We walked all over Puno looking for the local arts and crafts market. Apparently it didn´t exist. The map we had put it in one location, the directions of locals put it in another. The market wasn´t at either location. Fab and I gave up after about two hours of walking and went to a lookout point up on the side of a hill. Out in front of us we could see Lake Titicaca glimmering in the sun, the air fresh and crystal clear, and beneath us the red brick and dirty brown city of Puno.  We left the spot after an old woman came and told us that there were “bad boys” in the area that robbed tourists.

Back at the hotel, under the wool sheets, the temperature outside below zero, the hotel owner and his wife had a yelling match. The man just about blew out his vocal cords, broke down in tears, by the sounds of it fell down the stairs, and then yelled some more. His wife wailed and screamed, tossed things in the lobby and slammed doors closed. Fab drooled on my shoulder fast asleep while I tried to translate the tirade.   

Fab and I took it easy during the day in order to help acclimatize ourselves. We spent the previous night under the wool covers trying our best to draw heat off the portable heater provided by the hotel. During the night, the temperature dropped below freezing. I tossed at turned for most of the  evening until I stuffed my mouth with paracetamol and Dramamine and slept clear through the night.

After a terrible complimentary continent breakfast consisting of two day old buns, brown bananas and Nescafe, Fab and I ventured out to get a feel for the city of Puno. The city wasn´t much to look at, but the narrow streets bustled with local women wearing bowler hats tilted to the side, long braided hair and multi-layered skirts. Their cheeks were stuffed with coca leaves and they carried around goods in colourful cloth slung over their backs. Not only did I love their hats, braids and skirts, they wore knitted leg warmers, gloves without fingers and Mary Jane shoes. Out of all the different people Fab and I had encountered on this trip, these women were my favorite.      

The bus south to Puno, a town located at the northerly tip of Lake Titicaca, smelled like a locker room. Sylvester Stallone movies were played consecutively on the bus´s entertainment system with a sarcastic American providing annoying commentary about the films to Fab and I.

I drifted off into sleep at one point, but was awoken by heart palpitations when the bus climbed to 4,300m. The air became dry and thin, breathing became difficult and my head felt like it was being inflated by a tire pump. The bleak altiplano with it´s parched yellow tufts of grass, crystalline streams, and flocks of llamas passed by outside the window. The high altitude was making me giddy, as if I were stoned. It was the same surreal feeling I had had when trekking in the Simien Mountains.

Once we arrived in Puno, at the altitude of 4000m, I felt like my forehead was made of cement. I had an aching pain in my neck and my nostrils felt raw. The positive side of this was that Fab and I were at the highest point we would reach on the trip. From here, it was all down hill.

We walked all over town during the day and ended up at a mirador with sweeping views of the city, El Misti and the other snow capped peaks in the background. Back downtown, a huge Catholic mass celebrating Corpus Cristi took place in the Plaza de Armas. Dyed wheat and barley were laid on the ground in patterns to form religious icons. A priest bellowed from the pulpit and the devout laughed at his jokes. Fab and I passed through the crowd and found a place to eat.

We watched the sunset from a rooftop patio, sipping mate de coca to keep warm. We ate rocoto rellenos and fresh avocado salad for dinner, a meal accompanied by an Andean pipe flute group. After three different renditions of “As the Condor Flies”, we returned to the room and readied ourselves for our journey south to Lake Titicaca the following morning.

I laid in bed all day. After Fab and I realized we were starting to take things for granted the previous night and vowed to start having fun again, my guts had exploded in the early morning, not sure why. Why not? Might as well have one more bowel problem before heading home. Fab ran errands  and brought me food. I didn´t eat much during the day, but at night I went against my better judgement and ate a burger from a fast food joint called ” Johnny Coyote”. It was surprisingly good and hit the spot.

We walked around the city for most of the day looking at stuff. We snapped photos, looked inside churches, bought hand woven crafts from local women, had ceviche for lunch, crepes for an early evening snack, some mate de coca to wash the crepes down and then retired to the room. During the day we became painfully aware how touristic Peru was. There were grubby backpackers everywhere. Since Fab and I were also grubby backpackers, we were filled with self-loathing. Eleven plus months on the road had made us cynical of travelling. What made it worse was that everybody we saw was fresh faced and ecstatic to be exactly where they were. Fab and I just wanted to get it over with, a terrible feeling to be sure, since we were in an amazing city, in an incredible country having a great time that we couldn´t appreciate because we were so worn out.

We bid farewell to Lupe and her family in the early afternoon and boarded a plane bound 1000km south to Arequipa, a city known for it´s colonial architecture built of white, volcanic sillar that reportedly twinkles in the sunlight. Arequipa is backed by El Misti, a conical volcano that is flanked by two mountains, Chachani and Pichu Pichu. The city is also the gateway the area´s “canyon country”, which contains the deepest canyon in the world, Canyon del Cotahuasi. Upon decent, we could see the desert that runs down the majority of Peru´s southern coast surrounding the city. If we had had more energy, we might have considered tackling the terrain. Instead, we decided that we would just enjoy the city for what it was and save our energy for our last push in Cusco and the Sacred Valley.

We checked into our hotel, a well kept spot with stone pathways and potted cacti, and then headed out to discover the city. While walking around, it occured to me how much walking around and looking at stuff Fab and I had done on this trip. I mean, that´s basically what travelling comes down to: seeing stuff. I guess there´s the eating and the meeting, but aside from that, not much. I also realized that the experience gained through travelling doesn´t really take effect until the trip is over. Perhaps that´s why travelling is so special, because it ends after a while and you can go home. In our case, the end had only recently become visible.

We hung around the house during the day. At night, Fab and I went down to the Plaza de Armas in central Lima with Daniel, Lupe and Sayam. The historic centre was lit up with spotlights and people milled about with family members. There was a bronze fountain in the middle of the square surrounded by pigeons and kids. Government buildings, including the Palacio de Gobierno, and the Archbishop´s Palace rimmed the square. Police officers in chiffon coloured hats and green uniforms protected the peace.

From there, we wandered the streets, taking in China Town, a park filled with musicians playing Andean folk songs, and a tiny museum that contained a boring collection of pre-Columbian pottery. We stopped along the way to sample street food. Argentina must have brought out the carnivore in me because I tried skewered beef hearts and grilled tripe. Note to self: pass on the tripe next time. While we were snacking, a dirty street kid with a glue sniffing face and vampire fingernails rushed Fabiola. Daniel whisked him away quickly. Lupe explained that street kids like that were called “pirañas”.

We took a cab back to the house around 9pm. Lupe had some food that needed to be sold. We spent the rest of the evening laughing with the family, in particular at Dina who mocked her neighbour´s recent foray into modeling, saying that her runway strut was more show horse than sexy slink. To demonstrate, Dina walked up and down the sidewalk, keeping her knees locked and jutting her legs out in front her. By the end of the night, the entire family was there. Good times were had by all until a large rat came out of the bushes causing everyone to take cover except Julio who stomped it with his boot heel.

Fab and I killed our exhaustion from the day before through a good night´s sleep.  We slept like sardines in a single bed in Claudia´s room, the yellow walls covered with polaroids of friends, song lyrics written on foolscap and Hello Kitty stickers. When we crawled out of the room, Lupe had breakfast waiting for us on the table. We talked over coffee with Daniel, Lupe´s second husband, from Colombia, ten years younger, and then had a bucket shower using hot water Lupe had boiled in the kitchen.

When we were cleaned up and ready to go, Fab and I went to the nearby mall to purchase some plane tickets. We had only a couple of weeks left in our trip and we wanted to cover a lot of ground, something we wouldn´t be able to do using ground transportation. Zip goes the credit card. After picking up the plane tickets, we purchased a couple of cheap, portable speakers for our MP3 player, which were promptly stolen by a staff member at a movie theatre after we left them sitting on our seat once the show was done. We made it five steps out the theatre doors before we realized we had left them behind. We went back in, talked to a guy in the clean up crew and he told us that he had instructed his co-worker Rosa, to take the bag to the lost and found. We went to the lost and found. Not there, so we went back and talked the guy in the theatre. He went and got the manager, the manager found Rosa, Rosa denied having them, then said she threw the bag in the garbage, the manager made her look in the garbage, she didn´t find them, then the general manager was brought out, we were made to feel like assholes, and finally we left frustrated without speakers, but a couple of passes to another show. I looked into Rosa´s eyes. That girl was guilty as sin.

We returned to the house later in the evening and sat around Lupe´s food cart with the family on the sidewalk in front of the house. Lupe deep fries potatos and chicken and grills burgers at night to supplement her income. Neighbours from the community came by to talk, eat and swill Inca Kola, an electic yellow soda that tastes like cream soda. A dog wearing a stretched pink t-shirt chased children out on the grass. Salsa music bumped from nearby houses. Young lovers sat on cinder blocks in the center of the grass holding hands, exchanging lustful glances and kissing. Just another Saturday night in the neighborhood.

At the airport early. We tried to change our remaining Argentinian pesos along with some Uruguay bills at a change booth, but the cashier just sniffed at Fab and told her that the amount she was trying to change wasn´t worth his time. Tired of Argentinian arrogance, Fab pressed her middle finger to the glass. The man ignored her and typed away on his computer. I laughed and gave Fab a hug, I like seeing her get worked up sometimes.

We arrived in Lima by noon and found a man, Julio, waiting for us with a sign marked “Fabiola y Jeffrey”. Pedro, a Peruvian man we met in Wadi Musa, Jordan, had followed through on his word and set us up with his family in Lima. Julio, Pedro´s brother, greeted us with a smile and a handshake and quickly whisked us off to his sister Lupe´s house, where we were due to stay.

Both Lupe and Julio live in a low income housing community on the outskirts of Lima, not far from the airport. Small, single floor interconnected houses ran around a large swath of grass, a green lake in the middle of the multi-coloured dwellings. Dogs ran rampant and kids played tag with each other.

Near the far end of the park, we saw a short woman with a long, black ponytail standing with her arms crossed in front of her house. Lupe. Her daugther, Sayam, hugged her legs and eyed us curiously as we approached the house with Julio. Lupe greeted us with kisses and then introduced us to the rest of the family: her daughter Claudia, her sister Julia and daughter Carla, her husband Daniel, and Dina, a family friend.

We lugged our bags in through the front door of Lupe´s house and were soon seated at the kitchen table and fed an absurd amount of food. Fab and I talked with Julio, me in broken Spanish, Fab in her native tongue. Julio told us about his time in the military and how he was kidnapped in the 1990´s by the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group. He was taken into the jungle and, as he told it, almost executed when the members of the Shining Path got word that the military was going to bomb the area. Julio also told us about how he was almost killed by a bomb explosion in Lima. He was seated in his car when a bomb went off in the building next to him. He said he would have been killed if not for a small cement wall separating his car from the building. As a result of the explosion, he was deaf for two months. Once he regained his hearing, he returned to the spot and kissed the wall.

At night, after a nap in the afternoon, Julio took us on a sight seeing tour in his cab. He had been driving a taxi for years and had recently converted his car to run on propane due to high petrol prices. I´m not sure if people in the US and Canada are aware of this, but gasoline is more expensive in Peru, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Egypt and a whole bunch of other developing countries than it is the United States. And by a substantial amount. As one man in Ethiopia told us, “famine in Ethiopia is not created by poor crops and drought, it is created when we can no longer afford to transport goods around the country.”

Julio had wanted to take us to the Plaza de Armas, but central Lima was shut down due to an environmental conference taking place in the capital. Leaders and dignitaries from around the world were in town and all the roads were closed. Hugo Chavez garnered the most attention when he announced that he would be taking part in both the official conference as well as the anti-conference protests. Because of the blocked roads, Julio instead took us to a park filled with water fountains and lights. We circumnavigated the park, eating rice pudding and watching people run stupidly into the water before returning to the house and calling it an evening.