While on the road, I always try to save extra money in any way possible . . . so that I can stay gone longer, of course! 

If you leave your car behind while traveling, a great way to save lots of money is to temporarily unplug your car insurance.  It´s not viable for everyone or for all situations, but if you are not going to be driving your car for an extended period of time, then there´s no reason why you should pay for an insurance premium while your car sits unused. Here´s a basic guide for getting what´s called ¨non-operational status¨(non-op for short)  on your car so you can save money on your car insurance. I´m saving about $300 this year by acquiring non-op status . . . well worth the trouble.

Before we even get started on how to go about this, a few words of caution. Don´t ever drive without car insurance. It´s just not smart, safe or sane. Only try for non-op status if the vehicle in question will not be in use for several months or more. That means parked off the street and not used at all by anyone for the entire length of time that you have non-operational status on the car. 

First, determine if you are eligible for non-op status. Rules and eligibility will most likely vary from state to state. My car insurance is issued in the state of California, so those are the rules I follow in my example. Check with your state to find out if you are legally able to put your car insurance temporarily on hold.

Check with your insurance company to find out their policy on this matter. Thoroughly explain your situation. Get your agent as excited about your trip as you are – that way they will be more willing to help you. Don´t be afraid to ask questions. If your agent says that your insurance policy will have to be cancelled, keep asking, because sometimes there are ways to circumvent cancellation of your policy. For example, my insurance company lets me by have a theft-only policy in place for a grand total of $23 per year while I´m traveling. This keeps policy cancellation out of the equation.

So, once you´ve checked with your state and your insurance company, make sure you follow the directions of both agencies perfectly. Make sure you take the time to go to the DMV in person. Tell them exactly when you are leaving. Get any pertinent paperwork from them and fill it out before you leave town. In California, the process is very simple. You fill out a non-operational status form. This tells the state of California two things: that your car will not be in use and that your car will not be on the streets. This includes being parked on a city street.

Send the form by mail directly to the appropriate state office. When I went to the DMV, they were so busy with local stuff that I did not want to take a chance on my form getting lost. Ask the DMV personnel exactly where to mail the form. Get a supervisor´s name if possible. To be very thorough,  send the form by certified mail.

Before sending your planned non-operational form to the specific DMV office, make two photocopies of it – one for your records and one for your insurance company. Fax a copy to your insurance company. Call or email to confirm that your agent has it in hand. Send a hard copy to your insurance company. Again, certified mail is a good idea.

Try to get a DMV non-op office phone number. Follow up within two weeks to make sure that they have received your form. This is important, as insurance companies are required by law to inform DMV offices of policy changes. If they don´t receive your form for some reason and they get notice from your insurance company that you´ve dropped your car insurance, then at the very least, you may find yourself having to deal with the DMV while you are on vacation. At the most, depending on your state´s laws, you may have to pay fines. Neither of those scenarios are fun, so take the extra time and effort to do this correctly.

And last but not least, make sure your car is parked in a secure place for the entire duration of your absence, such as a garage. Parking is not available where I live, so I put the word out to all of my friends. Turns out, I have a friend with a parking space in his apartment building, but his SUV is too tall and won´t fit in the tandem space that he shares with his roommate.

This friend is a stable person (also very important) and he does not forsee moving for at least another year. This gives me plenty of time in case I decide to stay out of the country for longer than the four months I´d originally planned. Make sure you give a spare set of car keys to someone you trust who resides in the same town where you´ve left your car, just in case of an unforeseen emergency.

Last but not least, contact your insurance company the moment you return home and get that policy put back in force before you even put the keys in the ignition. I cannot stress this enough. Contact the DMV as well and let them know you are back on the road and that your car insurance is in place once again.

And if you are like me and a friend let you park your car in their garage, then bring them back a really great gift from wherever it was you were wandering!

Yesterday was the ultimate day for Carnival in Pisac. The whole town goes up to the terrace ruins and has a giant party while watching groups of traditional dancers from the entire Sacred Valley vie for the title of first place. The caretaker of our house, a local Peruvian, said that for sure, yesterday would be a free day. This sounds familiar . . . I’ve heard this story before . . . just last week . . . and was told by the guards that it wasn’t true.

“No matter that Turistico Control told me that there are no free days, ever?” I asked.

He reassured me that the day in question would indeed be a free day. I was still skeptical. I went to the local bakery for my daily Coca-Cola in a glass bottle and carne empanada fix. Conception, the girl who works there and knows me as a regular customer, asked me why I wasn’t up at the ruins. “It’s free today,” she said, “because of Carnival.”

So, Heather and Maria and I decided to splurge the US $3.00 for cab fare up to the top of the ruins since it was already well past noon. On the way up, I decided to ask our driver about it.

“No,” he said. “There are no free days. If you are Peruvian, it’s free. Don’t you have a ticket?”

We explained that we did not. Then our cab driver did something unexpected, fun and truly adventurous. “OK,” he said, “Hide your faces and your hair.” He spoke in fast Spanish. I could only understand the gist of what he was saying, but I got the idea that he was going to help us sneak in.

He stopped the car when we got close to the control station. He motioned for us to put the hoods of our raincoats on and duck down together in the backseat. He gave me a newspaper and motioned for me to put it over my face and hair. Then he hit the gas. We went a little way and then he said, “OK!”

We made it! He snuck us past Turistico Control! He then explained that if we walked down the other side of the mountain toward the market after exploring the ruins that the guards at the other gate would stop us and ask for our tickets. So, he offered (for an additional fee, of course) to wait two hours for us at the top of the mountain and then take us back down into town. The total fee would for the three of us for this scheme would be the same as one regular ticket, so we said yes and thanked our driver graciously.

There are alternate ways to get to the top of this mountain after all!

The verdict is still out as to whether Turistico Control really was open and checking tickets or not. We wouldn’t know, because we were hiding in the backseat of the cab. But I really don’t care.

My little friends who live down the road still pop out from the pigpen occasionally and scream, “Ho-o-o-ola!!” in a low growl. Sometimes, they can be mean, and try to act like they are going to hit me with their tiny fists, but of course, they never do. I surmise that some day soon when they are a bit older that they might be troublemakers. But for now, I just try to do what little I can as a transient foreigner in the neighborhood and keep them from punching or throwing things me. I greet them with humor and smiles always.

“Mis amigos! Hola!!” I called out when I saw the two of them on my way into town yesterday.

“No-o-o-o!” the little one cried as he stuck out his fist when I got near.

“Hey,” I said calmly, stretching my palm out flat toward him in an effort to gently correct his behavior. “No. Pare,” I said, which means ‘stop.’ He’s so tiny that as I did this, I had to bend my body down toward him.

He put his fist down and his gaze fixated on my necklace. “Daime esto,” he said as he pointed to it, which means ‘Give me that.’

I sighed with a little smile. “Creo que tu nombre es Daime, Daime,” I said, which means, ‘I think your name is Gimme, Gimme.’

Pisac sits at 9,800 feet above sea level. The stars here are amazing, bright and they seem so close you could almost reach out and touch them. Peru is an amazing place in general and because of that, full of folk-lore about mysterious happenings. The energy here is certainly strong, just about anyone here can feel it. Numerous New-Age Westerners have settled here for just that reason. But, you don’t have to be into New Age stuff to notice the lights flashing in the sky.

“It can be whatever you want it to be,” says my friend Javier.

Javier officially explains that the quick flashes that sometimes light up the night sky are from lightning in the jungle, which is only about fifty miles away just across the tall mountains of the Sacred Valley, where Pisac sits. The flashes appear to be heat lightning to me. There’s never any accompanying thunder, but I don´t think there ever is with heat lightning. Anyway, the weather here isn´t the humid kind that usually causes heat lightning.

“No,” another American friend who’s lived here for over a year says, “That’s not heat lightning. I have my theories, but that is not lightning.”

Whether the flashes are lightning or not remains to be seen. But what I do know is that the other night, as we lay out on the front patio, looking at the stars, we saw a  moving point of light that did not appear to be an aircraft. It zoomed across the sky, grew in size about ten times bigger than it was with a warm, steady glow and then went back to it’s original size as a small point of light. Then it disappeared.

Airplane? I don’t know. I’ve never seen an airplane do anything like that. It was a completely clear night. Matt laid in bed a few nights ago with a torn knee muscle, alone in the house, waiting for my friends and I to return. When I got home, he said he’d heard a strange, sustained humming noise for about 30 seconds that seemed to envelop the entire house.

“My knee hurt. The dogs were going crazy. I wasn’t about to get up and investigate,” he said.

I guess these things can be whatever we want them to be.

This entire week is Carnival in Pisac and the surrounding areas of Cusco and the Sacred Valley. Basically that means that all the local people close down their shops, drink alot of beer, the market is closed and/or relocated up the street and the plaza is emptied. Everybody has been getting ready for this festival for several months. It’s summer/rainy season now and this is sort of like the culmination of the summer vacation.

There are endless groups of traditional dancers all competing for the prize of dancing at the top of the ruins in Pisac. The groups range from little kids, teenagers all the way to older people. The kids who aren’t dancing run around the village with buckets of water balloons.

These epic water balloon fights have been going on all summer. The boys are tagging the girls they like. The girls retaliate. Gangs of children and teenagers have roamed the streets for the last two months and the fury of the battles has been escalating daily. Now some adults are even in on it. Every shop in town has been stocking squirt guns, confetti, extra shaving cream and this foamy stuff that´s kind of like silly string. People who can´t afford accoutrement for their battles use creative solutions like dirt, powered chalk or anything else they can find.

Last night, after dinner at Momma Chicken´s, we went up to the square in town to watch the dancing. We found a ragtag group of kids who were having some fun tagging one another. In general, the kids don´t search out tourists for targets in their war of mischeif, but we´ve lived here all summer long and we´ve decided we want to be part of the town, so we invited some action. There was another group of tourists hanging out and playing with the kids, so we joined them and soon . . . it was on.

One girl in the group had a little lamb tied up by a string. She dragged that poor lamb all over the plaza while she bombed other kids with cream and dirt. It could barely keep up with her, it´s little back feet skidding all over the rocks in a scramble as it tried in vain to keep up. Her companions, other than the lamb, were about five little boys. Between the lot of them, they had one can of shaving cream. Every one of them had at least two pockets full of specially prepared fine grit dirt.

Soon I was running around the plaza, trying to escape from the gang of kids. They finally got me – and got me good. I took several handfuls of dirt on my face and hat and I must have been laughing, because a good bit of it landed in my mouth. I didn´t have anything to throw at them . . . . except my bag of leftover chicken from dinner at Momma Chicken´s. That´s when I got an idea . . .

I love chicken skin so much that it´s become a tradition that everyone else gives me theirs at dinner, but I just couldn´t eat all of it, so there was a big, greasy, savory mess of it along with chicken bones in a plastic bag that I planned on taking home to the dogs. The kids saw the bag. They didn´t know what was in it, but they knew it must be nasty. I pulled out the bag and they all scattered.

I stood calmly in the middle of the square, spitting dirt and smiling, and I reached in an pulled out a big slimy piece of chicken skin. I zeroed in on my child target, letting out a whoop and ran. He was a fast lil´ booger, but I finally caught him and grabbed the cuff of his shirt. I tried to stuff the chicken skin down his front, but he was smart and held the front of his shirt tight.

He was about to get away, so in a last ditch effort to retaliate, I just went for it in any way I could. Two of his friend had caught up with us by that time and were starting in throwing dirt on my face again and trying to pull me away. I slapped that piece of roasted chicken skin right on the back of that kid´s head and smeared it in for a good ten seconds before his friends finally helped free him.

Good. Clean. Fun.

I´m b-a-a-ck!

When I got to Peru and went deep inside myself, I realized that I was carrying some major amounts of sadness, negativity, anger and a whole lotta self-loathing and judgements. So, I decided it was time to take a break from the blog-world and to be OK with that – to not be angry at myself for taking a hiatus. So, for the last two months since I´ve been here in Peru, I´ve been relaxing and working through some of this yuckiness and learning to take the responsibility for all that I´ve brought into my life – whether it be the sweetness or the sadness. And in the process, I´ve realized quite alot about myself and subsequently, the world at large.

I felt that a daily log of my healing would be not only too personal to broadcast on the worldwide web, but that it might also diminish the power of the process. It´s been an incredible journey of self-realization and discovery. I will say that I feel as though the path I was headed down was a potential path to disaster of my health and well-being. The new path I´ve carved out for myself is one of positivity and health. I´m happy to be back in the blog-world. I´m happy to be back in the real world too – and focusing upon the things that truly do matter: health, help and happiness.

Within the next few days, I plan to unveil a new direction for this blog, but to be honest, I´m still not sure which direction that I will focus upon. I do plan on back-posting entries from the past couple of months (January and early February) in order to share parts of my simple journey in the wonderful country of Peru.

Well, this post isn’t really about sneaking into the ruins, so much as it’s about going on a free day, so I’ve decided to post this entry along with the Sneaking Into The Pisac Ruins saga. So, this week is Carnival here in Pisac. I’ve heard through the local grapevine that the ruins are free today. Perfect timing as my friend Heather has just arrived today for a two-week visit.

There are two legitimate entrances to the ruins. One is just off the square in the middle of town at the foot of the mountain. From there, the walk up is about one and a half hours. The second entrance is via taxi about 9 kilometers out of town on the road. We all decided to head up to the entrance to the ruins at the bottom of the mountain in town. I wasn’t even sure if Heather, who just landed in Peru after traveling for two days, could make it up to the top because of altitude issues. Turns out that altitude would not be the issue.

We honestly believed that today was a free day because of Carnival – that’s what everyone in town has been saying. So, we were surprised when we got stopped at Turistico Control office and the guard asked for our tickets. “But I thought today was a free day at the ruins because of Carnival!” I said.

¨It’s free to come to the market in Pisac,” the guard said. “But there are never any free days at the ruins! Never!” he yelled.

I was confused by his comment because every day is free to go to the open-air market in the town square. But, Heather and the rest of us were winded from our short hike anyway, so we just went to Ulreke’s and had a few beers. We ran into a couple of other longer-term tourist friends there and asked them what they’d been doing all day.

“Well,” Jake replied, “We got caught up at the ruins without a ticket because we thought today was a free day and they threatened to take us to jail.”

¨What?” I asked. (I don’t even think there is a jail in Pisac.)

“Yeah,” said Sienna, Jake’s girlfriend, “We didn’t have any money on us and we told them that, so they made us give something for collateral and come back with money later. I tried to give them my necklace, but they wouldn’t take it. They wanted my fancy water bottle instead. Eventually, we returned and they let us pay two for the price of one.”

Aha! So, there are no free days, but you can barter with them . . .

We heard them the first night after Javier left to go on vacation.

Our friend Hardy had just retired for the evening in the smaller guest room. Our other friend, also named Matt (I’ll call him Matt R. from now on in this blog to avoid confusion) had been asleep in the other guest room for a couple of hours. Matt and I just got settled into bed ourselves when I heard footsteps in the front hallway, near Hardy’s room. Instinctively, I just knew it wasn’t Hardy. Matt and I lived with Hardy all last summer and I suppose that I just know what his footsteps sound like.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Matt.

“Hear what?” he asked. (His hearing is bad from too many rock shows.)

“I’m going to see what’s going on,” I said. But, I didn’t want to know, honestly. I didn’t even put my glasses on. I was hoping I’d just see Hardy walking to the hallway bathroom. No one was there, but I didn’t hear any more footsteps either. I went back to bed and fell asleep.

I had forgotten all about the footsteps by the next morning – until Hardy mentioned them. “Were you guys walking back and forth past my room last night, in and out of Javier’s room?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I heard something and came out and looked, but didn’t see anything.”

“Well,” Hardy said, “I guess there was an Inca walking up and down the hall all night long. It kind of freaked me out.” Hardy doesn’t get freaked out about anything, really.

I laughed. “Well . . . I suppose it could have been Javier,” I said.

“Yeah,” Hardy paused. “But isn’t he . . . um . . . on vacation? In Mexico? Didn’t he leave yesterday?”

“Yes,” I replied, “But he could have been checking in on us or something. You never know about these things when you’re living in a shaman’s house.”

Since then, we’ve been joking about the Inca footsteps, but we’ve all heard strange noises around here from time to time . . . sometimes when I’m alone in the house and asleep, I hear someone calling my name. I wake up and no one is there.

We found the best place ever – EVER – for chicken!

It’s this little tiny unassuming place with dirt-encrusted red doors on the main road in Pisac. The official name of the restaurant is Gamelas Polleria, but we affectionately call it ‘Mama Chicken.’

One day we had agreed to get home and have dinner ready by 6PM sharp. We’d hiked up one of the giant mountains that surround Pisac that day and we were so tired that our shaking legs were about to give out. We weren’t even sure if we could manage the one kilometer walk home, so the thought of going to the market and cooking dinner for our friends for movie night was completely out of the question.

Matt had been raving about ‘this chicken place’ for a week solid, saying it was the best chicken he’d ever had. I wanted to sample it for myself. We decided on one and a half hour trek down the mountain that we’d pick up some chicken to go. But, our plans were dashed when we realized that the red doors to the polleria were locked. It was nearing 6, we had no food at the house and really couldn’t think of any more options. We didn’t want to leave our friends hanging, especially after we’d promised we’d have dinner waiting.

So, we yelled up to the second story above Gamelas. Several times. Just as we were about to give up and walk away, this large smiling Peruvian Momma flung the windows open. She recognized Matt from the week before. (Matt’s especially easy for the locals to recognize because he’s got a long red beard, something they don’t see too often.)

“What time do you open?” we asked in Spanish.

“6:30, mas o menos.” she replied, which in Peru means “Oh . . . sometime after 7.”

“Awww, too bad!” we replied and began to walk away.

“Wait! Wait! Wait!” she called. “For you, 6:00!” This really meant that we’d have chicken in hand by 6:30. Well worth the wait.

Seriously, it’s some of the best chicken I’ve ever had. Mama Chicken’s back yard is a giant chicken coop. She’s got a shiny wood-fired stove where they rotisserie the chicken. If you walk in and ask for a menu, they’ll look at you a little funny, because there is no menu, there’s just chicken. And fries. And occasionally a good ole chicken foot soup. And salad, except we gringos most likely can’t eat that or we’ll be in the throes of a three-day bout of TD.

The chicken is smoky-fire flavored, moist, savory and the skin is divine! The meat falls off the bone. And since the chickens come hand raised from Mama Chicken’s back yard, there’s a ‘real’ kind of flavor that the factory farmed chicken I’m accustomed to in the states just can’t compete with. The fries can be hit or miss, usually a hit, but bring your own ketchup because the watery red stuff they serve can be dissappointing. And they have a TV, which is always playing something fun, whether it be The Simpsons or an old 80′s movie dubbed in Español.

We always bring an extra baggie so we can take the bones and any leftover skin home so we can feed it to the dogs, who smell us coming from a half a kilometer down the road. (Yes, Peruvian dogs live on chicken bones, but more on that later.)

So, if you find yourself in Pisac, make sure you check out Mama Chicken. She’ll have a smile for you. You’ll leave with greasy fingers, a full belly and a pack of dogs following you down the street.