Comfort Zone

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

So the thing about growing and pushing yourself and stepping outside your comfort zone is that, well, it can be highly uncomfortable. The last 24 hours or so have handed us our first missteps on this trip, the parts that make the good stories and make you really open up to the country that is surrounding you instead of cruise controlling through your trip. So they´re good...even if they are uncomfortable.

Thursday night we both did manage to shower (much to the relief of each other´s nostrils :) and got picked up by a local friend of Cate´s friend. He whisked us all around in his car taking us through a bunch of different neighborhoods and all along the coast which was beautifully lit up at night, pointing out beaches he went to as a kid and the place on the hill overlooking the water where teenagers would park their cars on the weekends. He also took us to a couple different places for food and drinks that probably snagged a few more stars on their ratings than the backpacker budget dive restaurants we´d been frequenting. It was interesting to see this other side of Peru. And you would´ve thought we´d found Mecca when we got to use a clean bathroom WITH toilet paper in one of the places! Don´t worry, as soon as we find a place to upload pictures there will be a whole post dedicated to bathrooms in Peru. :) At the end of the night, he took us to a late-night local food place and only told us AFTER we´d eaten the food he´d ordered for us that we´d in fact just eaten a shish kebab of beef heart.

Discomfort No. 1: Cate had a late-night battle with the shish kebab.

BEEF HEART 1 : CATE 0

The next morning we were a little tender and were supposed to be at the bus station at 3pm, so we packed up, wandered to downtown Miraflores, and hung out in a cafe. Then we caught a taxi to the bus station to get there early for our 5:30 bus. We waited our turn to purchase our tickets and when we got to the counter found out that our reservation was in fact no longer in the system, the bus was full and there weren´t anymore buses until tomorrow. Nice. After talking to a couple people it became clear that even though they had told us to arrive at 3pm to pay for our tickets, they in fact only held the reservations until 2:30pm. Interesting.

Discomfort No. 2: We loaded up our packs and trekked in the heat to all the different bus companies around to find out that all the buses were full and we were stuck in Lima for another night with no bed.

We returned to the first bus company, Cruz del Sur, and actually purchased our tickets for a 2pm bus the next day and after confirming four times when we needed to arrive, started calling hostels trying to find a bed. The first few we called were full as it was now the weekend. So we turned to a couple of friendly looking gringo backpackers and asked if they had found a place. They had and there were still beds there so we loaded down a tiny cab with our packs and selves and headed back into Lima. The boys were sweet and from Belgium. One was studying abroad and other was there visiting him for a month. We wandered down to the water and along the coast with them, grateful for some temporary male protection, even if they were only 19-year-old little boys. Then we split off, and Cate and I found a nice quiet restaurant for a pizza dinner...we decided to play it safe after the previous nights culinary tricks. We returned to the hostel and I crawled in bed planning on an early night, only to succumb to the Revenge of the Beef Heart, Part II.

Discomfort No. 3: Getting to taste my pizza for a second time.

BEEF HEART 2 : CATE & KRISTA 0

This morning we´re just been taking it easy and are heading to the bus station soon, much earlier than they recommend...just to be safe. And we´re going to test how well Dramamine works on foreign food induced nausea on our 19-hour bus ride. Should be fun!

But we´re traveling for real now, slightly off balance, floundering in miscommunications, reaching out to strangers for help, not able to jump in a car and head home when we don´t feel well, and very much, electrically involved in life.