Pearl #22 ~ Excerpt from Walking With Inkas

This is an excerpt from my travel blog, Walking with Inkas, and was originally written on May 30, 2006.


. . . continued from Pearl #21

After checking out and getting my weekly workout on the walk back home (I inevitably buy too much to carry comfortably, but it's good for my arms), Jared and I got ready for the rodeo! Angie's mom was driving us, and arrived just as I finished putting the frozen items away. We hopped in the car and headed off, stopping at the El Polo mall to pick up some of Angie's new friends from the gym that she goes to. Turns out these friends had made some other friends the night before . . . two European world travelers that happened to be passing through Peru! It took me a while to get the details, but after learning that they didn't speak Spanish, my interest was piqued. 

They clearly weren't American, so I asked where they were from. Turns out one of them is from Germany and the other is from France, but somehow Luxembourg got tied in there, too, and these guys met while working together at the Xerox headquarters in Dublin! I think. It was complicated. In any case, they had worked for a couple years, but then decided to quit their jobs and see the world, with the help of a friend who works for American Airlines and gets them cheap plane tickets. They've journeyed Route 66 in America, been all over Europe, have seen parts of Asia, and are getting through as much of South America as possible before heading off to Australia. They don't really have a solid plan, they just go when and where the wind blows and the planes travel. My kind of guys!

Nico (the French guy . . . and yes he has a bit of an accent, oohlala) and I were engrossed in the pictures on our digital cameras, when all of a sudden I looked up and realized that the city of Lima had disappeared and been replaced by the Pacific coastline, complete with beaches! I asked where we were, but couldn't make out the reply. No matter, about five minutes later we were on a dirt road, coasting by a couple alpacas and the ruins of a castle built for some lover of some king or something. I just took it all in. We pulled up in front of a tall brick wall, and after paying the guard at the gate, we were in . . . rodeo here we come, yeehaw!!

I wasn't sure what it would be like, but I sure didn't expect the atmosphere to feel so familiar. It felt just like this motorcycle bar in western Wisconsin that we sometimes go to when staying at our friends' cabin. You go there and there are all these guys riding in on their Harley's, wearing their leather chaps and drinking beer as they wait for the ever famous chicken to be served. This chicken is so tender it practically slides off the bone, and there's so much food you crave a hammock, so you can lay down and focus on digesting later in the day. That's sort of how this was, except that there were no Harleys, and they were cooking beef instead of chicken, and there was live entertainment following the meal. No hammocks. In any case, it felt like a summer festival.

The actual rodeo didn't get started until about three or four hours after we were done eating, and it was probably the least entertaining part! The whole thing got started with the introduction of the "vacaros" (cowboys). There were 16 of them split into four teams of four. The first activity involved each of them racing to a log placed in the middle of the arena, donning construction helmets and work gloves, and wielding a chainsaw with enough expertise to slice off the end of the log faster than any of the other teams. This was followed by an amateur rodeo for kids age 10 and under. They came out into the middle of the ring and climbed onto the back of a sheep, who was not at all interested in pretending to be a bull! One by one the kids fell off the sheep as it tried to escape the arena, making for a very entertaining show. The sheep was fine if a bit perturbed. There was also a couple's dance-off with young bulls racing around and between the dancers (the vacaros herded them so that the couples weren't in danger of anything more than a mild thrill when a bull passed a little too close for comfort). Other highlights ensued, including when the bulls rebelled during the lasso challenge and jumped over one of the walls! Only one actually escaped, and the entertainment was paused while they focused on getting him back in the corral. Suddenly the lasso was being used for real!

All in all, it was a great time, enhanced by the international flavor of our group. I spent about a half an hour engrossed in conversation with a man from Colombia (a fellow gym member and friend of Angie's mom), talking about the situation there with the drug cartel, guerrilla warfare, and tremendous gap between the upper and lower classes, as well as the beauty of that country and the improvements that have been made in the last five years. This was a turning point in my Peruvian experience, thus far. Up until then, I had been somewhat shy about speaking in Spanish, especially since so much of my time is spent in the Embassy, where most people speak both languages. I knew I had to change this, if I wanted to get my Spanish back up to where it was when I returned from Spain two years ago, but it wasn't until I talked with the Colombian that my confidence was restored, and my tongue remembered how to pronounce the words without stammering every time it had to roll an rrrrrrr or conjugate a verb. Suddenly I regained my confidence, and I was all smiles as I moved in time with Carlos Vives songs on our way home. I couldn't help marveling at the fact that I was riding down the Panamericana with a Colombian, an Ecuadorian (Angie's mom), a fellow American, a guy from Germany and one from France, and finally a couple Peruvians. Some spoke all Spanish, some spoke all English, some spoke both, and some could probably throw in a bit of Quechua, German, Gaelic, French, or otherwise if they so desired!

We invited everybody over to our house for the cookout we'd been planning on having, but it turned out that most people had other plans for the night, so Angie, Jared and I said goodnight to everybody else and got dropped off at our place. We started grilling up some hot dogs and hamburgers for ourselves as we tried to get ahold of the other interns, but since the rodeo had gone long everybody else had already eaten. We decided we'd meet up a little bit later: it was time to see what a night out in Lima was like! Unfortunately, our communication has been sub-par lately, due to the fact that the phone service in the intern house has been restricted! Turns out somebody forgot to pay the bill or something, so we can't make outgoing phone calls, although we can receive incoming ones. This made coordinating with others more challenging since we had to either wait around for them to call us or walk down the street to the payphone at a nearby store. In the end, it was just Angie and Jared and I that went out together. It seems every time we went someplace with the hope of running into each other, we just missed them! Maybe we'll have better luck this weekend. We're supposed to go out on Friday night, and I'm thinking we'll probably have a set time and destination to meet up.

We went down to Miraflores, home of Lima nightlife and chilled out at a lounge until a little after 2:00. The original club we were planning on going to, based on a call from the Marines, was over-crowded and nearly impossible to get into. It's called Aura, and is apparently the hottest place in town right now. We still got a bit of dancing in at the lounge, and were glad that we hadn't wasted our time waiting around to get into Aura when we found out that it was 40 soles to get in at 2:30! In all reality, that's not completely unreasonable since it's the equivalent of about $12, which is standard club fare in major U.S. cities. But we figured our money would be better spent if we came out a different weekend and got in earlier with a bigger group of people. We went home and went to bed. Turns out the Marines had reached the same conclusion, and had found somewhere else to spend their night, rather than try to get into Aura until they had to head home for their 3:00 a.m. curfew.

continued in Pearl #23 . . .