first blog

Well, this is the first of many travel blogs I am planning to write concerning my time in South America. I´m staying at Samay Wasi Hostal in Miraflores, Lima now. Nice place and I reccommend it. So during the next few days I will tell you about my last month in Peru and over the next few weeks hopefully I will be able to describe some of my previous visits to this great country and what happened to me.

Two weeks ago I arrived on the overnight bus in Cajamarca, Peru. I paid 110 soles ($30) for my one-way ticket which is expensive here to say the very least. I took a taxi into the centre of town to a friend´s house. He wasn´t home, but there was plenty of activity in the school for street children next door. In there I met Susanne who proudly showed me around Inca Wasi school, the place has changed considerably since I was last there. A second storey is being added to the building, the school is expanding and they are building extra classrooms and a library for the kids with donated money from abroad. Instead of graduating children at 11 years old like before they are educating them up to the age of 16 and those street children with the ability to go to university will be helped to do that. A real success story although small children I remember from three years ago who left before Susanne and others arrived are now selling bottles of Coca-Cola or cheap alcohol on the city streets, or washing the windscreens of cars as they wait at traffic lights.

After forty-five minutes Roger and Mallenio arrived by motorbike. Roger is Susanne´s Peruvian fiance, a stocky confident man of 28, he´s an excellent friend of mine and someone who features very heavily of the story of my time here. Mallenio is a slim man of 32, but he looks a lot older. The palms of his hands are as tough and as coarse as old leather after years of working on farms, and he speaks an almost unintelligible rural Spanish dialect which Roger needs to translate for me. It is a warm reunion for us as I´ve been away for well over a year. So they help me carry my bags over to Hospedaje Belen where I was planning to stay.

After dumping my bags with the rather unpleasant Señorita who was working there we traveled by taxi to Huacariz, Roger´s family farm about a couple of miles outside Cajamarca city. There Malleanio´s family were busy digging up weeds in the fields where the alfalfa grew with trowels. Old men women and I believe children also were helping out. Lunch was cooking on the fire inside an adobe hut nearby and the toddlers were playing with the dogs and the cats in the dirt. Mallenio then showed us the broken pipes or the irrigation system for the fields and complained loudly that he would have t o spend a lot of his hard earned money to fix them. He seemed agitated and full of worry about it all.

Well, someone else wants the computer in the hostal now. I´ll write again tomorrow.