'Roid Rage in Peru

Lots of updates since my last blog. After the wonderful boat trip and great meal of ceviche and roasted fish Josh and I had a beer and went to bed anticipating our great cloud forest adventure the next day. I awoke the next morning with a killer hangover, but after just one beer? At breakfast I decided I couldn’t go on this trip, let alone travel to our next destination. Luckily, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it our guide had to attend a funeral so our trip was bagged for the day. I spent the rest of the day with a headache and kidney pain, sleeping the day away. All I consumed that day was breakfast, water, and 20 hours of sleep.

We awoke the next morning, after cancelling our forest trip the night before, to get on a bus to Guayaquil, a port town in the southeast of Ecuador, one step closer to Peru. Here we would regroup, do some shopping and board a bus bound for the border. Josh spent a ridiculous amount of money on a camera battery and charger, he could have bought a whole new camera! The next morning we boarded a bus for Tumbes, a small town on the Peruvian side of the border 6 hours away. There we planned to catch another bus to Piura where we had tickets to fly to Lima.

The border crossing into Peru was strange, but luckily we had met an English speaking Peruvian who helped us out. Our bus dropped us off at Ecuador customs where we got our exit stamp, here the bus drove off with all of our luggage. It came back, then we drove across the border into Peru. There we got off the bus again to get our Peruvian entry stamp, then boarded the bus bound for Tumbes. Once in Tumbes we made a series of very stupid mistakes of trusting people that were not official representatives of bus companies, or even licensed taxi drivers. After a bit of negotiation we were in a private car with two men headed to an ATM to get local currency so we could drive to Zorritos to catch a bus. This was stupid, the drivers robbed us blind (well not really, we talked them down a lot, but still cost us way too much). The bus we boarded was nothing more than a glorified VW bus packed with people and luggage for our 4 hour drive to Piura.

After the most uncomfortable ride, we arrived in Piura to our hostel that I had booked earlier in the week…for the wrong night. So finally at 12:30 AM we were sent to a hotel with a vacancy. Though we had a private room with a television and hot running water it was the dumpiest and trashiest hotel I have ever stayed in. It even came with shotgun blasts ouside. We got up after about 4 hours of sleep and went to the airport. There we found out there was a problem with my credit card and the tickets were not officially purchased. Luckily there was room on the plane, but we ended up paying almost double to get on it. It was well worth it.

We arrived in Lima where our bad luck finally started to turn to okay. We had a good hostel, a good lunch and bought our plane tickets to Cuzco for pretty cheap. The rest of the day we just bummed around the city and didn’t do much. That night we had our first taste of pisco sours, an amazing drink that has egg whites as one of its main ingredients. I was going to bed in my empty 8 person dorm to find two girls moving in. They had just had a worse 48 hours than us so we swapped stories over a bottle of wine. They were nurses from New York City, about the same ages as Josh and I.

The next morning I awoke at 2 AM to a horrible pain on my backside. I went to the bathroom and went back to sleep. I woke up again at 7 with the same pain so I started my day with a shower. This is where it gets graphic…it turns out I had the largest hemorrhoid ever, about almond size. It turns out that I was so sick I was starting to turn inside out. As I was getting out of the shower one of the girls walked in and started telling me about her crazy dream, so I decided to ask her professional opinion since she was so wiling to share her wierd experiences too. She went with me to the pharmacy to get some ointment and some pills to stop me from being sick and further aggravate my problem.

After sitting around the hostel all day (in very weird positions) I decided to have a few beers with the girls to take my mind off of it. After a while Josh returned from his day out in Lima and we all went out for dinner to a nice little Peruvian style Denny’s. They were on the same flight as us the next morning so we all rode to the airport and shared a hostel in Cuzco. In town we went to Paddy’s Pub, the highest Irish owned pub in the world at 11,156 ft, and have shirts to prove it!

All of us decided to plan a paragliding tour together and met a guide, after much deliberation we saw that the weather was going to be bad so we decided to hire him to take us to a local market on Sunday then arrange our Machu Picchu trip. We celebrated by going to a nice Peruvian restaurant where I had my first taste of Alpaca meat. Some of you might know, that my parents have an alpaca farm. I am happy to report that the meat is tasty and as a burger is amazing!

Our guide met us at the hostel and introduced us to his neighbor Antonio, our driver for the day. We got into his brand new Toyota Corolla wagon with all of our gear and headed off into the hills in search of othe market. The driver introduced us to a group of women who made us coca tea and showed us how they clean, spin, and dye the alpaca fiber and then knit/loom it into products. Then we attended the major market where things were very inexpensive. I got myself a sweater and some gifts for home. All of this while my ‘roid rages on. By day 3, I graduated from sitting on my side to sitting on a towel, to sitting however I wanted, but getting up, sneezing, coughing and just about anything else was insanely painful.

That afternoon we had lunch in Urubamba and caught a train up to Aguas Calientes, the closest town to Machu Picchu. We were put up in a nice hotel where we waited for our guide to show up. We ended up drinking about 3 boxes of wine and playing cards, but he never showed up. After not eating since lunch we went to dinner around 10:00 and our guide found us there. We got a rundown for what we were to do the next day. He recommended getting up around 4:00 and heading to the bus station so we could make it up the mountain in time to climb the large mountain that sits behind the city. Only 400 people per day are allowed and you have to be there before sunrise to get a ticket. We decided to nix that plan and sleep in. Though we were about 2,000 feet lower the elevation was still affecting us.

The next morning we got some breakfast and headed up the mountain, we were met with stellar weather, eventhough it's the wet season! We met our English speaking guide Mario and toured the city for a few hours then were given free reign to see the rest of the park. A group of teachers from Washington College recommended that we go check out the Inca Bridge and the Sungate. Both were amazing short hikes and gave us some excellent scenery. At Sungate my stomach started to rumble and it rumbled hard. I RAN down the trail to the only bathrooms which were at the entrance. I had to fight large groups of tourists speaking all sorts of languages to get there (1 million visitors to MP last year). After paying the entry fee into the bathroom my body unleashed itself. I felt much better and the ‘roid popped so I had some relief, but worried about an open wound in that region.

We made it back to town and tooled around until our train came. We went to the station, then the power went out, and as Vinnie pointed out everyone regressed to 8 years old. Our train was late, which meant we might miss our connecting bus. Exhausted we found ourselves in a first class train, but slept through most of it.

Along the whole MP trip Josh and I toyed with the idea of joining the girls for their jungle excursion the next day…4 days and 3 nights in the Amazon and the Manu Biosphere. We met our guide at the hotel that night around midnight and booked it. We were going to leave at 9:30 the next morning. Operative word being “were.” That night my sickness took a strong hold on my body and sent me sprinting to the bathroom three times. Before going to bed it was recommended that I suppress my diarrhea so I could let the wound heal and not get infected, but I was still sick so it was kind of a Catch-22.

Believe it or not I didn’t have the worst sickness in the morning. Erin could not function, so we tried to cancel the trip. At $250 a head we couldn’t do this, so we said we would try again tomorrow and take a shorter trip if we were healthy. So far I am doing better, but on a water/rice diet and Erin is still deathly ill and Vinnie is pumping her full of drugs. We relocated to a more peaceful hotel, but a bit pricey. So today has turned into a day for healing, laundry, repacking and blogging.

Next we will see if this jungle trip happens, then figure out how to get to Chile.