek was to carry the least amount of weight possible. I could hardly manage to haul myself around.  Therefore, for 10 days in Peru, I packed everything into my pink flower first grader backpack.  This took some time, as a lot of rolling of clothes was involved and hard choices needed to be made.  For example, did I really NEED more than 3 shirts for 10 days?
Which was more important, the Advil or the blister reducing band-aids? I succeeded at this endeavor by not taking nearly enough clothing or any useful emergency items such as anti-diarrhetics or extra socks.

Things to keep in mind as we head into Chapter 1 and the heart of this story:

1. J1 sent us an email with several hostel choices, once of which owned its own bar called The Horny Llama.  Another of which was a quiet hostel billed as a "spiritual, new age retreat." At the time, we were in party mindset and the idea of a fantastic dance/bar spot right next to our bedrooms was the dream. We chose the Horny Llama.

2. We had read that you had to have at least 2 days of acclimatization time in the city of Cusco.  Any less and you risked dangerous side effects of el soroche, the terrible dreaded altitude sickness with which I was acquainted. Our original desired trek date was for May 27 but they could only take us May 26.  This involved on my end a lot of frantic calling around of bosses to see if I could take an extra day and abandon the children in the name of my own health and safety.  They kindly agreed. 

3. I had completely forgotten to call my credit card companies and bank to tell them I was leaving the country.