I’ve now been in Peru for over three weeks now and am running out of excuses for not getting off my duff and writing a first post to this blog.  So here goes.  

I left my home in very small Acworth, New Hampshire in the late morning of Friday, December 2nd for a nearby Amtrak train station in Bellows Falls, VT, where I boarded the daily train for, not so small, New York City.  The plan was to spend the next four days visiting and staying with good friends in the City and on the morning of the fifth day, Wednesday, December 7th, leave their house early in the morning for a flight to Lima, Peru.  And that is exactly what did happen.  Luckily there were no hitches and I got through check in and security with no particular problems and was on the plane and on my way to a plane change and a four plus hour wait in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  

All the time on the plane and while waiting I was going through lists in my brain to insure I had made all the preparation I needed in Peru and had finished up commitments at home.  I made a few phone calls and sent a few emails from the Fort Lauderdale airport but other than that i tried to pass the time reading, though the excitement of the trip was starting to sneak up on me and I had a hard time concentrating on anything else.  Would what I had learned in the Spanish classes in the months before I left stay with me and allow me to at least speak rudimentary Spanish to my hosts and not have to constantly depend on their son Raul, who speaks more English than I speak Spanish, for translation?  How would I do physically on the trip, I have recently turned 74 and while reasonably fit for my age I had not had the time, or made the time, to get much exercise during the summer and fall months?  How would the relationship with my host family go, after a few days in central Lima to rest (at least that was the plan) I planned to be staying with my friend David’s birth father and his family at least until Christmas?  David’s mother had died shortly after he was born and his father, a poor Peruvian shepherd, could not provide adequate care for both David and his year and a half older brother and so David was put up for adoption and has lived in SW New Hampshire ever since.  Last year I came to Peru with David and we were able to locate his father and brother and their families.  You can read about this here: travelwithjimdavidjerryandlizzie.blogspot.com.  Last year I had traveled to Peru within a few days of David but this year I was coming down a month earlier and even though the family had been terrific with me last year, what would it be like to be here without David?   I really hadn’t spent any time planning the travels I hoped to do around Peru, I only knew there was plenty to do; would I be able to put together an interesting itinerary without to much backtracking? Would David and Raul, who was hoping to travel with us as an interpreter and fellow traveler, enjoy seeing the same things I would?  In other words I was worrying about all the stupid things I always worry about before the trip really begins.  My experience is that once the trip really begins and I start moving around and interacting with people things happen, or not, and it is all part of the learning that I love when I travel.

My flight landed right on time and the taxi from the hostel, where I had reservations and had stayed last year for a week, was there to pick me up when I got out of Customs and Immigration. Two worries to check of the list!!  Arriving at the hostel, 1900 Backpacker Hostel, in central Lima was like arriving at the house of a friend.  I checked in, inquired if Raul, who was to meet me and deliver me to the family house in a few days, had arrived - he had - so I went to my room and quickly fell asleep.  

The next morning I connected with Raul, we ate a long breakfast at the hostel while we talked about what we had been doing and what we wanted to do for the next three months.  After a while we went out for a walk around central Lima, stopping along the way to walk through the Mineral Museum, interesting but not for a long time.  Later we found a restaurant near the Plaza Mayor for lunch and then took a tour bus up to the top of Cerro San Christobal, an outcrop of the Andes that extents almost to central Lima and affords a great view of the city.  I had taken the trip last year with David but Raul had never been there.  It was a reasonably clear day for Lima so we had a good view and Raul seemed to enjoy the trip.  By late afternoon we were back at the hostel and I was tired, not so much from the day but more from the accumulated tiredness of the year.  I’ve learned that my trips usually start out like this, the first week or so are mostly for getting rid of the accumulated tiredness of the year since my last trip.  So I try not to schedule to much for the first week, laid back days with some walking usually get me back to a place where I’m ready to take on a quicker pace and begin learning in earnest.  After a long nap Raul and I went out to a nearby restaurant for dinner, then back to the hostel for more talk in the lobby and to bed.  

The next day, Friday, Raul took the bus back to Huaycan for a day of school.  He had graduated  a few days before my arrival but there was class until right before Christmas and he wanted to be there.  So I spent a very laid back at the hostel and some walks around the area - the kind of day I really needed and don't allow myself to take very often.  Raul returned quite late in the evening so that he would be in central Lima as the plan was to spend the weekend here before moving to the family home in Huaycan to spend the time until just after Christmas.  

The weekend was very laid back again, I guess I needed that kind of time, with walks in the Lima parks near our hostel, a bus ride to visit Raul’s girlfriend at her work (we took the bus in the wrong direction and never got there, but ended up spending a nice day at the Zoo), and a long evening at the Lima Water Park - a place to see fantastic and colorfully lit fountains and to get wet.  It was a pleasant weekend and when it was over I felt ready to start my trip in earnest.  

Monday morning we checked out of the hostel and grabbed a bus, actually several buses, to get us to Huaycan where David’s and Raul’s family lived and where I was to stay through Christmas, a bit less than two weeks away.  As it turned out it was a great two weeks, lots of learning about how Peruvian live and interact, deepening understanding of the family members and the fantastic experience of beginning to integrate myself into the day to day workings of the family, as much as is possible for an outsider.  The family that lived in this housed was definitely an extended family, there was David’s father, Victor, and his wife, who was called Mama by everyone including me, and their three children, Raul, Monica and Yeremy,  two of Mama’s children by her first husband, he died many years ago, Jesus and Richard, and his very pregnant wife Liz (she is due next week).  Now I was added to that list and in January we would add David.  I settled into the guest room, where I would live for a week before I moved into Raul’s room because relatives from the family’s traditional village in the Andes’ arrived to visit for Christmas.  One thing you quickly learn is that there is almost always room for more people as those already there double and triple up.  

In order to not feel so much of an outsider, difficult when ones language skills are as primitive as mine, I early on began to help with the dishes after every meal.  At first they tried to stop me, I was a guest,  but slowly they accepted my help and it became the norm with me removing the dishes from the table after the meal and washing them at the sink.  Some skills do not need to be relearned and transfer easily from country to country.  No, I didn’t try to find a dishwasher to load!  

Raul was home in the mornings, his classes started at 1 PM and went until 6:30, and we make many trips to Huaycan Centro, the business area of this working class area of Lima, for errands like finding a dentist who would install braces, called Brackets here, on his teeth, buying me a hat for sun protection, it’s hard for me to think about summer things when I am packing in the winter and sometimes just to do something other than hang around the house.  In the afternoons when my ability to converse were limited by not having help from an English speaker I did my laundry, by hand - no washer and dryer here, read through the guide books as a first step in planning our travels, studied Spanish and took naps.  I also went along a few times when Mama went to the clinic at the local church with back and other problems.  Eventually, after some x-rays, they sent her to a Chiropractor which seemed to help, though, to my knowledge she hasn’t gone back which she needs to do.  One day I went on an outing with Raul and some of his classmates and their PE teacher, to a local swimming pool, which was great.  We also had to go to a lawyer to begin the process of getting Raul a formal permission from his parents to travel around the country with David and I.  This is a national ID country and Raul’s ID indicates that he is under 18 and thus he cannot travel without specific permission from his parents indicating where he can travel and who will be his “in loco parentes”.  After finding and paying a lawyer to draw up the original  document we then had to go to a Notary office, where the document was largely rewritten to conform to the standards of the law, and a day later Raul’s mother came with us to place her finger print on the document.  Then there was the need, a day before Christmas Eve to go into Huaycan Centro to buy fireworks.  Christmas Eve is more celebrate here than Christmas day and it is celebrated by a VERY large late evening meal followed by fireworks in the evening.  The fireworks are all generated by individual families and are amazing.  

The days were quiet in the house as everyone except Mama and me worked or went to school or both, Monica had school in the afternoon and Yereny in the morning.  Richard, his wife Liz and Jesus all worked filleting fish in the market, for ceviche, the national dish here, and Victor worked at a  large wholesale dry goods store in the same market where the others worked.  They all left the house between 3:30 and 5 in the morning.  Liz is still doing this one week away from delivering her baby.  Mama stayed home to do the marketing, cook and clean; and on some weekends run a food cart in the market.  Raul had worked the early morning fish filleting job from the time he was 12 until when he was 16 and had to fight off TB, the antibiotics he was taking plus the long hours were causing him to fall asleep in his high school classes.  After David and I leave he will go back to that work while also starting his pre university schooling.  Students often take 2 or 3 years of pre university before entering a degree granting school.  Monica, this year, also began working at the fish filleting on some mornings before her 1 PM classes started.  Maybe it is just because I am getting old and cannot keep up a pace like that any more, but it is incredible how hard people work here.  Seeing this, again and in yet another  place, tends to make me intolerant of the people I hear complaining that people are only poor because they don't work hard.  

As Christmas came closer and closer Raul and I spent many evenings trying to pick out some places to visit in the time between Christmas and when David arrives on the 4th of January.  Slowly we settled on going north along the coast, a very dry desert, by bus, to the city of Trujillo.  Trujillo is the third largest city in Peru, after Lima and Cuzco, and just outside the city are some amazing sounding ruins of cultures that go back to BCE, including the huge ancient all adobe city of Chan Chan.  Once we decided on this, we had to be sure we could get a bus seat during the busy Christmas/New Years holiday season, which entailed two separate trips  central Lima, a one and a half to two and a half hour bus trip each way.  We got our tickets and after the Christmas celebrations we were packed and ready to be in Lima at 9:30 in the morning on the 26th of December.