La Vida Cusqueña -- and then there were four.

When my German friend Lisa told me about Cusco, she told me that "the people are all very cute, they are very tiny." She did not warn me about all the crazy dogs. (Oh NO, another DOG blogpost!)

But before I jump into dog stories, I will mention that Justine and I went down to Puno to pick up Justine´s friend Ali. Ali met an Australian named Marty on the bus and now the four of us are all travelling together, splitting a two-person hotel room.

The dogs start here: Because I wake up hours earlier than the rest of my companions, I set out for a day on my own yesterday to explore Cusco. I was walking to a place where someone had told me I might be able to encounter Rock Climbing when a ferocious puma jumped out at me from a doorway. Oh wait, this huge, snarling, muscular creature is not a puma, but a pit bull. Now, from having seen a few dog fights in this country, I have learned to discern the dog-noises a dog makes when it wants to say "I´m mean, keep away from me" from the heathen-noises a dog makes when it is about to lunge, bite, tear skin, and terminate. This particular pit bull was making the guardian-of-death variety of noises, and as such I figured I should probably get a rock to throw (and normally I throw just to scare, but this time I was thinking I might have to aim a little better). And so about half a second after it jumped out of the doorway, I stepped back and my eyes frantically began the search for a rock, of which there were none. About a half second after that, the pit bull lunged at me, teeth bared. With dog-fending reflexes I did not know I possessed, I whipped the dog with my sweater (which I had thankfully just taken off a minute ago) and made a deep guttural sound that I also did not know I possessed. Maybe the zipper thwacked the dog on the nose because it retreated into its doorway and left me alone after that, but it was the scariest dog encounter I had ever had up to that point in my life. Little did I know that an even scarier one was soon to follow.

Instead of going Rock Climbing, I ended up doing Vinyasa Yoga. After Yoga, I thought I might do some Aerial Fabric. And so, I asked the first person I encountered on the street if he might know of a place I can do Aerial Fabric. And by golly, he had a friend who did! But the friend didn´t answer the phone. So instead the man and I had lunch together, he told me about how I can improve the efficiency of my walking, and we went up to the Temple of the Moon. Night caught us and we walked back from the Temple of the Moon along a dark road. Suddenly, three very large, very angry dogs started barking at us and slowly closing in. We quickly searched the ground for rocks, and grabbed as many of the biggest ones we could (most the size of baseballs). I keep my water bottle in a water-bottle carrier that goes around my shoulder. In this case, I detached it from my shoulder and used my waterbottle as a sort of mace or chain or nunchuck. Meanwhile, more dogs closed in. We walked along the side of the road for a good 5 minutes like this, navigating what must have been two dozen vicious stray dogs that were hunting us. Every time a dog would lunge at us (which happened several times), my companian would throw a rock and I would swing my waterbottle in heavy circles. He advised me to keep my backpack just on one shoulder, so if a dog goes in for the bite, the last defense is to drop the backpack in front of where he is biting so he bites the backpack instead. I am currently very thankful for my waterbottle for making such an awesome weapon, because I suck at throwing rocks. Also, I am now an expert dog-fighter. Expert.

(The next day, we walked through a sort of alpaca field and he handed me a stick. "Why are you handing me this stick?" "I don´t know if there are dogs here, but if they are, they are farm dogs. Farm dogs don´t respond to rocks." "What if they´re rottweilers?" "Let´s hope there are no rottweilers.")

So if you come visit Cusco (which, by the way, is nowhere near as cool as Huaraz, by any measure), beware of dogs.

-A