Made it despite Delta Airlines...

I learned upon arriving at SFO that my Continental flight had "been delayed." I learned later that that meant the plane I was supposed to fly to Houston on at 7:30 a.m., and then onto Lima, would not arrive until 5 p.m. in San Francisco. They found me a seat on, god help me, Delta, which has long been fighting with United to be the worst airline in the world. Check in at SFO for Delta is incredibly and inexplicably frustrating, consisting of standing in a series of lines, eventually, ploddingly, moving from one to the other, but with no real progress in sight. Somehow I made the flight, only to Atlanta, not Houston. I begged for an aisle seat on the Lima leg...the clerk acted like he had done me a big favor. When I boarded, I found myself stuck in a tiny, windowless window seat for the very long 6 hour journey to Lima. What a jerk.
The best news is that Monica was there to greet me with my name held high amidst of sea of jockeying touts. Between my broken Spanish and Monica´s busted English we had a lovely conversation as we drove the 30 minutes to the Miraflores district (the nice, much less dodgy part of Lima, on the ocean). The hotel, while aspiring to a kind of atrium lobby, quasi deco grandness is a tad sad. My room is covered in orange...and while I like orange, there is a limit (the bedspread is that cheap kind of plasticky fabric that scratches)...and outside my bedroom window it sounds like a riot or a robot war (but when I look out, I see nothing). But it is clean and very well located I am told (I have no idea) and the bellhop just delivered my Cusquequena beer.
Tomorrow, Monica picks me up for a tour of Lima. Then off to the airport to retrieve the Hawaiians. It is in the 60s and wet here.
P.S. I confront once again the mysteries of the international computer keyboard! Forgive me for a misplaced or absent hyphen, or a loose exclamation point...things just aren´t where they are supposed to be.

We're off!

Everything's a go (except Kristina just found out that that damned Continental airlines wants to charge her $700 to carry her baby on board. Oy vay.) And, as the idiot president might say, "Mission Accomplished!": I received just in time the fleece onesie I ordered from L.L. Bean for little Kanahe...only it's a little loud (looks like a gay prison outfit). But it'll keep that angel warm and that's all that matters. Over and out until Lima.

Finally, something useful on that internet...

I feel compelled to share a find I made in preparing for this little adventure. Given my pathetic Spanish skills (thanks to Mary Jo distracting me in Sister Carla Marie's high school Spanish class), in communicating with my Peruvian contacts, I've relied heavily on: http://www.spanishdict.com/translation. It's a simple website that not only translates English to Spanish and vice versa, but gives you translations from three different online translators! I fear, however, that Monica Velasquez, my Lima guide, will be disappointed with me and my "poquito" Spanish when I show up without this online crutch in tow. Me perdone, Monica.

FYI: I depart this Saturday, August 16...

and the Hawaiian posse joins me late Sunday, August 17. Happy to report that not only does the dollar go further south of the equator (the Euro whipped our ass last year in Sicily), but getting there is a lot easier than making the tortured connections (and suffering the wearying delays) flying to Asia or the mid-East entails. I leave at something like 7 a.m. and arrive in Lima around 10:30 p.m. the SAME DAY (with only a short stopover in Houston). Wheeeee.

The control freak in me reports, cautiously, that everything appears to be in order. Or was until I was assigned the job yesterday of finding longjohns for the Hawaiians (they're not routinely stocked in the tropics, you see).

Nevermind...

City Lights bookstore (of the Beat poets) saved me with its idiosyncratic inventory. It's got the standard fiction, non-fiction categories...along with a separate room for Latin American and Asian literature..and downstairs it's got the groovy categories you can find nowhere else (at least not at Borders): "Political Theory and Practice," (which is where I found several tomes by my hero, Subcommandante Marcos), "Commodity Aesthetics," and "People's Histories," etc. No New York Times bestsellers for my hippie friends. Anyway, not that anyone's the least bit interested, but I settled on a Mario Vargas Llosa novel, "Conversation in the Cathedral," and Matthew Restall's "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" (in which the ethnohistorian rips pervasive myths about the conquest of the Americas (e.g., "The Myth of Superiority" — the belief that the success of the Spanish conquest was due to technological superiority of the Spaniards or inherent cultural superiority)). Power to the people. And truth. I feel better now.

One week to go and I haven't picked my travel books!

This is a big deal for the nerd that I am. You know I can't go anywhere without a book (or books). And I'm having trouble deciding what to bring in the way of fiction (preferably Latin American) and non-fiction (just about anything, but if it relates to Latin American history, all the better). The only other requisite is that the book be relatively light and small (e.g., Penguin editions and not the Riverside Shakespeare). Suggestions anyone?

I'm also soliciting suggestions as to ways one might occupy the active (devious) mind of a 6-year-old on interminable and potentially tedious bus rides...Pete stop laughing.

Get the story straight...

Like everyone else who goes to Peru, I most want to see Machu Picchu. (For those who don't know, or forgot, Machu Picchu is the site of an Incan citadel perched on the tippy top of a steep mountain in the Andes, overlooking a valley floor 2,000 feet below...that's a photo of Machu Picchu at the top of the blog.) If you get your history from the Man, you probably know that Hiram Bingham, a Yale professor (and descendant of Protestant missionaries who helped steal Hawaii from the Hawaiians) "discovered" Machu Picchu in 1911. What you may not know is that when he finally set foot there--led by the hand by a local boy--he found some disquieting graffiti: Lizarraga, 1902. Yes, some 9 years before his "discovery," some cat by the name of Lazarraga got there "first." (He was a local, who lived on the valley floor for 30 years.) In the many books and articles he wrote about Machu Picchu, Bingham failed to mention Lazarraga...or the fact that a number of others told Bingham about Machu Picchu and where to find it, and three Peruvian families were already living next to the peak of Machu Picchu when Bingham showed up. As Kim MacQuarrie notes in the marvelous "The Last Days of the Incas," where I got this nugget, fortunately for Bingham, he had the Yale U. Press and National Geographic magazine to tell his story; Lazarraga, obviously, did not.