some final thoughts on Peru

I found a surprising (and heartening) amount of solidarity shown towards Chile in the wake of the recent earthquakes. Pretty much every time I told a Peruvian that I was a Chilean, they immediately asked if I had had any family affected and expressed their sympathies. They clearly have first-hand knowledge of living through earthquakes and their aftermath...

They´re a taciturn bunch, Peruvians. This may be mainly true of people in the highlands rather than people from the coast (eg Lima) or from the jungle areas, but generally they're polite also - even the guy who tried to nick Becka´s handbag was polite about it!

I didn´t get to decide conclusively whether Peruvian pisco really is better than Chilean pisco (as is claimed). Basically, you get pisco more or less thrown down your throat in Chile, whereas in Peru it's more of a refined thing, more expensive and marketed more as a high-class drink. That said, they both have top-quality brands so I'll declare it a draw. (There, will that do??)

Peru was the first country we hit on our travels where we had the problem of fake currency. Fortunately we never had any problems ourselves, especially as the drill for telling a real note from a fake one was so complicated and frankly difficult, that we would´ve been buggered!

They have a strange relationship with their political leaders. Alan Garcia was practically hounded out of Peru back in the 80s when he left the country bankrupt. He´s now President again. As for his predecessor Alberto Fujimori, he's now been convicted of human rights abuses, although his daughter Keiko is running for President next year so she's likely to pardon him (!). A surprising amount of Peruvians remember Fujimori with fondness, despite the fact he was rumoured to have given his wife electric shocks when she threatened to lift the lid on corruption in his government...

We´ll miss Cruz del Sur and their comfy buses. And of course the strangely flirtatious girl on their onboard video who would tell us, in her saucy way, that the toilets were strictly for urinary purposes, and that for "any other needs" we should let the crew know...!

There's a lot of really terrible Latin pop around. Enrique Iglesias is probably the creme de la creme, as it goes. This of course isn't just related to Peru (in fact I would blame Puerto Rico for most of it - this may be unfair of me, but sod it), it's just that we were subjected to a lot of it, and having come straight from Brazil, we definitely noticed it. We were also subjected to a lot of really poor quality Andean stuff, like the buskers who followed us around Huanchaco bellowing their terrible songs at us while we tried to eat, and then expecting us to pay them for this. Also, far too many easy listening panpipe versions of "Imagine", "Hey Jude" or even "Ze Vind Of Change" played everywhere... Enough already!!

We never got tired of llamas, though.

They have some entertaining celebrities in Peru. On top of metalhead Oscar nominee Magaly Solier, they have Jaime Bayly, who appears to be a cross between Jonathan Ross and Pete Doherty only with Presidential aspirations, if you can imagine such a creature. He's also having some kind of outrageous affair with a taboo-busting 22 year old novelist (whose name escapes me, sorry).

There's no shortage of cab drivers in Peru, and they absolutely love tooting their horns. And in Trujillo, where cabs are the ONLY form of public transport in the city centre (nope, no buses), they will honk at you to try and catch your attention if you even look like you're slowing down your walking pace. Of course this means you can always get a cab, but it can get pretty annoying after a while! We never got to try one of these, sadly (the tricitaxis) - they looked brilliant.

They´re still really into timbales of rice.

"El Peru". This is how Peru seems to be referred to by Peruvians, which seems slightly grand (you don't get "La Argentina" or "El Chile", after all), but fair enough, if it's a national pride thing...?

Talking of which, considering the huge amount of history and culture they have, Peruvians on the whole seemed to have strangely low national self-esteem (compared with the countries we'd been to so far, anyway!). One drinker in Barranco told us that a foreigner is more likely to get hired for a job in Peru than a Peruvian, though I don't know if he was just being drunk and melancholy. That said, his mate did declare that Lake Titicaca meant "Titi for Peru, Caca for Bolivia", so maybe the national self-esteem isn't THAT much of a problem...