Lima

This is the last blog post about Maria and Andrés' adventures in Peru and Bolivia.

Before flying back to Denmark from Lima, we spent a few days at Andrés friends' house. One of his friends is starting up a project in the jungle, a healthcenter based on permaculture agriculture. He has some really cool ideas.

Lima isn't the nicest place to visit, the dusty grey buildings and the black vultures that fly over them give the city a gloomy atmosphere. However, the coast in Miraflores is a nice area with gardens and has a beach. So we wanted to try surfing. For Andrés it was his first time surfing. 

Maria in the love park (Parque Amor).

Andrés hadn't forgotten his skateboarding skills and had no problem surfing. 

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu needs no words.

You can read some comments below the pictures.

Train is the fastest way to Machu Picchu, but you also pay for it. The bus takes around 4 times longer than the train, and we only had one day left on our holiday to visit Machu Picchu.

It's amazing to think that this river flows through the Amazon and ends in the Atlantic Ocean!

Andrés enjoyed the wildlife as much as the Machu Picchu ruins

Andrés enjoyed the plants almost more than Machu Picchu

They say that between 400-1000 Incas lived here permanently

The Inca bridge shows the impressive paths that the Incas built to get to the temples from different places

At the top of the mountain in the background lay the Huayna Picchu ruins

It's impressive how they could shape these huge granite stones to fit so well in their temples

Good models make good pictures!

Once more Andrés enjoyed all the different types of ferns

Beautiful Cusco

Our time in South America was reaching to an end, but we wanted to take some time to really relax and be "real" tourists. The place chosen for that was Cusco and Machu Picchu. However this post is only going to be about our relax time in Cusco. Machu Picchu will come in the next post.

Cusco is a very beautiful city, with lots of historical buildings from the colonial times and ruins from the Incas. Many of the colonial houses are used today as hostals, and some have very nice small courtyards, as the one we stayed in. One of the neighbourhoods stands out for its coziness, and that is San Blas, which lies at the foothills of the hill with the impressive Sacsayhuaman ruins from the Incas. The ruins are nice, but the entrance is extremely expensive (way too much!), 36,6€ (273kr.) per person, even for us as students with an international student card, just because we are over 25 years old.

Anyways, we had some very nice and relaxing days there. I think we needed that!

Peruvian and Bolivian animals

While we were living in the mountains in Peru and during our holiday in Copacabama, we met so many cute animals that I thought we have to share it with you. Even the pigs are cute here...

Foreigners not welcome!

Our last days in Peru have been very hectic. We were in four different towns/villages in one day and slept in dirty hostels, but Andrés got some valuable data. Thanks to the help of Kelluyo Tambo's manager, Alonso, we managed to get in contact with otherwise suspicious local people. And they have all the right to be so. In may 2011, a Canadian mining company got the rights to exploit the silver mine of Santa Ana in Huacullani, which lead to massive protests all around the Puno region, mainly because of environmental reasons and small benefits to the local communities. This event is commonly known as the 'aymarazo'. And still today this area is very suspicious of white people. Luckily, and thanks to Alonso's help, we did not encounter any problems, and the locals were very helpful, as they learnt about my thesis project and wanted to help in order to get a better commercial option for their qañawa, which is one of their main incomes.

Qañawa field affected by a dry spell early in the season. The plants are small and the yield will also be.

Huacullani, the place where the 'aymarazo' protests started. Further up to the left, out of the picture, the mining activity  is plundering the mountain of this valuable resource.

Kanccora Yacango

For a week we went higher up in the mountains where qañawa is grown. And lived in a Tambo in Kanccora Yancango, with no running water, but this time with a kitchen. A Tambo is an official governmental building for the development of rural areas. They serve as a link between the Peruvian government and the rural farming communities. In these high areas, many locals tend to be quite suspicious of strangers, because they have experienced exploitation of their resources by foreigners without real benefits to the locals. This made it difficult for me, Andrés, to gather some data, but I figured out that most of the qañawa crops there were mainly for self-consumption. And since my thesis is about value chains, the information I could collect here was not very relevant to my thesis project.

A QAÑAWA field at last!! They are similar in characteristics to quinoa, but a much smaller plant.
It has different names: in Peru it's called Cañihua and in Bolivia Cañahua. The Aymara call it Qañawa.

Another Qañawa field, but red. Next to the Qañawa field is a potato field which has been affected by the frost - the tops of the plants are black and dried out, giving a very low harvest for this year. But the Qañawa are much more resilient and have not been affected by the frost. 

On our second day in the mountains we hiked up to some cliffs to see a cave with old drawings on the walls. 

We didn't have a bag to carry food and water for our hike, so Andrés used our 'Awayu' blanket like the Aymara carry things.

Thanks to the help of the old community leader, we found the cave paintings. This woman was in amazingly good shape and could walk up the mountain faster than all of us.

The manager of the Tambo, Miguel, and Andrés talked to and learned from the local farmer communities about agricultural practices.

In front of our Tambo, was a vast plain where herders had their sheep, alpacas and pigs, and where we went to fetch water from a well.

To one of the meetings Andrés held for the authorities of the district, one of the men came by horse, like in an old western movie. It is the first and last horse we have seen in Peru. Donkeys, bikes, motorbikes or walking are much more common means of transportation.

In the top right our Tambo with red roof can be seen.