Thurs 11/19 - Cusco Depart
Day was whatever. Market haggle shopping. Got to get out of Cusco. Looking up places to go. Polish girls return from market. Originally wanted to go to jungle, but now are going to Bolivia. I can't go to Bolivia due to US visa restrictions without paying a shit ton of money and getting an impossible vaccine. I buy them a vodka drink and convince them to go to the jungle. We have about an hour to catch the bus. Rushing. Getting shit together. Laundry. A papa relleno which is like a chili relleno, but in a potato. Awesome. Get to the bus station. Polish girls are lagging. Get to get at exact time of departure. Need to pay "terminal tax." Wait in another line. Miss bus. Everyone is shouting in Spanish including Polish, bus station personnel, taxi drivers, and myself. Rush out of station to taxi. Taxi driver is calling someone. Bus is pulled over. Get on bus. Polish are already complaining to bus steward guy about something else. They need the bus to stop again to get something out of the bag they stored. The "give no shit" charm of these girls is wearing off. Shitty B rate Spanish dubbed US films. Pass out.
Fri 11/20 - Puerto Maldonado
Wake up 3am to armed guards and giant guns. Passport and bag check. Sun illuminates thick palm shapes rapped in vines bordered with plastic coke bottles and napkins. Arrive Puerto Maldonado. Someone's economy sized soap bottle has burst all over my bag. Motortaxi downtown. Peruse tour guide shops for best deal. Nothing until tomorrow. Recommended animal sanctuary with monkeys and parrots and shit. Seedy hotel. $7 total four hour round trip dirt road beer in hand mototaxi drive (he waited for us). Drunk. Arrive to cute animals in nice cages land. Lady is sick of us before we get there. Gives us a tour. My great drunk cute animal mood turns sour when she shows us a depressed monkey who sits on the ground and won't look up. Misses family and friends. Probably is going to die. Her seven year project is running out of money. She is guilting us into giving her more money. Passion hopes and dreams die together. Somber motortaxi back to town. Dead inflated dog on a bench. Back to hotel. Totally exhausted. Pass out.
Sat 11/21
5am. Crawl out of bed. Get to tour. Peruvian nice dude tour bro. Just the four of us. Mototaxi. Bus. Walk through small outskirts town. School (shack) hospital (shack) and police station (shack) that has a separate shack just for domestic abuse refuge. Show up to port. Port is just a dozen people crammed on one boat with a million wooden crates and the morning news. Take our own boat an hour up river. Laying in boat soaking in lazy humid jungle air. Parrots flying over head n shit. Monkeys playing in trees n shit. Tie to shore. Walk an hour through the jungle. Monkeys. Crazy looking birds. Crazy huge colorful insects. A slug the size of a softball. One thousand year old, walking, spike, and dick trees. Two tarantulas which apparently was the least deadly out of all of the former mentioned things. Arrive to some cabins. Palm rapped chicken olive tamale lunch. Boat on a lake. Stick string fishing rods tied to hooks of meat. Piranhas everywhere. Catch a Piranha. Fuck with piranha. Boat down river. Stop at sand bank. Swim in warm river in amazon jungle surrounded by monkeys and giant birds while running up shore and floating down river over and over. Not real. Something bites my finger. Return to "port." Some five year old shit of a kid call me a gringo. No taxi. Sit at "Merry Christmas" bar which is a hollowed out house the sells beer and animal crackers in a plastic bags. Taxi back to town. We are going out. Tour guide is coming with us and his motives are not well hidden.
Buy a bottle of rum. Kill entire bottle of rum on bench. Go to club. Never ending Reggaeton. No gringos. Peru racist fuckers won't let me up to the bar to have a drink. Only nice dude to me is a Brazilian guy who sold me a mountain of french fries at some restaurant a few hours earlier. Dancing with Polish. Of course tour guide knows how to dance super good. I dance with Agata. Leave tour guide and other Agata at club. Go to a few other bars. Weird Peruvian band topped with cowboy hats. Agata and I are close. Laughing. Drunk. Touching. I've now been awake for 24 hours. Head back to hostel. Agata turns to stone wall. I try pathetically to "sit down and have a cigarette?" She crawls into her bunk. I crawl into my bunk. She gets back up and heads somewhere without a word. My deflated ego and I pass out.
Sun 11/22
Wake up 830am to Agata twins "You're going to miss breakfast." Force myself out of bed and drag my shit useless hungover body to a table where the classic Peruvian shit roll with jelly and instant coffee awaits. Agatas have met two other Polish and I am sandwiched between their loud screeching burning rotor words which makes the already 90 degree 60% humidity breakfast even worse. Get a message from my friend Karen of Bolivia. Original plan of her meeting me somewhere is not going to happen. I need to get into Bolivia and the only possible way to do it is illegal. Dread. No bus information online. Polish girls go somewhere. I pack my shit and go to the bus station. Never see them again.
Arrive at bus station, my favorite part of Puerto Maldonado: tented restaurants and colorful menus boasting the food of the day. Plastic tables and smiling old folk. $1 noodle soup followed by an upsidedown bowl of rice topped with a fried egg boarded with fried plantains grown from probably down the street. Afterward next door fresh pressed jungle fruit (I have no fucking clue what it was - some sort of shiney golf ball sized chestnut looking thing) against a dirty wall of mototaxi and motorcycle drivers taking a pastry break to chat. One of few places I've seen people laughing.
The bus station itself involves anywhere from ten to twenty company booths sporting signs with the name of whatever bus they found and an out of place little a picture of an Incan ruin or parrot or something. Many buses are going to where I need to be so I pick whatever bus that is leaving at the time I want. While I wait some kid asks me to fill his cup with my water and feeds it to his mom's pet giant casual rat thing. Aboard the randomly chosen bus scene in chronological order: Melting hot jungle breath humidity. Screaming babies. Dude tries to fight some guy (this guy sits next to me). Lady chasing the bus for a half mile. Big shitty machine where my feet need burns my feet. Bus driver is honking at everything not letting anyone sleep. Kid kicking seat. Constant screeching tuned to the RPM outside. Seat only reclines half way for sleep. Smells terrible. When stopped window rattle is deafening (but if hold it just right it stops). Hell is a bus that drives a trash covered jungle road for eternity. Go with brand names.
Mon 11/23 - Puno
Twelve hours later bus arrives Juliaca. Star Wars market scene outside. Dead dog sorta town. Haven't slept. So upset I have to deal with this shit (privilege). Start asking around. People are very helpful and patient and friendly. A colectivo bus station is one for short distances and is sort of awesome: A random hodgepodge of large vans yelling destinations and people sending you hurried in a direction until you bounce off enough vans and find the one you need. In actuality it's quite efficient.
Arrive Puno. Food is cheap. Landry is expensive. Tinder the ten people match one and make date. Go to 12,500ft altitude indigenous floating shopping mall island. Started as a legit community that used reeds to build everything including houses, boats, and the land they live on - way cool. Now relies completely on tourists to buy made in china gift shop shit - way uncool. Return to hostel. Supposed to meet this girl. Exhausted. Half an adderall to wake up.
Meet girl. Seems fine. She can't drink. Go to rock and roll bar playing Red Hot Chile Peppers. Tells me she loves Oasis and Cold Play. Tells me she won the Puno Beauty Pagent. No one has ever told me anything like this, and I have no idea how to react. I still have no idea what the proper way is to react. But the absolute wrong way to react is say "really???" in pure astonishment. Suddenly she is really upset. I try to back pedal. Leaves within fifteen minutes. I don't care. She was boring and talking about her hair too much anyway. Plus if you can imagine the Puno beauty pageant bar is set real low. Plus Cold Play?? Pass out.
Tues 11/24 - Deseguadero
Wake up a few hours later wide awake from adderall and stress about Bolivia. Colectivo bus station scene again. Yelling the destination out the window the whole way out of the lot grabbing people as we go. Guy selling a photo copied book called "Secretes of Grandma" and announces the entire plot and spicy highlights. Knows his clientele - a small bus full of colorful mothers with bags for selling on the border. Kid plays US top 40s, Evanescence, and Cumbia out of his phone for all the grandmothers. Kid gets off and another guy takes out his laptop and plays music. I realize this is much less "I forgot headphones" and more "music is good."
Border: Arrive in Deseguadero. Dirt and whatever fell out of the truck for sale sorta town. Scope out crossing. Most people who look like they are working or live there just pass over a bridge with occational bags searched. If an obvious gringo attempted to cross, likely would be stopped. Original plan was to watch where boarder patrol stood, wait for them to close for lunch as read on internet, sneak in with the big opening crowd. Turns out internet lies and they don't close for lunch. Way more guards than expected. Sat around for two hours contemplating. Idea #1 - Walk in beside giant load of stuff to block view. But couldn't risk being stopped once. Idea #2 - Give people money to put me in a box. Walked around looking for shady folk, decided not to ask. Idea #3 - bribe the guards. Too many guards. I sit on a stoop getting worried that this won't work. Kid on roof dumps a cup of water on my head to add insult to injury. Idea #4 - I bought a colorful bag to put my backpack in as to pathetically attempt not to look like a traveler/tourist. Hat. Glasses. Waited for gusts of wind, hailed a pedicab, and covered my face with a t-shirt so none of my gringo skin was showing. Rolled through the border passed a dozen guards with my head down. Jumped in a colectivo headed for La Paz.
Unexpected checkpoint: Van stops. Armed troops. Everyone but me and some lady get out. Searching bags. Asking for passports. There's a problem with a bag. Can't understand exactly what. Can't see if it's mine because can't get out of van without all the guards questioning the only gringo. Stopped for twenty minutes. Totally terrified. Guards walking circles around the van. Don't ever look up. Plan is if questioned, act like a cheerful easily excited idiot who doesn't know a word of Spanish. If asked for passport and visa I have it but it's in a very terrible place to get to. If check passport I say I didn't understand and I thought South America was like the United States and you only need one passport and visa. Sweating and out of breath (the elevation doesn't help anxiety). Everyone get's back in van. We are less one person. Take off.
Two hour packed hot van ride. I couldn't care less. I'm so happy. Arrive La Paz. One hour smog traffic taxi ride. Taxi driver is holding down the horn at frozen buses and people with babies. Arrive to Karen. Sweet long embrace. Cable car ride to house. Beautiful city lights spilled into gigantic snow capped mountain bowl. Arrive Karen's house. The nicest house out of any of my friends. Within ten minutes we cross her yard to eat. Enter another house. It's her parents house. Suddenly reeaal uncomfortable. Juxtapose dirty illegal emigration with unknowingly meeting someone's parents you of who you fucked a few times and don't speak their language. Very unsure of formal greeting customs so fuck that up off the bat. Sit down for a meal I've never seen before and fuck up how to eat it off the bat. Trying to hold a conversation and be appreciative and witty and entertaining. Fucked that up right off the bat. Return to Karen's separate but right next to parent's house. Karen needs to go to work. Pass out in her bed.
Day was whatever. Market haggle shopping. Got to get out of Cusco. Looking up places to go. Polish girls return from market. Originally wanted to go to jungle, but now are going to Bolivia. I can't go to Bolivia due to US visa restrictions without paying a shit ton of money and getting an impossible vaccine. I buy them a vodka drink and convince them to go to the jungle. We have about an hour to catch the bus. Rushing. Getting shit together. Laundry. A papa relleno which is like a chili relleno, but in a potato. Awesome. Get to the bus station. Polish girls are lagging. Get to get at exact time of departure. Need to pay "terminal tax." Wait in another line. Miss bus. Everyone is shouting in Spanish including Polish, bus station personnel, taxi drivers, and myself. Rush out of station to taxi. Taxi driver is calling someone. Bus is pulled over. Get on bus. Polish are already complaining to bus steward guy about something else. They need the bus to stop again to get something out of the bag they stored. The "give no shit" charm of these girls is wearing off. Shitty B rate Spanish dubbed US films. Pass out.
Fri 11/20 - Puerto Maldonado
Wake up 3am to armed guards and giant guns. Passport and bag check. Sun illuminates thick palm shapes rapped in vines bordered with plastic coke bottles and napkins. Arrive Puerto Maldonado. Someone's economy sized soap bottle has burst all over my bag. Motortaxi downtown. Peruse tour guide shops for best deal. Nothing until tomorrow. Recommended animal sanctuary with monkeys and parrots and shit. Seedy hotel. $7 total four hour round trip dirt road beer in hand mototaxi drive (he waited for us). Drunk. Arrive to cute animals in nice cages land. Lady is sick of us before we get there. Gives us a tour. My great drunk cute animal mood turns sour when she shows us a depressed monkey who sits on the ground and won't look up. Misses family and friends. Probably is going to die. Her seven year project is running out of money. She is guilting us into giving her more money. Passion hopes and dreams die together. Somber motortaxi back to town. Dead inflated dog on a bench. Back to hotel. Totally exhausted. Pass out.
Sat 11/21
5am. Crawl out of bed. Get to tour. Peruvian nice dude tour bro. Just the four of us. Mototaxi. Bus. Walk through small outskirts town. School (shack) hospital (shack) and police station (shack) that has a separate shack just for domestic abuse refuge. Show up to port. Port is just a dozen people crammed on one boat with a million wooden crates and the morning news. Take our own boat an hour up river. Laying in boat soaking in lazy humid jungle air. Parrots flying over head n shit. Monkeys playing in trees n shit. Tie to shore. Walk an hour through the jungle. Monkeys. Crazy looking birds. Crazy huge colorful insects. A slug the size of a softball. One thousand year old, walking, spike, and dick trees. Two tarantulas which apparently was the least deadly out of all of the former mentioned things. Arrive to some cabins. Palm rapped chicken olive tamale lunch. Boat on a lake. Stick string fishing rods tied to hooks of meat. Piranhas everywhere. Catch a Piranha. Fuck with piranha. Boat down river. Stop at sand bank. Swim in warm river in amazon jungle surrounded by monkeys and giant birds while running up shore and floating down river over and over. Not real. Something bites my finger. Return to "port." Some five year old shit of a kid call me a gringo. No taxi. Sit at "Merry Christmas" bar which is a hollowed out house the sells beer and animal crackers in a plastic bags. Taxi back to town. We are going out. Tour guide is coming with us and his motives are not well hidden.
Buy a bottle of rum. Kill entire bottle of rum on bench. Go to club. Never ending Reggaeton. No gringos. Peru racist fuckers won't let me up to the bar to have a drink. Only nice dude to me is a Brazilian guy who sold me a mountain of french fries at some restaurant a few hours earlier. Dancing with Polish. Of course tour guide knows how to dance super good. I dance with Agata. Leave tour guide and other Agata at club. Go to a few other bars. Weird Peruvian band topped with cowboy hats. Agata and I are close. Laughing. Drunk. Touching. I've now been awake for 24 hours. Head back to hostel. Agata turns to stone wall. I try pathetically to "sit down and have a cigarette?" She crawls into her bunk. I crawl into my bunk. She gets back up and heads somewhere without a word. My deflated ego and I pass out.
Sun 11/22
Wake up 830am to Agata twins "You're going to miss breakfast." Force myself out of bed and drag my shit useless hungover body to a table where the classic Peruvian shit roll with jelly and instant coffee awaits. Agatas have met two other Polish and I am sandwiched between their loud screeching burning rotor words which makes the already 90 degree 60% humidity breakfast even worse. Get a message from my friend Karen of Bolivia. Original plan of her meeting me somewhere is not going to happen. I need to get into Bolivia and the only possible way to do it is illegal. Dread. No bus information online. Polish girls go somewhere. I pack my shit and go to the bus station. Never see them again.
Arrive at bus station, my favorite part of Puerto Maldonado: tented restaurants and colorful menus boasting the food of the day. Plastic tables and smiling old folk. $1 noodle soup followed by an upsidedown bowl of rice topped with a fried egg boarded with fried plantains grown from probably down the street. Afterward next door fresh pressed jungle fruit (I have no fucking clue what it was - some sort of shiney golf ball sized chestnut looking thing) against a dirty wall of mototaxi and motorcycle drivers taking a pastry break to chat. One of few places I've seen people laughing.
The bus station itself involves anywhere from ten to twenty company booths sporting signs with the name of whatever bus they found and an out of place little a picture of an Incan ruin or parrot or something. Many buses are going to where I need to be so I pick whatever bus that is leaving at the time I want. While I wait some kid asks me to fill his cup with my water and feeds it to his mom's pet giant casual rat thing. Aboard the randomly chosen bus scene in chronological order: Melting hot jungle breath humidity. Screaming babies. Dude tries to fight some guy (this guy sits next to me). Lady chasing the bus for a half mile. Big shitty machine where my feet need burns my feet. Bus driver is honking at everything not letting anyone sleep. Kid kicking seat. Constant screeching tuned to the RPM outside. Seat only reclines half way for sleep. Smells terrible. When stopped window rattle is deafening (but if hold it just right it stops). Hell is a bus that drives a trash covered jungle road for eternity. Go with brand names.
Mon 11/23 - Puno
Twelve hours later bus arrives Juliaca. Star Wars market scene outside. Dead dog sorta town. Haven't slept. So upset I have to deal with this shit (privilege). Start asking around. People are very helpful and patient and friendly. A colectivo bus station is one for short distances and is sort of awesome: A random hodgepodge of large vans yelling destinations and people sending you hurried in a direction until you bounce off enough vans and find the one you need. In actuality it's quite efficient.
Arrive Puno. Food is cheap. Landry is expensive. Tinder the ten people match one and make date. Go to 12,500ft altitude indigenous floating shopping mall island. Started as a legit community that used reeds to build everything including houses, boats, and the land they live on - way cool. Now relies completely on tourists to buy made in china gift shop shit - way uncool. Return to hostel. Supposed to meet this girl. Exhausted. Half an adderall to wake up.
Meet girl. Seems fine. She can't drink. Go to rock and roll bar playing Red Hot Chile Peppers. Tells me she loves Oasis and Cold Play. Tells me she won the Puno Beauty Pagent. No one has ever told me anything like this, and I have no idea how to react. I still have no idea what the proper way is to react. But the absolute wrong way to react is say "really???" in pure astonishment. Suddenly she is really upset. I try to back pedal. Leaves within fifteen minutes. I don't care. She was boring and talking about her hair too much anyway. Plus if you can imagine the Puno beauty pageant bar is set real low. Plus Cold Play?? Pass out.
Tues 11/24 - Deseguadero
Wake up a few hours later wide awake from adderall and stress about Bolivia. Colectivo bus station scene again. Yelling the destination out the window the whole way out of the lot grabbing people as we go. Guy selling a photo copied book called "Secretes of Grandma" and announces the entire plot and spicy highlights. Knows his clientele - a small bus full of colorful mothers with bags for selling on the border. Kid plays US top 40s, Evanescence, and Cumbia out of his phone for all the grandmothers. Kid gets off and another guy takes out his laptop and plays music. I realize this is much less "I forgot headphones" and more "music is good."
Border: Arrive in Deseguadero. Dirt and whatever fell out of the truck for sale sorta town. Scope out crossing. Most people who look like they are working or live there just pass over a bridge with occational bags searched. If an obvious gringo attempted to cross, likely would be stopped. Original plan was to watch where boarder patrol stood, wait for them to close for lunch as read on internet, sneak in with the big opening crowd. Turns out internet lies and they don't close for lunch. Way more guards than expected. Sat around for two hours contemplating. Idea #1 - Walk in beside giant load of stuff to block view. But couldn't risk being stopped once. Idea #2 - Give people money to put me in a box. Walked around looking for shady folk, decided not to ask. Idea #3 - bribe the guards. Too many guards. I sit on a stoop getting worried that this won't work. Kid on roof dumps a cup of water on my head to add insult to injury. Idea #4 - I bought a colorful bag to put my backpack in as to pathetically attempt not to look like a traveler/tourist. Hat. Glasses. Waited for gusts of wind, hailed a pedicab, and covered my face with a t-shirt so none of my gringo skin was showing. Rolled through the border passed a dozen guards with my head down. Jumped in a colectivo headed for La Paz.
Unexpected checkpoint: Van stops. Armed troops. Everyone but me and some lady get out. Searching bags. Asking for passports. There's a problem with a bag. Can't understand exactly what. Can't see if it's mine because can't get out of van without all the guards questioning the only gringo. Stopped for twenty minutes. Totally terrified. Guards walking circles around the van. Don't ever look up. Plan is if questioned, act like a cheerful easily excited idiot who doesn't know a word of Spanish. If asked for passport and visa I have it but it's in a very terrible place to get to. If check passport I say I didn't understand and I thought South America was like the United States and you only need one passport and visa. Sweating and out of breath (the elevation doesn't help anxiety). Everyone get's back in van. We are less one person. Take off.
Two hour packed hot van ride. I couldn't care less. I'm so happy. Arrive La Paz. One hour smog traffic taxi ride. Taxi driver is holding down the horn at frozen buses and people with babies. Arrive to Karen. Sweet long embrace. Cable car ride to house. Beautiful city lights spilled into gigantic snow capped mountain bowl. Arrive Karen's house. The nicest house out of any of my friends. Within ten minutes we cross her yard to eat. Enter another house. It's her parents house. Suddenly reeaal uncomfortable. Juxtapose dirty illegal emigration with unknowingly meeting someone's parents you of who you fucked a few times and don't speak their language. Very unsure of formal greeting customs so fuck that up off the bat. Sit down for a meal I've never seen before and fuck up how to eat it off the bat. Trying to hold a conversation and be appreciative and witty and entertaining. Fucked that up right off the bat. Return to Karen's separate but right next to parent's house. Karen needs to go to work. Pass out in her bed.
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