Have no plans, will travel anyway!

You might think that, having reached an age where backpacking and sleeping in creepy hostels are no longer my preferred mode of travel, I would have stumbled upon the benefits of Planning Ahead. 

You might think that, but you would be wrong.  Nowadays I want certain creature comforts like clean sheets and flushing toilets when I travel, but I still strike out without much planning ahead.  I will book a flight to my destination country but nothing else.  Yet I am always confident that I will figure it out when I get there, and everything will work out all right.  

This lax approach to holiday planning has driven certain people I know quite crazy, even when they are not going to be travelling with me. 

When I went to Peru a while back, I was asked the question, “Have you booked your hotels?” so many times in the weeks leading up to my trip that I finally gave in and made a reservation at a Lima pensione for the day of my arrival, just to get everyone off my back.

The friend I was traveling with and I had discussed a rough itinerary, but he is even more last-minute than I am, so of course we hadn’t booked any of our internal flights or any more hotels. 

 

The result of this lack of planning was that we had to start out at the highest point – Cuzco, instead of adjusting to the altitude by visiting Arequipa first.  But at least we did get to see most of  the places we wanted to see after all.  (We couldn’t have seen ALL of them unless we had a few months to spend noodling around – Peru is a huge and diverse, incredibly beautiful country.)

Since we started out at the highest point with no time to get used to the mountains, I was affected by the altitude from the minute I got off the plane in Cuzco and started walking sideways like a disoriented crab.  I was light-headed and slightly breathless the whole time I was there – it felt a little bit like being drunk.  I drank lots of coca tea and sucked coca candies, hoping that they would either cure the altitude sickness or get me a bit high. 

Seeing the Inca sites around Cuzco was worth any discomfort, and we could have happily stayed longer to have more time for hanging out in the squares, taking photos, and just gazing at the peaks of the Andes.

If we were more organized people, and if we had booked it a year in advance, and if we had time to adjust to the altitude and if we had more time to for the holiday, we could have walked the Inca trail from Cuzco to Machu Picchu, but that’s a lot of “ifs”, and quite honestly, I might be a bit too lazy and fond of indoor plumbing to have fully enjoyed the trek.  So we took the train.

No matter how you get there, Machu Picchu is as breath-taking, beautiful and strange as the guide books promise.   Set like a jewel in the ring of mountains, it shows the ingenuity, engineering ability and sheer hard work of the Incas who built this lost city on the top of a mountain and then abandoned it during the Spanish Conquest. 

And we got to see it even without planning ahead.  In fact, if we’d planned our trip in advance, we might not have been on the particular train we boarded, heading back to Cuzco that evening.  We would have missed the unexpected delight of a fashion show of Peruvian woollens put on by our train attendants to the accompaniment of ear-splitting Peruvian disco music.  Yet another mind-boggling, breath-taking and strangely beautiful sight. 

Because although seeing ancient sites is a fine reason to travel, what it really comes down to for me is people watching, and being privileged to get a glimpse into another culture, even including the whacky ways people find reach out to tourists.

P.S. Sady, my camera was out of juice by then, but you can go to YouTube and search for “Peru Rail fashion show” to get an idea of what I mean!