Edd's Travels: Lima, Peru (again)

That last update was a bit long-winded and depressing wasn’t it? Apologies to you all. I was ill and feverish and feeling sorry for myself.

A big part of travelling is exposing oneself to new experiences. In Huancayo I recorded a personal first by eating a guinea pig, or at least half of one. They call it cuy here. (If anyone has ever owned and cherished a guinea pig, then yes, I’m a bad man and I’m truly sorry. In my defence, it was dead.) I wasn’t all that impressed: even with half of the whole animal on your plate, there only seems to be about as much actual flesh as you’d get in a chicken drumstick. It’s mainly skin and bone. Still, it’s one more for the ‘been there done that’ list.

Sadly it’s also one for the ‘oh Jesus never again’ list. If that guinea pig had put up half as much of a fight at the abbatoir as it did in my guts, it’d still be alive today. At the time of writing the last update, I assumed that me feeling like death microwaved was mainly due to the chill and the altitude sickness, but I was wrong. I’ve hardly eaten anything since.

One final gripe. I’d noticed that the domestics at the Hotel Presidente seemed to be a bit over-attentive with my room. I’d been lying there ill all day, undisturbed, and then when I popped out in the evening for 5 minutes to get some more bottled water, I came back to find that my towels had been changed while I was out. At the time I gave them the benefit of the doubt, although I did take extra precautions with my money and bank cards. However on the bus out of Huancayo the next day, it came belatedly to my attention that I now have one less MP3 player than I used to have.

As you can guess, on the whole I’m not too enamoured of Huancayo. Not for nothing are the local people named the Wankas. I’m not joking: the local football team is called Deportivo Wanka, and the name Huancayo is derived from the same word – it’s pronounced ‘Wank. Aye. Oh.’. The place now has a medal ranking on the list of Things I Wish I’d Never Done, along with growing a beard and buying a Sunderland season ticket for 2005/2006.

I’ve decided to take a different route through Peru, hence me being back in Lima for the time being. See pictures for my current hostel…it’s a grand colonial-era mansion, very bohemian, right in the centre of the historic city, opposite the Museo de Arte. Very nice. And I watched Boro 1 SAFC 2 live on my computer today.

So it’s not all bad news. I’m glad to see that SAFC are performing with greatly increased spontaneity and fluidity. It’s just unfortunate that right now my bowels are doing exactly the same thing.