Peru Part III – Discos, Dunes and Diarrhoea

Several of you have asked me whether it’s full on volunteering all day, every day while I’m here.  The answer is no; we teach five days a week during the day, but outings are relatively common.  When I arrived, some of the more veteran volunteers told me that Huaycan can prove a little suffocating after a while, and I can see how that might be the case.  It’s a good life, but a hard life, and every now and then it’s nice to be a ‘Gringo tourista‘ for a while.

The regular outing is Friday’s ‘Kenko nights’, when we head to the local discotheque.  Given the isolation of Huaycan, it’s quite surprising to find a perfectly respectable nightlife venue in the vicinity – although we are, naturally, the only English-speakers in the club.

We don’t completely stand out, though, as we usually meet up there with some former students of the school and their friends, creating a funny old mix for our Friday night crew.  My language limitations are amplified in the noisy club environment, but with $3 cocktails and enjoying a novel experience as tallest man in the club, I’m rather enjoying it.

Only two connected problems spoil an otherwise perfect clubbing experience: the music, and the dancing that goes with it.

The usual aural experience is “Reggaeton”, some sort of bizarre cross between traditional Latin genres, hip-hop and commercial pop.  (If you’re familiar with the chart-topping smash “I Know You Want Me” by the handsomely bald artist Pitbull, you’ve already had a taste.  And believe me, a taste is enough.)

I shouldn’t bias your judgement; after all, I’m the only volunteer in the house who doesn’t like the music.  But, coming from a rock/dance/lounge music, this bastardised hip-hop/RnB mix doesn’t really do it for me.  Add to that the complexities of dancing a cross between salsa and something out of Dirty Dancing, and you can see my issues.  Ricky Martin meets Patrick Swayze, pants and all.

Usually at a bar, the non-dancers compensate by occupying the mandatory lounge area and talking at length about love, politics and other similarly  irrelevant philosophies.  Given my Spanish, that’s almost as difficult an option as navigating my way across the dance floor without breaking a toe or filing a lawsuit.

Still, all ranting aside, the Friday night excursions do add a little welcome normality to what is otherwise a completely foreign experience, and give us a chance to let off a little steam.  And the Pisco Sours aren’t bad at all.

The other reprieve from the dust and grime of our town is the occasional volunteer field trip on our ‘weekends’ (Wednesdays and Thursdays).  Last week, we made the seven-hour bus trek out to Huaca China, a town out in the Peruvian desert that is something of a pit-stop for tourists heading from capital cities to Cusco and the famed Machu Pichu.  Market forces have turned this little sandtrap into a desert oasis, sustained purely by Gringo spending money and thus catering to tourists in miniature Las-Vegasian style.

It was nice to experience sun, other backpackers, and safely walkable streets, for a change.  Orders for the day included hair-raising dune buggy rides, perilous ‘sand-boarding’ (think boogie- or snow-boarding, but with harder landings, and sand e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e), and copious mango smoothies in hippy cafes sprouting Bob Markey wallpaper, hammocks and – yes – chessboards!  I almost died happy.

Unfortunately, not everyone was as comfortable in paradise as your author.  Something from our diet hit our crew with explosively inconvenient force, and all but two of our crew came down with ‘la Tourista’, the name given by the locals to the relatively routine cases of diarrhoea.  And if there any activities worse in such situations than riding a four-wheeler up and down sand dunes at 90 degrees or hurling your body down the same sandy hills at breakneck speeds on a flimsy slice of plastic… well, you get the idea.

One escapee was Gladys, our American of full Peruvian extraction, complete with 100% fluency, artistic prowess, a very unfortunately addiction to Reggaeton, and a delicious ability to cook the local cuisine for our house.  The other, very surprisingly, was me.

I’m usually among the first to get sick when a bug is going around, and usually the last to shake it (and the most vocal complainer throughout any scourge).  But somehow I escaped unharmed on this occasion.  Not that it made much difference to my inability to stand up on the sand-board while in motion.  To be fair, my focus was more on not getting a nosebleed from face-planting at pace, as once befell Andrew Fitzpatrick during our Rotorua trip.  On the other hand, I can barely ice skate.  Rather than embarrass myself through visual media, then, here’s a clip I took after one of my rides, of Chris hurtling down the dunes (note also that this is the first ever video to find its way onto DavidSmerdon.com.  Hello, digital age!).

VIDEO – Chris sand-boarding in Huaca China

Yes, I went down that dune, too.  No, it wasn’t as graceful.  Yes, there’s video.  No, I won’t post it.

But I may think about videos in future posts, if you like them.  I have a great one of Tristan Stevens playing Nigel Short in blitz after we’d all eaten a bit too much meat at a South African ‘braai‘.  Despite the 600 rating point gap, the very colourful trash talking from both sides does the video exceptional justice, certainly worthy of posting.

As soon as I work out how to censor the dialogue.