Primero destinación...Punto Hermosa, Perú

So my Semana Santa in Perú was inolvidable, sin embargo, it was very long and very crazy, I´ll try and recount what took place from the beginning...

We started off the trip flying from Quito in the mountains to the coast in Guayaquil and waited there for a couple of hours before we met up with four other kids that had just gotten done visiting the Galapagos Islands to leave as a 10 person group to Lima,Perú. And this is where the trip started to go sour...

If you recall, we were supposed to travel with Professor Florencio Delgado, professor of Andean Archeology. He arrives at the airport with $2000 in hand to return to us. We each gave him a $500 deposit the week before, which should have been an indication of how unorganized this trip would be. He went to the bathroom and counted and it and returned it to us. Then he informed us that he would not be traveling with us to Lima(Friday) but would meet us on Sunday because his mother was ill in Cuenca(2hrs away by car from Guayaquil). He then introudced a prof. from another school named Gilda who would be accompanying us on the trip,nobody had ever met her before. So here we were, 9 students and one random adult headed on a plane to Lima where we would meet....someone we didnt know.

The plane, although it only cost $165 roundtrip was really nice with free movies on the back of the head rests and in flight games. Also for Ecuador and Peru there are airport taxes for international flights that you have to pay in cash at the airport,a little new. It took two hours before we arrived to Lima. In the airport, because we weren´t told otherwise we converted all of our money ($480) into peruvian soles(pronounced soul-lays). We were then met in the airport by the hostal owner Enrique who was there to pick us up in a bus for 20 but there were only 9 of us...the beginning of the miscommunication.

Enrique is an archeologist phD candidate at the University of Pittsburg and has a Heines(the ketchup company) fellowship to carry out his work near Punto Hermosa,Perú about 40km outside of Lima where he works with his team from Belgium, Spain and several other countries at an archeological site that I can´t remember but have pictures of(haha). So even though Delgado did not accompany us we were getting the real deal with this guy...to an extent.

So we take the 45min bus ride,tired, to his hostal in Punto Hermosa. There we explain our situation and how nothing is really organized. He starts by saying that he is soo glad that we ended up with him and not on the streets and Lima with all this cash strapped on us, and so were we, we thought. He agrees at that point to give us a free night on Sunday if we can´t get a bus to go to Cuzco from Lima that day. That was $30 off basically, so we all paid upfront. Needless to say he reneged and the last night said that the numbers weren´t adding up and he´d need $15 from all of us, well that didn´t go over too well with the indignant of the group,which resulted in a hr and a half back and forth between the group and him. Some highlights were him saying, that what he felt was us being ungrateful, we were TOLD to leave by 9am the next morning on monday, and since we were talking business he expected to be reembursed for the gas he wasted driving 45min into Lima to get our bus tickets for us($2 a piece)...very awkward situation thanks to Delgado!!

Back to the fun stuff...

So he took us to Pachacamac which is a HUGE archeological site right outside of Lima. He helped with the excavating of it about 6yrs ago and had VIP access to some parts which was neat. The site is super old and on the coast originally used by pre-Incan societies, then by the Incans, and then conquered by Pizzarro and company in the 16th century. When Pizzarro ransomed Atahualpa, he sent Pizzarro to Pachacamac to steal the gold he demanded. The size of the site is muy impresionante, and there are still huge huge parts that are underground and one can tell from a far because of the different shades across the many acres of land. By the way, I´m sure you can notice how dessert-ie it is here.

Kique(as he liked to be called), then took us to eat at this really nice buffet lunch restaurant, and then to his site where he works. It´s smaller than Pachacamac and open to the public which can complicate things but they still work 8hrs a day in the arid heat. He´s looking mainly for pyraimd remains and the implications of social structure in the area, very interesting stuff, but I´m glad I´m an African American Studies major.

That night he threw a party at a club within walking distance from the hostal on the beach and the dinner was salmon! The next day was Sunday, the day we wanted to leave but could not so based on his suggestions we went to go be lazy on the beach. We laid out and got burned under the sun at Punto Hermosa. The place is well known within the surfer world because of Pico Alto, which is the second largest surfable wave on the planet. In fact, the hostal we stayed at housed supposedly one of the greatest surfers of all time back in the 80s, and of course Kique surfs and is all about good energy...but we had the exact opposite that night. I even went to misa(mass) with the catholics in the group...it was boring(sorry God, please forgive me)...I say this because the misa I went to the following Sunday in Lima was really nice and interactive.

that´s all for now, that´s the very first leg of my trip from there we took a 20hr bus ride from Lima to Cuzco(because we didn´t know when we would be going where we were unable to buy plane tickets for 150 ida y vuelta(roundtrip) from Lima to Cuzco. I´ll post as many pics as I can right now and more later but I have to go meet a friend for a birthday a la Mariscal(see previous posts) and it takes forever to do this at an internet café!!!!

i´ll try and post about Cuzco tomorrow, stay fresh...till tomorrow

(ps...email me Willa)