What a thing that was, but, first, Lima.

The Marinas returned from their Machu Picchu trip pretty exhausted.  They’d had a hell of a day. While I was traipsing around Cusco spending money and avoiding huge parades, they were stuck on a train for four hours. Their train broke down on the way to Aguas Calientes.  How much does that suck? That was four hours they could’ve used at Machu Picchu, especially since they were only able to work in six hours to begin with because of all the tourists and the trains being full. (I finally figured out why there were so many people at Machu Picchu; turns out, and how I could’ve overlooked this is beyond me, it was the 100th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of Machu Picchu. So, maybe, if you go, it won’t be as overrun with tourists as it was for me in this particular year.) (Oh, also, if you ever go, make sure you get your tickets for the day you want to go in advance. They are now beginning to limit the number of tickets sold per day to cut down on the damage done by tourists, which is good, but it will make it more difficult to get tickets for a lot of folks. In fact, they just started to enforce this rule and when the Marinas were there, they either witnessed (or heard about?) an entire tour group who had gone all the way to Aguas Calientes only to find out their tour company hadn’t bothered to purchase the tickets ahead of time. A riot ensued. Had tar and feathers been available, I’m sure there woud’ve been a very ‘decorated’ tour guide.)(Oh, and wear lots of bug spray. The noseeums are nasty.)

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Every morning since we got into this (extremely clean) hostel on Plaza de San Blas, at about 7 am, we’ve been awakened by the sound of exploding sticks of dynamite followed by very bad marching band music. There’s always something going on in this little square here and it seems that these particular explosions as well as the bad music is a tribute to Santa Carmen. I’ve never heard of Santa Carmen and being Italian, you’d think I would’ve heard of Santa Carmen since Italians say novenas to every saint under the sun—Pray to Saint Ann if you want a man, Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, etc. and so forth—but Santa Carmen? I’ve never heard of her, but it seems like she’s an iteration of the Virgin. Anyway they totally dig her and have been celebrating her birthday. (I think it’s all about her birthday since I keep hearing an awful horn player playing Happy Birthday.) (Being a Saint and all, one might assume she should at least have a better horn section.) Yesterday, they built these huge and rickety looking structures out of what looked like bamboo, and they did something with them, I don’t know what though. We were at dinner when whatever was supposed to happen happened. (While we were waiting for our table, we spoke with this delightful French woman. She lives in Sante Fe but has a business where she conducts shaman and spiritual tours for French people down here in South America. She’s carved out quite an impressive niche for herself. Her website is santefecoaching.com. We told her about the structures and she high-tailed up to San Blas to see what it was. I hope we bump into her again so I can ask her what happened.) Anyway, after a truly fabulous meal, and I mean wow, it was good (I had some sort of native potato gnocchi with a creamy pumpkin sauce) we headed back up to the hostel at about 10 pm and found a ton of people singing and dancing in the street outside of the church that is practically next door to our hostel. There was, however, no trace of the big rickety things.

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What a journey. We left Cuenca early in the morning, but not before I had to talk to a family that we’d seen in a restaurant in Otavalo, our Hostel in Baños and then, our hostel in Cuenca. It was like they were following us. I get the whole Lonely Planet People thing, but that was extreme. He was traveling with his wife and daughter. He is a professor of Geology and she is a cartographer. Like Peter, the whole professor thing has enabled their predilection for travel. Though, I’m jealous of the fact that they got to hike to Machu Pichu 24 years ago. THAT was the time to do it. They were such seasoned travelers that I’m sort of impressed that they chose the same stuff we did. Maybe we’re doing this traveling thing mostly right after all.

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