An independent tour.

When I thought about this title, already about a month ago, I had no idea yet that the significance would get even deeper after the tour…

 Yes, this was probably one of the most independent tours I ever guided. Within the group of 18 people there formed already quickly more or less two groups of four, four more independent couples and two individuals. This doesn´t have to be a bad thing, as long as everyone respects each others differences. This isn´t always easy, especially if some people have very different ways of enjoying their vacation.

 In general I can say that this wasn´t a very difficult tour to guide. We didn´t have many things stolen, not many sick people, no real fights within the group, no roadblocks or what so ever. Yes I think that the tour was for 17 of the 18 group members a success. Maybe I warned too much that people had to be careful in certain places and with the altitude, but if this is the result, I prefer to warn a little too much instead of too less.

I do have to admit that during this tour I had problems with showing respect for someone who, in my opinion at least, doesn´t belong in a tour like this. It is part of my job to also respect people like this,  but if this person often complains and sighs, about things which are a normal part of the tour, a bus ride of 6 hours was already to long, one staircase too high, the temp. wasn´t good, there were not enough tree’s and more, it gets very difficult for me to keep on showing some respect. In total there were 13 different things (yes I counted them, because I first thought that I maybe overreacted), which are a normal part of the tour and which she complained about. I don´t count complains about a room ones and a while, because it can happen that people sometimes have to sleep in a lesser room than expected and I think you´re allowed to complain about that.

 With this woman I ended up trying to do only the necessary things for her and except from that trying to avoid her before I would get angry with her.

 What I did with this woman did a big part of the group with a 60 year old single travelling male. This guy was very nice and wanted to make a great movie with the highlights of this tour. His biggest problem was that he often acted as a child. In general he needed someone to take care of him, but even more to love him. With his 60 years he was still looking for attention, company and love. The problem often with people who do this is that they try to talk too much and if they don´t receive enough attention, they start to make their stories bigger and bigger and hopefully more interesting, so people would start listening. Of course this often works the opposite…

 Also love isn´t very easy to find especially when you speak no Spanish and no English at all. So the easiest way for this man was to try to meet some young women on the plaza, offer them something to eat and/or drink and hope that they would keep him company, give him a massage or maybe even more. You can imagine that this left him with a lot of disappointments, but luckily for him at least one girl seems to be really interested in becoming a friend. This lonely man cost me a lot of time during the tour, but somehow I felt sorry for him and I also admired that he really tried to see and experience as much as possible within this tour. I also think the movie he made is really going to give a great impression of the beauty of this tour…   

A tour of two months is never the same, so let me tell you about some new experiences of my own. These started in Vilcabamba when I decided to visit another part of park Podocarpus. I had been here before, but never on this side of the park. When I told this to some of my group members, we ended up going with 6 of us, looking forward to a new adventures tour, exploring the unknown…

 I had heard that there were some tourist trails on this side of the part and usually touristic trails aren´t very hard to walk on. When we got at the entrance we had the option of walking 4 different trails, two were very short, there was a middle one and a large one of 14 km . We were all experienced walkers, so we decided to go for the 14 km , which could be a nice exercise.

 Seven hours and about 8 (according to the little map we had) steep kilometers later we were back at the beginning. It turned out that we had trying to take the non touristic tour, which wasn´t 14km in a circle, but 14 km to get to a cabin and campsite at the end. When we found out about this, we turned around and used part of the middle trail to go back. This trail had some very steep descends, assents and edges, but also great vegetation, birds and views of the surrounding! It wasn´t an easy tour, but we are all glad that we have done it.

My second new experience was close to Chiclayo when we decided to visit a relatively new excavation site named Ventaron. About a year ago they had discovered at this site a painting of the Peruvian flag. This isn´t very special, until you know that these ruins are estimated to be about 4000 years old and the official Peruvian flag was invented by General San Martin in 1820…

From Ica we went camping in the pretty dessert of Huacachina. We had a campfire, Pisco sour, rum and cola, only the playing cards and sleeping mattresses were missing. It was a special experience and maybe the most surprising thing was to wake up and feel that everything outside, in the dessert, was wet with some kind of damp?!

Christmas we celebrated this year in Potosí and New Years Eve was in La Paz again. From La Paz to Cusco isn´t very far anymore and then we are already at the end of our tour.

 This time I wasn´t allowed to go with the group to Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu , so I had time to visit friends and contacts and make new ones. One of these new friends is a journalist of ‘El Comercio’, the biggest newspaper in Peru . I finally had my interview to complain about the safety on Huayna Picchu mountain and the shortage on service from the Peruvian government towards tourist. Even in a year within tourism in Peru grew with 12% we often still seem to get little appreciation from the government. The journalist isn´t in charge of what would be printed in the paper, but she promised to do her best for me and because she turned out to be good company, we went for a drink together and promised to keep contact.

During some other meetings with friends in Cusco, we decided that it would be nice if we can use our own experience and knowledge to organize and sell our own tour of 3 weeks travelling through Peru . Of course this one has to be different from the tours, most other tour operators are selling, but because most people will visit Peru only ones, we also can´t skip the highlights. The tour we came up with is more or less the following:

 Day 1- Lima, Day 2- Lima, 3- Islas Ballestas and the dessert of Huacachina, 4-Nasca, 5- Arequipa, 6- one more day in Arequipa to improve acclimatizing to the higher altitude and maybe to do a special reality tour, 7- Colca Cañon (but we sleep in Cabanaconda, so we have more time to enjoy the views of the canyon and also with less tourists around. Maybe we even already see a condor with sunset?), 8- From the condor viewpoint of Colca Cañon to Puno, 9- Uros reed islands and Amantani Island on the less touristic side, 10- Taquile and Puno, 11-Cusco, 12- Cusco, 13- Secret Valley, 14- (Very early) Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu, 15- Aguas Calientes to Cusco (early), 16- Cusco, 17 -> 21 Jungle experience and on day 22 back to Lima.

 Where possible this tour will be with public transportation and of course we try to sell it for a sharp price. I think our first independent tour looks promising, but I suppose we only know for sure if we also sell some tours…

If I look back at 2008, I look back on a year that passed very quickly, probably because I´ve been very, very busy. I´ve accomplice my own website; I´ve guided great tours; made some new friends and finally found some more reliable contacts. I found out that getting the right answers on e-mails isn´t always normal to expect, so you really have to be careful how you ask a question in a e-mail. I also had to be careful with trying to improve the tours I guide. I shake so many trees that I even got comments from my superiors. I organized some colleagues to get their opinions about how we could improve our tours and the safety of our passengers and sent all this information to the agencies I work with. Now it is up to them to do something with it, but even if they don´t no-one can blame us anymore that we didn´t inform them.

 I do am a bit disappointed that the important information I gathered about altitude sickness seems not to reach all tour leaders, especially knowing the consequences of being badly informed…

 I really like what I´m doing, but I do guess that all these things together are only adding to my wish of starting something of my own, to get appreciation for working on the details and to see if I really am capable of doing things a better way.

It is now Thursday, the 22th of January and about a month ago I was thinking that this story would be a very long one about urban legends and all of my experiences from the last year, but somehow, here in the quite jungle of Merazonia, it all seems less interesting.

 I´m tired now, I have to get used to work in the jungle again. My hands are sore from a day of hard labor on the land, but I feel very satisfied.

It is my third night now that I´m here all by myself. All right, I also have a cat and 3 dogs and a jungle full of live around me. The closest neighbor will be a 20 min. night-walk on a jungle trail and the closest village is during the day on a walk of more than an hour. My only contact with the outside world is a cell phone and a dog who would walk to the village to explore the garbage bins if I would let him do.

 It was a beautiful day so we finished late with working. We is our worker Guido and a friend of us from Baños, but they left before it became dark. Then I had to connect a new gas bottle to the shower, take a nice hot shower and feed the dogs. After that I made one of my best pasta dishes ever, ate it, cleaned up a bit and it wasn´t before 21:30 that I had some time left to turn on the new generator and start using my laptop to finish this story.

 It´s amazing to think that less than a year ago there was only some mud and plants on this location, then we build a cabin on top of it and now a generator on a distant location provides electricity, so I have light and can use my laptop in my own little house in the middle of the jungle.

 Merazonia now has finally all the legal permits to keep animals, we only need to build some more cages, a clinic and a quarantine and then all the mistreated wild animals of Ecuador are more than welcome to join us on this pretty location in the modern jungle of Merazonia.

Saludos y buenas noches,

Martijn