¡El Peru!

I´ve been in Peru a week and a half so far and this is first chance to sit down with my blog because we´ve mostly been in one wilderness or another. After a number of mechanical problems my folks and I managed to get into our hotel in Lima at 1 am, which luckily was just when the party was getting started at the bar around the corner. We managed to stagger onto our plane for Cusco and spent most of a day laying around wondering where they keep the air. The next morning we left for our 4 day hike of the Inca trail to Macchu Picchu. We were in a small group, Sharada, myself, mom and dad and 5 Argentinians who spoke varying levels of english. Mom and Dad had decided to go first class and hire porters to carry all of our gear for us in addition to tents and a whole portable kitchen and dining room complete with chairs and a table where they served lovely 4 course meals. It was a bit old-empire and Dad kept calling me bwana, but we were definitely secretly thanking god that we didn´t have to carry our own bags once we got up relatively high.
According to the Incas apparently Macchu Picchu and the passes we hiked over(13,880 ft) are in the lower-middle region of altitude, but it seemed pretty rarefied to us. I thought that at those alitudes we would be watching llamas frolic in the snow, but I had forgotten that we were subtropical and actually we saw a lot of corn and bromeliads on the way up and came down through the cloud forest. The second day is usually the hardest, crossing the first and highest pass, but I followed my guide´s instructions and chewed plenty of coca and felt like whistling the whole time. Obviously that would have required oxygen, but it was the thought that counted. Possibly due to altitude or a very cold shower, or bad chocolate I felt very sick most of the next day and could not eat until the late evening. Somehow I shambled 16 km to camp. We passed mostly through jungles that I tried to remind myself were very beautiful, but mostly I was thinking how nice it would be to lay down. I felt much better after that and was able to really enjoy our walk down through the cloud forest to Macchu Picchu, which although very short on llamas and snow was very beautiful with large number of bromeliads and orchids growing on every available surface. Unfortunately it was a bit heavy on the clouds, and the rain, and the fog. We missed the agency-poster view from the sun gate because of the weather, but just as our guide more-or-less predicted, the clouds opened just as we arrived outside the site and we were treated to a theatrical view of Macchu Picchu through the mist. The terraces also had a few scattered llamas grazing just to make up for all that cloud forest. They were probably city llamas paid to act like incan ones but we could hardly tell the difference.
Probably the most amazing thing about Macchu Picchu is that it was lost. No one knew about it for years and years, because, and this may be more amazing, it was abandoned. In terms of the amount of man-hours committed this place ranks with anything we´ve seen except the pyramids, but they never quite bothered to finish it and they left the hundreds of houses and acres of farmland bitterly carved out of the jungle and the rocks totally empty. I´m sure they had a good reason but they don´t seem to have mentioned it to anyone at the time. Probably just said they were going out for a pack of smokes.
After we got back to Cuzco I mostly needed to rest and complete the incredibly complex process of booking our stay in the jungle. After 5 or so visits to the rather fly-by-night travel agent (whom we had selected on the basis that he was open on sundays and didn´t bother shave) we finally received some concrete evidence that we would not simply be left on the dock at Puerto Maldonado on arrival like a bunch of bananas awaiting shipment. In fact we arrived at a grandiose camp surrounded by alien-looking tropical flowers and eccentric tropical birds who had taken up employment there. It was rather like being at camp again except that the older guests made no attemtps to haze us. We were rousted from our beds each more at an hour dictated by the arcane calculations of the camp manager and escorted on a wilderness adventure of some sort before being brought back to the cafeteria where we were organized by table so that they could keep track of us. For the first two days we were attached along with a dutch couple to a large group of polish people who spoke neither english nor spanish making them the only people in the entire place we could not communicate with. Despite their lack of understanding they were sure to crowd around our guide at all times to soak up his wisdom(delivered in english), which they were unable to pass along. Still, the jungle was very exciting and we saw lots of animals that were very difficult to believe. I would say offhand that the average tree in the Amazon has more species living on it that the state of New Mexico. I felt that I had to move briskly to prevent myself from becoming equally encumbered with lichens, vines, mushrooms, lianas, parasitic trees and bird´s nests. Overall it was very nice, and spending four days in the same place seems to have allowed me to fully regain my health before we head into the high plains and Lake Titicaca.