Playa de los Hippies

The family has promised to take me to the town of Jujuy, but to our dismay the car won't start, and after trying for a while to get the engine going by pushing, I have to give up and start a three-kilometre run to catch the bus that only runs once every day.

After an hour and a half of standing in an old rackety bus that anyone would have considered full already before the last twenty people got in, I'm finally at the bus station in Jujuy. It's almost 8 pm, and I find there is a night bus to Cordoba, 900 kilometres away, leaving in an hour. I decide to take that instead of making my way straight to Buenos Aires; I can still spend a day or two in Cordoba before reaching my final destination.

Cordoba is a university town, full of colonial and Jesuit history. I walk around the streets and visit a museum on the "disappeared" people in Argentina in the 1970s, but I'm mostly enthusiastic about the prospect of going to one of the riverside beaches outside Cordoba.

On my second day, I catch a bus that takes me one and a half hours outside the town - but I'm late. It's already early evening when I get there, and I also don't have precise directions. I ask a girl in the bus, and luckily she and the three guys she's with are going to the same beach I'm looking for: La Playa de los Hippies.

Although it's embarrassing how hard it is for me to understand their Argentinian accent, I'm still happy to be with them, since it turns out the route is not that straightforward. After getting out of the bus in the middle of nowhere, you first have to walk, then call a kind of a taxi, and after the taxi trip either pay for a canoe ride or walk over a hill for twenty minutes. As I haven't been aware of all these extra expenses, I haven't brought enough money with me, and have no chance but to hope I will find the right path over the hill. I say goodbye to the girl and her friends, who sit down to wait for the canoe.

But the Playa itself is lovely. Indeed, it is a Hippie Beach, with tents and more permanent makeshift living constructions all around the shore, but it's all very peaceful. I'm almost the only person in the water. I float in the  river and let the mild current carry me while the sun sets behind the hills.

When I begin my long walk back to where the bus left us, the moon has already risen to guide my path.

Why I don't visit churches

I don't do cathedrals. 

For sure, they can be full of fantastic art and give us meaningful insight into the beliefs and ways of life of the past. That's all great. I might peek in one if I happen to stumble upon one and feel like some solemnity might be in order. But seriously, when you enter your fifth cathedral, do you still remember the first? When you've read the plate about the painter of the frescos, taken a picture of the altar and stepped back out into the sunshine, has any of it stuck with you?

I'm wary of museums, too. If I live in a place for a year, then, of course: I'll probably visit most of them. I'm profoundly interested in history, politics, art, design – all that stuff that museums are usually good at. But a museum run in the sense of a pub crawl is beyond the point. On this trip, as I've been constantly moving from place to place, I still haven't been inside one single museum.

You know, there are these guide books, "Lonely Planet" they are called, and they are awfully popular. You'll find them in the backpacks of almost every traveller in almost any hostel. At the tables of the hostel bar, the backpackers compare notes with each other and discuss which Lonely Planet recommended experience they have or haven't done yet.

One series of books the Lonely Planet Corporation has is called X on a Shoestring. It's for people for whom seeing a country or two isn't enough; they want to travel at least half a continent. Europe on a Shoestring. Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. The World on a Shoestring (coming up). The word shoestring is supposed to refer to cheap travel, but in my mind, it evokes an image of someone drawing a line from the main attraction to another onto a map with the help of a string and then sticking to it.

I used to own one of those books too, years back, and I know what great writers they have. All you have to do is to open one of them, any of them, and you'll feel like you're missing out on some great fun somewhere in the world. "Be sure not to miss the amazing experience of...", they'll write. "Ideally, you'll get to X the night before, do Y and Z, and then get up early the next morning to..."

And the readers do! They dash from rafting to horseback riding, from canopy tour to hot springs, from mountain biking to temple ruins, from bird-watching to swimming with the dolphins. And inside cities, from cathedrals to museums. Tick-tick-tick, they tick off to-do lists in their guidebooks, click-click-click, they snap the selfies with the temple ruin or the friendly dolphin, tap-tap-tap they post them for the world to see. At the end, they'll feel like they've seen everything there was in the country to see.

What I like to do is watch. I watch people, how they go about their life, what kind of work they do, where they go. I listen to the people on the streets and buses, see how they talk to their friends, partners, or strangers. I observe how mothers and fathers behave with their children, what children are allowed to do and what not, how the children play and how they talk to their parents. I look at what people eat and what they buy, what happens in situations of buying and selling, what kind of shops there are. 

I look at how people have decorated their houses or their yards. I watch celebrations of birthdays or other parties in the streets or in parks. I try to find places where I can hear people sing or see them dance. I go to places where local people go: bus stations, cinemas, educational institutions, vegetable markets. I visit parks and squares and observe how people spend their free time, and what kind of people seem to have free time. I look at how people laugh.

Whenever I get the chance, I talk with the locals and ask them questions, but I rarely approach complete strangers – as an intruding outsider, I feel I don't have the right. I like to remind myself that whenever I set my foot in some city, I'm stepping into other people's home, and none of that was made just so that I could have a great experience.

Before I arrive, or during the first days, I try to read or hear and understand as much of the local history as possible. After that, I just breathe in the way of life. There's so much of it, you don't have to worry about it running out anytime soon.

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.