Bus to Cusco

I got into the social network of Spaniard girls for a few days. Followed one to a comfy hostel/home stay, she flew home, then followed two more to the cheapest bus to Cusco. They are awesome, half this continent is their playground. They´re so comfortable here, it´s like they never left home. And unlike other expats they´ll teach you Spanish.

The intercity buses have been bizarre lately. Now they fingerprint everyone´s index finger when you get on, and yesterday they had a cheap camcorder velcrowed on top of a recording TV/VCR watching everyone hand over their ticket. Maybe it´s so if the bus goes over the edge they can show my parents a nice tape of me arguing with them in broken Spanish over whether or not I have to check my small backpack.

By the way, a massive bike box to Cusco with Cromotex costs 50 soles. Just show up early and it´ll get on the same bus as you.

That driver has no fear too. There are guardrails, but only some of the time. And why should he be, we were riding on the Mercedez Benz Marco Polo line, not just any double decker bus. I started wondering today...did that driver do all 21 hours straight? I´m not sure if there were two or not. The stewardess looked in great form for having slept in her clothes just like the rest of us.

On hour 14 of that bus ride I wasn´t even ansy to get off, the views were incredible! Everything after Abancay was top notch. The switchbacks after that town took probably an hour and a half for the first mountain pass. I definitely recommend the Lima to Cusco bus, then maybe fly on your way out.

Some seriously gnarly farmer folk live back in those hills, I´m sure I´ll learn all about them soon. You´ll see cows grasing on some switchback and it looks like they have just 6m x 2m to make use of. Their irrigation systems must have been backbreaking to build, they pull all the water off the roads and dump it into terraced or high grade plots.

I made all sorts of a fuss with my bike after getting into town. It started off really smooth, but then I had the wrong address for South American Explorers, where I was going to assemble everything. Turns out it was another two blocks and then up some hundreds of stairs. A rough experience on my first day at 10,000ft altitude. I stashed the lighter half of my stuff with some pharmacy girls, and then this really eccentric social worker saw me trying to carry the box by myself and helped out. First we went the wrong way several times though, just to make it really gut wrenching. He spent a good jovial hour of manual labor with me, so I tipped him and his poor kids more than twice the taxi fare. Oh yeah, and he spoke fluent German, how weird.

Llamas are more scare than I though. I saw a small one tied up outside a gift shop, but that´s about it. I´m still in the market to purchase one.


Oh yeah, my travel plans! So I want to ditch the trucking routes and do backcountry if I can, so I´m planning to go to this jungle town, Puerto Maldonado, near the border of Bolivia. It´s almost all downhill from here, 500km, so it´s almost cheating. Then, if you´ll follow along on your maps, there are no towns or roads south of there, just rivers and national parks, so I hope to get to this tiny town, Astillero, by jungle boat. Then continue on backroads from there back up the mountains to lake Titicaca, and on to La Paz.

This looked great on 1980s maps in Lima, and the people in the hostal said, ¨Can you even drive to Puerto Maldonado? You have to fly.¨ All very promising. Unfortunately, this dude burst my bubble today, telling me that the road to P.M. is brand new, in fact the newest road in Peru and under construction right now. The first 30 miles are all original nastiness though, so that might be enough to make it a private road for me. I´m going to do more research tomorrow, but that´s the plan till further notice.

Till next time.