Peru – Page 2 – The Nature Bloggist

Guess What, We’re Going to Peru

Some time around the end of February, 2019, Haley spotted an Interjet fare from San Antonio to Lima, Peru that was a really great deal. I had vacation hours built work, so we booked it and then started quickly learning about Peru.

Our approach to visiting places around the globe has been driven a lot by keeping an eye out for travel deals, mistake fares, etc. Haley is the master architect, who can find ways to plan trips to various fascinating place on the globe and is a fan of deals.

We’ve jumped on mistake fares and other one-offs that are far enough out to schedule a trip as well as using point and miles and things to keep things as cheap as possible. The place to go to learn about this stuff is http://flyertalk.com, and to follow some Twitter accounts that announce mistake fares/deals, and check big international airports nearby if you can get a cheap domestic hop.

We flew to Oslo on a mistake fare and saw a spring migration there, then hopped to Paris then Rome. We flew to Australia on a mistake fare that into an amazing trip. We also use things like Southwest’s companion pass once they opened routes to San Jose, Costa Rica.

This Lima flight was an Interjet deal from San Antonio to Lima that was cheap for getting to South America. Once Haley booked that we started to learn more about Peru. Peru is a large country, full of a lot of really unique places and wildlife, with a coastal desert that meets an ocean full of life, the Andes have an amazing cultural and historic heritage from the Incas and other pre-hispanic cultures as well as being home to interesting and really unique wildlife. And across the Andes to the east is the Amazon basin, so Peru’s partly Amazon rainforest.

We both worked together to read up on the places we could visit and deciding which ones we thought were critical, which we wanted to try to work in, and which we could skip. At the top of the list for me was Paracas and the Ballesta islands. Flamingos and penguins! And we found an Air B&B deal staying on the beach that sounded really cool.

We talked about it and both felt we were obliged to go to Machu Picchu. Archaeological sites truly are interesting, but we really tend to enjoy ecotourism more. On a vacation in Greece we were reading epigraphy off Hellenic and Hellenistic and Roman monuments in Greece when my Greek and Latin was still fresh enough that I could read a lot and I knew much of the history as we visited Delphi and the Acropolis and things. Also we visited a Byzantine monastery near Sparta that was incredibly ancient with pieces of it built from ancient Greek and Roman structures, and still in use. This was perhaps too cool. Even Pompeii was not quite as cool.

So we both worried we might be too archaeology spoiled, but also we were in some way obligated to see Machu Picchu.

Everything we read about Arequipa made it sound like a beautiful place to be and it’s near lake Titicaca, which sounds like a really unusual and fascinating place with floating villages and the really odd biome of a high altitude lake at the feet of the Andes. Jacques Cousteau did a program on Lake Titicaca and even with a name that made all of third grade giggle, I remembered Cousteau showing the lake and odd frogs and interesting and unique habitats, but we didn’t have time.

We were okay with skipping the Nasca Lines. They’re interesting and once of those things that has some interesting mysteries, but to really see them you have to get a flight over them, and also they’re in the middle of a dry desert and distant from other things. We were also okay with just using Cusco for an airport stop and not spending time there.

We’ve found it’s usually better to spend more time in a few amazing places than to try to hit everything where you wind up spending a lot of time time traveling between brief visits with amazing places. I like to learn the calls of local birds and wildlife since for me it adds to the enjoyment of the habitat when I’m more in touch with its richness through sound. Over time we’ve worked out our style of fewer places and more time, and it works for us.

Due to booking requirements we had eight days in Peru. Peru is a very large country, and distances between many lot of points of interest are often large. It is a very long trip from arriving in Lima to reaching the Amazon.

So we cut Manu/the Amazon, Arequipa, lake Titicaca, and other things. Our focus was getting to Machu Picchu, then getting time in Paracas/Pisco area, then on to Lima which has really cool birding esp in the beaches and wetlands to the south, fascinating culture, and is a beautiful and interesting old city, and a large oasis built up on the dry cliffs over the Pacific.

The cuts to fewer sites felt rough when we were planning, but getting more time into exploring areas and spending less in transit was really worth it.

We had visited Precision Camera (happy to support a great local business we know and trust, and we like being able to visit a camera store where we can look at models in person) a few times to get the D500 cleaned, and to look & eventually buy a P900. While there we wound up talking to a guy with a D7500 and a lot of great bird photos who lived in Costa Rica. We talked for a while about Costa Rica, and mentioned we were prepping for a trip to Peru. He mentioned that Ollantaytambo was really cool to visit and mentioned a couple other things about Peru that were really helpful for planning.

Eventually hard choices were made and we had an itinerary:

San Antonio-Mexico City

(long layover here with hotel booked on points for eve, and chance to visit the Archaeology Museum or some other museum)

Mexico City-Lima flight booked

Lima-Cusco domestic flight on LatAm booked

Cusco-Ollantaytambo – complicated but worst case we hire a taxi in Cusco, AirB&B room booked

Ollantaytambo-Aguas Calientes – train tickets booked online

Aguas Calientes-Machu Picchu – bus ticket only bookable in person at ticket office

Machu Picchu-Aguas Calientes – return bus on round trip

Aguas Calientes-Ollantaytambo – return train on round trip

Ollantaytambo-Cusco – plan to hire a taxi

Cusco-Pisco – LatAm domestic flight

Pisco-Paracas – worked out ride via Air B&B

Paracas-Lima – local Peru greyhound-style bus, 5 hour ride to Lima, hotel booked in Lima

Lima-Mexico City – booked

(another long layover, plan to visit some museum)

Mexico City-San Antonio – booked

San Antonio-Austin – long drive home after landing in SA

The plan hit a few small hiccups but mostly worked quite well.

next: Packing and Prep

Books and Spanish Prep for Peru

(Jan 2020 content – we’d gotten back from Peru, were writing about the 2019 trip, didn’t publish this back then, it’s a bit dated now, but we’ll have more to say on learning Spanish so this adds some context)

Once we’d booked the flight, we started planning for Peru. One early thing we did was go to a local Barnes & Noble to take a look at travel guides on Peru. We read through them and liked the Lonely Planet’s Peru travel guide. It was helpful for looking things up in prep for the trip to get a sense of things there and to look up transit inside Peru. We also used to it in Lima to find things to do and get a sense of what was where.

We also looked for what Spanish-English dictionaries, phrasebooks, etc. they might have, though the brick and mortar had nothing I liked.

At home we looked up field guides to the birds of Peru, and got a used copy of Princeton Field Guides Birds of Peru which we read through in prep for the trip.

An important book for this trip was a Latin American Spanish phrasebook to use for prep and take on the trip. I’d visited Costa Rica and we managed to drive all over the country in a 4×4 and we were fine, but I am definitely not fluent. At one point in Costa Rica we managed to get a rented 4×4 stuck in the mud, I talked to some locals about our problem and got a solution involving a tractor pulling us free worked out, but I didn’t know the word for mud (which I eventually looked up – “barro”).

We decided we wanted a paper book for this trip. We were in areas with very limited network, so no online tools were reliable. We ultimately bought the Lonely Planet Latin American Spanish Phrasebook and Dictionary online and that thing has been worth it’s weight in gold.

The book’s good – helped sort out the important vocab quickly, offer phrased (of varying utility, but many helpful), and it has a small but nice dictionary in the back.

I read and reviewed relevant sections of the book before the trip for prep, on air/bus/train travel, hotels, restaurants and other utility vocab./phrases to work into working memory. I reviewed before the trip and also during transit times or other down times. I hadn’t spoken Spanish in a couple years and was far from fluent then, so I had to work a lot in. I read bits and pieces of the dictionary as well just to look things up when I wondered about vocab. The book worked well for this.

I studied four years of Spanish in high school, and in college studied Greek and Latin with bits of French and German. This kind of background meant that I have a fair proficiency with reading Spanish, but learning to understand spoken Spanish by ear is really hard.

Part of my prep for ear training was listening to Latin music, and listening to/watching Spanish language media. Before the trip I watched a fair amount of Maria La Del Barrio with Spanish subtitles. This helped catch up on vocab more and work on listening skills. Also on the bus from Pisco to Lima Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit came on with Spanish voice acting and Spanish subtitles. That turned out to be a great show for immersion. (Iron Man II which was on earlier was less effective). I also listened to Latin music, though it’s likely Tito Puente’s latin jazz instrumentals didn’t really solidify my Spanish much.

Since the trip we watched The Muppets in Spanish which was great, and also interesting since the Latin American Spanish voiceover and the Latin American Spanish subtitles didn’t match.

I did Duolingo every day for a couple months leading up to the trip to keep basic language exercises running and help good enough vobab in working memory. It’s probably not the best language teaching app, but it’s adequate and helpful for reinforcing core vocab and reinforcing basic idioms. Since then I’ve kept it up and daily practice really is key.

Immersion really is the a great way to exercise auditory processing of a language, so this trip was also an opportunity to work on improving Spanish listening/comprehension skills. During the time spent in Peru I practiced where I could, and the immersion really did help a lot to reinforce learning. On the ride to the airport on the way home from Peru I chatted with the driver about the things we’d done like seeing penguins and flamingos on the coast, and how I really liked meeting people who spoke Quechua and he told me about the protections of pre-hispanic languages and cultures in their constitution, and we talked a bit about Aymara and Quechua.

My Spanish skills improved, though I was motivated to improve and thus spent time studying in prep. Learning some Spanish before visiting a Latin American country helps ease getting through customs/airports/train stations, etc. It’s also helpful in getting better food, and helps for finding interesting spots to visit on the ground. It’s really nice to be able to just chat with locals about birds and wildlife, it’s pretty common to find people who really do love seeing their local wildlife, and it’s honestly just nice to be able to tell them in their language how interesting/wonderful/important you find the local ecosystems and wildlife. You also manage better when visiting the little produce stores and so on. If you want to improve in a language, motivation really is important since you need motivation to keep up a practice regimen. The chances of getting really good food, seeing interesting birds/wildlife are easy motivators for me.

You can learn things about areas to look around, get pointers to interesting birds, etc. You also can save money, since stuff catering to anglo tourists can be priced higher than things marketed to Latin America, esp lodging. It also really is interesting when you get the chance to talk to people who live in other countries.