17: climbing in altitude

overlooking the Plaza in Arequipa

The night bus from Nazca to Arequipa was a long one. I slept pretty fitfully and woke at around 5am thinking it was earlier. I couldn't help thinking about various people at home, 6 hours ahead, and wondering what they were doing. Most people were still sleeping, although Amy woke up around the same time I did, and we sat watching the desert as the sun rose. Something was glinting in the sand, creating an effect that made the ground seem to sparkle, and it was only as the sun got higher and stronger that you could see that it was actually due to the light reflecting off a sea of thousands of plastic bottles. This rubbish went on for miles and miles.

Monastério de Santa Catalina

Arequipa is a pretty (in its centre, anyway) colonial city - the second largest in Peru. It's 2,400m in altitude and we were starting to feel it: shortness of breath, and for me, weirdly sensitive sinuses. Our tiredness combined with getting used to the thinner air meant the day was pretty much written off; we managed a bit of light shopping and lunch, and by the time I'd faffed around trying to confirm our later flights from Cusco back to Lima, we'd knackered ourselves out.

The following day we visited a shop specialising in alpaca garments, and were taken round the back to see some of them sitting around in a field, and then on to see how the wool was sorted, spun and dyed - something we would see a few times in different places! We spent a lovely afternoon wandering round the Monastério de Santa Catalina, a beautiful nunnery-turned-museum with peaceful streets within its citadel, and I ate a truly enormous jacket potato, which was perhaps the best I think I have ever eaten, anywhere.

That evening we climbed aboard the night bus to Cusco, where I'd booked us VIP seats at the front on the top floor. Amy was not impressed, and spent most of the beginning of the journey in trepidation of the driver's actions: "He's not really going to overtake here, is he? Oh, yes. Yes, he is." Despite our alleged comfiness, the road was awful, and windy, and neither of us slept much at all. The temperature seemed to range between "off" and "on", which meant wearing all your clothes inside your sleeping bag, or trying to take everything off to cool down. Needless to say everyone was pissed off on arrival at 5.45am. I had visions of us sitting on our rucksacks in the cold outside the hotel, but as soon as we got there a guy came and took both our rucksacks, brought us in, and sat us down with a cup of coca tea until our rooms were ready. They couldn't have been kinder.

We slept for a good few hours, waking up again with the feeling of a massive hangover, and after a long shower walked into Cusco to have a massive breakfast at Jack's café (literally called "Gordo" or, "Fatty"). The rest of the day was spent getting bits and pieces needed for our trek: walking poles, flasks etc. That night we met with our tour group for the briefing for the next day. It was a bit unclear about exactly what was happening; due to a road being rebuilt, we would be doing a completely different walk to the one we thought we had booked on, albeit apparently higher and colder!

We had a very early start the next morning. Our group consisted of a couple of Aussie girls called Carly and Amanda, a guy on his own called Chris (his friend was in hospital with salmonella) and two Korean girls, as well as some Brits and some French Canadians doing another walk the following day. Our bus wound round uphill past the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, and we got a good view of the terraces from the road as it rose above the town. Our first stop was a project village sponsored by GAP (the tour company), where we heard more about the spinning, dying and weaving process. I always find the setup of demonstration and then being expected to buy a little awkward, but bought a little woven llama to give away as a present when I got home.

Following the village we visited a llama/alpaca project, where we entered the pens of different llamas and alpacas and were given leaves to feed them with. They were amazingly soft - especially the juveniles - and luckily I didn't suffer the same irrational fear of them that I experience with sheep (this isn't a real fear, just a dislike of being ganged up on with no means of escape).

our guide Henry drinking strawberry chicha

After sampling chicha (beer made from corn) and playing a game with frogs in a local bar, we headed to Ollantaytambo, where we would spend the night before climbing. As we approached the town, the sky disappeared behind a smoky veil, and I noticed that the mountain was on fire. The flames formed an almost straight line, as though it had been set deliberately, but nothing else about it looked in control.

As the sun set, we climbed the Incan ruins as Ollantaytambo. It was quite incredible to see the size of the massive blocks of stone which had been lifted up the hill. Before dinner we were told that the plans for the walk had been changed. Farmers were going on strike some time in the next couple of days, and that would mean roadblocks and no trains from Aguas Calientes, the town near Machu Picchu. We would have to do our walk in two days instead of three to make sure we got back to Cusco in time. Everyone felt a bit annoyed about this, having spent quite a lot of money on a trip that wouldn't be as long as we had thought!

We all gathered together to have dinner in a local restaurant, and our guide Henry drank about five cuba libres. The final part of my trip was about to begin.

dusk over Ollantaytambo

16: darkest Peru

When I arrived in Lima, the first thing that struck me was the strange fog that covered the city. Over the winter months, a thick grey mist hangs over everything at a low level, making it feel like its shrouded in a sort of dirty cotton wool. I had a day to kill before Amy arrived, so I took a walk down to see the travel agent to sort out our trip to Nazca.

Wandering round the quiet suburbs of Miraflores, I can't quite explain the the peculiar sense of affinity I felt with Lima. This was where I came from, 30 years ago, and the streets oddly reminded me of places I had visited and lived in with my family years before: I almost kept expecting my Mum to appear from round a corner, waiting to meet me in some shop or restaurant. I walked down to the coast and took the cliff path toward the centre of Miraflores. The sea was full of hundreds of surfers (the water must have been freezing) and gliders were climbing into bodysocks and jumping off the edge of the cliff into the circular air currents swirling about above the path. I headed back toward the hotel via the Artisan market. Not having bought anything up until this point I wasn't keen to fill my already full backpack with too many bits before the last few bits of travel we had ahead of us, but it was worth a look - full of beautiful alpaca products, silver jewellery and intricately carved gourds.

over the Panamerican highway

After picking Amy up from the airport, the next morning we had a quick look round the market and stuffed ourselves with empanadas before getting a taxi to the Cruz del Sur depot for the bus to Nazca. The landscape was totally different from what I had been used to: dusty roads, barren mountains and desert plains. Nazca was a bit of a dump, but the sites we had gone there to visit were worth it.

After waiting ages at the aerodrome to see the Nazca Lines, we took off in a four seater cessna. The little plane bounced along the tarmac in a way I can only describe as rather like a heavy bumblebee taking off from a fruit cake and we were in the air, soaring over incredible desert mountains. We wore headphones but they seemed more to protects our ears from the noise than for communication, as every now and then the assistant pilot would turn to us, point at his map and shout "monkey!", at which point the plane would turn sideways and the windows would face the ground in order for us to see and try and take pictures.

the spider

The Nazca Lines are weird. They were discovered when the American professor, studying from the air what he thought were remnants of ancient irrigation, saw the tracing of a huge hummingbird measuring 110m in length. In 1946 a German mathematician-turned-archeologist called Maria Reiche began studying them, an occupation which would take up the rest of her life. My parents lived in Peru in the 70s and recalled meeting her when visiting Nazca: they said she was "...strange".  There are hundreds of huge shapes and figures marked in the desert, from straight lines to a monkey, a spider and a whale amongst others. Maria decided that the lines were astronomical; they centred on the summer and winter solstice and pointed to the horizon in line where the sun and stars were at particular and important times of the year.

Being in a small plane is much like being in a small boat for me, so it wasn't really a surprise when I had to stop trying to take photos, and after the final lurching turn to see the last figure, I had to be sick. Amy tried very hard to ignore this, but no one could miss the telltale signs of her tapping her mouth repeatedly as she said to herself: "don't be sick, don't be sick". I prayed no one else would chuck.

visitors approaching from the desert

We headed from the aerodrome to Chauchilla cemetery, discovered in the 1920s and over 1,000 years old. It was a peculiar place, stretched out on a flat piece of desert with a small one-roomed building serving as a museum. Rows of stones have been laid out to denote a path, and simple straw huts on wooden stick have been erected over the burial areas. The graves are open, and many of the human remains still show skin and hair. Our tour guide told us that archeologists come back occasionally to clean and preserve the remains, but other than that very little study has been undertaken, no DNA analysis; they don't even know whether these remains are male or female. The weirdest thing about the place, and it's something I only noticed halfway through the visit, is that the remains are not just contained to the grave pits. Years ago the cemetery was plundered by grave robbers looking for valuables, and they literally ripped the remains apart. Tiny fragments of bone litter the sand, so small that at first your eyes take them in as part of the natural bleached colour of the sand. But when you look closely, you see bone in every square foot of the ground; some just tiny shards, some rather larger.

As we got back into the car, the air grew thicker and eventually the sky disappeared under a cloud of sand. We had dinner at the hotel Maria Reiche used to stay in and visited her planetarium to hear about the astronomical theory behind the lines. At the end of the lecture we were invited to look through their high powered telescope to look at jupiter and the moon.

15: the last of the Mayans

sunset from the wooden bar

We said goodbye to our Aussie friends, who were heading back to Roatan (the sister island with an equally large if not potentially more affluent number of divers) and on our penultimate day on Utila, went diving with Dec. Dec took us to Black Hills, a coral mountain to the south east of the island. This was the most impressive site we visited, and were treated to seeing toadfish, trumpetfish, black triggerfish, big eyed jacks, blue wrasse and ocean-going triggerfish, as well as many juveniles. The volume of marine life was much more impressive than any we had seen in Honduras so far, although it still felt lacking compared to the Red Sea and further north in the Caribbean.

The rest of our time in Utila was spent reading books we didn't want to carry, sunbathing, and drinking rum. We took a very early ferry to La Ceiba back on the mainland and got a fancy Hedman Alas coach to San Pedro Sula, where we treated ourselves to a carb-loaded and very cheesy pizza in the cavernous shopping centre. After that it was a long journey to Copán through amazing lush scenery. Traffic was delayed along the road, and as we approached a bridge we realised it was because part of the road making up the bridge had fallen away. We crossed it anyway.

Copán stela with jungle vines hanging behind

The next morning we were woken in Copán by rythmic drumming from the nearby school. After doing boring things like dropping laundry we took a tuktuk up to the Mayan ruins at Copán. We managed to team up with some American missionaries to cover the cost of an English speaking guide, and wandered through the site, almost managing to avoid the site. It was the last Mayan site we visited, and an impressive one to finish on.

amazingly intricate stonework

We climbed over huge tree roots that were breaking up the stones to the top of the main structure overlooking the plaza and sat enjoying the view for a while. On our way out the peace was interrupted as there was a massive influx of teenage schoolboys, whose teachers were apparently blind to the fact that they were blatantly taking photos of us (not that we looked interesting?) and making hissing noises - a particularly unattractive trait of Latin American men. Now normally it takes quite a lot to annoy me, but for some reason it really, really pissed me off - to the point where I shouted "a little respect!" in Spanish (nearly followed by "you little fuckers", but I wasn't certain on the grammatical structure to follow) and looked around frantically trying to identify their teacher so I could relay my thoughts on the matter. Luckily for Clare, he wasn't easily identified (probably the fat guy on his mobile smoking a cigarillo), so we headed out toward the museum.

The museum was probably the best we'd seen. It was large, airy and well lit, and had a huge central reconstruction of one of the central pyramids in the ruins which we'd declined to pay extra to see. There was some beautiful stonework, particularly involving animals and birds, and we enjoyed the respite from the heat, until we were chased out by the hoardes of schoolboys arriving.

We jumped on another tuk tuk to Macaw Mountain, a nearby bird and butterfly sanctuary, where we drank beer in the pouring rain, and a large parrot destroyed the top of my hat. That night I switched on our lightswitch and the power in the whole street went out.

The next morning I didn't feel too good, probably because of the badly microwaved burrito I'd been served the night before, but we packed up and got the bus across the border towards La Antigua in Guatemala. The journey was rainy and foggy, and we could hardly see the mountain roads as we wound through them.

We arrived at the Black Cat hostel in the rain, squeezing into the heaving bar for shelter. Clare went off to find about rooms while I waited with our backpacks, and managed to get one bed there and another at the sister hostel round the corner. We had a quick beer in the bar and then headed our separate ways. That night at the Black Cat put the final nail in the already decaying hostel coffin for me, when I was woken at midnight by an American girl who decided that the courtyard in the middle of the hostel was an excellent place for her to have a three hour shouting match with her boyfriend; only to be woken again at 4am by people sleeping through their alarms for getting up for buses.

rainclouds cover the volcano

I was in a pretty foul mood the next morning, surprisingly enough, and Clare and I managed to find another room near the market. Antigua is full of churches, many of which have been destroyed in various earthquakes shuddering through central America. We wandered round visiting the grounds of all of these, hoping the next earthquake wouldn't hit while we were there.

There were lots of weddings going on, with participants and guests dressed in various shades of shiny synthetics. The weather changed quickly between sunshine and thundery showers, and we escaped from the rain into Casa Santo Domingo, a beautiful hotel created in the grounds of an old monastery and containing ruins and some interesting galleries and museums.

The next day, we discovered the Bagel Barn, where we had a four hour breakfast. The afternoon was spent dodging the pouring rain and going into some really crap museums. Clare was leaving the next day; she went to get her hair cut and, pissed off with the rain, we went to a cafe and talked about her experience of Peru. As the rain cleared we headed down to see the last church ruins at Capuchinas and La Récolecion. Slightly out of town, this felt more isolated than the other ruins, and as the sky darkened we were anxious to make our way back. That evening we headed back to Casa Santo Domingo and celebrated our trip with a bottle of prosecco and probably our most expensive meal.

I felt sad when Clare left the next morning, headed for Rio to meet her friend Sarah, but we'd had such an amazing time and neither of us wanted to prolong the goodbye. I wandered to the adventure tour place, where we'd already enquired about trips up the various volcanoes surrounding the town, but they were still not running any trips due to the heavy and persistent rain, and there were few people interested in signing up. This was disappointing as I had a few days to spend in Antigua and this had been my plan, partly to warm up for Peru, but the weather had caused many problems around Guatemala, with mudslides and death, and I wasn't about to screw things up by being swept down (or into) a volcano. So after a few days of updating this diary and eating many bagels, I took a 4am colectivo to Guatemala City, and boarded a plane to Lima.