Plaza Mayor in Lima
So due to popular demand, me and Steve are going to make a bit of a blog of our travels. Here goes the first entry...
We have been in Peru for a week now, but it feels a lot longer because we have already done quite a bit of wandering. After a few smog-filled days in Lima (which smells about 4 times worse than La Linea on a particularly smelly oil refinery day...that may not mean much to some people, but honestly, it stinks) we headed inland to a biggish town called Hunacayo, which was great, but a bit of a shock to the body, and we both had a couple of groggy altitude sickness days.
One day we caught a collectivo (a ram-packed minibus) to a village in a beautiful valley, and went on a tour of an 18th century convent, and showed around by an utterly joyless woman, and subject to loads of paintings (old and new) of monks dying with smiles on their faces as hoards of savage indians hacked them to death. My already watery opinion of the roman catholic church plummeted. But luckily there was some sort of movement of independance and the people of the valley have mostly turned their backs on that scene and have returned to bonkers oldschool ways as we discovered the next day when we wandered into a fiesta in the village where all the med were dressed as crazy chickenmen talking only in squeeky voices, with fullface balaclarvas complete with knitted noses. Ill include a picture of that for sure, although I have no idea what was going on in terms of cultural context, but I´m betting it had little to do with catholics.
Now we are in a small town called Huancavelica, heading in the direction of Macchu Picchu (which is still about 20 hours of bus travel away), but this town is lovely and surrounded by mountains on all sides. We climbed one today and are going to stick around here for a few more days to climb more. I´m also on a missio to find some alpaca wool which is proving more difficult than I thought for some reason- the people are knitting crazy here, and loads of people just wander around the towns whilst knitting. Will have to get a picture for all you stitch n bitchers out there- it´s incredible!
Ive already written more than I wanted to so will stick a few pictures on here now and be off.
Big love xxx
Ps. Peruvian people are SO nice. So far everyone we have met has been welcoming and friendly and honest and generally really lovely.
First lung-splitting hike above the convent
At the top
Fiesta in Ocopa
Above Huancavelica
