June 2   2:50pm
Lima, Peru:  Jorge Chavez Aeropuerto Internacional

I´ve just arrived from BA and have been sitting here at the gate for 30 minutes, with over 3 hours remaining until my flight to Arequipa...and I´m bored out of my mind.  Thank God for the annoying little boy who´s playing on the floor and rolling coins into my feet, like a 1-pin bowling alley. We´re both having fun with it.

I have the kind of dull headache one expects in the afternoon when running on 5 hours of sleep and having travelled since 7am that morning, combined with various delays, two doses of airline food, and recurring diarrhea.  I´m dying to read something, but every time I begin, I feel slightly nausiated or completely distracted, pretty much like anyone playing defense for the Lakers right now.

Excuse me...potty break....

(10 min later)

Well that´s something fun to do every 5 hours.  It may have been precipitated by the weird sandwhich I just ate but its mostly likely from yesterday´s adventure with 5-day-old homemade clam chowder.  I made it for the family I teach with here, and it was absolutely buttkickin´.  It was really exotic for them but they loved it: The had looks of suprise on their face as they tried it and actually liked it.  They probably were a little scared of my cooking ability too.

Well that was 5 days ago...so learn my lesson: Don´t take risks with 5-day-old seafood and dairy products.

So more about my first impressons of Peru from the airport here. They have Dunkin Donuts here so it can´t be all bad. And Doritos & Pringles.  That being said, so far its conforming to all my negative prejudices. The weather is absolutely miserable...perfect visibility for 50 yards, then just a wall of white fog everywhere. Its like living in a cloud...and if you thought that would be cool, its not.  Its like this over half the year here.

The domestic terminal here, all 8 gates of it, smells like dirty butchershop or slaughterhouse. It especially smells like old dead chicken.  I´ve switched seats 3 times trying to escape the odor, finally settling here next to a group of 4 college-girls in college sweatshirts,  who are even more casually annoying and tomboyish than I remember.  Maybe I´m just a macho asshole now.  Sometimes its fun to try and guess whether groups of American-looking&sounding people are Canadian or not, but since their backpacks are in plain view (sans maple-leaf patches) its not even a challenge. (Its required by law in Canada that backpacks come with a prominently-placed Canadian Flag patch)

So this being my first day in Peru, Im a little apprehensive about getting altitude sickness. The symptoms sound like what I felt like 30 minutes ago, except altitude sickness can also kill you, or just make you want to stay in bed all day.  Sounds like a bad hangover minus the bar tab, good times, and the 3:30am call to your ex-girlfriend that you dont find out you made until a Christmas party 3 months later.  

The plus side is that I have a legit reason to injest cocaine, by chewing coca leaves, as it is a known remedy for altitude sickness.  (And if I have any loyal readers at the DEA: it takes 2 kilos of coca leaves to equal the high from 1 gram of the white lady, so dont waste your time with me.)   Incidentally, the other 2 legit reasons are,  A) If I was ever in the presence of a Scarface-sized mountain of yayo, or B) Peer pressure.

Now I´m heading to Arequipa as my first destination in Peru, as its only 8000 ft, so being there some days will help me aclimate before heading to Cusco at 11000 ft.  From there I´ll do a 2-day tour of the 2nd deepest canyon in the world, before heading to Cusco, stopping for one night in Lake Titicaca along the way.  And no, you perverts, that name is not Spanish for one of those weird sex moves you read about on the internet.

...

Just talked to a Peruvian guy who´s in the specialty lumber business (read "rainforest") and does deals with America and Europe.  He says he works with a group of 33 local producers in the Amazon that are now working with the WWF for a stamp of approval on operations.  Its good to see the WWF taking a realistic approach and working with a business group that actually wants to adapt to more earth-friendly (and lets face it, ultimately business-friendly) practices, instead of pouting and holding out for stone-age level of environmental perfection.  The guy was cool: He talked about how conservation was in their interests, but the poor people who live there also have the right to have the forest be their lifeblood. 

I told the guy I´m from Oregon and he gave me all his contact information, in case I know someone who want´s to do business.  Weird.

Since I just had a $.87 haircut at a local salon (whose entrance looked like a Trainspotting toilet), I thought I`d share a few other interesting facts about Peru and its history.

There are over 500 different types of corn here,  but only one kind of popcorn...disturbing.

In some of the pre-Inka tribes, they hadnt learned to domesticate animals yet, so the men had to work the land with primitive tools.  The cool part is that they made women plant the seed, hoping that the fertility of women would lead to better crops. It kind of makes sense, but isnt planting a seed tradionally men`s work? (To quote Spinal Tap´s "Sex Farm": "I'm scretching in your pea patch / Plowing through your beanfield / Planting my seed ....")

In the biggest cathedral in Cusco, an absolutely massive and stunning building with over 300 oil paintings inside, the most famous work is a huge painting of The Last Supper, with Jesus about to carve up some fried ginea pig, Peru`s most traditional dish.

Strangle-mugging is the most popular form of robbing tourists here. A group of men will accost the tourist: One will put him in a sleeper hold while the others pick up his legs and shake him until unconscious.

For Inkas, deformed babies and people were considered special because it was believed the Rainbow or Thunder&Lightning gods "touched" them in the womb. They were so special that they were often the first to be sacrificed.  So if you`re a deformed baby in a primitive society, you`re kind of up shit creek no matter what culture you`re in (in other primitive cultures, and even recent ones, deformities were seen as work of devils and got you killed also).

Speaking of deformities, South America`s fascination with cosmetic surgery probably had its birth in the Inka empire.  There`s no evidence of fake tits, although like I say about Argentina`s boob jobs, its really hard to tell what`s fake if they`re tastefully done.  In any case, babies of noble famlies or sons destined to be priests often had "head sqeezers" from birth until age 6, shaping their head into a half-ass Conehead or a double-bump head, just like the profile of a double-hump camel.  I think there was a character in the Cantina bar from Star Wars who had a head just like this. Seriously.  And you thought Chinese foot-binders and the BonsaiKitten.com guy had cornered the market on post-birth deformation!

So there are gay flags all over the little town of Machu Picchu. Or is the new label LGBT or NAMBLA or METROSEXUAL or BI-CURIOUS or FLAMING-PROVINCETOWN-PUNCH? .... Im so confused as to what the current correct name is...Its like my old grandma that still calls negros "colered".

So this little town is the stopping-over point for tours to Machu Picchu and only has hotels, massage parlors, and pizza resturants (20 of the 34 resturants here are pizzerias), although now I highly suspect a hidden enclave of antiques shops and showtune recordstores.  Assaulted with all the gay flags, I feel like I`m in the middle of a gayfest, like maybe South Beach on Babs birthday or Castro on any day ending in "y". Well, except for the suspiciously large percentage of Peruvians here. And no guys making out. 

Ok so the rainbow flag really is the Inca flag and the gay movement "stole" it. Or is that just what they want us to think? Truth will be told tonight...

On a very non-gay note, I was just in the thermal baths here and witnessed something kind of funny.
The other name of this town is Aguas Calientes, and the locals and tourists alike take a dip in the pools. As I was halfway done with my beer and looking down the andean valley, two average (by San Jose standards, not BsAs) 20something German girls stolled along the edge of the hot pool, and EVERYBODY rubbernecked...Im talking local men, little girls, old Japanese guys, the fat austrailian lady with swollen ankles (more about her later). Weird phenomenon. I thought they were really into white people with curves, so on my way out I took a little extra time and swayed the hips a little....you know, for the fans.

Oh so I was up at Machu Picchu today and its spectacular. Im going again in the morning.

Ive been keeping a journal on paper and when Im back in BsAs I`ll give the full highlights of the trip with pictures.  Also, more to come soon about my favourite tour partner, the fat australian lady with swollen ankles.

So Im on a 11 day whirlwind tour through Peru, starting in Arequipa, a one night stopover in Lake Titicaca, and then up to Machu Piccu for a few days.

So Arequipa is at a medium altitude (7000 ft), and Im here to view all the colonial arquetecture as well as do a 2 day tour to the 2nd deepest canyon in the world tomorrow. The weather is absoutely beatiful here, but it cant be more than 40 degrees this morning.

As last night was completely uneventful, except for watching Argentina lose to Brazil 3-1 (disapointing) and falling asleep at 10pm after a day of 13 hours of travelling, Im going to write about breakfast this morning.

First the positives....I was next to a table of 4 british lesbians who must be here on some sort of erotic sex holiday (thats half Columbo and half wishful thinking). Also, I had freshly squeezed, or whateverthehelltheycallit, papaya juice, and the breakfast hasnt given me diarhea (yet).

I guess the only thing I have to bitch about is the coffee. Every table had steaming cups of coffee while I was shivering at my table so much, I could tell the lesbians were thinking about throwing a couple self-adhesive sextoys on my forehead and playing "pony express". But that`s beside the point. Once I finally got my coffee, i spilled a heaping spoonful of sugar into the mother and took a healthy gulp. To my disgust, this sludge had a sickenly sweet taste not unlike warm prune juice, but with out the helpful side effect of regularity unheardof outside the Swiss railway system.

Hopefully lunch is better.

Here are the photos.... PHOTOS
I have 5 different alblums. I´ll do some explanations soon.

I fly to Peru for 2 weeks this Wednesday.

So I just arrived in Bariloche, the main city in the Argentine Patagonian Lake District.

Not much to report yet, but you should take a look at these pictures. Incidently, its late autumn now and it looks exactly like these pictures.

Bariloche Photos

First a little reading...

This latest article by The Sports Guy is required reading. It basically makes fun of Friends and extolls the virtues of The O.C.  Whoomp, here it is

Another required reading article is by one of my favorite history writers, Victor Davis Hanson.  Its a little long, but comes highly recommended nonetheless.  Raise the roof

Well, thank you to Nate Riggs who was just down here in BA for a week. He took some photos of us in a club on Wednesday night, one from the River Plate game, and various others of La Boca, San Telmo, and Barrio Norte.

Photo Album

...smelling something really awful when you`re walking around a cemetary with tombs is that there`s a very good chance you`re smelling dead people.

I was walking around the Recoleta cemetary yesterday (pictures forthcoming) checking out all the statues and tombs. Its just rows and rows of tombs with super scary and sometimes funny statues on them.

Well.. I discovered when walking in the top half of the cemetary it smelled like really good pizza, in the middle, no smells, and in the bottom half, it basically smelled like death and old cat poop. There`s a decent chance I`m walking around with particles of some old guy in me...not to mention little bits of pizza and cat poop.

Like I said, pictures on the way.