Week 4?

I’m now in my 4th week here in Peru, the time is flying by pretty fast and it’s hard to believe that I’m almost half way done with training. Everything has been going pretty smoothly and I have been busy with everything. Some of the highlights of my past few weeks were a trip to the mountains, trip to central Lima, and some fun nights out with the other volunteers here.

Overall I feel as that I am getting used to everything here. The food is pretty tasty, however I’m getting sick of the always present, potatoes and rice. Peruvians love, potatoes and rice. Apparently the potato was first discovered here and they haven’t stopped eating it since. Rice is something that they have with every single lunch and dinner and they generally like to put oil on it as well. But besides getting sick of the potatoes and rice is has been good so far. Some of the volunteers have had the unfortunate experience of diarrhea and it is something that 99 percent of people will get at some point or another. So far I have been able to avoid it but it is pretty common here so I’m sure it will come. It even has the nickname of ‘bicycleta’ that all of the volunteers love to say casually, which you can try to figure out for yourself. But anyway back to my trip.

Marcahuasi

As I mentioned earlier, all of the business volunteers got to go on a trip to the mountains of Peru. The town that we went to was called San Pedro de Casta. The town is in the outskirts of ‘Lima’, which is used pretty liberally considering this town is about 4 hours outside of the center of the city. It took us about 3 hours to get there from Chaclacayo, however it really isn’t that far away. The reason it takes so long is that the roads on the way there are incredibly small and pretty dangerous so you can’t go very fast. The road slowly crawls up a mountain and at many parts it is only possible for one car to pass at once, makes very a interesting and slow trip. However the scenery on the way up was beautiful with huge valleys and terrace farms along the slopes. After the three hour trip, we arrived at the town of San Pedro and waited to begin our trip up to our ultimate destination of Marcahuasi.

Marcahuasi is the name of a place where locals and tourists from all over go to hike and spend the night in tents. We all got to take horses up the to the camping ground and it took about an hour and half. We could’ve hiked but they were worried that we would have problems adjusting to the altitude since it is about 4000 meters up. After the trip on the horse I was grateful that we didn’t have to walk but it surely would’ve been pretty tough. After arriving to the campground we set up camp. We made a bonfire, where we prepared our dinner of traditional chicken stew, caldo de gallo. We all hung out for a while and then took to our tents to rest for the next day. Since we were so high up, it got really cold in the night (probably about 20 degrees Fahrenheit) and we had to dress really warm and bundle up in our sleeping bags.

After a night in and out of sleep we woke up and had some breakfast, some quaker which is essentially watered down oatmeal, which I have had many times since. After our breakfast a bunch of us went on a hike a little further up. Marcahuasi is famous for some of its rocks forms that have the shape of other objects. The most famous is the ‘human profile’ where you can easily make out all the features of a human head. The others were a little questionable, but were characterized as some other animals such as gorillas or rabbits, and you needed a little imagination to make them out. Also on the hike we got to see the remains of an ancient town that was abandoned hundreds of years ago. After a hike we took the horses back down and after waiting for our bus we arrived back in our homes. So all in all it was a pretty great trip. The scenery was pretty amazing and I got some great pictures to share.