Cine

In La Paz, it's even harder to find anything vegetarian to eat on the street than in Peru. On the second day, after walking for hours and eating only biscuits, I give up and look up a veggie restaurant in town. This will save me from starvation.

While waiting for my meal, I chat with the two workers of the restaurant. The girl is from Chile and a little punk, but not too much. She's very cute. The guy, co-owner of the place, comes from Norwegian Lapland and looks like an elf. The girl who's a little punk but not too much says that there will be a free screening of a film at a cinema that evening. I ask the guy who looks like an elf why it is for free, and he just shrugs his shoulders: That happens sometimes. But it's in a neighbourhood I haven't been to yet, and since I had wanted to walk around there anyway, it sounds like a perfect plan.

On my way to the hostel, I stumble across a demonstration on the Plaza Mayor. A big demonstration. The people have filled the whole square, amongst them children, young and old people. It's not a very warm day, and everybody is wearing jumpers and jackets. Some have taken over the balcony of a building. Street vendors mingle among the crowd as usual.

Afraid of appearing blatantly ignorant of some hugely topical issue in the country (or being punched by some frenzied demonstrator), I choose not to ask anyone what the protest is all about. I try to read some of the banners, but they don't reveal the mystery either ("30 mega projects -> 30 disasters!"). Instead, I ask the kitchen worker of the hostel when I get back.

"Oh, it's about water", she says. "Water?" I enquire. She tells that there is a serious water shortage in the city and people are at the end of their rope. "And the government doesn't do anything", I suggest to empathise with the protestors, but she says it isn't really the government's fault. "You know, the water is gone", she smiles helplessly. "Climate change."

I spend the rest of the day roaming the streets of unknown neighbourhoods and find the cinema on time by 7:30. It turns out that the old beautiful building is actually a municipal theatre and the film to be shown is a work of some film students. Both the elf and the punk show up to accompany me, and once we have taken our seats, I ask the girl why she has left Chile. "Chile is terrible!" she exclaims. I'm surprised. What's so bad about Chile? "The people", she replies. "They're awful. I like Columbia, Bolivia and Paraguay."

Then there are four young men on the stage in suits, and the one holding the microphone is almost in tears, talking about the overwhelmingness of finally seeing their film being screened. But when the film – a drug mafia crime thriller – begins, it is so badly made (even for a student film) that we decide to leave half an hour into the start. I'm not disappointed, though. It's been a good La Paz day.

Cusco

Cusco is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the "Historical Capital of Peru", hosting nearly two million visitors a year.

And it shows.

Tourism appears to concentrate on the Main Square, Plaza de Armas, the streets surrounding it, and the historical San Blas area situated on the hillside just above Plaza de Armas. I assume most of the city's 400,000 inhabitants can live their lives quite undisturbed by the tourist masses, as the city stretches far and wide with most buildings having just two or three floors.

However, my first Couchsurfing host lived right in the middle of San Blas, which I was excited about at the beginning, as it was supposed to be the best area to be in. And true, the narrow streets were very picturesque, and I loved the Quechuan street names and ancient white stone buildings that originate from the times before the Spanish conquerors had set their foot in the country.

If there only had been anything else left from times past. But no; this was a real tourist heaven. Or hell, depending on how you care to see it. Yoga, reiki, massages; hand-made scarfs, handicrafts, lama wool, alpaca; organised tours to do Machu Picchu, to do drugs with a shaman, to do paragliding or liquor tasting, to do a real Peruvian (I wouldn't be surprised); hostels with a bar, hostels with a view, hostels with oh-so-quaint colourful deco; vegan food vegan food VEGAN FOOD!!

Every place had a beautiful, hearty hippie name such as Mother Earth or Sister Moon or Universal Balance – or then "Inka" anything. In Spanish of course, to be cooler. And while I love yoga and vegan food and am fully aware of the complexity of foreigners travelling somewhere and demanding to get the really truly authentic experience (or, perhaps worse still, being horrified that a lot of other travellers want to see the same place as you), I could not take it.

It didn't make me sad because of the locals who were the owners of those businesses; I understand they have to earn their living and sell what people buy. (An important question, though, is whether those places are even owned by locals.) But it made me sad because of the vast masses of people who fly to Cusco and buy a reiki-shaman beer tour with a view and find it lovely. That's what I find so disturbing.

Impresiones del Centro Hístorico

The Centro Histórico of Lima is not the neighbourhood where most tourists stay; that is Miraflores on the shore some six kilometres from the historical centre.

The centre has a central square similar to many other old colonial cities, but because of regular earthquakes and fires in the past, the buildings are not actually particularly old.