Firstly, apologies for the lack of action on the blog lately. It´s been pretty busy. Apologies also for the lack of photos. I can´t seem to upload any here at the internet cafe, and when I tried to do it on a fellow volunteer´s computer, I couldn´t even get this site up! There are some photos on Facebook though.

I´m now into my fifth and final week volunteering in Huancayo. I can´t believe how quickly the time has gone. I leave for Lima on Friday 6 July, five weeks to the day I arrived. Soon I´ll be having new adventures on my tour, and making new friends. I wish I could take the volunteers with me - they are such a cool bunch of people and I´ll miss them. But with all the people who were here when I arrived now departed for home or more travelling, it does feel like it´s time to go.

Some highlights:

Volunteering

NURSERY

Super cute niños! There are anywhere between 7-10 kids in my class. I honestly don´t know how the teacher, Doris, does it! I love them, but they do my head in! Today one of the girls, who looks angelic, very deliberately threw a wooden block in my face, hard, because I asked her to say please before I gave her a toy. She was being a brat before that too. So I picked her up and put her on the other side of the room, and the whole time she screamed and slapped my face. One of the boys in the class is very also naughty, but mostly they are pretty good. I was greeted this morning by little Jesús (aka Booboo), who is two, running towards me, arms outstretched, calling out "Messita, Messita"! Kind of makes all the crap worthwhile when you get that sort of welcome!

COMMUNITY CENTRE

I don´t know how much use I am here! My Spanish is still far from great, so it´s hard to help with homework, which is what we´re meant to do for the first hour. I get by though and am often to be found outside playing fútbol or volley with the kids who don´t have homework or have finished it. I´m still not great at either sport, but I´m getting there! It´s a lot of fun. The kids at the centre are older, ranging from five to 12 or so. There are some real charmers! The kids greet you at the gate and give you a kiss on the cheek. They actually seem happy to see you, something I can´t really imagine happening in NZ.

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I came to make a difference, and apart from helping to give a CPR class with Jenny, an American nurse who I shared an apartment with for the first two weeks, I really don´t know if I have. The kids will forget about me soon enough. I´ve had lots of fun though and have met some fantastic people. In fact, the volunteers have been the highlight for me. It´s great to be around people who are all there for the same reasons and want to be here. We´re quite a diverse bunch. In the time I´ve been here there´s been: one Kiwi (me), three Poms (including a seven year old girl!), four Americans, an Austrian, a Frenchwoman, an Irishman, a Pole, a Latvian-Brit, a Swede, a Mexican-Japanese and a Canadian! Almost sounds like the start of a joke... a Kiwi, three Poms, four Americans, an Austrian, a Frenchwoman, an Irishman, a Pole, a Latvian-Brit, a Swede, a Mexican-Japanese and a Canadian walk into a bar...

Some of our adventures!

CONCEPCION

I might have covered this in a previous blog. A brief overview though:

I´ve been there twice, the first time a couple of days after I arrived, and the second with the newer volunteers. Concepcion is very pretty and the surrounding hills look like an oil painting. They are much clearer than in Huancayo, possibly because there´s less pollution in Concepcion. On both trips we walked to the big Virgin Mary statue and hung around there for a while, then on the second trip went in search of trucha (trout) and all the locals said to go to Ingenio. So we caught a taxi out there (about six of us crammed into a taxi, so Aidan and Masato sat in the boot!), and found a great place to eat. We ate out in the sunshine and oh, it was so nice! I had cerviche - mmmmm! A bit spicy for me but I kept going because I´m a sucker for punishment sometimes.

By the time we came to leave, lots of other people wanted to as well so we had to wait for a bus (which is really just a minivan with seats). We eventually got on one which went directly to Huancayo. But they kept cramming more and more people on. There must have been between 30-40 people I reckon. Aidan is very tall and had to sit on the floor. I felt suffocated. It wasn´t very nice. So we got off in Concepcion and tried for ages to find a taxi, with no joy. Someone ended up flagging down a proper bus and for a very cheap price, we had a relaxing ride back to Huancayo. After we´d stepped over assorted children, dogs and bagged live chickens in the aisle!

THE GLACIER

The glacier has a proper name but I can´t remember what it is and can´t be bothered looking it up sorry, so The Glacier will have to do!

Early one Saturday morning, a bunch of volunteers got up and took a bus out to the wops to tramp to a glacier. All the way through the tramp I was thinking "why am I doing this? I´d never do it at home, so why would I freakin´do it here?? You dumb arse". It was tough, I won´t lie. But it was worth it. It was so beautiful once we got there. I do remember thinking once I got to the first highest point that I´d made it, woohoo! That wasn´t so bad. Of course, we still had many hours to go! I was lucky and didn´t get any altitude sickness, and just had a few issues with my breathing, which could have just as much to do with my asthma, but they weren´t biggies. The glacier was very majestic and if you wanted to, you could sled on it! I didn´t have the energy, and it was enough just to be there.

On the way back, lil Rashay, the amazing seven year old from England, was feeling poorly, so the guide got her to lie on her back with her feet on a big rock. The rest of us did that too, and that to date is the quietest time I´ve had since I´ve been in Perú. There wasn´t a sound - it was blissful! Slightly magical even! We moved on after a bit, and when things were getting a bit tough for Ria (Shay´s mum), the guide pulled out what Ria thought was water. Turns out it was tequila! Tequila shots in the mountains of Peru anyone? Don´t mind if I do! Certainly warmed me up if nothing else.

Before we knew it, we were back at base and had served up to us what was quite possibly the best meal ever (at least, for that moment in time) - a hearty vegetable broth with a side of potatoes. Scrummy!

I slept very well that night!

But I´m still not going to do anything like that again. About seven hours of tramping. Ick.

LA MERCED - WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE, IT GETS WORSE HERE EVERY DAY...

So say Guns ´N´ Roses. And that´s kind of how it felt for me last weekend. Most of the volunteers caught a people mover for the three hour journey to La Merced. It was fun on the way there - singing, joking, I Spy (in the dark!), that sort of thing. When we finally arrived in La Merced I was feeling really tired, but nothing more. We piled out into the heat and met a lady Christina had used on a previous trip there. She isn´t a guide as such, but organises things and essentially organised our stay there and in Oxapampa. She took us to a place that does tours of the jungle (that´s maybe not the jungle as you would typically of think it) and we signed up for one that started the following morning. I paid my S/. 30 and happily toddled off to bed for a good sleep.

I woke up the next morning feeling under the weather, but not quite realising how sick I was going to be. Once my roomies had used the bathroom, I went in and that´s when the trots began! Awful, just awful! When I flushed the loo, the loo didn´t flush, but the shower started! There was a huge hole in the ceiling, which acted as ventilation. Thank goodness it was there, as things were to get worse! I showered, dressed and went downstairs with the rest and even started out the door to go to breakfast, but I knew it wasn´t a good idea, so I said goodbye to my S/. 30 and my amigos and headed back to bed for a day of toilet-bed-toilet-bed-toilet-bed-you get the picture. I won´t go into any gross details (amazingly enough for me!), but I can tell you that I even had hallucinations! As I´ve said before, Peruvians love to party, and in the afternoon, there was a big street party going on right outside my room. Argh! It was way too hot to close the windows, so I had the sound of music and fun floating through my room. As I lay there in my misery, I could very clearly hear the volunteers talking. I could hear them saying each other´s names. It was like there were right there in the room. It went on for for a while. All I could think was, they know I´m sick, why has no one come to see me? When I eventually saw them later that evening, it turned out they had been miles away and nowhere near any street parade!

I had taken some pills to stop the diarrhoea and they worked, so the next morning I headed to Oxapampa with the others. It was a two hour bus ride heaing up in altitude a bit. Oxa was certainly a bit cooler at night. We were going there to attend a music festival.

Our La Merced lady, Marita, treated us to breakfast at her house, and her mother was there too. I couldn´t have anything other than bread, water and camomile tea, but it was nice of her to do that, and she wouldn´t accept any money for it. She had also bought us the tickets for the festival and arranged our hostel accommodation in Oxa.

OMG! What a f**king dive! As one of the volunteers said, if you wanted to shoot a horror movie somewhere, this was the place for it!

We had two rooms, one with three beds and the other with five, but there should have been another bed. The girls put three of the beds together and five of them slept in there. I shared a room with the boys. Our room had a window that opened into a room that seemed to be used for storing dust. It also had broken shutters. The bathroom was so revolting that I didn´t even dare use it.

To get to our rooms, we had to walk through what was the wash house room, a narrow dark corridor that stank and then another corridor that was slightly better. It was the only place that Marita could find that would accommodate all of us. All I could think of, apart from how awful it was, was how I was so pleased I was sick the day before. If I´d been sick that day as well, I´d have had to find elsewhere to stay, as spending the whole day in the musty little bedroom would probably be a health hazard on its own.

We got out of there as quickly as possible and headed into the centre for a lookie before taking some tuk-tuks to the festival.

I haven´t been to that many festivals, but I´ve been to a few and this was probably the most chilled out of them all. There was some horse stuff going on and the music didn´t really kick off for a few hours. There was a batucada group there, and I recognised the songs they played from my time learning batucada. There was lots of food, not that I could eat most of it, as my tummy was still tender, but I did manage to get some potatoes and beer down me. I´m pretty sure the beer helped!

We spent some time down by the river and then lying on the grass. Eventually the music started and the line up was quite varied. There was pretty much something for everyone and it was great! They even had what I consider to be Peru´s answer to The Black Seeds! Very cool. I also liked a group called La Nueva Invasion. Real Latin American beats, great to boogy to, although I kept dancing to a minimum for the sake of my stomach.

A bonfire was started up and some of sat by it to keep warm. I thought Oxa might be like La Merced, as in warm at night, so didn´t have a jumper with me. The fire was lovely though and we sat by it for ages. What looked like a great rock band started up and I would have loved to have stayed to watch them (they had great head gear!), but was too cold and tired. So with some of the others, I headed back to the hole-stel. A tuk-tuk driver said he could take five of us, which was really a bit unsafe, as there were four of us in the back and poor Masato had to sit half on the railing-half on my knee, and hold on tight! We made it back in one piece.

We woke up the hostel owner to be let in and made our way gingerly along the dark corridor when Jenny saw a big mouse. Or a rat. A rodent anyway! She screamed, Rashay screamed, I screamed (although I don´t know if I knew what I was screaming about at that point, it was a chain reaction thing). Jenny and Shay moved so quickly that they tripped over a pipe on the floor and landed, splat, on the ground! The owner eventually came out and got rid of it and we ran through the corridor to our bedrooms.

Masato and I went into our room and sat on the beds and we just really didn´t want to be there! We were looking around the room to see if we could see anything undesirable. I had a look through my bed, and could see hair (not mine) and a squished dead spider, about the size of a 20c piece. Luckily for me, I had borrowed Ria´s sleeping bag so I slept in that rather than under the sheets. Masato, hiccuping away, slept on top of the bed to begin with.

I eventually got to sleep and then I heard the unmistakable sound of vomiting! Masato had had fun that night, and now it was his stomach´s payback time! It´s hard to sleep through that sort of thing, so it took me a while to get back to sleep but eventually I did, until Aidan came home. I heard Masato tell him that he´d been sick, and that the toilet didn´t flush, so can´t use the bog! Somehow that seemed so fitting of the hostel, that the toilet wouldn´t flush. Oh well!

About 10-15 minutes after Aidan arrived home, Jenny burst in to say goodbye. Lovely Jenny was heading back to the States that day and had to catch an early bus back to La Merced then on to Lima. I was so tired that I didn´t even get emotional about it, but I was very sad to see her go. It just wouldn´t be the same without her. I did manage to get back to sleep for a while, then Elin, our lovely Swede, came in to say it was time to get up. I couldn´t face using the shower in the bathroom so went to the girls´room to freshen up and change and then we went for breakfast. For me that was water and toast with a scrapping of butter and jam.

We made our way back to La Merced and Ria, Rashay and Masato headed back to Huancayo early. Wish I´d done the same. But I stayed for lunch with Merita and her hubby, and the remaining volunteers to watch the UEFA Cup (?) final. Go Italy! No, Italy sucked the big kumara when it counted! Spain scored a well deserved victory.

We went to the bus terminal to book to come home and decided on a people mover again, but had some time to kill so went down the road for a coffee.

We were about 45 minutes late leaving La Merced and our driver, who appeared to be about 12, was a bit of a maniac behind the wheel. Normally I`´m ok on road trips, it´s only on the big buses that I need to be at the front to avoid motion sickness. I was at the back with Christina and Silvia on this journey. It was just awful. He had to make up for lost time I guess, but I wished he´d taken it a bit slower. There are some pretty big drops from mountains on the trip, and I did wonder a few times if we were going to go down them. We didn´t obviously, but I almost lost my stomach, bowel and nerves at various points on the journey. The first thing I did when we got back to the terminal in Huancayo was make for the loo.

The next day I felt so unwell still that I didn´t make it out of bed. I had the day off sick. Drank a bit of water, didn´t eat a thing (not hungry) and slept. It was probably good for me to have a complete rest.

On Tuesday morning I felt so weak that I couldn´t even stand in the shower. I needed food and had a bland breakfast, and a comforting vege broth and rice for lunch. After the community centre that afternoon, Ria and I stopped by the pharmacy to get me some antibiotics. Over here you don´t need to see a doctor for that sort of thing! It was just a two day course, which I have now finished, but I´m feeling better. Unfortunately the Imodium I took on Saturday worked very effectively, and I´ve been clogged up ever since. Hopefully I´ll get back to good gut health soon! I am currently living on water and ´Soda´crackers. Very boring! But funnily enough, I´m not craving any other food. It´s like my body knows that I have to eat like this to get better for my tour, which starts this Saturday.

Well, that´s all for now, there will hopefully be another blog coming in the next day or so, as I´m sure I have heaps more to tell you!

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