2 months in Peru
Arriving in Peru was magical since the first place I visited was the floating islands of the lake Titikaka. The highest lake where people live. It is amazing that the plant called totora is used for everything, from building the floating islands to build the houses and even to eat it. I wish I had had the time to stay in an island for a couple of days but I already had the hostel booked in Cusco.
Cusco is a beautiful city up in the mountains. It has so much Spanish style architecture, so many museums, an amazing main square called ¨Plaza de armas¨. There I saw ???? the child that shows Cusco to Gael Garcia Bernal in Motorcycle diaries. When I saw him, I instantly knew it was him. What a small world. It has been 8 years or sosince the movie but I recognized him. He told me a beautiful story: Gael García Bernal and his travel partner at the movie Rodrigo de la Serna were wondering Cusco in their free time when they ran into this child who offered them to show them the city. The child, Nestor, made such an impression on them that they convinced the movie director to add him in the movie. The crazy thing comes now, in exchange for his acting, they paid for all his education in Fine Arts. Another crazy detail is that I saw him at the Cusco wall and I immediately recognized him. I approached him and asked if he was the child from the movie and he answered ¨yes¨ and told me this story.
I was not able to see Macchu Picchu because I had a big translation to do and I worked 11h a day while in Cusco, I just had 1 day off to try to check everything out.
Macchu Pichu is extremely expensive too.
I flew to Lima in order to be on time to volunteer with the NGO TECHO in Lima. For 4 days hundreds of people volunteered fixing the handrails, trees… of the poorest neighborhoods of Lima. Ours was called Pamplona norte, what a coincidence.
We also interviews the locals to learn about their necessities and it was very interesting to see how diverse their houses are even if they all live in this ¨asentamientos humanos¨.
Next week I did a presentation on the Basque rural sports at the Basque Center of Lima located in one of the most expensive neighborhoods of Lima. Lima is extremely diverse, from the most elegant neighborhoods to the poorest ones. It really is an interesting city.
Peruvians are much more social than Bolivians and that was nice after 3 months of not really making any friends. We made few friends while working with TECHO, but one mainly.
The following week we went to the town of Cañetes, 3h away to help ensure that the river will not overflow again. It was hard work but interesting too.
Right after we went to Trujillo to volunteer teaching English in public schools with a NGO called Help Trujillo. It was interesting to see how different one school is from another one . Well, the NGO turned to be fake, therefore all the volunteers went to the police and the newspapers and right now the president of this NGO is being investigated for fraud. That was stressful but also a learning experience for the future.
After all the stress we volunteered in an ashram for 1 week. Working with the horses, at the garden, in the kitchen and meeting interesting people.
The friend we made in TECHO proposed us to host and feed us in exchange for garden work. The goal: clear the fallen structure and create a new fence to hold the heavy and huge grape plants. 3 days of hard work but mission accomplished.
After that I went all the way to Quito and came back to the north of Peru in Piura to volunteer with Techo for 10 days. That was a really long and tiring trip. I ended my trip in Cusco (again) where I visited my friend from Boise and where finally I had some time to enjoy the city and rest.