Cake face and camping in Pisac - Week 3 for Lauren in Peru

COUNTRY: Peru
PROGRAM: GapBreak
PROJECT: Teaching & Building
WRITTEN BY: Lauren Collee

Three weeks into the Peru placement, Cusco really is beginning to feel like home. Our first impressions of our host families turned out to be spot on. They are perpetually good natured and embrace our cultural differences with a sense of humor. My Peruvian mum is so concerned for our well-being that she puts our knives and forks in a saucer when setting the table so that bugs don’t fall off the ceiling and crawl over them and make us sick. Apart from the occasional unconventional dinner, like cold apple pie or jelly, the home cooked meals here have been exceptional - parents back home have a lot to live up to!

For my 18th birthday, my host mum plonked an incredible looking chocolate cake in front of me, and then told me to take a bite out of the side while my host brother shoved my face into it. I don’t know why no one warned me this was a South American tradition, but it was delicious anyway. Everyone carefully avoided the portion of the cake that had the imprint of my nose and chin in it. I don’t think Eleanor had her face shoved in a cake on her big day later that week– it was a dense banana loaf, might have hurt a little bit.


An update on our progress at the school in Corao for all our lovely friends and family who have donated – as we finally begin to understand the meaning of the term ´hard labor´, we are getting more and more efficient with our greenhouse building. We have come a long way from the first few days, when our attempts to wield a pickaxe looked more like interpretive dance. The expression on Sarah brindles face when she is working at a particularly tough weed these days is something beyond terrifying. Unfortunately, our attempts to actually teach the students have been thwarted time and time again by public holidays and government strikes.

We have been assured that the strikes will pass, but for the meantime, it’s quite nice having the school to ourselves while most of us still look a bit ridiculous trying to get the hang of wheelbarrows.

Last weekend, we left Cusco for the first time since getting here.. for the second time in the case of Jacinta and James, that is, who obviously didn’t get along too well with the officials at the airport, were granted hilariously short visas, and had to flee temporarily to Bolivia last week before their stay ran out.

Anyway, it started off with a 2 hr wait outside the camping hire store, which we had been assured would open at 9am (a 1.5 hour delay is nothing in Peru time). After finishing at Ccorao, we hopped on a bus to Pisac, and somehow managed to find our way to a campsite that we knew nothing of save the name and price. Pisac is beautiful – quite like Cusco in that you can wander from the very touristy main square into streets that appear completely untouched by western culture within minutes. It was in these backstreets that we found the most satisfying meal of our lives – in a mudbrick room, around a massive table with a tablecloth that looked like great aunt jan´s bath curtain, we were each presented with a plate of rice, pasta, potato chips and fried chicken for 4 soles – around $1.50. It didn’t matter that the chef had to chase a couple of dogs out from under the table. No description will do that chicken justice. We ate in that total silence that happens when you don’t have room for words in between bites.

It turned out that the whole camping idea was a lot nicer in theory than in practice – at night, we only survived the cold with some serious spoonage. But that did not dampen our spirits as we woke up on Saturday morning for Pisac ruins. A significant part of the morning was spent battling with the Peruvian authorities - a standard, and not entirely unenjoyable, part of your average day here – all for a student discount. We lost this time, but the view was more than worth the seventy soles we paid for it. After two hours uphill, a lot of snacking, and several adventures (including but not limited to being walked in on in a squat toilet and finding a live brown snake sealed in a bottle on top of a cactus), we arrived at the top.

It’s a surreal feeling, having the whole of the sacred valley spread out before you. The huge, grassy tiers that the Incans had carved into the landscape made it seem as though you could simply step back down into reality, but there was a quiet satisfaction involved in remembering the gallons we sweated making that journey. It turned out that getting down was not so easy either – soph, lu holm, chaz, sarah and I opted for the short cut that jack and Sam had taken up to avoid paying. As fogl put it, “there was kind of a path for some of it”. I am still finding bits of cactus in places I never knew they could reach.

Sunday morning, we headed into town for the famous Pisac Sunday markets. It really was incredible. With all the locals descending from their homes in the hills for mass, the town just came alive. The stalls stretched up every street, selling everything from unidentifiable woodwind instruments to fresh fruit and vegetables. We gouged ourselves on 20 cent bread and pure cacao chocolate, then the majority of us hopped on a bus for moray, another archaeological site. After heated disputes with minivan drivers over prices and some serious uncertainty about bus routes, we made it to a beautiful, wheat-field Peruvian landscape that we never knew existed. The Incan site itself was only half the beauty, as is usually the case in this country. Our trip had a slightly anxious end when we realized that Sarah wasn’t on the bus back from Urubamba, but she arrived home in one piece 20 minutes after I did, tired and happy.

Its around 7pm now in Cusco, and I’m sitting in an internet café surrounded by local Peruvian kids playing internet soccer – ahead of me is an incredible Peruvian meal, followed by a lot of coca tea and a viewing of “yo soy” - a Peruvian reality tv show, which some of us are getting embarrassingly involved in, where the contestants are professional impersonators. Hasta luego, amigos.