back from the valley.
and cusco is here just as i left it, full of touristas, massage peddlers and slippery cobblestone streets.
first,i start with the jungle experience. it actually began quite similarly to our favorite disney jungle book boat ride. we boated up the rio in a standard long boat and were promptly and awe-inspiringly pampered from the minute we arrived. i can easily say that was some of the best money i´ve ever spent. after many many hectic days in cusco, a warm and lux visit to the rain forest was just what the doctor ordered. wow. now it seems long ago, but last weekend, i was the embodiment of bliss. i even perfected a three-ingredient concoction of lotions and potions and managed to escape without a single mosquito bite.
· we walked among the jungle creatures (jumped when what we thought was a fake tarantula on a tree trunk darted into it´s web nest...a substantial heart attack, of which there were many in the depths of creepy crawly land.)
· we lolled in our personal hammocks at the front of our cabana. we took three showers a day (the shower was one of my happiest places) and promptly dressed in the light, cotton robes they provided for us.
· we ate three freakishly tasty meals a day in the beautiful dining room, where i encountered a dulce de leche/vanilla wafer dessert that actually gives chocolate a run for its money. oh my god. and the juice! would it be me in south america if i didn´t mention the juice?? it was better than in cusco...and who thought that was possible!? the passion fruit juice. the honeydew melon juice. my new loves. i dream of them. when i get home i´m buying the best blender you can buy and i will figure out the secret to this juice. oh yes i will.
· we walked along a 100-ft high jungle canopy walk and it was the greatest! it titillated my tree-house lover like you don´t even know...and raised the bar for my future tree house as well! so much fun. not a lot of life up in the canopy when we were up there, but of course when we were down on the forest floor again, we looked up and next to the rope bridge we were just on, was a toucan. all i wanted was to see a real, live toucan at some point, so i was happy (though a little peeved that he waited till i was so far away to show himself).
· we visited a beautiful butterfly preserve and saw fabulous little flutterers. dazzling.
· i met my new peruvian boyfriend, sherlock (yes, not your average peruvian name)who heralds from lima and is a bartender and waiter at the resort, on the boat and had a great time speaking in spanish with him the entire weekend. he was our first and very valuable connection to the dining room crew (almost all of whom were our best friends by the end of the weekend). it was fun, because you could tell that the crew isn´t used to tourists who can speak spanish...much less who are single girls under the age of 65. so every time i went up to the buffet, whoever was up there would ask me tons of questions and speak to me in spanish. it was pretty wonderful and great practice! and getting complimented on my spanish wasn´t bad either ;)
the dream vacation, of course, was as fleeting as my glimpse of the monkeys in the jungle and fizzled to just a faint memory at exactly 2:30 pm last sunday when we arrived by taxi back in the plaza de armas. and the traffic dodging and ¨no gracias¨ fun recommenced.
later sunday afternoon i taxied a little ways past pisac to the little pueblo of taray. the school´s house was pretty cool, but - as is par for the course here in peru - a bit rough around the edges. i shared a room with three other girls, two of whom were my new good friends: larissa, 26 from brazil studying to become a p.t. (and who has been in my spanish class for the past three weeks and quickly became my campañera. we share a log of the same sensibilities, but she immediately posed a great challenge for me to keep up with her rapid banter (a mind-addling mix of portuguese and spanish). it´s possible i´m the only american in the school who can understand her. and audrey, 28 a doctor in chicago who has become my music-loving counterpart here in s.a. we bonded initially over a freakishly similar taste in music and continued to share tasty details of our lives over the past week. fine, fine roommates indeed.
we banded together along with a few other sensible individuals and, with a healthy diet of mockery and judgement, managed to survive the week with the young partygoers. it was extra amusing when the batch of them got so wasted that they didn´t make it to class the next day...despite being about 10 feet away from the living room where classes were held...
they did their partying the in their little rooms in a little, native pueblo in the peruvian countryside. ´twas quaint.
i did my best to soak up my last chance at learning tenses and practicing spanish with my new professors. it was a great week of classes and i got in two last tenses, though i think my spanish is actually getting worse. it´s possible that i reached my saturation level and i´m overflowing with information. now, when i open my mouth, i just don´t know whether future, conditional, subjunctive, progressive etc. is going to come out...not to mention whether it will be appropriately male or female, singular or plural. aaaaaahhhh. and leaving for argentina might just complicate the situation further. we will see. one thing is for certain, my dream of waltzing back into the u.s. fluent in spanish ain´t happening! i think i might have been overestimating my 32-year old brain.
the highlight of studying in the sacred valley was, hands down, the insane, ass-kicking, purely will-driven hike/scramble that 6 of us went on after class yesterday. we left the house at 1 pm and returned at 7:58...2 minutes to change for dinner. i´m uploading photos now, but i don´t know if they´ll do the experience justice. i have no idea how high or how far we traveled, but looking back on it today, it looks impossible.
we started out with the simple, but logistically challenging goal of climbing and summiting one of the surrounding mountains. didn´t matter which one because there aren´t really trails. we basically followed the main road west away from pisac and picked a spot to start the scramble/climb. the vegetation was pretty forgiving, but the ridiculous degree of incline was interesting and sketchy enough that i was wondering how the hell we were going to get down. but we persevered (and at the altitude we´re at here, that is no small feat) and we climbed and climbed and climbed straight up. (background: one of the cool things about the peruvian mountains is that no matter how high they are and how crazy steep, you find crops growing all over...growing at a 60 degree angle...) so when we reached our false summit and took a break we were next to a section of crops and there were animal tracks all around. we followed a few of those until we encountered the trail that the farmers must use - that is one hell of a commute to work...
we decided to just follow the trail instead of attempting the true summit and to our greatest enjoyment, the trail just kept going and climbing and going and climbing until we had traversed the entire wall of mountains that i had been admiring for the past week. we wanted to climb one, but we managed to climb many and we ended up all the way past pisac, looking down on the mountain where the pisac ruins are. (i thought the pisac ruins were insanely high up, so my surprise at being that much higher looking down on the entire mountain was immense. and captivating.) it was a long day of countless ascents and descents, some sprinkling and a slightly scary 5-minute thunder storm/downpour, followed by a full rainbow across the valley, a cross-country descent through mountain farmland, jaunts through sudden eucalyptus forests, packs of grazing goats and summit views...
we were all worked...some a bit more than others, but they hung in there and ended up being pretty proud of themselves. (i was ready with my safety-first WFR skills to save them...except for the part about the sketchy scramble climb.) it was a breathtaking hike on a magical trail that took us everywhere we ever wanted to go and it fulfilled my reason for going to taray in the first place. perfecto!
ahora, i am in a hotel near my school and the plaza de armas and am in for a whole ´nother kind of scramble. i have one day to figure out my next two weeks in b.a. and uruguay and to get all my last cusco experiences in. should be interesting. i´ll be back tomorrow to finish the photo upload and secure my next chapter!
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