Peru - Chapter 3

As we sat and played our three-person game of beer hockey, a simple game where you spin a coin and call another person's name so that person attempts to knock the coin off someone else’s beer bottle thus making the person whose bottle they hit drink from said bottle for the duration of a subsequent spin of the coin, we were approached by the manager of the hostel, a young Englishman named Tom.

Tom was a slight, good-looking guy with a charming air. He walked up to our table and told us we could go upstairs and play in the hostel bar; a sort of lounge room with couches, a tv, pool table, and sure enough, a bar. We told him the game could get quite messy and loud and didn't want to distract others who may be using the room less for recreation than for leisure. He assured us loud, messy distractions were nothing short of condoned in The Point Hostel bar and that he thought our game looked brilliant and would like to learn. We agreed to meet him upstairs to teach him after he closed up the office and we got a bite to eat.

We walked the shortest distance imaginable for dinner. It would have taken us longer to walk up to the kitchen in the hostel to get food our chosen sustenance source was so close. We walked out the front door of the hostel and there was a small Peruvian manning a grill in a walk-up order window directly across the narrow street. We each got a cheeseburger for 2 soles ($.66), but for what it was worth, the meat was thinner than a pancake and likely did not come from an actual cow. Content, we headed upstairs to start our game.

Tom seemed very excited to learn, and like all good beer hockey rookies, was easily exploited for some time. We were hitting loads of shots at his bottle, and he was easily two full 1 Liter beers down before the rest of us had been through our first. This led to mayhem, as we eventually added two Irishmen, Eoin and Eorin, and Tom was smashing people’s bottles right and left. We played for about two good hours, and we were ready for bed.

A long day of travel, longer for some than others, led us to a weary end of the evening. The four of us brushed our teeth, put on the pjs, and went to bed. We were probably in bed for 5 minutes when the Irishmen burst in and tried to roust us. They were unsuccessful in their first and mostly half-hearted attempt. We weathered the first wave of being called weak Americans and all dozed off. Moments after we had all found a peaceful medium in the rich and welcoming darkness of the hostel bunk beds, Tom came in and disrupted our temporary Xanadu. With a flash of the lights and biting comments in a layered English accent, I was convinced this onslaught would not stop until we committed to spend the rest of the night with our newest acquaintances. I popped out of bed and threw my pants back on, encouraging Justin to do the same. He is bear-like in many ways, and the near state of hibernation was no exception. He grumbled and again mentioned how much he hated something; a surprisingly common theme for one of the more amiable guys I’ve ever been around, and begrudgingly got dressed to go. Adrienne followed suit in a light-hearted manner, but no one was less enthused than Derrell. Perfectly content under the covers with his reading headlamp and notebook, Derrell’s eyes alone conveyed he was more displeased than a certain mother hen you will find out about later in this tale, with the notion of being displaced from his current state. But, in the true spirit of “no man left behind”, we got him out and he came with.

We were corralled back to the bar, where Tom bought us all a terrible drink, then set us up with some wristbands for the “disco-techas”, which I’m still not sure exactly how much good they did us, and set us up with a cab. The moment we walked out the door to the street to get a cab, there was a young Peruvian man standing on the opposite side of the street literally urinating in the street. He was facing right toward us, pants down, going in the street. It was one of the most bizarre things I have ever witnessed. People were just walking by him as if nothing about the situation was abnormal, but it seemed to me that was all the entire setting was.

Next we piled 6 deep into the smallest cab you can imagine. It was literally like a clown car. Derrell, the tallest among us, ended up sitting on Eoin’s lap in the front seat with the manual transmission stick located far too close to an area that was understandably too close for any sort of comfort. Eorin was having a brilliant time in the back seat, making jokes about confines of the vehicle and other nonsensical comments one might expect of a heavy drinking Irishman. It didn’t take us long to reach our destination, but I would venture to say it took exactly the length of the car ride too long for Derrell. If he wasn’t perturbed before,..

The good news is, we made finally made it in. At that point though, all the fun had been had. The journey was truly best part, and after a very short time, we left the Irishmen to their wiles and headed back to the warmth and relative seclusion of our hostel beds.

We awoke early the following morning to board a bus to the Sacred Valley. About the time we got back from our tour at 5:30 pm, Eoin and Eorin were finding their way out of bed for the first time that day. More on what happened in between next time.

Peru - Chapter 2

Allow me to digress from the forward momentum of the tale for only a moment to share a few comical moments that befell us early in the trip due to our lack of familiarity with our surroundings.

First, as we were going through immigration and having our passports stamped, I was called to the booth when it was my turn. For no apparent reason, when I went to set my passport on the counter, I also reached to move the stamp out of the way, though it was not really necessarily in the way. It might have been a move of delirium, as it was 5 am and I had had very little sleep due to the staying up and watching of Shrek 3 on the plane. Not a wise move on so many levels. The next unwise move was reaching for that stamp, because as quick as I had gotten into this country, I thought I was about to get thrown out. The clerk snatched the stamp out of my reach with one swift, abrupt manuever, and gave me a glare I have ne'er experienced. I raised my hands in submission and declared, "Lo siento amigo". Luckily no harm was done.

Next, we were walking from baggage claim to the customs check, we walked up to the this sort of doorway facade, and there was a button we had to push before we could walk through. I pushed the button and a light turned green, so I proceeded through the door, quite confused as to what the point of the whole thing was. It seemed perfectly reasonable that we could just walk through this arch, there wasn't much to the situation. It puzzled me for some time. As it turned out, it was a random screening facilitator. If the light turned red, you had to be pulled aside for extra screening. This is a good system, except of course in the case where you want to profile someone...

Lastly, and by far the best, was when we deboarded the plane in Cusco to be met by a barrage of taxi drivers all trying to take us to the Plaza de Armas. We agreed to go with a guy and his driver for 15 soles (roughly $5), and go with a guy and his driver is exactly what we did. We loaded up into a random car that in no way resembled a taxi, our large backpacks in the trunk. These cars were not big by the way. I jump up front with the driver, and Justin and Derrel into the back seat...the very small back seat. Then, suddenly, the other guy who was with the driver, arbitrarily crams into the back, pushing Justin, the biggest of all of us, into the middle of this tiny back seat. We drove the whole way into town with the guy talking non stop about going to stay at this other place he was promoting instead of the hostal we had already booked. We staved him off and got to our hostal, which ended up being the best move of the trip. We quickly came to find out that a cab ride from the airport should have only been about 5 soles, so we found out we were had, and proceeded to haggle every cabbie for the rest of the trip.

After, for some of us more than others, a long spell of traveling, we were ready to take it easy and call our first night in Cusco an early one.

Around 8 pm or so, Justin, Adrienne, and I found ourselves relaxing around one of the plastic lawn tables in the courtyard vestibule in the middle of the hostal, playing some version of a newly learned drinking game called beer hockey. You can already see where this is going; check in next post to find out what happened.