Saludos desde Perú

Hello from Peru!

For those of you just joining, I've somehow convinced an ex-pat owner of a small hotel and tour guide company in rural Peru that it was a good idea to give me a job for the summer. After almost two days of airplanes, layovers, customs agents, bus rides, confusion and frustration, I finally made it to Ollantaytambo, Peru.

First of all, Ollantaytambo is not a quiet little mountain town in the hills of Peru. Regardless of the small population, every five seconds in Olly a petro fueled noise box passes you on the street. The old stone walls and narrow roads make the acoustics great, but I feel like I'm on the street corner in Times Square. Most roads are cobble stone or dirt, which adds to the wonderful noise of passing traffic. They have double trailer semi's, dirt bikes, motorcycles, cars, trucks, vans, bicycles, and hundreds of pimped out motorized pedi-cab's all competing for space on the single lane roads with  thousands of people on foot and a million "stray" dogs that literally lay in the middle of the road without regard for you or anything else.

Every waking hour is filled with barely muffled exhaust, horns blaring, and dogs barking. All that on top of American tourists snoring so loud that the entire hotel commented on it the next morning. There were some that thought it was a dog. Some that thought it to be a dying donkey. Others had never heard a noise so strange in all their lives and thought it was a Peruvian monster of some sort. As for myself, I was in a fully enclosed room on the furthest end of the hotel and I swear it was a dying gato (cat) on the boarded up windowsill outside my room. At 5am I was ready to go outside and put it out of it's misery!

The good news is, I don't have to listen to the dying cat tonight. The bad news is that he is flying out tomorrow from Cuzco due to a broken leg from today's ride. Pro Tip: If the local guide tells you not to wear clipless pedals, don't wear them! But that's mountain biking and we all know the risks when we throw our leg over the bike each time we ride. We all hope the benefits outweigh those risks, but there are times that's just not the case. As for the dying gato, he seemed happy to have been here even though his time was cut short.

Lets talk about colors. America is a drab country. The colors I've seen in Ollantaytambo in only two days have blown away every other country I've visited to day, with the exception being the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania. Even still, the colors in Olly are so vibrant and more condensed than the sparse Maasai huts and villages in Africa. Today I learned that the hats many of the local women wear are of two kinds. Those with flowers and those without. When the woman is single, she has flowers in her hat. When she is taken, no flowers. I'm wondering if this is where the term "de-flowered" comes from.....

Everyone here seems very friendly and I can't wait to learn more Spanish so I can get to know more of the locals and their culture. I think I'll need to learn a bit of Quechua too. The Peruvians are very loving toward one another and their children. Many of the taxi's are adorned with a statement about their loving children and the names of their kids. It's kinda like the little stick figure stickers you see on the back of every soccer mom (or dad) SUV in the States, but in a much bigger way!

Tomorrow I heard talk of hot springs. If I get to go, it'll be a nice break from the rush rush world of international mountain bike tourism in a developing country. If not, I'm happy to ride my bike more!

Until next time,

Shannon