When I started planning our trip to Peru, I never thought it would become such a comedy of errors, or such an expense. It started out fine – my husband's and my tickets were almost free and the hotels seemed quite reasonable. However, after a little more research, I discovered that the distances between places in Peru were vast. Only air travel would enable us to visit all the places we wanted to visit. Fork out more money…
Then there was the medicine. The guide book recommended altitude sickness tabs for the mountains and anti-malarial tabs for the jungle. The altitude sickness tabs I had to order from the US, but I was told that we could find anti-malarial tabs on-island. Hmmmm. The one pharmacy that carries them discovered that their supply had expired. I asked them to order more; they forgot. I asked again; they would only receive them a week or two after we left. So much for that.
We had to visit the doctor the morning that we left: my daughter had a fever. After waiting 2 hours in the doctor’s office, the doctor confirmed our diagnosis: ear infection. Just the thing to make a long, red-eye series of flights more enjoyable. More medicine to pack in the carry-on, but this had to be refrigerated. Ice-packs only last so long…
The next emergency occurred as we were walking out the door. Actually, everyone else was already in the car. I was running some last minute items over to a neighbour when, thump, thump, one after the other, the soles fell off my hiking boots. I just stared at the two crumbled, footprint-shaped lumps in stunned incredulity. I felt like I was in a slap-stick comedy, except it was supposed to be an adventure/action flick. Completely bemused, I picked up the soles and hobbled to the car to get the house keys. Our friend who was taking us to the airport, started laughing and my husband just snorted (he had discovered a hole in his hiking boots while he was water-proofing them and had taped it up with duct tape) – this was just par for the course, obviously. I left the boots on the gallery, grabbed the next available pair of shoes, which happened to be my running shoes, and jumped into the car.
At the airport, I soon discovered that my trousers were too long now that I was 2 inches shorter. During the course of the 3 flights with layovers in Miami and Lima, I tried rolling the trousers up, tucking them into my shoes, holding them up with both hands – nothing worked. They are made from a very slippery material, and after 5 minutes, whatever I did would be undone and I would be tripping on my trousers again. My family became very used to short, five-minute spurts of speed, followed by a “wait” and a pause to try something else to keep the trousers up off the floor. Again, par for the course.
My husband had a different sort of problem with his trousers. Well, his shirt too. Our 3-year-old fell asleep on his lap during the first flight and peed all over him. Of course, she was wet too, but I had spare clothing for her so it was a simple matter of changing her. The hubby had to wear the same clothes for the next 2 days.
We arrived in Lima at 4:30 a.m. I visited an ATM to withdraw Nuevo Soles. The machine, which said it would take any card, wouldn’t take mine. I felt a little short of breath at this point. I tried several more machines – same result. It looked like we would be attempting Peru on a rather limited number of dollars a day. Par for the course… After trying to figure out what the trouble was at several banks (none of them spoke English, so they couldn’t help me), we went over to baggage claim. We waited, a little distracted, until everyone else had claimed their bags and left. We just knew that our bags had to be lost – what else could we expect? We approached the baggage claim officials, who took one look at our tags and sent us over to the other baggage claim, where we found our bags immediately. We felt equally dumb and relieved.
We had a short walk to the check-in desk for our flight to Cusco, which was just as well, because the toddler was in no mood to walk. E.J. had to carry his backpack and her. It was a short flight, and we arrived in a fog at 8:45 am. By the time we left the airport, it was a beautiful day and we could see the mountains all around. We were met at the door by our driver and escorted to a waiting taxi. I had arranged this, despite the cost, because I knew we would be asleep on our feet after 18 hours on the move. There were 50 or so other people outside the airport asking if we needed a tour or a taxi. Even when I said we had arranged transport, the response was, “Mine is cheaper!”
I had been a little nervous about going to Peru with only a smattering of high-school Spanish, while E.J. had none. Now, I dredged up long-forgotten phrases and massacred them as I tried to communicate with the taxi driver. After a minute, I reached my limit and I wondered how on earth we were going to manage travelling for 14 days without any means of communication. I didn’t have long to contemplate this though, because the drive through Cusco was a bit harrowing. The roads were bumpy, to put it mildly. There were more obstacles than in Antigua – other cars totally disregarding logic or common sense, bicycle-carts, pedestrians. There were no road signs that we could see and the roads wound around and up and about in seemingly random ways. To add to that, everyone drove at 60km/hr, slamming on their brakes at the last minute to avoid collisions. E.J. and I just looked at each other and thanked God we had decided against renting a car. Eventually, we passed the city limits and were able to relax momentarily and look at the scenery. I think what struck me most at first was how dusty everything was. I suppose that is only to be expected during the dry season. We passed the various Inca ruins above Cusco and then started racing between mountains. I tried to take some pictures, but most of them were big blurs due to unexpected bumps, or the sudden need to hold on as we took a hair pin bend at 60-70 km/hr. There were a lot of these, especially near the end of the 40-minute drive when we started down the escarpment to the Sacred Valley. The driver pointed out the village of Pisac below.
