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The flight was 16 hours including a 2 hour stopover in Auckland and I´ve never been so bored in my life. I read my book until my eyes started blurring then watched Die Hard 4.0 on the plane´s screen. I realised I´d seen almost all of the films that were on offer and the others I really didn´t want to see so I watched a terrible film called Adam, a few episodes of a TV show where they play pranks on members of the public, and tried to get some sleep. It didn´t work.
I was exhausted when I finally got to Chile. I had one night booked in a hostel so I got the bus and the underground to the station nearby. Ryan had spent the last few weeeks reassuring me that I didn´t need to speak much Spanish - people would speak English like they had in every other country we´ve been to... no one spoke English in Santiago! I managed with my knowledge of ´I would like...´, ´please´, ´thank you´ and my ability to count in Spanish haha.
I got to my hostel about 4pm and slept almost all the way through until 2am. I got a taxi to the airport and boarded my flight to Lima. When I reached Lima airport I had enough time to collect my luggage, check in for my next flight, send some emails and get no the next flight to Cusco!
The flight was 16 hours including a 2 hour stopover in Auckland and I´ve never been so bored in my life. I read my book until my eyes started blurring then watched Die Hard 4.0 on the plane´s screen. I realised I´d seen almost all of the films that were on offer and the others I really didn´t want to see so I watched a terrible film called Adam, a few episodes of a TV show where they play pranks on members of the public, and tried to get some sleep. It didn´t work.
I was exhausted when I finally got to Chile. I had one night booked in a hostel so I got the bus and the underground to the station nearby. Ryan had spent the last few weeeks reassuring me that I didn´t need to speak much Spanish - people would speak English like they had in every other country we´ve been to... no one spoke English in Santiago! I managed with my knowledge of ´I would like...´, ´please´, ´thank you´ and my ability to count in Spanish haha.
I got to my hostel about 4pm and slept almost all the way through until 2am. I got a taxi to the airport and boarded my flight to Lima. When I reached Lima airport I had enough time to collect my luggage, check in for my next flight, send some emails and get no the next flight to Cusco!
I was picked up from the airport on Tuesday (or Wednesday in Australia) and we took a quick detour to pick up two more volunteers who had flown in the day before. The journey from Cusco to our placement in Huyro was 6 hours through the mountains. At one point the road reaches 4800ft and I really suffered with altitude sickness! I hadn´t eaten in a while and hadn´t slept much, so I ended up falling asleep/passing out in the car. Part of the way there we had to swap cars into a 4x4 because the road had been damaged by landslides and the bus we were in wouldn´t make it. Half of the road had dropped by about a foot down the side of a cliff, the whole middle of the road had just cracked.
We got to Huyro at about 8pm and picked up the other volunteers from the village on the way. They had been having beers at the shop and us three new people were almost collapsing from lack of sleep so I don´t think we made too much of an impression on our first night! We ate dinner, had a bit of a chat and went to bed.
I was exhausted but didn´t get much sleep that night - it was only about 20degrees and I was freezing! I´m convinced I´ll die from hypothermia when I get home haha.
We were up at 7.30am on Wednesday for breakfast and went straight out to climb our first mountain! The hike wasn´t very long, thankfully, but the altitude was a huge shock - it felt like my heart was going to fail! We spent a few hours clearing vegetation from some Incan ruins with machetes, my new favourite hobby, then went back to the house to relax for the afternoon.
We were given a tour of the house while the other volunteers did their weekly clean up... Our ´house´ is actually an old cowshed which was cleaned up in 2007 and converted into pretty basic accommodation. We like to call it ´rustic. The name of the house is El Establo, which means The Stable. Outside there is a shed with a wood fired oven and a bbq is in progress. In front of the house there are chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits and ex-guinea pigs. One of the dogs ate them all, so there are none at the moment! There are also 3 dogs and a parrot living in the house. On the land surrounding Establo there are plenty fruit and veg growing, so we have fresh organic fruit every day and organic corn to feed the birds! They´re testing out growing lots of different foods on the land so the knowledge can be passed along to the local farmers.
Inside the house there´s one bedroom for the girls, one for the boys, some rooms outside for the staff, 2 bathrooms, a kitchen and a seating area. The staff is our supervisor, archaologist, driver/supervisor/general staff member and his family and another general staff member and his family. There´s no hot water, only freezing cold showers, and we only have electricity from about 7pm until the Peruvian soaps finish at about 9.30pm! We don´t have a TV, the only thing it´s used for is so the families can watch their crappy soaps. Every night we go to the village at about 5.30pm to sit outside ´The Shop´and drink beer, coke or inka kola, then head back to Establo for dinner. I´m really grateful for the free food we get at Establo, but it´s really terrible. I don´t think a week has gone by that I haven´t been sick! There seems to be an illness travelling around our room and at least one person is out most days. My guess is that it´s because every single item of food in Peru is fried carbohydrates - there´s only so much of that your stomach can handle! They don´t even boil pasta here, they fry it until it goes soft. Ugh!!!
Anyway, on Wednesday night we had our weekly quiz night, that week it was put together by the two Danish volunteers, Emma and Rasmus, and was Danish themed. It was fun, but no one knows much about Denmark!
On Thursday 7th we were out early for another hike - much harder than the last time! I´ve gotten used to the altitude pretty quickly so I´m not finding it too difficult. We get plenty energy from our pure carbohydrate diet anyway! We were supposed to play volleyball that afternoon (the locals are volleyball fiends), but the combination of lack of sleep and 35degree heat send me off to sleep! I managed to sleep straight through until 5am on Friday.
We had Friday off because most people were getting the bus to Cusco and they left early in case the road was bad. It´s been raining a lot so the landslides are getting worse as the weeks go by! Myself, Rachel and Bond, the new volunteers, didn´t feel up to the 6 hour journey back to Cusco that week so we decided to spend the weekend at the next big town, Quillabamba, instead.
I was really glad there was no work on Friday... My ankles had been eaten really badly by evil little midges and had swelled up like a balloon. I had 70 bites on my right ankle alone, and by Saturday night I couldn´t even walk! Peruvians have very good antihistaminico though, they did the trick.
Our weekend in Quillabamba wasn´t too interesting... the journey there took 3 hours instead of the 1hr we expected on a really uncomfortable mini van! The record number of people on a 15 seater bus was 28 people, including the driver, and one dog! It wasn´t that full for the whole journey, but I was glad to get there! About halfway we had to stop as the road was blocked by one of the many wonderful Peruvian taxi drivers... he´d tried to overtake a truck on a hairpin turn, on a crumbling stone bridge and got stuck! Genius idea really. Another truck came along and had to attach a tow rope to the front of the taxi and pull it quickly off the bridge while stones fell a few hundred foot into the valley below! Everyone was out with their cameras taking pictures haha.
On Saturday we went out to the one tourist attraction in Quillabamba, the Siete Tenajas (7 bowls) waterfall. It was quite nice out there, but it rained the whole time we were there. We got a station wagon taxi for the journey back to the town and it was even worse than the minibus there. Rachel and Bond had to sit in the boot, and I had to share the front seat with a horrible sweaty man and the gearstick! Anytime the driver had to change gears I had to stand up haha.
We just relaxed for the night and got the bus back to Huyro on Sunday. We arrived in the afternoon and spent the whole night waiting for the other volunteers to arrive but no luck! They finally arrived on Monday morning after spending the whole night up the mountain on the bus! The rain was so bad that they couldn´t continue so it was an 18 hour journey instead of 6! I´m so glad we didn´t go to Cusco that weekend!
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