Mike Down South

I took a trip to Puno, Peru to see Lake Titicaca, the world’s largest high-altitude lake (a superlative which, in itself, has the distinction of being the world’s most arbitrary superlative). I did a day tour and the first stop was the Uros. They’re these little man-made floating islands constructed of reeds. The houses are made of dried reeds. All the furniture is made of reeds. For food, they eat fish… and reeds.

They claimed that the Uros people lived there full time, but I’ve heard that it’s kind of a gimmick and while they at one point lived there full time because they couldn’t afford to live on land, now the whole “we really live here” is mostly a show for tourists. This is my skeptical face:

The “residents” split us into groups and took us into their houses, which curiously contained no signs of living and instead only handcrafts they were selling. One elderly woman chose me and a Japanese guy to show her house to and as we walked over she asked us our names, which seemed a friendly enough gesture. But then when she started trying to sell us stuff, she went into full on begging mode, getting on the floor, holding out her crafts and saying, “Please…. 10 soles. Please… Michael.” I’m used to Peruvian begging, but when they add in your name it’s really creepy. Doubly so when you’re trapped with them on a tiny island.

Before leaving the Uros, our tour guide sternly explained to us that the pronunciation “tittie ka-ka” was wrong and I feared that she was going to offer another pronunciation that wasn’t hilarious. She went on to explain that the name was Incan and that “ka-ock-ah” means “puma” in Quechua because from an aerial view, the lake resembles a cat (Incas had an aerial view of this 3,200 sq. mi lake? repeat skeptical face). The actual pronunciation is “tittie ka-ock-ah” but this sounds exactly the same so she ended up going on for like a minute repeating, “Not tittie ka-ka; tittie ka-ka. Tittie ka-ka is incorrect. Tittie ka-ka is correct.”

The other island we visited was Taquile. On the boat ride there, they gave us the following facts about the island:

• all the work is done collectively and the revenues shared
• work animals such as mules, horses, and dogs (yeah, dogs) are forbidden
• all the men wear little elf hats to indicate marital status

Naturally, I envisioned this:

But it was a little more like this:

The hats were the best part. It’s an island where all the men who are married have solid red hats and all the men who are single have red and white hats. It sounds like the setup to a really good riddle.

It was a pretty cool island. They had these weird animals they claimed were cows, but I wasn’t buying it.

In the afternoon, the clouds cleared and we got really good views of the lake

It might look like I accidentally got a picture of this guy, but this was actually very deliberate because I thought he was John Waters (still not convinced it wasn’t him!).

I was walking back to my hostel from the Arequipa city center and I suddenly noticed that almost every business on the street was a driving school. It seemed like more driving schools than you’d need for a city of only a million people and a LOT more driving schools than you’d need on a single 3 block stretch of road in any city. I broke out my camera and I turned on the “driving school count overlay” feature so I could get a full count of the number of schools.

Fourteen driving schools! I repeat that this is on a single 3 block stretch of road! I’ve seen this a lot in Peru. Sometimes it’s something like a bunch of candle stores or lamp stores clumped together, which makes a little more sense. Other times it’s a street with like 9 identical book stores in a row. I don’t know if there’s some sort of weird zoning laws or if one business opens and everyone else is like, “What a great business slash location! I’ll do the same.”

I’m currently in Arequipa, Peru. It’s Peru’s second largest city, which apparently doesn’t change the fact that it’s incredibly small. Conveniently, it’s also incredibly cheap. The first gym I found cost S/1 (~$0.35) for a day pass, but it turned out that pretty much all the machines were broken, so I had to splurge for a fancier gym at S/3 (~$1) for a day pass. Prices are so low here that people often refer to the city as “Arecheapa” although by “people” I mean me and only in my head because I would get made fun of if I said that out loud.

My favorite inexpensive item is private Spanish lessons, which cost $6/hr for 1:1 tutoring (for comparison, it costs $16-28/hr in Lima). My Spanish tutor speaks English really well, but there are of course there are miscommunications. To date, they are as follows:

I had just switched to a new hostel that was really cheap, really disgusting, and much farther away from the tutor’s house, so I had to run the last few blocks and I was still a little bit late. When I came in, I explained, “Cambié mi hostal. Mi hostal nuevo está muy lejos.” [“I changed my hostel. My new hostel is very far away.”]. So she laughed and nodded and I added, “Es muy sucio.” [“It’s very dirty.”] She corrected me, “Estoy muy sucio.” I was a little confused because I knew what I said was correct. Then I realized she she had assumed that I was trying to say “I am very dirty.” What? Why would you assume that’s what I wanted to say? I chalked this up to the fact that she saw me sweating and not to the fact that I hadn’t showered or shaved in a few days and was wearing the same clothes she saw me in the day before.

My tutor was having me construct a sentence with the verb “disfrutar” which means “to enjoy oneself.” I always (incorrectly) think that this verb is reflexive, meaning the subject and object of the action are the same and so requires a reflexive pronoun. I conjugated it as “Nos disfrutamos” and by the way my tutor started giggling, I’m pretty sure this is like saying “We pleasured ourselves.” After she stopped laughing, she explained, “’‘Nos disfrutamos’ this is a… hot expression.”

She gave me a Peruvian slang worksheet and we were going over it when we got to “pucha” which is a variant of “puta”:

“Pucha: horny,” she said.
“But the sheet says puta.” This seemed to confuse her.
“Yes, puta. Horny,” she replied.
“But I thought puta was prostitute.”
“Yes, a woman who sells sex… is horny,” she said matter-of-factly.

I’ve noticed that this is a general trend and that South Americans often have trouble with “whore” in English. A lot of them think that “bitch” and “whore” are synonymous. Last weekend I was talking to a bartender who told me, “She’ll sleep with you on the first night if she’s a bitch.” Another girl I was talking to at a discoteca pointed out a couple making out and said, “You can tell that she’s a bitch because she just met him and she’s kissing him.” Even when they know when to use the word correctly, there are still issues. In Lima, a girl told once me “I have sex with men,” before quickly adding, “but I am not hork.”

Moray is one of the stranger tourist attractions I’ve seen. I constantly saw pictures of it on travel agency signs, including this one:

(It actually took me several hours to realize what “By Food” was supposed to say.)

For something so heavily advertised, it was surprisingly desolate. On the 90 minute bus ride over, I was the only tourist. I asked for the Moray stop and they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere, but there were some taxi drivers hanging out at the bus stop to ferry people the 15 minutes to and from the site. Even at the site, there were only a handful of other people there, which is surprising for something so cool-looking.

This is the main series of trenches at Moray. they’re about 100 ft deep. Nobody really knows why they exist, but popular theory (according to a cabbie I talked to at least) is that they were made for experimental farming, since the difference in depth causes significant differences in wind and temperature.

This is the view without any distractingly handsome men in the shot.

This was the other, slightly shallower series of trenches. Legend has it that if you enter but are not pure of heart, you turn into a small pile of stones.

The stairs are my favorite thing about Incan architecture. Where else do you get to see these kinds of stairs outside video games? This was how you got up and down in the trenches.

These girls were doing it wrong. Anyone who ever owned a Nintendo knows the only respectable way to climb these is with feet-together hops (preferably with an accompanying sound effect).

While I was in Cusco, I decided to take a day trip to Machu Picchu. It’s an ancient Incan city that was built in the 15th century and abandoned about a hundred years later. It was rediscovered in 1911 by an American guy (go America!), who kind of stole everything and gave it to Yale and Yale now refuses to give it back to Peru (go America?).

Arriving in Aguas Calientes, the city below Machu Picchu.

They charge you to go to the bathroom at Machu Picchu, which wasn’t all that new for me, but the interesting part was that they actually give you an entrance ticket. Luckily, it wasn’t the kind of thing where they had patrols inside to verify proof of payment.

Arrival into Machu Picchu! It was a bit cloudy / rainy when we first got in, so you can see most of the city in this shot, but Wayna Picchu (the big mountain behind the city) is hidden by the clouds. Pro tip: a good way to make it stop raining is to go to the trouble of getting out and putting on your rain jacket.

View of the city from the other side. All of the terraces were for Incan farming back in the day. The Spaniards never found this city (which is lucky because apparently they really liked bashing the crap out of Incan cities) so 90% of the masonry is from the original construction.

I was sort of baffled the entire time how the Incas could arrived at one of these giant mountains in the middle of nowhere and thought, “Hey, let’s build an awesome city right here!”

At the top of the city with Katrina, a friendly (albeit suspiciously clean) fellow backpacker I met on the tour. The big mountain in the back is Wayna Picchu, which conveniently escaped cloud cover right as we reached the top.

Picture from along the trail to the Inca Bridge.

In bargaining with the guy who sold me my trip to Machu Picchu, he said he would take $8 off the price, but he was going to take away my bus ride down the mountain (90 min walk vs. 30 min bus ride). As I was walking, tour buses would pass me every 10 minutes and the passengers would wave and laugh at me, but they were the suckers! $8? Ha! It actually was a pretty fun hike down, though the next day my legs were le tired.