WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS, MAKE LEOMONADE . . . even if the leomade is watered down and warm, with no ice cubes in sight . . .

A few days prior to my scheduled departure, I mentioned to my step-brother Joe that my Peru trip "was closer than I ever thought it would be."  Obviously, I was wrong . . .

I had anticipated being in Lima today, wandering its streets in search of adventure.  Instead, I have spent a good part of the day figuring out how to put back the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that had once been a portrait of my Peruvian Vacation.

I had sent The Doctor three emails yesterday while I was still at the airport.  Having not heard back from him during the rest of the day, I didn't know when I went to bed if he had even received them, or if he was still expecting me to show up at the hostel late last night. 

When I woke up, I found a series of three emails from him, sent early this morning while I was asleep. He was almost as traumatized as I to learn of the unfortunate turn of events in our vacation plans. Although I had given him the option of continuing the rest of the trip without me, he made it clear that "I still want you to come. I can not even imagine the trip without you." Right answer, Doctor!


We managed to connect this morning through an extensive series of emails and on Facebook.  I created sort of a "dummy" Facebook account for The Doctor to make communicating easier.  I expect he will delete the account once this whole debacle is finished.  He has always been loathe to join Facebook, due in part to my descriptions of its endless ways of wasting one's time.  While we were on it today, I "poked" him, and I don't think the poor man knew what was happening to him. "What the hell is a poke?" he asked.   I told him the polite thing to do was to poke back, but he never did.  I told him, since I had created his account and knew the password, I would just poke myself when he wasn't looking.  It wouldn't be the first time . . .

But I digress.  We discussed several options as to how to proceed from here. One he suggested involved him sticking to the original plan, and me catching up with him on Wednesday in Puno. I did not care for that, as I didn't want to wait another two days to join him on top of the three already lost.

His second option was for him to wait for me to arrive Monday night, and change our flight to Juliaca from Monday morning to Tuesday morning. By doing this, we would still miss out on the two day Lake Titicaca tour and the overnight home stay on Amantani Island, but we should be able to find shorter tours of the lake that would allow us to at least visit some of the floating islands. This would also allow us to catch The Amazing Trip bus tour from Puno to Cusco.


I myself was leaning more towards just scrapping the whole Lake Titicaca portion of the trip, and going from Lima directly to Cusco, and spending an extra day in each of those cities. I had been wishing we had scheduled more time in Lima as there were a few things there I wanted to see, and Cusco also sounds like an interesting city. But so far The Doctor has not been at all impressed with Lima, and sounded as if he couldn't wait to shake its dust off his shoes. "There is really nothing here in Lima," he said. "It is a dirty city witout character and with lots of barricades." And later he added "Lima sucks...I have no desire to spend any more time here..." I suggested that if we did run out of things to do in Lima, we could spend some time trying to jump the barricades . . .


Apparently he felt I might take his harsh criticism of Lima personally - though I don't know why he would think that - because when we connected again in the afternoon, he apologized: "I am sorry that this morning that my comment about Lima was so overt. It has been overcast (probably smog...lots of smog) since I got here. There is an ocean out there...but too dangerous to go to...and with the smog...who would want to." 

After considering all our options, I did begin to lean more towards his Option #2 - flying out of Lima to Juliaca a day later than planned, and picking up the rest of our itinerary from there. As he pointed out, that would involve less reworking of reservations than skipping Titicaca altogether and trying to rework plans to get to Machu Picchu from Lima. So we both agreed to go with that choice.

This afternoon we began trying to make what schedule changes we needed to. The biggest issue we had to deal with was changing our Lima to Juliaca flight from Monday to Tuesday. As I arrive in Lima late Monday night, and we will be flying out early Tuesday morning, The Doctor estimates that I will have roughly 3 hours to sleep and shower before heading back to the airport.  But I guess that can't be helped, and I think at that point I will be happy to just have at last arrived.

I agreed to call Cheapo Air, the web site we had booked the flight through, to see what sort of change fees were involved.  We had initially booked through Cheapo because we were able to find a flight with them that was around $400.00 less than anywhere else. (Now I am beginning to understand just why they were so cheap . . . )  I reached a helpful gentleman who I suspect was working his shift at a call center somewhere in India. He put me on hold for several minutes while he was supposedly calculating the change fees.  He was gone so long I suspected he might have stepped out for more Vindaloo.  When he came back it was only to tell me I would have to call the airline directly to get that information.

So I then called Peru Star,  using the 800 number for the US listed on their web site, only to get a recording in Spanish. I held on, and shortly a woman answered, also in Spanish. I asked if she spoke English, and she said "one momento", and put me on hold. Shortly an English speaking woman answered, and when she attempted to access our reservation, she could only find our flight from Cusco to Lima, nothing from Lima to Juliaca.  I gave her the booking number listed on the Cheapo Air confirmation, and she said it was not one of their booking numbers, and went on to say that Peru Star was not in any way affiliated with Cheapo Air. No matter how many times I told her I was looking at a paid reservation confirmation her answer remained the same. I finally asked to speak to someone else, at which point she said she would attempt to search for us by my passport number. While she was doing that, I noticed the confirmation also had ticket numbers (in addition to the booking number) so I gave her that as well. SURPRISE!!! She was finally able to find our reservation!  She put me on hold, supposedly to calculate the change fee, and then came back on to tell me I would have to go to the "airline counter" in person, or call them at another number which she gave me  . . . which was in Peru.


I passed this on to The Doctor who I was still communicating with on line. He said he would try to take care of it on his end. While I had been making my futile attempts to change it myself, he had managed to make the necessary changes with our Pirwa Hostel reservations for both Lima and Puno (since he was right there at the hostel), and had also emailed our contact for the Lake Titicaca tour to cancel our home stay on Anamanti Island.

Later in the afternoon The Doctor contacted me again. He had discovered Peru Star had an office only 7 blocks from the hostel and had gone there in person to attempt to change the flight reservation. He was successful, in spite of the fact that there was once again a major language barrier, and most of the transaction was conducted "in hand gestures and a computer translation". But he got the job done, and the good news was the change fee was only $26.10 total.


During all our communication, I tried to get what info I could out of The Doctor about his trip so far. I already knew his impression of Lima was less than favorable. He didn't seem too impressed with the the conference he is attending either. In referecne to the whole mess with my flight he had commented: "In some ways this was more exciting than the conference...and a far more interesting story...only I wish you were on this side of the story and not the state side." He mentioned the conference is only a mile from the hostel, a distance he has been walking, and it sounded like he plans to walk it again tonight back to the hostel after 11:00 PM.   I am not sure how safe that is . . .

He also mentioned finding a vegetarian restaurant that he seems to like, and hopefully I'll get to try it also (we still have one day in Lima at the end of our trip, so maybe we can go there then). He didn't have much to say about the hostel, other than that their English was not very good. Though he has traveled far more of the world than I (he's been to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and England), it sounded like he is experiencing some culture shock. "What does it mean that I am dreaming in Spanish...and can not understand what they are saying," he asked. "...and that last night in my dreams...which I never have...I made mad friends with Liza Minneli...crazy."  I wonder if maybe he's been drinking the coca tea  .  .  .  I told him I was jealous, but not surprised by his friendship with Liza.

All in all, we seem to be doing the best salvage job possible of a nearly wrecked vacation.    All I can hope for now is that Monday morning's flight is with a fully operational aircraft . . .