Peru🇵🇪Six month backpacking trip through Bolivia, Peru and central America: update 6/14

Napaykullayki kgochu!
This might sound more like Nepali, but I’m still in South America. To add a cultural touch to my emails, let me disrupt your simple worldview that they speak Spanish or Portuguese throughout this continent. The above greeting is Quechua, and a few days ago, I ended up with a family on an island where it was the only language they spoke. There I was with my carefully built-up basic Spanish. It was a truly unique experience. Having a cozy Quechua chat with mom and dad in the dark kitchen while the woman was preparing our food over a fire (I felt like I was living in a Rembrandt painting), and the guinea pigs were happily hopping around between the pots. I gestured that they were cute pets, but they turned out to be for dinner (not that evening, though). Both dinner and breakfast the next day consisted of rice and potatoes. So, I tossed in a vitamin pill for good measure.

In one of the first days in Peru, I took a tour to 3 islands. The first island was a floating island made of reeds. The reeds rot away at the bottom, but they throw new reeds on top. A few families live on that island, there’s a school, post office, everything made of reeds!

Then I have two more stories for you. Machu Picchu and a random walk through the mountains. Machu Picchu was breathtaking, but you can check any random website to see what that mountain town looks like (by far the most touristy attraction of all of South America). The random walk through the mountains the next day, however, was a much more enjoyable experience.

After a few hours, I came across two farmers on a tractor who urged me to come to them. They gave me a full mug of corn juice. And try politely taking a sip of that. That stuff is undrinkable, but they found it so amusing that I was there that I had to drink the whole thing. Half an hour later, I came across a family in a field. They also gave me corn juice. I knew I couldn’t get out of it and chugged the mug with a happy face in one go (this is acting from the top shelf). They found this so nice of me (apparently, they don’t find that stuff drinkable either) that they offered me a full lunch: hot rice, chicken, potatoes, corn, and a vegetable salad, all at 3.700 meters above sea level in the middle of the mountains on a little field. After that lunch, I met one more family (so another mug of corn juice). And in the evening, a taxi driver took me back to Cusco. After a journey of an hour and a half through the mountains, he dropped me off at the door of my hotel for 1.5 euros. One of the better days of my trip here.

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