Light Unto The Nations

Yeah, not so much. We´ve been having a real dilemma with our identity here. Nothing to do with antisemitism. More like, are we proud to be one of the thousands of our countrymen occupying all of South America and getting reactions of ¨Oooh, Israelis, shalom shalom, sababa. jerusalen? haifa? petach tikvah?¨ Did we really travel so far from our little country to be covered on all sides by Israelis, to the point that we long to hear some English being spoken? On the one hand, there´s great value to the familiarity, the convenience of the information exchange. On the other hand, there´s the recurring feeling of walking along the same path that millions before us have walked on and not really feeling like we´re having an authentic vacation. I would say this is the biggest challenge of my vacation in Peru so far. Yes, all the planning and organizing and logistics is tedious, but it´s so much more exhausting trying to enjoy the vacation without feeling so touristy. With the time restrictions and destinations planned on our itinerary, it seems almost impossible to escape the crowds, so I guess we´ll have to get used to not being very original...

The above picture (yes, those are lamas and not horses) is near the ¨Bayit Hayehudi¨ where we had our first Shabbat. We met a whole bunch of really nice Israelis there, religious and secular. We had a lovely experience, not to mention really nice food. A tiny teeny piece of home away from home.

While we`re on the subject of food-I forgot to mention in my last post the first ¨food crisis¨ we had on our trip to Chavin. We had bought 6 eggs the night before and boiled 3 of them for the trip. Rikki put them in the fridge and I took them out in the morning. Well, what happens when the right hand doesn`t speak to the left? Yesss, we sat down for our lunch and lo and behold I had brought along the raw eggs instead of the cooked! Not wanting to starve, we ordered a salad at the restaurant everyone else was eating at, I said, very explicitly ¨only cucumbers and tomatoes, nothing else please¨and we received on our plates 3 pieces of tomatoes and cucumbers each, together with boiled potatoes, corn and some other stuff I can`t remember...

Kosher food, as expected, has been a constant challenge. Rikki, bless her, keeps surprising me every day by producing another piece of food from Israel, hidden deep in the recesses of her backpack, which seems to be bottomless. So far she took out: couscous, ptitim, chocolates, oatmeal bars, candy, cabanos and cans of tuna... We`re constantly scavenging for vegetables, which don`t seem to be a staple around here. I must mention though that the lemons, while tiny, are very good!!

After Shabbat, we went on a 1 day hike to a place called Lagoon 69. Apparently there are many lagoons in this area of Peru and they have numbered them and this one happens to be the 69th one. We were told this was a relatively easy hike so we decided to do it on our own and headed out at a relatively early hour on the Sunday. Not entirely surprisingly, we met an Israeli couple along the way to the hike and ended up doing the whole thing together.

The scenery was gorgeous, with pretty waterfalls along the way:

and funny looking plants:

It wasn`t long before we started walking towards a snow capped mountain:

This is where things started getting tricky. Suddenly our lungs decided they were not going to make this easy for us... For about the 3 hours that we climbed towards the lagoon, the amount of oxygen in our bodies seemed to be constantly depleted. We kept stopping every 5 minutes to rest and soon the scenery just became a big blur for me at some point. Our friends, who seemed to have no such problems, made it to the top relatively quickly and assured us that this was due to our being in high areas for the first time. A few breathless and highly uncomfortable treks later, I am forced to conclude that while the amount of time spent in a high area is important, some people just seem to deal with heights better and I`m not one of them. But more on that in a later post.

After the gruelling climb up, I couldn´t believe my eyes when I saw the first drop of water in the distance. Look carefully and you will see it:

Here`s a closer picture of the lagoon-note our friends who had been sitting there and waiting for us for the better part of an hour :)

We spent a fair amount of time throwing rocks in the water and had a lot of fun, the 10 year olds that we are... Then I came up with the idea of throwing sand with little rocks in it. And yes, the wind did happen to blow in the wrong direction and the sand did happen to get into our friends`eyes at some point. But isn´t this beautiful sight worth it?

Yeah, travelling miles away to the other end of the world did not take the idiot out of me. :)

Next post-our 4 day Santa Cruz trek-and that will bring us to the end of our 1st week in Peru...