Life in Huancayo

Life in Huancayo continues to treat us well. Nothing really to complain about, bit disapointing really. I have put a few pics up on my photo site if you want to see what it is like up here, pretty idilic. Ah, well lets see you lessons are going well, we need to spend a bit more energy disaplining than we are used to. Not that the kids are bad per say but just spirited. Well ok some are a little naughty but we are starting to get a decent amount of control and run games with minimal pushing, shouting, hitting and cheating. Made me miss Japan a little bit. I have been getting some decent study done, still nowhere near the productivity levels I managed in Japan but I think having a more set routine and place of my own their helped. Fingers crossed I will do OK in the exams, the maths one will be the hardest, for a bit I was wondering if I would be able to do it, now I think that maybe I will. The economic history course in contrast is keeping me very interested. I only wish I had more time to study it because it is so interesting. I think I am learning muchos about the world, how we got to where we are. Also changing my views on the British empire and certain prominent countries impacts on the world. I still can´t decide if I am a free tradist or a trade protectionist. Maybe most accurately I am a free tradist who think free trade is the aim but that it is not the method to get to that state. Anyway, moving on. I and Kel are taking dance lessons at the moment, we have our first two on this Sat and Sun past, respectively. Goodness I ache in places I have not ached in before. Good fun though, hopefully we get it down pat before we go, doing the Marinnera btw, a traditional peruvian dance but with spanish influence. The dance revolved around a man and woman flirting or courting. The woman acts all elegent and coy (but a little flirty) while the man acts like a horse. Also had a rocking day at the market, got some good hats. I really like peruvian hats, they have heaps of different kinds and they are all really good. Different regions and villages have their own unique hat style, its great, really great. Boy I like hats! The only bug in my bonnet is that the great felt hats they have are rather hard to transport. The felt will get all put out of shape if I pack it. Wearing it on your head is the only realiable way so I have only one felt hat. I have many more delightfully packable alpaca hats.

Toodles

Craig

So we are up in Huancayo now, the heart of Peru´s highlands (siera). It is beautiful up here to say the least, much more the Peru I had imagined before coming here. Everymorning we get up to catch a 7.30am car (like a shared taxi) to another spot where we catch a combi for one hour to aco, the small peublo where we teach english. Now a combi is bascially a minivan that acts like a bus, and here in Peru in such a mini van you can fit 27 people plus babies inside. We counted. It is amazing how they cram people in. Then we come home and have a wonderful home cooked lunch from one the peruvian volunteer coordinators grandmother. Actually she cooked us breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is amazing, really. Then in the afternoon we volunteer at an afterschool homework club in a closer village, only 15 minutes away. It is a little less stuctured there and the kids are VERY lively but it is fun. Some of the kids are very bright and it pains me to think some of them won´t reach their potential due to a lacking in the standard of education they recieve here. One half of a set of twins has impressed me in particular. He is only 7 but managed to pick up how to do basic equations (eg. 2X + 2 = 12) in about 5 minutes. And it was evident he had not come across this before and I was explaining it to him without knowing any of the relevant spanish words. Well. Today I and Kelly had a fantastic time, we had a short sleep in, then made it to a nearby village for their market day and festival. We did some good shopping, I got a Alpaca inca style slingshot amung other things, and then we took a taxi out into the campo propper (the countryside). We got out next to a beautiful, crystal clear river and found a grassy spot to have a picnick for lunch. Then we explored up along the side of the river and I found nice spots for me to study and Kelly to knit. We found a tiny little peublo up there too before catching a combi back. Great day. Later we will make and eat pizza with the other volunteers.

Cherio!

Mud Mud Glorious Mud!

We had a good time up in tumbes in the far north, a stones throw from Ecuador. First we stopped off in Puira though. Kelly had managed to get her hands on the LP (guide book) and found out that there was a little town good for shopping (handicrafts etc) near puira on the way to tumbes. So we stopped off there. We ended up buying a bunch of pottery and some filigree jewelery all for amazingly cheap prices. Filigree jewelery is made up of fine silver thread wound in intricate designs. Then we were back on the road towards tumbes. It was an interesting town, they had made an effort of make the place look good. And they had decided colourful and excentic was the way to go. Am I right the church looks like a licorice allsort? The first day we hired a boat and guide to show us around the mangroves at Port Pizzaro, where Pizarro first landed in Peru and discovered the Incas. It was pretty cool, we got to get off and walk around in the squelchy mud and see a huge frigite bird colony up close. We also got to see some of Perus only crocodiles getting nursed back from the brink of extinction, here's to reptiles with secondary palettes! Maybe the delighfully squishy feeling of the mud inbetween my toes had triggered something but when I found out about thermal mud baths near by I knew we had to go. The LP didn't have anything about it except mentioned a hostel which did tours to the site. So we took a combi down to where the hostel was (in a little town named Zorritos, little foxes?). The hostel proved useless so we started wondering down the pan american highway which runs along the coast the entire length of Peru. The coast of Peru, except for the very tip around Port Pizzaro is desert, so save the small patches of cliff is is one long sandy beach where it meets the sea. So being partial to beaches we walked the roughly 100metres from the pan american to the coast. The beach was amazing, perfect white sand and blue sea stretching either way as far as the eye could see. Not only where there no people but no litter! I guess there aint many litter making people living in the desert. So we spent a pleasant 2 hours or so walking down the beach, there must be allot of oysters in the water there as the beach was littlered with lovely pieces of mother of pearl. Just about when I was getting hungry I was giving up hope of finding the thermal mud baths. So started back towards the Pan american in hope of finding a restuarant, in our way was a large compound with basketball nets, I assumed it was a school, but luckily kelly was on the ball and recognised it for an upscale hotel/resort. So we approached the compound and stood mornfully at the locked gate. A fellow approached us and kelly used her Spanish skills on him, we were in! We were served up some awsome cebiche ('raw' seafood marinated in lime juice) and not content with fixing up our grumbling tums the waiter fixed us up with a ride to the thermal mud baths! Oh yeah! He called a taxi for us which would take us there, wait for us and take us back for 30 soles (ten bucks), pretty good deal. So we got to play in mud, mud, glorious mud! Also the mud bathes were free! They are just these completely natural pools of bubbling mud in the middle of nowhere! Each pool had a slightly different mud and we tried them all out, throughly covering ourselves from head to toe. It was splendid. Oh it is supposed to be therapeatic and help/cure various things, I dunno, all I know it was really good squishy mud.
Now for the bad news, looks like the road up to the mountians will likely be closed for a week more, we are looking at our options.

The last pic of off the little balls of sand that crabs make when they feed on the little bits of organic matter that surround each grain of sand.

So it seems like the earliest the roads will open is early next week so we have taken it upon ourselves to get out of dodge and go up north so see some mangroves and maybe some south american crocodiles. YES! Not caymen or alligators, crocodiles, the real deal! Also we will drop by a lil´town renowned for its handicrafts. I feel bad about being a little mean about chiclayo on my previous blog, we met up with our good Chiclayo friends last night and have great time drinking wine and watching a pirated movie (why go to the cinema here for 9 soles when you can buy a pirated copy for 2!). They are such great folks and being so nice to us I felt bad. But still we are getting out of chiclayo for a break. Fingers crossed we can go to liemabamba on Monday!

A man doing something to a chicken or something
kelly on the roof of a ruined church
Another ruined church, this town (Zana) used to be rich with many churches but then after some pirate raids and a slave uprising and finally a flood it gave up the ghost.

pretty ruined church in zana
same church
same church

The street about 2 days after it rained, it was worse earlier!
At some parade done by some theatre groups
Me Kelly and a Raptor!

Well we are still here in Chiclayo! We were meant to leave on Sunday, we didn't becuase I had a fever and sore throat. Yep that is two fevers in about two weeks, I feel like an invalid although given the filthy nature of our surrounding it is perhaps unsurprising. So that was why we didn't go on Sunday, the reason for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday was that the road was impassable due to heavy rain. It is the last month of rainy season atm. We keep going to the bus station and asking them and they keep saying come back tommorrow. We have decided that if it is cancelled tommorrow we are going to go somewhere else, anywhere else! The people we met in Chiclayo are lovely and we were sad about having to say goodbye, well we were on Sunday anyway, maybe Monday too, now we just wanna get out of this city! The streets here are basically at a medieval level. They are unpaved, without drainage and oft used as a rubbish dump (and to a lessor extend as a toilet). The streets in the centre and around the shiny american style malls are paved etc. but the vast majority are pitted, rutted and either throwing up clouds of dust or turning into a foul smelling marsh depending on how much it has rained. Oh and then the garbage, some streets in particular seem to be used to dump either construction or household waste. I don't know if there is some system at work there or not. We learned last week that the rubbish collection business is partially ruled by the mafia here, at least at night. During the day there is a limited official rubbish collection service but at night a certain gang/group/organisation controls the rights to route through the rubbish and take out all the valuable things (stuff that can be sold for recyling). Further more it seems that most of the rubbish is just dumped into the desert outside city limits, whenever we drive out of town we see these lumpy fields of rubbish with the sad little raggidty dwellings of the people who make their meagre living scavanging there. Well isn't that despressing! On the bright side my throat is much better today, we self diagnosed and suspected it was perhaps bacterial (I had not cough or other cold symptoms) so we went off to find some pencillin. Pharmacies here sell everything on request, so we hit up a couple and managed to get 20 penicillin tablets (for 56 cents a pill at one place and 30 cents a pill at the other - it pays to shop around) and also a syringe, a bottle of penicillin to be injected and a little vial of some cortical steroid stuff, also to be injected! We didn't actually want those but it turns out we asked for them, darned language barrier! I personally think they might very well come in useful in some remote place. All those other things only cost about 25 soles; 8 dollars or 4 pounds. So being here in a city which has medieval streets but in which there are multiscreen cinemas, american style malls, many many shops selling luxury goods, and were almost every house has TV reminded me of an observation of George Orwell. His observation of working class people in the north of England was that they would first spend any income they might have on luxury good and not on improving the quality of more basic things. At that time (early 19 hundreds I think) the primary luxury was tea and he observed that families would subsist off nothing but white bread and margarine in order to afford their tea and suger. So perhaps it is not so strange that a person here is happy to walk down the dirt street, weeving between various piles of rubbish and breathing in clouds of dust and goodness knows what when he can do so wearing some trendy quiksilver boardshorts or brilliant white new sneakers. Perhaps I am being harsh but it is my wont sometimes! So far our contemporaries we have met here have been smart, upto speed with whats happening in the world and also happy to be living in Peru, and in Chiclayo at that! I am probably missing something. On a more positive note things seem to be fairly progressive from a social standpoint, at least here on the Costa. After our first failed attempt to get the bus some of the peruvians came back to the house we are staying to chat. Somehow we got talking about India and that led on to arranged marriaged which they were shocked at. Then we told them about what we had learned from "Kabul beauty school" which we have both just read and they were just as shocked as we were when they learned about the hardships Alfgan women suffer. So that´s good here, maybe.

This is a Peruvian hairless dog, it has a higher body temperature than normal hairy dogs and was used in pre Columbas times as a topical remedy for arthitus and things like that. Like a living heat pad!

Well I didn´t plan to write a post but I actually have a newish keyboard so I thought I might take advantage. Usually they are so worn that they can barely be used. The delete and return keys seem to be the first to go. We went with our new Peruvian friends to see a small parade yesterday evening which was pretty fun and then replaced our usual english lesson format with ´sit and drink beer and try and talk english or spanish´. It worked pretty well. Tonight is our last lesson and I think they are planning a wee shindig for us. Oh the other night we had some medicinal plant drink, sounds a little dodgy I know. It started when Kelly told them about maple syrup and they then told us about all these various trees they get liquids from. These and extracts from all sorts of other plants are blended together in various combinations to cure just about any ailement you can think off and a few ones that might be new to you. They are sold by these fellows you have their little plant laboritories mounted on three wheeled bicycles. They also only come out at night. We were interested so we had our students help us track one down. He has 18 glass bottles each filled with a different plant juice/ extract and some powders and a couple of tubs of hot liquid. You tell him what you want cured and he begins adriotly and rapidly mixing and shaking and transfering liquids between various containers left right and centre! Some of the ingredients were gooey (like alovera or snot) and others were dark and viscous. Most were green and watery. At the end of the process you had a hot drink that actually tasted quite good, like a herbal tea but more slimy. Our friends swore that they were very good and as evidence impressed us with the ages of their parents and grandparents (who regularly drank these potions). We went out to dinner with our host and his father to celebrate his fathers birthday a few days ago, maybe last week, and we were shocked. He looks 50, not older than 55 but apparently he had just turned 70 that day! Maybe there is something to it after all! Ahh what else.....I have been spending most of my time studying maths. Yes, I know, I don´t know why I am doing it either. It is hard too, I haven´t studied much maths since Highschool, hopefully I pass the exam! On Sunday we will take a bus upto Chacahopoyas up in the northern highlands and then get a collectivo taxi (little minivan) to Liemabamba were we will volunteer for April. The trip to Chacha will take 10 to 11 hours, yikes! But if we are lucky and there is a cama, bed, bus then they are actually very comfortable. Oh! I learned something today (other than maths) and it is this; re-applying sunscreen does NOT extend the amount of time you can spend in the sun with whatever factor of sunscreen it is you are using. Maybe most of you knew this, and if you think about it logically it is obvious but it never occured to me. Just to

reitterate- if you would burn in ten minutes without suncreen and put on some factor 15, that mean you can stay out for 150 minutes and not burn, it does NOT mean you can re-apply and then stay out for another 150 minutes after the first 150minutes. I guess I had never though about it before but really that 150 minutes is that max time you can stay out before burning assuming you are sufficiently covered in sunscreen for the whole duration of that 150 minutes. Re-applying only ensures you are sufficiently covered, it doesn´t reset the clock to zero. I just thought if there were any of you out there you hadn´t really thought about how sunscreen works like me, well that you should know this.

Take care!

Just waiting in an internet cafe for someone to come online. It has been raining for a couple of nights this week here in Chiclayo and in a city where most of the streets are dirt and which does not have drains or anything this results in very muddy, dirty streets. In the centre of town where the streets are paved (concrete) you can´t even tell it rained but further out (where we stay) where as I said the streets are not paved, oh boy! Mud mud glorious mud! Well not glorious mud actually, scary mud, that smells of poop. It must be the most noxious mix concievable, not only is household waste thrown there but the faeces from all the stray dogs is mixed in too. Also the sewage system is rudamentry and in some spots there is a distinct odor and one suspects it isn´t coping with all the water. It makes walking around here like an obstacle course but at least it has reduced the previously omnipresent dust. I really liked the group of young things (all older than me) who we were teaching English to, it was nice to find out that in Peru there were young people just like me. I didn´t really think there wouldn´t be but it was nice to get to know some. I also always thought that the vast majority of south americans were deviot Catholics so it was nice to find out that at least some young people were not so. However this said I am looking forward to going up into the mountains and breathing some of that pristene and rarefied mountian air. Plus countryside dirt is good honest dirt unlike city dirt which is just nasty.

Best

Craig

Well what have I been upto and thinking about? We took a little trip up into the Andes, to a mid sized town called Cajamarka. The trip was unexpected but welcome. Cajamarka is notable as the place where Pizzaro and his 160 fellow conquisidors captured the Inca (the inca emperor) and slaughtered about 7000 to 8000 inca warroirs and others who were unlucky enough to be in that place at that time. Those numbers themselves are quite alarmingly disparate but consider that the Inca had an army of (I guess these are rough estimates) 40 to 80 thousand battle hardened troops stationed around Cajamarka. As a show of confidence he only took 7000 with him to meet Pizzaro, he also decided coming unarmed was a good idea. Sometimes one doesn't get a second chance. Whatever you may think of Pizzaro and his ruthless gold grabbing ways what he pulled off that day was quite extraordinary to say the least. He and his men knew what they were up against and it is recorded that none of them managed to sleep during the night before the big day. Well the rest is history and the mightly Inca empire, the largest in all south america was no more. For the record pre Columbian Peru does not equal the incas, in fact the inca empire was only around for under 100 years. Peru was inhabited by an number of diverse cultures who waned and waxed and generally lasted for more than 100 years. Here in the northern coastal desert of Peru, the major civilisations where the Moche, Sican and Chimu, in that order. These cultures were in the main not at all obliterated by the Incas but they did not survive the Spaniards and all that came after. Well, perhaps, I have only been in Peru a short time and I have not been up in the Andes very much. I expect alot of what happens in the remote parts of Peru is the more or less similar to what has always happened in the remote parts of Peru. Maybe. Of the Peruvians I have met so far, a significant number have talked of the sense of Peruvian national identity or the lack thereof. They mention a lack of unifiying national identity and also a lack of education about their past resulting in most people who don't identify with the spanish identifying with the incas, even though another culture was much more dominant in their area. But I don't really know much about that and anyway it is always a tricky, convoluted issue for any country. I am reading the 'Motorcycle diaries', or rather I was reading it while up in the Andes but I have since finished. Well Kelly read the end to me as I lay in a hot beer and fever induced sweat, but that is another story. It is an interesting book (Che Gueveras memoirs of his south american travelling during his days as a young Argentenian medical student). Two things made me a little apprehensive of meeting the campesinos of Peru, the rural dwellers. One was the way Che described them. I quote 'The somewhat animal-like concept the indigenous people have of modesty and hygiene means that irrespective of gender or age they do their business by the roadside, the women cleaning themselves with their skirts, the men not bothering at all.'
This and the fact that the most shocking scene I had experienced, the life atop the land fill site, was inhabited by people who had come there by choice from the Andes.
So I was apprehensive, fearing of being too far outside my comfort zone. Of course I know it is good to get outside your comfort zone and I want to experience as much as possible the differing realities that people of this world call life. That is the main thing I think I will take away from my travels.
Anyway my fears were as yet unfounded, Cajamarka is quite an afluent town being as it is next to a large and productive (and polluting) gold mine. We did see Camposinos living in a very rudamentry manner but not too shocking. In the town itself there was however a sharp contrast between the Peruvians who wore western/modern clothes and those who wore traditional clothes. There seemed to be nothing inbetween. It made me wonder, is it mearly a matter of wealth, do those two types mix socially. Do people wear jeans and a tshirt one day and then traditional, colourful textiles and a wide brimmed hat the next?
We spent a pleasant few days seeing our first inca sites, enjoying the cool climate and even bathing in the banos del Incas. The very same hot spring baths that the Inca emperor bathed in before going to meet Pizzaro and his fate.
We got to go on a little field trip with a bunch of Peruvian birdwatchers and pratice taking on and off our emergency rain ponchos a lot. We bought these one dollar emergency ponchos in Target before we left the States and at the first sprinkle of rain we wipped them out. Well wipped implies a degree of speed, of course by the time we had the ponchos out the rain had stopped. But as it was the tail end of the rainy season in the Andes it showered on and off all day and we got pretty proficient at wipping out and wipping on the ponchos. They were definately a good buy.
Well, that is all for now, I gotta go study maths now. Yeah I know. Why? I don't know. All I know is the exam is probably going to kick my ass, so I better go nerd out.

Bye

ps. We also got to sit and drink good wine while listening to a father and son band play guitar and sing cuban songs under a big poster of Che illuminated by the warm glow of parafin lamps. Awesome.

pps. there should be a few more pics up on my photo site.

Well, I have chosen a photo sharing site and here it is: http://point-zeroth.dotphoto.com

However don´t get too excited, after two days I have only uploaded the meagre selection of photos you will find there. Hopefully I will find a better internet joint or at least be more picky about which photos go up.

Cherio!

I apoligise for being a lame blogger. I am not sure why I havn´t had time to post. I would like to think it is because I am doing so much study (for the distane course I am doing) but no not really, despite trying to make myself study all day long I get disapointingly little done. Something always comes up! Recently we did get to spend 3 days up in the Andes which was very nice indeed. I promise I will find time to write. I am working on getting pics too, but upload speeds are woefully slow here, it takes about an hour to get 4 or 5 pics uploaded. Meh.
I hope you are all well!

Craig

The cathedral at the plaza de armas in Trujillo.
Two TINY little kids dancing the Marinera, the traditional peruvian dance, they were sorta cute.

Hi just a quick little post. Still having a great time here. We are being taken on lots of bird watching trip and musuem visits by the canatura volunteers, pretty much every other day! The bird watching is amazing here, really, in just 2 hours and a gentle stroll we easily see 10 to 20 different bird species! I have been snapping away like a man possessed but a 12x zoom is paltry for nature photography. The countryside here is just splendid. After having been in a dirty, dusty, noisy, smelly urban environment for so long it was, to say the least, uplifting to be in pristine, beautiful nature. I know for sure I want to work in the field of environmental protection/ conservation now. Definately gave me a boost. I will write more soon I promise and I am looking for a good photo sharing site as I have too many pics I want to share. We are also getting into the swing of things with our english lessons, Kelly is great to teach with. She is both better at planning lessons and adlibbing (is that how you spell that?) during the lesson. I am just there is confuse matters with my wacky British english.

Cherio

A moche pyramid

A complex Moche site, basically a royal city.

Kelly with Verdy

Just a quick update. We are settling into Chiclayo, we havn´t seen another gringo since we got here on Monday! It is a nice city though, although we have witnessed our first crime. Sesar (sp?) one of the Canatura volunteers came to pick us up and take us to the house where we would be giving our first English lesson and someone just ripped off his bum-bag (fanny-pack) and took off with it. It happened so fast we didn´t have time to react! Anyway since then I and Kelly have been taking extra special care with our bags. We had been careful before but this was a wake up call as up to now the overwhelming impression I had was that Peruvians were very curtious and honest. It is a shame, I don´t want to be eyeing up everyone on the street with distrustful eyes, but better safe than sorry. The group of volunteers we are teaching english are young peruvians who voluntarily take school children out of field trips to teach them about the amazing natural wealth of Peru and the importance of preserving it. They also do some environmental awareness festivals. Peru apparently has the 2nd largest number of endemic birds in the world, partly due to its varied environment, going from low coastal desert, to high jungle in the andes to the amazon rain forest on the other side. It seems there is very little official efforts to protect what they have. The hunting of birds of prey for sale in rich western markets is one problem close to sesars heart. He specialises in raptors including the massive harpy eagle which they have here in Peru. Our host, Edivali (who is the local canatura chapter leader) has been kind enough to take us on a few sight seeing trips, one to the museum of ´the lord of sipan´ which contained many wonderful gold and shell bits and bobs from the tomb of a Moche king which was found nearby. The story of the discovery of the tomb is like an Indiana Jones story with arceologists and police battling robbers culminating in the death of the robber leader. Anyway most of the priceless artefacts were saved and a good thing too. The Moche culture rules over the northern coastal desert of Peru and were a major pre Inca civilisation here. Their metal working skills were amazing and the gold jewelery of the king was stunning. Their pottery was also very good, often it depected animals in a very life like manner, I was impressed. They biuld huge truncated pyramids out of adobe bricks which when they weathered looked just like large hills and so escaped detection until recently. The musuem was well laid out and the guide entusiastic and informative but photos where not allowed so you will have to take my word for how great it was. It is also always interesting to hear about the human sacrifices and blood drinking that their religious and cultural activities revolved around. OK time is almost up.

Cherio!

Well, what an interesting time it is for me. For more than one reason actually. Most of you know the one HUGE reason why I am in something of a state of bliss. I keep remembering it, that I actually did it and its real and I get tummy tingles all over again. I expect that to last for some time to come. Another unrelated piece of good news took me by surprise and now puts me in a quandry. It is not related to the afore mentions happy happening and it is a nice quandry to be in. What I do want to do is introduce you to OUR newest charge, a very young green iguana names Verdy. How he came into our charge I will write about soon as I am almost out of time in the internet cafe but please enjoy this picture of Verdy in his Verdant Verde Voluptumouness. We hope to find a suitable jungaly home for him and set him free.

Please take care, shake what your momma gave you and accept my heartfelt thanks for all your congratulatory exclamations.

And btw I can´t get the spell checker to work.

Adios!

Looks like I have more time. Well I and mi novia were walking along the shore front marveling (and wondering whether we should be conserned) at the small tsunami which was hitting our chilled fishing hamlet (slash tourist resort) and also wondering what on earth was happening to the sun. Well anyway now that the scene is set a little girl covered in bright green lizards on pieces of string confronts me. Turns out she wants to sell them. I decide I would earn some sneeky Karma by buying one and setting it free (in hindsite, no, but it seemed good at the time). So we took the lizard which turned out to be a recently hatched green iguana home. We thought we might let it loose (not knowing it was a green iguana capable of growing to 4 or 5 foot long and living 35 years) it the little garden at the house in which we were staying. We planned on doing a little research before we did this but the old lady tormented poor Ferdinand (as he was then called) so much he shed his tail showering her in little droplets of blood. That was more than I could handle and I cut him free so he could escape. It was then we discovered his true potential, he could not live in the tiny garden! But when we came to look for him again he was no where to be found! How sad! Luckily Kelly, amazing as always, found him the morning we were due to leave to Chiclayo. Phew! Anyway he is getting along fine and seems to like us handling him. He also likes green beans and sitting on Kelly´s head but we will try and vary his diet. Tomorrow we hope to get a small tank for him to live in (temporarily) as he is growing to very much dislike his current shoe box of a home. It does have air vents and a plastic sheet for a rude window. Sorry Verdy but it is for your own good. Not too far away there is a nice tropìcal foresty natural reserve, we will deliver him to the freedom he deserves!

That´s all

Just a quick update, seems like plans have firmed up and we will be starting our first volunteer project this Monday! Pretty excited about that. We will be teaching english to Peruvian eco tourist guides. More soon.

Here are some pics: The traditional peruvian fishing boat, called Cabaito toertiga, which have been used esentially unchanged since at least the moche culture 200 years ago.
The reed boats drying in the sun.
In you look closely at this relief at the moche pyramid (Huaca de la lun) you can see clearly one of the reed boats (upper left). The site dates back to around 200 years ago.

The humming bird who visits the garden of the house were we stay everyday.
We were lucky enough to arrive in Huanchaco just before the carnival, the after party went on (officially) until 6am!
At the carnival parade

A colourful barrio overlooking Lima
The beach at Miraflores, Lima

I continue writing this post back in the house we are staying; we are renting a room for a week for 20 bucks each from Senora Wilma. She is a rather cute older Peruvian lady who has the world’s most complicated domestic water supply in the world. The two Dutch girls and Canadian woman who have been here for three weeks confess they haven’t got worked out how it works. Never the less it is a fine place to stay, with a cool patio next to a cactus garden frequented daily by an emerald throated hummingbird. What have we been upto? Let me think. Well we spent about a week in Lima, it is a nice city. I was expecting something along the lines of India or Cambodia when I arrived but it was very civilized (aside from a very long immigration queue). Things were quite clean, there we no touts and we easily got a safe clean taxi. The following day we explored the city and again very civilized. The streets we pretty clean, little rubbish, they were not overly crowed with people, everything was paved. So far so good! People seemed pretty well dressed too, there were hardly any beggars, touts or down and outs. This said we were in the centre of Lima which seems to have a large police (normal and tourist) presence. My first call of the day was to visit the Britanico centre where I will sit my exams in a few months time so final arrangements for that, we decided to brave the public bus system and what fun that turned out to be! We were helped by some kind people also waiting for the bus and hopped on the right bus. And were helped trhought the day by a string of curtious people. The busses themselves are tiny, ramshackle and driven by wanna be race car drivers. They have a list of streets through which they will pass written on the side which is quite a good system, although if you ever go make sure to double check with the conductor that that list is uptodate. Oh and those buses only cost one sol as far as you want to go (within city limits)! That's only 30 cents (US)! You would pay ten or fifteen times that for a taxi! So we got my business done, I paid my exam fees at the Scotia bank to sit my exam at the Britanico centre. Next, siteseeing! While looking for the San Fransico monastery we were approached by our first random Peruvian, an old lady wondering if she could help us with where we wanted to go. I was initially suspicious and kept a keen I out for any funny business as we she walked along with us to the Monastery, she was very pleasant and warned us about the robbers posing as tattoo artists on a nearby street and about the inflated prices of the street vendors, much better to buy souvenirs from the official shops and markets she said. She apparently taught English to primary school kids in Lima but as we said our goodbyes and thanked her at the Monastery I still half expected her to ask for some money (as is not unusual in say Thailand) but no, nothing! After the monastery tour, with the large and creepy catacombs being a highlight, we said outside and pondered our next move. A shoe shiner approached us then, be turned him down but then he too started to chat to us. Saying he was from some little rural mountain town and didn't really like Lima. Then another chap came up, asking if the church next to the monastery was open, it wasn't. He went to check and then returned to, yes you’ve guessed it, to chat! He was a trainee lawyer in Lima who was studying English. We chatted for a while and he taught us some Lima slang. Then a yellow uniformed tourist policeman approached and started speaking to us. He said he had noticed how we talked to two people and that although some people were nice we should be careful as others may have ulterior motives, and then it seemed like he too just wanted to chat to us. He was also studying English and wanted to go to the USA to teach Spanish. Oh boy! As lovely as those people were, after that we were a little wary of dallying in one spot for too long for fear of someone wanting to chat to us! I continue writing this blog now after a break of some days. In that transition period my view of Peru has changed. Up until Wed the 27th it had seemed to me Peru was actually quite well off. Lima as I said was quite civilized. Huanchaco the smaller town in which we are now domiciled also shows no signs of desperate need, the beach is packed with Peruvian holiday makers bedecked in their quicksilver and such like surfer/beach apparel. There is a new shiny American style mall near by which has an entire floor dedicated to the 'back to school sale'. Interesting as we have been lugging circa 80 ish pounds of school materials with us to donate. However this all changed on Thursday. Juani, one half of the husband and wife volunteer coordinator team, took us to see first a refuge for women (escaping domestic abuse) and then a land fill site. The woman’s refuge was sobering enough; domestic abuse is rife here and men and women alike sometimes view it as the norm, the woman’s refuge receives no government money. There funding was cut some time ago and now a few volunteers struggle to keep this small operation going, able to help on average 6 women a month. They serve a population area of around 2 million people. Next was the dump, a land fill site serving the city of Trujillo (768,300 people) and surrounding area. We visited the families who both live on and make a living from the rubbish of the land fill. They live in crude shelters, pieces of cloth or plastic strung between poles, with perhaps a mattress underneath. Right on top of the garbage. They sift through the rubbish separating out what can be recycled which they then sell to rickshaw driver who in turn sell it to lorry drivers and so on until it returns to the recycling plants around Trujillo. After a long day of grueling work a person working the dump would expect to earn one dollar....on a good day. As we drove away we passed a dump truck going to unload Juani commented in a tone heavy with the bitter anger and disgust of this situation "now they will fight over it." Oh my dear goodness! So people will fight over what is thoughtlessly thrown away by the relatively affluent inhabitants of a city less than 30 minutes drive away. Like dogs fighting over scraps fallen from the table. Well anyway, makes you wonder at the nature of the system at work here. The volunteer project, ACJ, operates right next to the land fill and provides a YMCA/ school for the children of the dump families. They actually have a really nice building and good supplies, courtesy of foreign aid (which has now dried up as European attention now focuses most on Africa). The Parents of the children must agree not to use their little'uns as child labor and in return the children are always welcome at the centre and to all its resources, I believe they periodically check the dump to make sure the parents are holding to their side of the bargain. Another things which causes pause for thought is that the people on the dump has moved there willingly because where they come from is worse. They come from the Peruvian highlands to work on the dump because they can earn more money there. So there we have it. We gave the lion’s share of the school materials, clothes and crafty things that Kelly's mother's school has so kindly donated to the ACJ project. As luck would have it they were having a birthday party that day (for all the children who had a birthday in Feb and also Jan as they had missed that month) so our timing was quite fortuitous and they kids were very excited about the gifts they were all of a sudden getting. We had to rush off though to be at the volunteer lunch. There are now I think about 19 volunteers who have been placed through Otra Cosa in various projects in Peru. They were a varied and interesting bunch although hopefully we will not get to know them. I wish this not for any failing on their part but because I hope we can get our project for March sorted out and be up in Chilclayo by Monday or Tuesday. We will be teaching English to volunteer eco tourist guide up there (it is further north), but as yet there is a distinct lack of communication, it is Peru after all. If that doesn't work out then we will have to wait at least a week, maybe two for another project here in Huanchaco to start up. In April we will be off up into the Peruvian Andes to again teach English there, should be an adventure, there are lots of exciting temples and fortresses and things hidden in the jungle up there that require days of hiking (with machetes) to get to. Awesome. Oh and also people to teach English to. Shouldn't forget them. Time to wrap things up before I start having to serialize this post! Last night we went to a club (fundraising event) with our Spanish teacher and some of the other volunteers. Pheeeeeeeeeeooooooh! It was heaving! The club was packed to the rafters with young (like 18ish) Peruvians and gyrating and jiggling and generally creating far too much body heat. It was like a sauna in there, we are all dripping with sweat after just sitting down in there for 5 minutes. The condensation in the air was clear to see, like I said just like a sauna. And then we danced. If the diarrhea wasn't dehydrating me then dancing in there certainly was, but it was fun! We were dancing on the upper floor which flexing alarmingly under our boogying weight. When we all jumped in time (required for certain tunes) it felt like we were on a trampoline. I figured it was going to be the people bellow us who came acropper and not us and kept on dancing. Today will be boring, tidying and laundry but tommorrow we are going to rent boards and surf all day. Kelly surfed for her first time last week and surfed across the face of a wave, like really, properly surfed a wave! She's a natural! However as a little boy who had the missfortune to get in her way discovered she didn't have much experience in turning, but don't worry he survived.
Adios!
Hasta Siempre!

ps. we went in search of rehydrating drinks today and found for some strange reason that each little shop here in Huanchaco (of which there are many) had one and only one bottle of sportaid. No more or no less. Wierd. So we had to visit several little stores to get as many as we wanted.

Minnesota

Welcome to my new bog!

I am sitting in an internet cafe in Huachuca, Peru. It is a small fishing village that woke up one day to find itself a popular tourist destination for beach lovers and surfers, Peruvians and gringos alike. Its iconic icon is the reed boats the fishermen here use, they have remained unchanged since anticquity, and paintings in a nearby mocha culture pyramid clearly show fishermen using identical boats, circa 2000 years ago. True the fishermen spend allot of their time taking tourists out for rides and the design has been updated with a polystyrene core, but still, pretty neat. But before I start yappering about Peru I would like to yap about Minnesota. I spend a wonderful month with Kelly and her family in Minnesota prior to coming here. I whiled away many a happy day cross country skiing, snow mobiling and of course ice fishing. It is pretty chilly at times in Minnesota, one cannot deny minus 40 to 60 Celsius is cold even if one likes to think of ones self as a wee Scottish hard man (and I like to think that with my tongue half in my cheek, but only half). Actually I liked the weather there, it was an improvement on the Scottish winter I had left behind. Although it only fell to perhaps minus 5 in Scotland (and that was early in the morning) the wet and wind make it much more miserable. And boy can it get windy, I went on a hike with my dad and his walking group and we literally had to crawl on our bellies for the last 10 meters to the top of the hill, hugging the ground for fear of being blown away! It was as we say a little fresh that day. And back to Minnesota, they really like hunting and fishing and such like, this I discovered. Within days of arriving I had been out looking for deer castings, shooting squirrels with a bb gun, playing a hunting, fishing and camping version of trivial pursuit and waited outside a giant outdoor equipment shop to get in as soon as the doors opened. OH! And also allot of the petrol stations here also sell live bait (as in little fishies to catch bigger fish), and this not considered unusual at all! I spend some fun evenings drinking in very small bars that all had a hunting arcade game. I saw many paintings and statues of ducks. I also had more opportunity to experience the American state of being. It is indisputably a very wealthy country but also the wealth is used in a different way to Europe. For instance a family here can be very well off in terms of possessions, with things the average brit wouldn’t consider having but still not be able to have medical insurance. Or as another example the large quite affluent city of Minneapolis and or Saint Paul was wondering how on earth it was going to afford to extend the one tram line in the city. European countries seem to have no problem sprouting train and tram lines up the wazoo! This said I and many Americans do hope the healthcare system in America will be sorted out. And it's not as if the NHS in the UK is not a big mess. I suppose if I could afford it I would like to have my healthcare in the US but on the other hand as I am now an unemployed bum I quite appreciate have the HNS at my service in the UK. More soon!