Juliaca and Sillustani Ruins

So I'm home now, but I have more I want to write, so I'm gonna keep going for two or three more posts. I flew back to Chicago, chilled with my family for three days, then made a mad dash across country to my new home for the winter, Kings Beach at Lake Tahoe.

I forgot to write about Juliaca before! After enjoying the sparsely populated jungle, cloud forests, and barren altiplano for two weeks, Juliaca was a surprise treat. It is on no tourist's list of things to see in Peru, since it has no ruins or museums or anything, but I think it's awesome! It's really for the altiplano people of Peru, I saw maybe one other white person in that 100,000+ city. It really is on the gringo trail, you just have to make a choice to stop there.

Some videos of the market in Juliaca,




It felt like a piece of Lima's Barrios Altos neighborhood on a tract of flat land at 12,000ft. That means the streets were packed with people and the open air market stretched on for (a few) kilometers in all directions. And since it was above 3000m elevation, everyone was gentle and friendly, unlike Barrios Altos. People bent over laughing about my height, but nobody tried to hustle me.

A few kilometers before Juliaca I saw the first white person since 14 days previous in Puerto Maldonado, also bicycle touring! I greeted him with a hearty "HOLA GRINGO!!!" He started speaking German to me, further melting my mind. He was from Berlin, and he was much more of a soldier cyclist than I. He had full serious biking clothes, a helmet, bike shoes and clipless pedals, a bike computer, etc. I was dressed in a stupid alpaca sweater with stick figures on it. Someone told me this made it clear I was a tourist. My backpack and other crap was lashed on my handlebars because I broke a spoke in the rear wheel the day before. No helmet, just a Arlington Park horseracing baseball hat. No cycling tights for me, just cutoff slacks.

This guy, Andre, did not have a sense of humor really, he was all business, Lima to La Paz, head down and hauling! He did tell me about a time he got lost and ended up on an old Inca trail that traversed over some peaks and made his effing life! I wish I would have had him point that out on a map.

We rolled into Juliaca together and I was intrigued by this huge outdoor market. He didn't have time to explore, just four days to get to La Paz, so we parted ways.

In the market there was some decent 1/4 chicken for 9am, a huuuuge mud pit in the middle of it all, tons of buses waiting to be filled, and the first sizeable bike parts selection I had seen since 3 weeks earlier in Cusco. I got some great neon mudflaps with a picture of a snarling tiger face on them. Everyone had these in the altiplano.

There was also the biggest coca leaves dealer I saw on the trip. They had massive bales of coca leaves for 80 soles, sold by old ladies. I turned them down.

This is where comical bowler hats made an appearance in traditional women's dress. I chuckled about that about every day. Apparently someone in the early 1900s ordered tons of them from Europe by mistake, and then convinced Aymara women to wear them, and they still are a fad to this day.

I really should have stayed a night in Juliaca, but I was set on getting to Puno and resting there, so I just passed through quickly. Halfway to Puno I stopped to sugar up, and these people told me about some ruins nearby, Sillustani. They made it sound like it was really close, like 5km away. It turned out to be more like 25km.

I took off on this choppy dirt road towards some town in the distance, still sporting a broken rear spoke. This was really worrying the whole time, once one spoke fails, more can quickly follow, resulting in a really unstable squirrelly wheel.

I asked a bus for directions to the ruins, and they used a preposition I didn't know, so I smiled and nodded and kept on to the town. I biked through a field up to a house built out of rocks, and the women in bowler hats looked like they were really over doing it with their traditional dress. I really don't know what happened next, but I blame the towns people. There was a group of Peruvians outside the house, and I distinctly asked, "Is this the ruins? Is this a museum?" and they fucking said YES! Then they started telling me I could park my bike in the small courtyard of the stone house, so I did. One of the guys had a button down blue shirt, I thought he was the tour guide. I started taking pictures of stuff.

Next, suddenly, the blue shirted man and some kids wanted me to walk with them to the parque. I thought this was a tour of the ruins, but it was all complete fiction in my mind! I just rolled up to some random house in the countryside with the neighbors outside talking, and they walked me over to the sports park to play or watch soccer. I realized it wasn't a tour once I saw the soccer field, and then couldn't figure out a polite way to leave, so we sat talking for a while. I couldn't stop thinking about the $200 USD in my bike seat, and my passport back with my bike.

Eventually, my plans of getting to Puno that night became clear to everyone, and we all saw some rain coming, so I got free of my friends and rushed 10km onward to the ruins. Compared to this experience, the ruins were really boring and not worth it, but the mobs of Japanese and Europeans seemed to like it.

So I made it to Puno, stashed my stuff, then took a bus back to Juliaca for a day with my bike. The bus cost 60 cents to go 40km, and at that price they wanted that thing full! Not only did they yell out Juliaca! at the bus stop 50x, they continued as the bus slowly made its way through Puno's streets. And they got it full, no problem. I'm not sure how that worked, everyone in Puno knows where the bus stop is, but I guess people miles away from there can also get sold on an impulse idea of going to Juliaca.

I had no idea where the bus let me off, I just started biking randomly without recognizing a thing for three hours. The thing I needed most was a spoke, so I hit up the bike district of sorts. It was all full of new Chinese Walmart bikes, nobody there knew how to work on them or get parts, but some lady was willing to disappear for 20 minutes off to somewhere, leaving me in charge of the shop it seemed. I tried to sell one of her bikes for 20 soles ($6), but no dice.

Eventually she came back with a spoke that was too long, but it worked well enough. The guy from the stove store next door helped me install it, and noticed I had a crack in my frame! I'm really glad he saw that, that's really no good. Neither of them wanted any money for 45 minutes of scavenger hunting, problem solving and struggling.

So I went down to the local open air welder. This is a person that's hard to start a conversation with because you walk up and they had a blinding arc welder working on some bed frame or something. I had to chime in and tell them their ground wire on my frame wasn't going to work because it was insulated by rubber from the rest of the frame (it wasn't that detailed of a story in Spanish). They welded for about a half hour, the two of them, then they wanted only $1.50! I talked them up to $3 because good christ, that's a bad hourly rate.

Next, I was biking around and noticed all the bicycle rickshaw drivers were hanging out around the same dilapidated block. There were about 7 ladies serving the same food I had at my second homestay, fry bread and outrageously thick syrupy red tea. The tea was on par, but the fry bread was pre-made and cold. Still, I didn't know where else to get this besides that one house on the mountain side. The rickshaw drivers were all sitting in their comfy passenger seats, enjoying life.

The wheelbarrow of food I chose was right in front of a huge green puddle in the street, and there was a waiter of sorts wearing shin high rubber boots, serving all the rickshaw drivers. I got some funny looks for eating with them.

After this I set out on my other mission for the day, to get a Ronaldinho soccer jersey. One of the top ten T-shirts I ever saw was this Ronaldinho jersey with a bunch of soccer action shots, worn by a gas station attendant near Cusco. Then in Puerto Maldonado there was another one with a picture of him kissing an old lady on the forehead. Really, who enjoys every second of his life more than that guy? He proposed to a Swedish soccer player at the Beijing Olympics in broken English the second time he met her. What a hero.

Anyways, I went to about 20 jersey stores, no exaggeration, and it was hard for me because I can't really pronounce Ronaldinho, and he's Brazilian so Peruvians don't give a damn. It'd be like asking for Ohio State jerseys in Milwaukee, there's a massive lake and another country in the way. Eventually, I found a place with one, but it's not nearly as cool as the other two I saw.

After that, I continued to get lost, and found and lost the bus district a few times while running other errands and randomly exploring, then couldn't find it again for a half hour when I wanted to leave.

A train went through Juliaca at one point, which is funny because the train tracks are fair game for the populous to set up their market, so they must have scrambled to pack up. Then it cuts off a major taxi street on the main shopping street, which really chills out that town like nothing else. It was nearly like going to the mall in America since we don't have taxis and microbuses passing through.

That's about it. For next time I have the bulk of Bolivia stories to tell, then this ride is over!