Children of the Sun.

My second tour of two months, or 56 days over 8556km, how would that go? Before the first I promised myself that when I would guide that tour well, I would see myself as a real tour leader. However this tour went very smooth and was easy to guide. A colleague of my had worse experiences. Two out of three from her tours, she had bad luck with her groups.

My second group included 14 persons with almost even so much different characters and different reasons for doing this tour. A group like this is more difficult to keep together. I usually don’t prefer to do this anyway, but according to the new regulations of my agency I should try…

To be honest,  I didn’t even try. I still think that things like that should come from the group. A group needs to form itself and I can only direct (or try) that everybody find his/her place.

For two characters in this group this was very difficult and because I think that people are interesting creatures and most of us are interested in the strangest among us, I will give a short description of them:

This was different with the second special character. She pretended to have a lot of travel experience, but sometimes it seemed that she was living only in her own little world. She often didn’t pay attencion to the things and people around her, but kept asking to receive attencion. She could talk a lot but had problems to listen. Off course this worked the opposite way and it also didn’t help that almost every morning, before leaving the hotel, we had to wait for her. Arie, who organizes mountain-bike tours from the Cotopaxi, told us already in the first week a very predictive sentence: This woman is going to give you a lot of work…

All right later I will come back on this, first I want to tell a little more about the special experiences I (we) had during my second tour of two months.

The tour started a bit confusing, when we found out that we would have one day more. According to the program the group would arrive in Quito on the second day, but because of different flight-times, they arrived already on the same day that they left Holland. Well, one day more is not a bad start I would say. Only to bad that this time we couldn’t visit the market of Otavalo. Except from these little things and some personal inconveniencies the tour itself started smooth in Ecuador.

Ones again I got my proof why I prefer tours with public transportation, when we encountered a landslide on the way to Tena.

      Now we only had to walk over to take an other bus on the other side.

As always we had a great time in the jungle lodges close to Tena. Only this time, unfortunately there went something wrong when we went innertubing down the river. One woman ended up in the wrong rapids and hurt her ankle. Later we found out that it was broken! What do we do? What does she want? What can she do? Men told us that the fracture was straight and could heal in maybe 3 á 4 weeks. All right, she didn’t want to give up and since it would also take some time to arrange everything for going back to Holland, she decided to go with us to Lima and there and then we would oversee her possibilities again.

The volcano in Baños stayed calm and with some group members we went down a new mountain bike route on old bicycles. Two of these broke down, to make the ride more of an adventure…

Well it was a nice adventure, something two Japanese men couldn’t say anymore after they got hit by an electricity cable while they were standing on top of the famous train from Riobamba. It happened half April and they didn’t survive. For this reason it is not aloud anymore to travel on top of this train, which makes the ride boring and not recommendable.

Luckily Cuenca and Vilcabamba are always good destinations with something for everybody. After asking about the possibilities and risks, even the woman with her broken ankle enjoyed a horseback riding-tour in VilcabambaJ

Piura we can better skip and Chiclayo was again a cultural highlight! Only not for our ‘Cotopaxi woman’. It turned out that she had all her valuable things in her backpack when she left it in both of the storage rooms in the Bruning Museo and Tumbas Reales. In one of these museums someone took his or her time to go through her things and steal exact one or two bills of each amount together with some traveler cheques. Luckily they didn’t find her banking-cards.

Off course we went to the police, the museums and the local agency I organized the tour with. They couldn’t find the thief, but a few weeks after I got an e-mail in which they told me what they’re going to do to prevent this in the future. Nice to know that they took it serious, because apparently someone else didn’t learn her lesson…

Huanchacu, Lima, Pisco, Huacachini en Nasca went quick and smooth although the group started to separate a bit more. But this is expectable and as long as everybody find his/her place, there is no problem. However there was something else in Nasca that wondered me. It seems that Nasca is slowly disappearing. By this I mean the name Nasca. Officially the culture is already more than 2000 years old, but now the name is chancing into Nazca. It seems that it is easier to find info on the internet about Nazca than about Nasca. Strange that apparently people who can’t even write a name right, are capable of chancing history…

Arequipa stays a beautiful city and luckily the condors in Colca Cañyon were more forgivable than some of my group members towards a certain woman who showed up more than 15 minutes late for the ‘Condor Tour’. The condors gave a great show just after we arrived at the Cruz del Condor and everybody was happy again.

With a good mood we went to Arica and San Pedro de Atacama. The long bus ride to S. P. wasn’t to bad this time and after a nice sunset above the Valle la Luna, everybody was ready to experience the beautiful nature of South Bolivia. The colorful desert, laguna’s, flamenco’s and the white salt flat were again great highlights in the tour, even for our materialistic person ;-) Only to bad that during 3 days close to each other, the tiredness and differences between the group members caused some unwelcome tension. But the group survived.

In Potosí people could do their own thing again and things calmed further down. Except for one group member. Guess who… Apparently she hadn’t learned anything in the past and from Chiclayo. She went around 18:30h, when it was already dark, looking for a restaurant in the direction I had told everybody not to go, because there were some serious student protests. They were even throwing dynamite in the streets! I heard that they were already 7 months in protest. They wanted to change the rector of the university, because he is corrupt.

If everybody in Bolivia showed so much dedication to reach their goal, Bolivia should finally be able to improve her economy. Especially in combination with the high prices for metal on the world market, the big sources Bolivia has and the new gold and silver mines which are found close to a town called San Francisco (about 100km from Uyuni).

Off course we went again to the police and off course they never found the thief. But did she finally learn? No, the next day when Potosí became soccer champion of the country, she was paying a phone bill in a call office and her new backpack was standing a few meters behind her…

Luckily we managed to arrange money and a new passport for her, but my pity for her was gone. I can’t help someone who can’t listen. She is a sad woman and even with eating she couldn’t take very well care of herself. This resulted in the end in a short of vitamins, a feeling of weakness, not being able to go to the Inti Raymi festival and even not being able to walk the 4-days Inca Trail. Or at least this is what she told us, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more a psychological problem. The worst still has to come; apparently she had been working to help other people with psychological problems, while she is the one who needs some serious help herself. Enough about her now, I hope she finds some help…

Back to Sucre, here was an other student protest, because the government wants to interfere in the policy of the university and the university wants to stay independent. In Sucre I also heard on the news that they want to bring the government back from La Paz to the real capital of Bolivia, Sucre. Off course La Paz isn’t happy with this, because they’re afraid to lose economically and even on a tourist base, because to a lot of tourists (and other people) La Paz is still kind of the capital of Bolivia.

With all this things going on in Bolivia, it was interesting to be able to join the official celebration of the beginning of the new Aymara year. This started with the Solstice, the ending of the longest night, on the 21th of June, at the site of Tiawanaku. Last year even president Evo Morales, who is also Aymara, was present at this party to receive the first powerful sunrays from the beginning of the new year. Apparently it helped him, because he is one of the few presidents who ‘survived’ already more than one and a half year as president of Bolivia. We had found ourselves a good position on a temple hill at the side of the ceremony. From this position we couldn’t see the first sunrays coming through the gate of Tiawanaku and without binoculars it was difficult to see the sacrifices for the new year, but in total we had a good overview. We were standing between the locals and could all together feel the warmth from the first sunrays. As you all know, I’m not religious and not a real culture junk. But if you keep in mind that some locals had spent the night on the site waiting for this moment, while others were still standing in line to enter the site, then we were fortunate that we could experience this, while we only had to get up at 3am.

After the sun started to warm up the site, people wished each other a Feliz Año Nueve, drunk something and started to make music and dance in, sometimes, colorful clothes. This lasted for about two hours, but after breakfast the whole site was totally empty. A strange view.        

After a short visit to Puno, we arrived one day earlier in Cusco, thanks to the first extra day of our trip. Because of this we were also able to join the famous celebration of Inti Raymi Cusco on the 24^th of June. During this festival the Inca’s, who called themselves ‘children of the sun’, honored their god ‘Father Sun’ or Inti. It was also the start of their new solar year, because from that moment the days would become longer again.

The festival started for us around 9am at Qoricancha, the temple of the sun in Cusco. We got to see a short show in which groups of people were dressed as Inca’s in the four different colors, from the four different directions of the sun and the old Inca empire, Tawaintisuyu. These groups of people came to honor Inti and the Inca king with words, songs and music. After this we got to see more or less the same show on Plaza de Armas. All right, there was probably more into it, but because everybody was talking in the old Inca language Quechua, it was difficult to follow, even with a little information book with translations.

The last part of the Inti Raymi festival was at the site of Saqsaywaman, the head of the puma shape in which Cusco was originally build by the great Inca Pachakutec.

Sure is that this festival is now very touristy. While the leaders of the 4 directions from the old Inca kingdom told their king what happened last year and the priest predicted, with the (fake) sacrifice of a lama and some chichi, what will happen this year, thousands of tourist, from over the whole world were watching. A lot of them, including us, had paid 80US$ to see this final part. Money that the government will luckily spread over the country, but still gives the performance a bitter taste. Like we are only watching a fully programmed show. Just when the great Inca king raised his hands to thank the sun god Inti for his support and right at that moment the sun came through, for a moment it could have been that Inti had really listened to the Inca.

But when we found out that Bill Gates was on the tribune with important guests, in combination with the high entrance fee, we also got an other idea. Maybe his software made it possible that somewhere, out there in space, a big screen was blocking the sunrays until the Inca king raised his hands… 

No, I guess this isn’t fair. I sounds nice, but I shouldn’t make fun of this old ritual. Especially not with the luck I usually have with the sun, during my travels. Lets say the sun really came when the Inca called him, maybe the predictions of the priest are also true? He says that Inti is happy about us and predicts a powerful year. Sounds good to end this story about Inti Raymi with. It would also have been a good end of this travel story. But, as always, I do have some more things to say:

For example, what happened with the woman who broke her ankle, I didn’t mention her anymore in my story. This is with reason, because different than you would expect, during the tour she didn’t need much special attention.

It turned out that the fracture recovered much slower than expected and she had to keep the casting around it during the whole trip and even after. However she is a strong women who didn’t want to give up. She enjoyed the things she could do, instead of complaining and being sad about the things she couldn’t. That’s the spirit of a traveler and with this spirit she didn’t gave me, us any more work during the tour. She acted as a normal groups member and that is why I even almost forgot to mention her in this story. Only because I’m proud of her and think that she can be a great example to other travelers, I had to tell you her story.

Now to end my own story, I want to say this: However this group was more difficult to guide than the other group of two months, again I can’t complain. They were good people and all together, with a little exception,  a good group. I had fun guiding them and also learned some new things about my job.

I say thanks to most of my group and thanks to you all for reading my new travel story J