The Chris Cardé Experience

Just got back from a two-day mini-excursion to Colca Canyon and related tourist tasty treats. Overall, a good trip, though I´m starting to get the idea that I wasn´t built for high altitude. We crossed a mountain pass at 15,000 feet on the way to Chivay, the gateway town for Colca Canyon. Of course, at the summit, instead of starting the heck down the other side (as I would have voted for) we got out to examine the lack of vegatation and moon-like landscape due to, duh, lack of oxygen.

.... but the bus is already half an hour late. A number of us from the hostel who are going on this trip dragged our asses out of bed before 7am and are now moping around. Hopefully this´ll be fun, late bus notwithstanding.

When it rains, it pours. Or, less cryptically, when Chris starts doing tourist stuff, he REALLY does tourist stuff. Today, I got on one of those cheesy "city tour" buses and got chauffered around to sites that were thinly veiled tourist traps billed as "attractions." Did I really want to pay S/.10 to see the inside of the house beloning to the guy who founded Arequipa? Answer: no, and I did not pay.

A funny thing happened in Arequipa. I stopped moving around. My backback has been unpacked for half of a week, and is serving as a platter separating and elevating my stuff off of the hostel floor. By the time I leave, I´ll have been in this hostel for a week! This isn´t a bad thing, though. Adventure travel somehow morphed into relaxation lounging. This is kind of like a trip to Hawaii or the Carribean, just without that pesky beach. I ran out of reading material days ago (having bartered my copy of Wired magazine for goods and services), so excluding my time on the internet, I pretty much sit in a hammock and think.

I saw a dog fall off of a roof onto the sidewalk yesterday. That left me in a sad, sad mood all night. It was a big, goofy, [formerly] happy long-eared hound, and it looked to be hurt really badly. There´s something so innocent about a dog, not knowing why whatever bad thing that´s happened to it is happening -- You just hate to see a dog get hurt. That´s the saddest thing I think I´ll see for quite some time.

I had walked by the same rooftop earlier in the day and took pictures of the dogs frollicking (and they were quite photogenic at that!). I hope dogs falling off rooftops isn´t a common occurence here... If so, I may have found a calling in founding the Peru arm of the SPCA.

Nat, Anders, and April appeared out of the ether last night in the form of an email saying that they´ll arrive in Arequipa by bus this afternoon. I´m not sure how much time they´ll want to spend here, but it seems more than likely that, after seeing the sights this afternoon and tomorrow monring we´ll be back on the road by Monday night or Tuesday. I´d love to tell my readers where exactly the road leads, but Anders, April, and Nat (basically everybody but me) are the travel-masters. I am the travel-follower -- who also forgot to print out the Excel sheet describing where we wanted to be and when.

So, since arriving in Arequipa 36 hours ago, I haven´t left the hostel. I´ve been the [backpacking world´s] biggest homebody.

It´s actually been quite nice as a recuperative phase after the altitude sickness. My days have consisted of breakfast (a peruvian roll with jam and Nescafe), reading Wired and The Economist in the sunny courtyard, talking to some of my fellow travellers, communal dinners (cost: $3) in the evenings, and watching the hostel´s collection of pirated DVDs and VCDs in the evening.

Oh yeah, and the internet. Lots and lots of time on the internet. What with my 8000 mile and equatorial separation from work (and the daily grind behind a computer), idly surfing the internet and reading political blogs suddenly became fun again. I also may be the hostel´s most hated over-user (and abuser) of the few free internet computers here. Nobody´s been overtly mean to me - yet!

My big plan for today? Laundry. That´ll get me out of the hostel, and as an added bonus, clean laundry will qualify me to re-enter civilized society. I should also probably do SOME sightseeing here so that when Nat, Anders, and April show up (tonight? tomorrow? sometime?) I have some kind of local touristic expertise to show for my bonus 72 hours here - even if said expertise takes the simple form of 3 extra pictures of the local volcanic mountain and knowledge of the whereabouts of a single laundry shop.

So much for my being Mr. Alpine Skier High Altitude Extraordinaire! My previous blog entry was ever so slightly premature. Yes, Cuzco was beatiful and a great place for some sightseeing, but a few hours after writing that blog entry I crashed into bed with what turned into severe and extended case of Acute Mountain Sickness. Not a good time! So, I missed out on the other 36 hours of Cuzco.