Peru

We began our last stint of volunteer work this week! An hour outside of Cusco, nestled on the hillside across from Inca terraces and at the foothills of Inca ruins lies the community of Cuyo Chico (meaning Which Boy? not Witch Boy as I originally thought). We were expecting something small, similar to our experience in Karina, and we were proved wrong with a literal fanfare. When we stepped off the bus in front of the main hostel, we were greeted by people in traditional Peruvian clothing playing the flute, drums, and blasting away on a conch shell.

The women threw flower petals over our heads while the men took all our baggage from us and whisked us away upstairs, where we were also dressed in traditional skirts, jackets, shoulder wraps, and hats. They welcomed us to their community and we introduced ourselves (in Spanish and rather poorly) before we were taken to our rooms.

The rest of the week has been an extremely diverse and fun look into life in Cuyo Chico. We learned how to make clay for sculptures, we were making necklaces and bracelets with dried beads and charms and took corn kernels off the cob with our hands.

We don’t have to work on weekends, so we hiked the 40 minutes down to Pisac to look around. The market is enormous and covers at least 4 square kilometers and has everything a tourist could want. Davina and India did the hike back to the top while the rest of us took the bus (we got back to the top at the same time. Let that sink in for a moment).

We came back to the market on Sunday because it wasn’t pouring down rain and, to our amazement, the market had gotten even bigger in the sunshine. It really is a breathtaking experience.

The food has also been some of the most diverse we’ve had since the trip started. The families rotate cooking duty in the community, so we get a different family dish every night. We’ve eaten quinoa, corn, squash, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, eggs, beans, and algae spheres from a local lagoon (how cool is that?!). Each family prepares the ingredients in slightly different ways, so we have yet to eat the same dish twice.

All in all, we’ve all said at some point how we feel cared for and cared about. We are seriously looking forward to next week in Cuyo Chico!

This week on “nothing in Peru is close to anything else in Peru”, we spent a grand total of 13 hours on buses. It was 7 hours from Puno to Cusco, where we got to spend a full day before hopping on another bus and driving another 6 hours out to THE AMAZON!

But let’s start with Cusco, we spent the day exploring the Museum of Precolumbian Art and the accompanying Textile Shop, where Peruvian women weave tapestries and sell them to tourists (yes, I am absolutely going to buy one). It was then on to repack our bags for THE AMAZON (for future travellers: you are absolutely allowed to leave stuff at hostels in their luggage closet. We left all our winter coats and stuffed the extra space in our packs with cookies).

So now we’re in the Amazon. Specifically, we’re staying at a place called Tierra Linda in El Manu National Park. We’re staying in an open-air house about 3km off the main road (it feels like 200km). The walls are nothing but screen, so all the natural light and smells and sounds of the river and jungle are with us all the time. We sleep in twin beds under bug nets. We wake up when the sun comes up, and we go to sleep pretty much when the sun goes down (like, we’re up at 6:00 and in bed by 7:30). The food is also delicious: porridge and banana pancakes for breakfast; rice and squash curry for lunch; mashed potatoes and tomato/cucumber salad with vinaigrette for dinner.

Chores so far have included a wide range of activities. We went on a two hour hike through the jungle (India and Emma got machetes) and we had to hack through some of the brush that had fallen across the path (we also got to swing on a vine like Tarzan. It’s harder than it looks; three of us fell off). We planted pineapples after the hike (they are REALLY pointy plants). After working, we had a bit of free time (siesta lasts from noon to 3:00pm) so we went swimming in a natural pool formed by the river and let little minnows nibble at our toes (no, they weren’t piranha. We asked). We then spent the last two hours before dinner with machetes in hand acting like human weed-whackers. Fully covered in dirt, it was back in the river before dinner, which we eat by candlelight because electricity isn’t exactly a thing (we charge our phones via solar panel and it’s so cool).

My least favourite part of the day is at 9am, when we have to climb up a steep hill in order to get to work each day. Good training for Machina Picchu, I guess. Despite all the climbing, the view in the Sacred Valley is incredibly beautiful. From the house where we are staying, I can see Inca ruins, and we are surrounded by huge mountains that are so green and vibrant, they almost look fake; like a picture from Google Images.

There's definitely been a lot more work to do here than in Karina. Tierra de Los Yaquas is a community of about 15 different families, and we help a different one each day. We’ve done a lot of corn shucking and carrying things around. Friday, we carried large stacks of corn stalks on our backs to be used as feed for the animals. This was accompanied by a traditional call and response song as we walked. I don't think any of us really had the singing/yodelling chops, but we tried our best.

There has also been some down time to go to Pisac, the nearest town. There's a huge marketplace filled with stalls selling everything from souvenirs to jewellery to dye. We walked around, shopped, and bought a soccer ball for a game with the community the next night. It was quite an intense match up, one that we eventually lost.

We had two celebrations this week. Tuesday was Alex’s birthday. We celebrated with cake for breakfast (hi mom). Then, we walked to a hotel in Pisac, the closest town, for a swim in the pool.

Thursday was a national holiday, Corpus Cristi day. Our hosts invited us to take part in building a traditional oven out of dried mud. Then, you light a fire until the inside of the oven gets very hot. Finally, you put the fire out, put potatoes inside, and collapse the entire thing so the potatoes cook inside the hot mud-pile. And then of course, as we have done so often on this trip, we ate potatoes.

This week has been a bit of a mish-mash. On Monday and Tuesday, we went on tours around Cusco. One to an Inca archaeological site and some salt mines, and the other to Rainbow Mountain. Then, we packed up and took the bus for about an hour to arrive at the Tierra de Los Yaques project.

Our last stop of the day was a salt mine, which was very cool, and can only really be described with pictures.

Tuesday morning was a ridiculously early start (4 am) to leave on the bus to Rainbow Mountain. I was still a bit groggy when we started the hike around ten. Going up was… rough. It was about a 2 hour hike, and even though it was nowhere near as steep as Colca, the much higher altitude made it a tough hike. Sadly, the view is not that impressive from the first base you come to when you reach the end of the trail, you have to commit to walking up a bunch of stairs to the very top to actually see the rainbow effect.

I enjoyed both tours, though hopefully I'll have time to do some sight-seeing in the City itself on the next few weekends we are there.

We got quite a welcome when we arrived to our final project. A conch was blown and flower petals were thrown on us, before we were dressed in traditional Peruvian outfits and introduced to our hosts for the next 2 weeks.

We have only done about 2 days of work so far, but it has been interesting. We helped make the clay that they use for handicrafts, fed an entire shed full of guinea pigs (rip, probably) and prepared the land for planting in September.

Will we become expert farmers by the end of this? Probably not. Stay tuned.

This morning, breakfast was at 12:30. That's what happens when you leave teenagers to fend for themselves for food. Only joking! This morning, we decided to forego the cold hostel breakfast to make our own breakfast of eggs, toast, sausage, and bacon, which was a nice break from the more traditional Peruvian food that we have been eating during our time on the Karina project. We’ve now completed a week and a half of the project, and it's been a big learning experience. On the farm where we have been staying, they produce almost all of the food that they eat including potatoes and quinoa, which we have been helping to harvest, as it is currently Fall in Peru. Our other jobs on the farm have included taking the sheep up into the hills to graze and moving the livestock to their pens at night.

We also got the opportunity to do some teaching this week. I taught English to 12 and 13 year olds. The teaching has been a bit of a challenge as the school has no English curriculum or certified English teachers, but hopefully what we have been teaching them (basic conversation, parts of the body, and numbers) has been useful. I have also been able to practice my Spanish a lot, as well as learning some words in Aymara, which is an indigenous language spoken by many people there.

At night, we spend our time playing soccer and basketball with Will, our host family’s son. Soccer really is a universal language. You start kicking a ball around and suddenly a dozen people who speak all different languages are all doing the same thing together. And then we all run home because its stormed basically every night this week. Believe me, you have not heard thunder this loud in all your life. All in all, this week has been very physically challenging, but at the same time very rewarding. We have about 4 more days left in Karina and then it's on to Cusco.

Hey everyone reading this week’s blog.

Okay where do I start ? We found out we are all pretty good at volley ball! Richard called himself the Ronaldo of volley ball which was very modest of him

After we left Coparaque we made our way to Cabanaconda which was about an hour and a half away, first thing I noticed was again the breathtaking view of the snow tipped mountains surrounding us. Not to mention a higher number of tourists which was quite a nice change. Having had an amazing dinner and got an early night, we then headed to the oasis at the bottom of the Colca canyon. The trip down was more difficult than I imagined it would be and was I very hot and bothered by the time we reached Sagalle at the bottom, but quickly remedied that with a jump in the pool. The hostel was like something out of a movie and was dreamlike, with friendly dogs roaming and palm tree’s blocking out the sweltering sun

The trek up the canyon was one of the biggest team building exercises I think we have done and we were all pretty chuffed by how quickly we did it in. Of course this was achieved by Richards amazing music choice and my speaker, which I remembered to charge up the night before. We even got a couple of thank you’s from the other hikers for the music!! Overall such an experience and can’t wait for the other amazing hikes and insane views I’m gonna experience. Will post again soon.

A

I hate Snickers bars. Offer me one in the UK and I will instantly refuse, regardless of exhaustion or hunger. Today, at the top of the toughest mountain trek of my life, the Snickers and banana my companion Marvin bought me was like mana from heaven. Let me start from the beginning of the week…

Back in Coporaque, we really enjoyed our last weekend break. We made our way to the nearest town, Chivay. Although we elected to take a ‘short cut’ through the fields, Peruvians who live this rurally don’t really ‘do’ proper paths, and we ended up on a pretty difficult hike through cacti and scrubs. At Chivay we splashed 30 soles on huge pizzas and mango lassies: the best meal we’ve had so far I reckoned.

We also enjoyed a small party with some beers my surrogate Dad bought. Once again, they’ve been very kind to us, and attempted to learn some limited English as well. We’ve certainly been able to make our Spanish more natural and fluent.

This next week, Alejandro told us, we can regard as a ‘holiday,’ a break in between the two challenging volunteer projects either side. We left relatively early on Tuesday morning for Cabana Conde: a more touristy town deeper in the canyon.

Our hostel in Cabana Conde is very touristy. This is a nice break, actually. It’s refreshing to hear English voices again. After a monster pizza dinner and breakfast we set off down the canyon on foot to Sangalle.

Sangalle (‘Oasis’ in Spanish,) is a collection of five hostels deep in the canyon surrounded by insane plant growth and fuelled by the river further below. It felt rather like a traditional resort: pools, terraces, everything. It was a rather lovely and unique place, with one’s happiness tempered only by the knowledge that at some point, you have to hike back up.

After a restful full day, we met three lovely American guys called Moshe, Ari, and Elly. I decided to go trek up with them the following morning. The boys are both fitter and more competitive than me, so I figured this might be easier. We rose at 4.30am, and headed up the mountain, with the head-torches of other groups trailing us like lumbering glow worms. The view of the sunrise over the canyon was, needless to say, spectacular.

We have spent the last week in the rural community of Coporaque. Located deep in the Colca Canyon, it is a far cry from Arequipa. The trip to Coporaque was a four-hour bus ride across stunning landscapes, where scrubby plains give way to steep mountain roads. Once we arrived, we played football with some kids in what I’m convinced is the pitch with the most beautiful views in the world. We took it more seriously once the adults arrived, and England managed to thrash Peru 5-3. We’re each living with local families: Alejandro and I with one, Robbie and Ben with another, and Katie and Izzie with the third.

For me, this is really important. Breakfasts force us to practice Spanish, and the families help coordinate our volunteering efforts in a town that isn’t all that organised. It seems to maintain its own timezone, which I have dubbed ‘Coporaque Mean Time’ (CMT.) One where events happen a little later than they should, or on different days altogether. It’s an important lesson for foreigners who are used to rather structured lives.

Our main volunteer project so far has been clearing the primary school’s football pitch of debris, and filling in holes. It was very gratifying to come back the next day and see they were already using it, with brick goalposts!

We have also helped with Holy Week preparations. We’ve carried saints from the Church, shelled green beans for a feast, set up a cross on which to crucify a wooden Jesus, and had our feet washed by a catholic priest in gratitude.

To relax, we’ve done a walk that offered spectacular views over Coporaque (with lunch costing less than a pound each,) and visited the hot springs about three times. They’re undoubtedly a highlight. Showers aren’t great here, and it’s a good opportunity to wash clothes.

We definitely feel part of the community here. Tourists came to watch and took photos of us as we helped set up a ceremony. Our families have been very welcoming, and we’re looking forward to another week’s volunteering.