Last week on Friday, things somehow got worse. Much worse. It all started when I had to do my laundry. I am cheap, therefore I didn't drop my laundry off at the first place I found. They wanted 4 soles per kilo. No way! I went to a tienda (little shop that sells junk food) and saw they had a laundry sign and thought that theirs must be cheaper. Well, it was 4 soles, too. I was late for class so I just decided to drop my stuff off there and pick it up in the afternoon. I talked the man down to 3.50 per kilo, but then when he weighed my laundry he rounded up the kilos so I paid a bit more anyway. I asked him to lower the price to the correct amount and he said that because I wanted my laundry at 5pm instead of 6pm I had to pay a bit more. I told him I REALLY needed my laundry done by then because it was going to get freezing at around 5pm and I needed pants to wear at night (I was wearing a dress). He said okay. I thought, okay whatever, and left for class. I show up later at 5pm, and guess what? No laundry. There is a different guy there who has no idea what I'm talking about when I mention that my laundry was supposed to be done by 5pm. It's always at 6pm, he stressed. I kept arguing, but that didn't make my laundry show up. I asked for a discount and he refused. I begged for a discount and tried to pull the poor me little voice that all the Ecuadorian and Peruvian women are so good at (it's really annoying sounding, by the way). He still refused. He said to come back at 6pm and it would be there. I stormed off and used the internet for an hour. I show back up at 6pm and NO LAUNDRY. I beg again for a discount and he finally gives in and asks for my 10 sole bill and says he'll give me some money back. He only gave me 50 cents. At that point he had my money and I couldn't get a bigger discount, so that was a bad move on my part... especially since I then had to wait for another HOUR until my laundry actually arrived!!! It was absolutely ridiculous. It was 2 hours late, I told him that he'd ruined my plans to meet my friends for a salsa lesson, and I was about to scream I was so upset with him and his calm attitude. And all I got was a 50 cent discount. My teacher told me later I should have either not paid, or just given him 50% and walked off. That made me even more mad, because well... I clearly didn't do that. Plus, they spilled some sort of glue on the back of my fleece. Where did glue come from in a lavanderia? Okay, done with this story now, onto the next terrible one.

So Saturday I am at home alone after class, attempting to make lunch. My room mates all can light cigarette lighters, and so that's all we have to light the stove with. Previously, I had them light the stove for me, but this time nobody else was home. A few days earlier we'd had a full box of 40 matches, but the box mysteriously disappeared. Hmm.... I am convinced they hid it from me to make my cooking life more difficult. So I cut up all my veggies, beat the eggs (it was going to be an omelet lunch), and then spent the next 15 minutes attempting to light the lighter. I failed miserably and ended up with a bruised finger. I finally went outside and waited on the walkway for someone to show up. I asked a teenage guy to help me light my lighter. He showed me how to do it, with a weird look on his face, probably wonder why a grown girl couldn't light a lighter. The flame went out and I exclaimed that no, I needed him to hold it down so that I could then take his fingers´place with my own. He gave me an even weirder look but performed the trick. I grabbed the lit lighter and ran back to the kitchen, tried to light the stove, and burned my finger in the fire... all the while managing NOT to light to stove. I finally gave up and decided I'd just have to go buy matches from a nearby store. I ran up the steps to the street, bought some ¨fósforos¨and ran back to the apartment. I put my keys in the door, turned them to the right, and... nothing. The door wouldn't open. It took me a good 10 minutes of locking and unlocking the door, and even shaking the door really, really hard, to come to the realization that I was for some incredibly stupid, unfair reason locked out of my house. And my food was inside, waiting patiently to be cooked and eaten by me. And my stomach was growling. A construction guy from next door heard the door banging and came over to investigate. He tried his hand at opening it, but no luck either. I asked him who might be able to help me, like where I could find a locksmith perhaps. He shrugged his shoulders and left me. I couldn't believe it. He had to know someone who could help, I'm sure other doors in Peru behave like mine at some point. I didn't have anyone´s cell phone number from the school, and my school was closed at this point anyway, so I wasn't sure who to turn to for help. I'd never seen a locksmith much less a key store around town. I wandered around San Blas neighborhood, waiting for something to inspire me. I saw a girl in the plaza handing out Hemp Cafe flyers. She looked like she spoke English and maybe lived in the area, so I explained my situation and hoped she could help. She was nice, but didn't know anything. I decided to go to a travel agency and ask. Surely they had to know something. Turns out they didn't really, and just looked at me with blank stares. After I mustered up a very upset and sad look, they finally got out a map and told me to go to Calle Nueva street where I'd somehow ¨find¨a locksmith. It was all very vague, but they assured me it would work. So I flagged down a taxi, went to Calle Nueva, and yes! It was an entire street of just key shops. Imagine that. I picked the first one, told the guy my problem, and he said he'd try to help. I brought him back to my place where he then proceeded to try to unlock my door with what looked like a part of a hangar. Nothing was blocking the door, so then he used a hand powered drill to try to get inside the lock itself. Still nothing. At this point the Austrian girl and her Cusqueñan boyfriend had come to watch the door opening spectacle, as they wanted to get inside to get some of her cigarettes. Her boyfriend is loud, dreadlocked, and kept saying hilarious things (well, at least he thought so) and cracking up at his own jokes. I didn't quite understand. Then he started making out with Andrea. I just sat there, cold and annoyed that we were locked out and my food was still inside. The locksmith finally told us that he couldn't fix it from the outside and would either have to saw part of the door off to get to it, or break into the apartment. He chose to break in because it was ¨easier¨. He worked on the window to my room. Then once he got it off, tried to climb up the security bars and somehow fit through them through the window. Didn't quite work. Had to then saw off the security bars with a hand saw and THEN he was able to fit. It was a really amusing sight to see him climb up the bars, twist and turn like a crazy circus performer, and somehow fit through the small opening and jump down into my room. The entire time we were just hoping he wasn't going to fall and break his neck or something. He got to the front door, and... still nothing! He was in there a good while trying to actually get out. After 3 and a half hours of waiting, he FINALLY got the door open. Turns out part of the lock had ROTTED and it wasn't even my fault that the door wouldn't open... it was just very, extremely bad timing. And at around 4pm I finally got to cook my lunch!! Locksmith man then said he had to come back later to saw off the lock, take it apart, put in a new piece, and sauder it all back onto the door. This happened much later in the evening.

Well, things didn't stay good for long, however. The cable woman came by and told us we hadn't paid our bill (we aren't even supposed to pay it, our school is), and she informed us she was shutting off our TV and stormed off in a huff. I almost cried. Then, after I ate and showered quickly and went to a concert with my friends (more on that later), I came home to discover that the locksmith had fixed the lock, put the safety bars back on, but for some reason didn't reinstall my window. So for the rest of my stay in my apartment I had a 30 degree room at night. And I was still sick. ARGHHH!!!!!

Back to the concert... the night the whole lock out fiasco happened, I was supposed to meet my friend Mark (from the cafe) and his Spanish school friends for a salsa class. Well that didn't happen, but luckily I caught them in time to go out to dinner and then plan to go to a concert the next day. The concert was called ¨Caosfest¨but wasn't quite chaotic in the musical sense. The tickets said the concert was starting at 4pm so we went at 5pm thinking we'd arrive just in time for the good bands to start. Once we got there, however, we discovered that 4pm really meant 6pm. So we waited around for an hour. We didn't actually get in until 6:30 or so. Finally! Not quite. We discovered that they were still setting up the stage and just starting to do soundchecks... which they continued to do for at least 30 minutes. It was a bunch of ¨Si, si, hola, hola, si si si si, dos, tres, chao, hola, chao, si!¨. We were about frozen at this point, even though we were bundled up to the max. We drank a lot of beer and ate muchos hot dogs. After the longest wait ever for a band to come on, the show finally started. It was mostly Peruvian and Argentinian bands. The first two were okay, and I'd actually heard one of the songs on the radio. Nothing special, though. Then Lucia de la Cruz came on, an Afro-Peruvian singer with a very powerful voice and a dirty mouth. She was really entertaining and the crowd loved her, I guess she's pretty popular even with people my age. Then the rock band Los Violadores from Argentina came on. At first their lead singer didn't come out because he was suffering the effects of altitude sickness. Bad idea to fly into Cusco the day of your concert, I guess! He came out after a while, though, and all was well. At this point, though, it was almost midnight and we'd been standing for about 6 hours! I was getting tired and cold, and so was everyone else, so we headed back to the main plaza and went out to the dance bars for the rest of the evening. When I got home later that night, I could still hear the last band playing somewhere off in the distance at the arena... Peruvians are really bad at keeping the sound level down in neighborhoods and cities, haha.

....

Anyway... as I write this, I can officially say I've left my room mates and my apartment. Wee! I'm now in a pretty cool hostal in a different part of town and it has billiards, movies, free internet, and breakfast AND a kitten are included. All for just a whopping $7. Bolivia trip is up next with my Canadian friends in a few days.

Last bit of Cusco, continued... remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

When Rachel left me in Lima, I was worried I wouldn't make any friends during the day I had to kill there. I woke up, ate breakfast alone, watched some Peruvian news about the EU-LAC summit that was going on in Lima that week (60 heads of state, 48 snipers around the city, and a lot of road blocks!), and wondered what I'd do that day since I'd already seen most everything I wanted to see with Rachel. Some guys sat down next to me and were speaking in English. Yes! A few minutes later they asked me if I spoke English, we became instant friends, and they invited me to spend the day being their Lima guide. As we were preparing to leave the hostal, we started talking to three librarians from Idaho (they are going to school for this, I swear) and suddenly our group turned into 6! I took them to Old Town where we marveled at the thousands of pigeons at the Monestario de San Francisco, were served lunch by the French nuns at L'eau de Vivre (and my Canadian friends got to practice their perfect Quebequois french with the nuns), then we headed to Miraflores where we checked out the photo exhibition in Parque Kennedy. After a while, I decided to go to the department store nearby and buy a coat for the cold weather that was awaiting me in Cusco. Bad move. This is the moment I lost everyone. I told the guys where to meet me when they were done looking at the pictures, but we never ran into each other again. I found out later that they had waited in front of the store entrance for me for a while but I guess I took too long trying on coats! I was only worried that they wouldn't make it home without me because earlier they'd said they only had a $5 bill, but when I got home I found them there safe and sound.

That night we all made mojitos in our hostal kitchen and our favorite resident hostal worker, Leonora, took us all out to the bars nearby in Barranco. We danced the night away and soon enough it was 6am... and I had to leave for the airport at 9am. Oops. The same taxi driver who had taken Rachel to the airport the evening before came to pick me up for my 45 minute drive to the airport. He took a different way than before, however, and soon we were in a slummy area that didn't look so safe. Since I was running on little sleep and I had never heard back from Rachel that she had actually arrived safely back in the US, I was convinced that he had kidnapped Rachel the night before and dropped her off in the middle of nowhere and I was going to suffer the same fate. Eek. But then we arrived at the airport and all was well. This time my flight to Cusco was not as turbulent as before, so luckily I did not have to think I was going to die on the plane alone and crash in the Andes. The airport in Cusco was filled with fun Andean pipe music like last time, what a great touristy welcome. Once everyone collected their baggage the musicians stopped until the next crowd arrived.

I had lunch at The Muse cafe in San Blas (cute neighborhood where I live and go to school). It's a really cool, artsy cafe, as are all the other places in this area. The music was even my style (I miss my music, remind me why I didn't bring an iPod and everyone else did). I was sitting alone, probably looking very awkward because I was just twiddling my thumbs and staring at the wall. A guy was also sitting alone across from me, but he looked less awkward because he was actually reading a magazine. He noticed my awkwardness and introduced himself and invited me to join him for lunch. He's a 29 year old from London who has spent essentially all of his 20s traveling around the world. We exchanged email addresses so that we could meet up later on to share more travel stories. Yay, my first friend. Went to my first Spanish lesson after lunch, which went pretty well even though I was fairly tired... I got compliments from the professor on my non-American accent!

Cusco this time around is a LOT colder than before. I discovered this that first evening after my Spanish lesson when I had to wait around in the cold, cold, cooold weather for someone to finally bring me the keys to my apartment so I could go home and sleep and put on warmer clothes (the previous tennant had taken my keys with her on accident).

Once I finally got home at around 7:30pm I was a bit annoyed at the whole key problem. I was so cold (it was at least 30 degrees outside) and I wasn't sure where anything was in my neighborhood, so I just ended up having a piece of leftover bread (from lunch) for dinner. It was a bit pathetic.

The next morning I asked my room mates (a 20 year old German couple) where I could buy some groceries so I wouldn't have to nibble at pieces of stale bread. They invited me to join them for breakfast and then on the way they'd point out where the grocery store was. Nice! Well, it didn't turn out that way. Somehow I instead ended up following them to a tour agency so they could pay for a jungle tour, then we had to walk 15 minutes down to the main road to the LAN Peru office to buy their plane tickets, but then discovered after waiting for 20 minutes that we had to walk down further to a different travel agency and buy their tickets there. After 10 minutes more of waiting around, the German guy looked at me and said, ¨Well, actually we have plans at 12pm to go see some ruins with our other room mate, so I'm sorry but maybe you should just go eat on your own now.¨ I asked which ruins and pulled out my Boleto Turistico (tourist ticket needed to visit most all museums and ruins in and around Cusco) and he pointed them out. He said he just had one day left on his ticket and wanted to us it. I said I just had one day left, too. However, he didn't invite me to come with them and just said goodbye, so I took that as my cue to leave. Nice first meeting with my new roomies. Things with them just got so much better as my time in Cusco went on... cough cough. I think all my problems with them deserve their own entry. That will come later.

At this point, I didn't have much to do and I was alone for the day. I started to wonder why exactly I'd come to Cusco on a Friday, when I had the whole weekend with nothing to do and didn't quite know anyone yet, and my 5 cool Canadian and Idaho(ian?) friends were still in Lima. Plus I apparently missed an amazing, free Mouse on Mars concert in Parque Kennedy (it's a really neat German psychadelic trance type band)! Boo. From what I remember I didn't do that much during the weekend except spend hours trying to get ahold of my friend Matan from my Galapagos trip, who was supposedly in Cusco. It's very annoying trying to make plans through email, especially when nobody is ever online at the same time. I finally decided to just walk to his hostal and hope he was there... and he was! He invited me to go to an all night, open air party an hour outside of Cusco with all his Israeli friends that night, and since I had nothing else to do, I figured it would be fun. It ended up being a fairly bad idea. My night consisted of a cold, hour long bus ride to a mystery area near Urubamba with a bunch of Israelis. Then we entered the party, and I discovered more Israelis. I listened to a lot of Hebrew that night, sat by the fire and tried to keep it going, and wondered when 6am would come around so that we could take the bus home to Cusco. I ate a cold soy burger, drank some watery hot chocolate, and watched as a 40 year old crazy man came up to Matan and demanded he give him his tea because the world was amazing and we should share everything. I also met a girl from Utah and we bonded because neither of us understood Hebrew. Fun night.

The rest of my time in Cusco has been spent going to Spanish lessons for 2 or so hours a day, and for a while when my Canadian friends were here before their Machu Picchu trek we hung out during the day and did a short hike to Sachsaywaman ruins above Cusco and went out at night to go dancing. I've gradually learned more and more complicated things in my Spanish lessons, although it's all been really quick!, but now I can say I at least have some sort of grasp on the past, future, and conditional verb tenses... and today I learn the imperative. Only thing left to do is practice mucho! My teachers all know that I like conversation, so we've done quite a lot of talking instead of just lectures and grammar. At one point I was discussing global warming, women's lack of rights in Peru, the problems in Middle East, and what I would propose to do for the US if I were a president hopeful... all in Spanish! Basic Spanish, but it is still pretty cool that I can now say more than just hola. The funny thing about my teachers is that they have all assumed that I am from Europe. One of my teachers asked me where I was from in Germany, and just yesterday another one thought I was Dutch (as did an actual Dutch woman who started to speak to me in rapid fire Dutch). When the teachers found out I was from the US, they were shocked because apparently they don't think I have an American accent when I speak Spanish. That's great to hear! Maybe it's because I was sick and had a hoarse voice? Haha. Anyway, four more hours of class today and I'm done for the rest of my trip. I actually went to the doctor yesterday and managed to describe all my symptoms in Spanish and tell him about my past history with asthma... so I think all the lessons I've had so far have been really helpful.

So back to Sachsaywaman... we hiked up a bunch of tiny Inkan steps at the back of San Blas area and after much huffing and puffing (and drinking a Powerade), we made it to the top where the ruins were. We first hiked up a different hill to a giant white Jesus statue that overlooks the entire city of Cusco. It was such a beautiful view! I even made a new friend while I was up there, some 14 year old local boy who was for some reason just hanging out up there with a jacket on and a roll of toilet paper in his pocket. He was pretty nice and must have thought I was, too, because he asked for my email address. I gave it to him, because he said he really wanted to practice his English, but he hasn't written. So sad. On the walk back home from the ruins, I was telling Mike and Ivan (Canadians) about a really hilarious dog that I'd seen in Cusco the last time I was here... it had the body of a dachshund and the head of a golden retriever and I couldn't have even dreamed up a funnier looking dog. Right after I told him, we turned a corner and saw a black version of the same dog! He tried to take a picture but the dog kept staring at him for a few seconds and then turning and waddling away right when he'd click the shutter. We also passed a few llamas and donkeys carrying a ton of long grass on their backs.

On the 22nd, there was a giant holiday celebration here in the city for Corpus Christi. I've never seen anything like it. My area of town was a bit quieter that day, but during the days leading up to the 22nd, there were fireworks going off every day, at all times of day, and often random dances at night in the streets or small religious processions. But on the day of, man was it insane. I walked down to the main plaza and discovered that it was packed to the max with thousands and thousands of people. There were bands playing in the middle of it all, dancers, floats of religious figures, and for some reason a guy was crowd surfing on a giant table (??). It took me at least 20 minutes to cross the plaza because the crowds were so tight and I had to cross a few parade lines. I almost felt a little claustrophobic. I was also getting annoyed because everyone kept bumping into me and pushing me, as if I could somehow go faster that way. I had one small woman half my size literally trying to ram me into the person in front of me. The traditional dish of Corpus Christi is called something like Chirichu (spelling is probably wrong), which is a dish of seaweed, caviar, chicken, mystery sausage meat, and fried guinea pig complete with it's hair, toenails, and teeth still intact. I decided not to try it. I walked up to the other smaller, nearby plazas and discovered that there were stalls upon neverending stalls of this stuff. It seemed to be the only thing people wanted to eat that day. Plus beer. I was all alone, though, since I wasn't able to get ahold of any of my friends via email since we were never online at the same time... it's so frustrating that we don't all have cell phones. I spent the rest of my afternoon eating an overpriced pizza at a touristy restaurant on another plaza because I was so hungry I didn't want to bother looking for a cheap place among all the crowds of people. I had about 50 people come up to me during my lunch to try to sell me finger puppets, paintings, phone calls, and more paintings. I finally got up and went to sit on the steps of the plaza to people watch, only to have a small girl come up to me trying to sell me grape candy.

....aaand more to come later when I have free time to write, but you blackmailed me so I had to post this now!

For you, Mom... Trip so far minus The Rachel remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

That's about all our adventures in Pisco and Paracas entailed... I told you it would be the shortest entry ever from me. Back to Lima on a 4 hour bus ride for the end of our trip together.

Pisco / Paracas... shortest entry ever remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

After our 11 hour bus ride to Ica/Huacachina, all we really wanted to do was sleep. Plus there wasn't much to do in our tiny oasis town in the sand dunes, anyway, at least until our sandboard and dune buggy tour later in the afternoon! Huacachina is essentially a tiny oasis resort town for tourists in the middle of some enormous sand dunes on Peru's southern coast. The hotels and restaurants are built around a small, smelly lagoon (but it looks pretty). The sand dunes surrounding the town go on and on as far as the eye can see towards the coast. We stayed at what my guidebook describes as a party hostal, though during the 2 nights we were there I can't say there was even a smidgen of a party going on... in fact, we were often the only ones up and about around the hostal and after dinner time the town shut down! Our first night we spent watching ''American Wedding'' at the hostal with the resident dalmation curled up on our laps, and the second night we retired to our rooms and read a bit before going to sleep early. Some crazy trip, eh?

Well, turns out it did get a little crazy... our sandboarding and dune buggy experience on our first afternoon ended up being one of the craziest and most fun things we've done on our entire trip. We were picked up at the hostal in an 8 seater dune buggy and as soon as we strapped in and put on our safety goggles (I looked like a mad scientist), our driver stomped down on the gas pedal and we were off racing through town and up and over the sand dunes. Pretty soon we were in a vast sea of sand dunes, stretching on as far as the eye could see. It was so beautiful. Our driver apparently wasn't as insane as the other ones, thankfully... though at the end of our tour we got a little taste of what crazy really was. After we raced around the dunes a bit, our driver stopped at the edge of (what we thought was) a gigantic, steep sand dune... and then told us we had to go down it on the sandboards face first on our stomachs. We thought he was joking, but no, he wasn't. Little did we know, each sand dune would be larger and steeper than the ones before it. We finally got up the guts to go down, and once we pushed off we suddenly realized it wasn't so bad... in fact, it needed to be faster! The first dune was about 100 or so feet long (a baby) and my favorite was probably about 200 feet long or more. But the last sand dune was a monster! It had to have been at least 4 football fields lengths long... and ridiculously steep. We all just stared at it in shock for a good 10 minutes before anyone had the guts to go down. One crazy daredevil in our group was a veteran sandboarder, so he just hopped on his board and FLEW down the dune like he was on a rocket. A few others followed, a couple even went down snowboard style (even more insane, in my opinion). Finally it was just Rachel and I and a few other girls left at top. After much debate, we decided to go down... at the pace of a snail. The dune seemed like it was at a 10 degree angle, though in reality it was probably less steep than we thought. We layed down on our boards and went down face first with our feet digging into the sand as hard as they could manage. At one point I almost got off my board and walked down the rest of the way... until I realized it was probably safer to stay on my board and inch along like a snail, than to possibly risk messing up and somehow tumbling down the hill. At one point I almost burst out laughing because I was thinking about how ridiculous Rachel and I probably looked to everyone else. After a few years time, we finally made it to the bottom.

At this point our shoes were weighed down with a ton of sand. Rachel took off a shoe and an entire beachful of sand fell out. Sand was in my hair, shirt, and pants, as well. We laughed, hopped back into our dune buggy and then had the craziest ride of our life back into town. This was when our sweet innocent driver decided to turn into an insane maniac. But a fun maniac At one point as we bounced about in the backseat and drove down a steep dune rollercoaster style (think Goliath, mom), Rachel yelled out to me between all her screaming that we'd normally have to sign a release form for something like this. I just screamed and laughed back in response. We had gone on the tour with 2 or 3 other buggies, and toward the end they started racing together... down a hill. At this point, I really did think they were insane. But it all ended well, and here I am typing this blog entry safe and sound with a great story to tell! Our driver was nice enough to stop at the top of the sanddune overlooking Huacachina for a photo op... once we finished snapping away, he raced down into town past scared onlookers on the dunes and screeched to a halt in front of our hostal. Whew!

Turns out our friend Matan from our Galapagos trip was also in Huacachina and had done the same sand dune tour... though unlike us he was brave enough to snowboard down all the dunes, and even broke his board in half on one of them. Makes him sound tough, doesn't it? Or perhaps kind of stupid, I'm not sure. We bumped into him earlier when we'd first got to town after lunch. I love randomly running into people in different countries. The really funny thing is that ever since Puno, we've been seeing this same French couple in every town we visited afterwards and in every bus terminal as well. And of course we had to see them walking around the lagoon in Huacachina.

On our last full day we decided to take a bodega (winery) tour in the nearby town of Ica. It was only about $10 for a private taxi driver to take us to the two wineries, pretty good price. The first winery was a bit disappointing... the tour was super quick, everything was really modern and all we saw was machinery, and the wines were kind of gross. The second winery was much more interesting, because it still uses the same traditional methods to harvest and produce its wines and pisco... including stomping on the grapes for the harvest each March (there is a whole festival for it!), and fermenting the grape juice in traditional clay (?) cannisters that they bury underground. We had our tour in Spanish and our guide complimented us on our comprehension and speaking skills... yay! We tried a dessert wine here, as well as pisco (the grape brandy that is Peru's national liquor), and a mixture of pisco/milk/figs that tastes somewhat like Bailey's (figs, coffee, same thing). Pisco is made by boiling the special grape juice, trapping the condensation which then swirls down a series of spiraled tubes into a bath of ice cold water, and then the condensation re-liquifies and there's the basic pisco. I really enjoyed all the old traditional methods they used for their wines and pisco.

That was pretty much the last of our trip in the Huacachina and Ica areas... next morning we woke up bright and early and caught a bus to Pisco, which would prove to be fairly uneventful, mostly due to the lingering effects of the August 2007 earthquake...

Sandboards and dune buggies in Huacachina! remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

As big as the city is, we haven't found we like it as much as the other places we've been... even gigantic, crazy Lima. It's a beautiful city in a dry deserty valley between a bunch of towering, active volcanoes... but other than that, we just aren't feeling it. On our first evening we walked around a bit and bought some gelato. We somehow ended up talking to a guy who was in the ice cream store and he latched onto us and ended up spending the rest of the evening with us (not quite because we wanted him to, though). At first he was nice, but in the end he turned out to be quite pushy in his desperation to be friends with us. We told him we wanted to go to see the Museo Santuy (it's entirely dedicated to the 500 year old, young Inkan girl sacrifice discovered frozen and in perfect condition atop the volcano near Arequipa). He decided he'd follow us and wait outside in the cold for us to finish our hour long tour. The tour itself was incredibly interesting and informative, and the entire museum was really well organized. Our guide told us about ''Juanita'' and what her experience was probably like as she prepared to be sacrificed. Apparently all of the most beautiful babies were selected at birth to be potential sacrifices later in life in case there was ever an earthquake, volcanic eruption, or some other natural disaster. So they knew from early on that one day they might die. Some were sacrificed as young as 6 years old, others were as old as 18. In Juanita's case, they think she was about 12. We watched a documentary that followed the man who discovered Juanita as he and his crew climbed the icy volcano she was found atop... they were looking for more sacrifices (I think they found about 3 more child sacrifices on that climb, which is very rare... guess their first sacrifice didn't apease the volcano god!). Juanita walked up the mountain in a procession of Inkans, all who wore just woven sandals to make the climb up to the top of the 20,700 ft high volcano. She had fasted the day before and then was given some chicha (alcoholic drink) before she was killed by blunt force to the head. She was then buried along with some textiles and other god and silver offerings. Since she was found frozen, her internal organs are still in remarkable condition and when we got to view her at the end of the tour (in a glass freezer so she won't thaw out!), even her skin and fingernails still looked so real... it was a bit creepy.

We ended our tour and discovered our friend was still waiting for us in the cold. He took us around town to the plaza, where we went to Mass in La Catedral because we've become Catholic during the span of this short trip. We sat in the back and discussed politics, food, and tried in vain to explain to our new friend that Jews do not believe in Jesus, but he didn't seem to understand, especially since Jesus was a Jew himself. Then, of all things, he told us that he was Mormon. A Morman Peruvian! He had like 10 brothers, too. Makes sense. We then hung out at a mall because it was ridiculously cold outside and I was still wearing my clothes that were more appropriate for the scorching hot afternoon sun. We felt like high schoolers. Then we got a set dinner menu for less than a dollar (good noodle soup, so so rice and tiny fish). Our friend was quite the gentleman, pulling out our chairs for us and getting us whatever we needed. We were still hungry so we convinced him to watch us eat a giant piece of chocolate cake and drink some hot chocolate at a cafe nearby. He refused to eat there because he wanted a specific type of cheese bread and coffee. We went home after that... he made us promise to call him once we returned after our trip to the canyon, but he was a little too pushy about it. I felt bad for him because he seemed to genuinely want to be our friend, but he was just a bit too odd.

Next day we woke up early, stepped outside into the hot sun, and I realized I'd lost my sunglasses yet again on this trip (left them at the restaurant the night before, I think). Grr! And unfortunately for me, Arequipa was not like Cusco, and there were not 100s of people trying to sell me sunglasses on the street every 5 minutes. We went to the Santa Catalina Convent for a tour and it turned out to be one of the neatest places we've seen so far. It's a giant convent that is almost like a tiny walled in city, with little ''streets'' inside that twist and turn... you could almost get lost in there without a guide or a map! It's absolutely gorgeous... some of the cloisters are painted a beautiful bright blue, others a sunburnt orange color and others just white. There are flowers and trees everywhere inside. I felt like I was in Greece or something. From the top of the church (up 33 steps, just like Jesus' age when he died) you have a really great view of the convent, Arequipa outside of it, and the volcanoes outside the city. It has a pretty juicy history for a convent... it was originally created for the Spanish women who were living in Peru after the conquistadors came. Since many of them didn't have a calling to become nuns, they didn't all live like true nuns. They had apartment style living situations with their own kitchens and bedrooms (normally convents have communal living situations). Their families would bring them exquisite tea sets, textiles and paintings for their rooms so they could keep up the same high class lifestyles they had had in Spain. The nuns who paid the most were given more privilages and could become Mother Superior, and those whose families could not pay in full were lower in class. My Lonely Planet book says that they also would throw parties and the pope finally had to send a strict nun to force them to tone things down, though our guide didn't mention this so I can't say for sure whether it's true. The most interesting thing to me is that the Spanish nuns actually had slaves... they were allowed up to 6. The slaves were supposed to be learning from the nuns about religion, but since they were black and at that time black people were considered too impure to even become Catholic, it was clear that their role was just to serve the nuns. If a slave became pregnant, the child belonged to the nun since the slave was her property... if it was a girl, it was allowed to grow up in the convent, but if it was a boy it had to be sent away to live with the nun's family. Young girls would live in the convent as novices, and they'd essentially spend their days locked in their rooms praying, embroidering, and reading philosophy and theology books. Sometimes they would even have an elder nun spy on them and watch through their windows to make sure they weren't doing anything else. There are stories of very religious nuns who followed the nun lifestyle to a ''t''... one of them supposedly journeyed to the convent all the way from Bolivia, paid in full but chose to shun all her privilages and wanted the smallest, darkest room where she could devote her life to praying. Sometimes she'd ask other nuns to tie her upside down on a cross and was often found unconscious. She died mid-prayer. The convent was eventually opened up to indigenous women and whoever else had a calling and today there are 23 resident nuns who follow a very strict schedule of praying 6 hours a day... and they don't party.

We walked around town some more and found our way to a nicer neighborhood with a great view over the entire city. On the way we bumped into a random old woman on a bridge who started talking to Rachel after she heard us speaking English... turns out she was a retired insurance worker who was now living in Arequipa teaching English for a year. And she just would not stop talking. We heard her whole life story. As we parted ways, she let us know that she'd studied business at Georgetown. And that was that.

Colca Canyon...

Next morning we woke up bright and early at the ungodly hour of 5am to catch a 6am bus to Colca Canyon... twice as deep as the Grand Canyon! VERY unfotunately for us, our 3 hour bus ride was one of the worst bus rides that could possibly exist. We settled into our seats on the nice double decker bus, unaware how quickly things would change. A few minutes into the drive, the music started blasting. But it wasn't music. It was a morning radio show with men laughing like hyenas and then talking in baby voices. It wasn't funny. We asked him to turn it down. He said ''of course!´''. Then the stupid bus ticket collector boy turned the volume UP. It was so loud the speakers were crackling. Suddenly, the sound turned off. We breathed a sigh of relief. But too soon. A minute later, the bus boy was putting in a DVD. We could have never prepared for what horrible DVD he had picked. Trumpets blared and a bunch of local families marched around an arena... turns out it was a home video of a bull fight. We were forced to watch a bull fight on our 3 hour bus ride at 6am at top volume. The same trumpet music played over and over, matador after matador waved their stupid red flags at the bulls, they shot their spears into the bulls, the bulls bled, the bulls died. And we couldn't get away from it!!! And it was SIX AM IN THE MORNING. I almost cried I was so upset and frustrated. And of course the night before I had left my only pair of earplugs under my pillow, so I had to resort to stuffing my ears with toilet paper. Didn't work. At some point, the bull fight DVD ended, and we almost jumped for joy... until the bus boy started to put in another DVD. It was the icing on the cake... an anti-abortion, male chauvenist movie from the 60s about a husband who forced his wife to have the baby she didn't want to have, and then forced her to stay at home and take care of their child because it was ''her duty'', even though she wanted to start her own business. I honestly think the bus ticket boy was stupid and I'm baffled as to why he would think those movies were a good choice for a 3 hour bus ride... yes let me remind you, at 6am in the freaking morning!!!

Anyway, finally arrived in Yanque, the first town at the edge of the canyon. Except we didn't see any canyon. This was the start of everything on our trip going wrong and not being quite what it seemed it would be. We had taken a rickety old combi (cheap shared collective transportation, or just a beat up van seemingly made from junk parts that can magically fit 20 people inside) into town from the main canyon town of Chivay where our favorite bus dropped us off. We wandered the 12 streets of Yanque looking for the hotel our book recommended, only to discover that nobody in town knew where the street was that it was on. We got an unofficial tour of the town that way. While wearing our giant backpacks. And it was hot. The town is interesting though... very tiny, built entirely around the church in the center, with perfectly layed out streets radiating out from each side of the main plaza. Each street was dirt, had a few donkeys and dogs, and on either side were mud walls with protective cacti on top (to keep animals in and intruders out). We finally stumbled across our hotel... our big splurge on the trip at about $30 each per night or something, but hey, it included breakfast, a guided hike, a sauna, and a jacuzzi! (Or so we thought... we discovered later that night after our long 3 hour hike that the jacuzzi was nothing more than 3 giant tubs filled with lukewarm water. We almost cried again upon this discovery.) We also ended up spending a bit more on our meals because as it turns out, there weren't any resturants in town. Of course. At least the food was delicious. At this point we were the only ones in the giant hotel. We thought it was a bit weird, but soon the place started to fill up...

Our hike turned out to be a highlight, at least. It was about 3 hours and we had a local guide take us up into the hills to some pre-Inkan ruins (called Uyu Uyu), complete with a gorgeous view of the town and valley below. I couldn't stop taking pictures. Rachel and I spent a lot of time talking with our guide and she was impressed with our Spanish. Nobody else on the hike knew any Spanish so we felt especially smart, and we even got to translate for them. Along the hike we passed a lot of donkeys, sheep, cows, and pastures of quinua. At one point we even came across a little girl with a baby llama. On the hike back, we discovered that our hotel had neglected to mention to us that we should bring our bathing suits so we could stop and bathe in the hot springs on the way back. We were upset, until we discovered that the hot springs were just two small, crowded swimming pools... and nobody on our tour wanted to go anyway. We hiked back up into town, at which point it was getting pretty dark... we passed some more donkeys along the way carrying some supplies uphill, and I got to pet a llama! We were oohing and aahing at a llama on the side of the road when a local woman came up to us yelling ''Mine, mine!'' and then grabbed my hand, dragged me over to her llama, and forced me to pet it. Okay, well I wanted to, too. I think ''mio!'' was the only Spanish word she knew (the locals traditionally speak Quechua in the canyon country, and until very recently the canyon area had been entirely cut off from the outside cities due to lack of a main road going in/out).

Back at the hotel, we watched a really silly traditional dance put on by some local kids. The costumes were interesting... the guys actually wore embroidered dresses and these funny, floppy hats that had straps around their chins and noses. The girls just had beautiful embroidered skirts and vests. They proceeded to shuffle around to the music for a few minutes (their traditional dance?) before one of the kids grabbed my hand along with some other tourists and we started shuffling around in circles with them while everyone else watched us, highly amused. Then Rachel got a turn to shuffle. Then it was jacuzzi time and we cried. We were the only ones in there until a French guy came in and joined us... though it turned out he was actually born in Reunion (French colonist ancestors?) and now lives and works on the island of Guadaloupe in French Guyana. He didn't speak English very well, and our French is almost non-existent by now, so we had a really hard and frustrating (but amusing!) time trying to communicate with each other.

The next morning we got up bright and early yet again to catch a 7am bus ride to Cruz del Condor, where supposedly we were going to see a family of giant condors (heaviest flying bird in the world, with 10.5 ft wingspans!) flying over our heads as they went on their morning run. After our 2 hour bus ride along the canyon edge (beautiful!), watching it grow deeper and deeper, we got to the condor lookout point. Unfortunately we were stopped by a guard who said we had to buy a $10 entrance ticket. We gave him our money, and then he said ''uno momentito!'' (just a minute) and ran away. He was gone for a good 15 minutes. We had no idea where he went, but couldn't enter because he hadn't given us our tickets yet. We watched down below as the condors (tiny specks from our viewpoint) flew just feet above the onlookers heads. The local woman next to us kept saying ''He's coming, he's right there!'' and would point vaguely down below, but we didn't see the man... I think she was just trying to make us feel better. Finally we saw him sauntering slowly up the path towards us. We were incredibly annoyed at this point, and Rachel ran to get the tickets. We ran down the path to the lookout point... only to realize that the condors had gone back to their nests. We waited and waited until we were the only ones left at the lookout, but they didn't come back out. We were furious at the ticket man. We essentially paid $10 for nothing, since his stupidity (why didn't he have tickets with him?) forced us to miss seeing the condors. At least we can say we saw them from afar. We spent the rest of the morning hiking around the edge of the canyon, which was really amazing. I can't believe it is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon... I seem to remember the Grand Canyon looking just as deep, but maybe that was because I was like 12 or so when I saw it?

After our hike we caught another bus to the nearby town of Cabanaconde where we had lunch. The bus was full, though, so I had to stand in the aisle with the local women and I bounced around for a good 15 minutes. I hit my head on the TV three times and everyone said ''ouch!'' because they felt my pain. We arrived in the main plaza, had a delicious lunch, met the most annoying little boy in the world (he tried to steal our cameras, then he lied and told me his name was Santa Maria and tried to spy on me while I was in the bathroom), and hiked to another mirador (lookout point) over the canyon. Unfortunately the mirador path was blocked off by some rocks and a rusty wheelbarrow. After walking around for 10 minutes, confused as to how to cross or whether we even should, we finally just jumped the wheelbarrow and discovered the well worn path to the mirador. We gazed down the ravine at the oasis that we had previously pondored hiking 2 hours down to (and then 3 hours back up), and then decided to just go back to Arequipa instead.

After a lovely 6 hour ride, which included a screening of the horrible scary movie ''Jeepers Creepers'' (bad, but better than a bullfight), we made it back to Arequipa. The scenery on the way home was beautiful, though... we drove up out of the canyon and got great views of the canyon valley towns below, there were some icy, moss covered rocks, I'm pretty sure I saw a viscacha, and then we passed a very creepy but cool area of thousands of rocks piled atop each other in small stacks... I am still not quite sure what that was or who did it. We descended into the Arequipa valley area at sunset and the colors of the sky were really amazing pinks and purples. There were small puddles/ponds, llamas and alpacas, and then it became pitch black as th sun set and we spent the last hour a bit bored out of our minds.

Our last day in Arequipa involved the best lomo saltado of my life (and cheapest!), which is a Peruvian dish of rice, indiscriminate cuts of beef, french fries, tomatoes, onions, and a mysterious sweet soy-like sauce. We also spent about 4 hours on the computer uploading pictures and watched an episode of Friends... until the ripped DVD died on us and we missed the ending of the episode. Then it was time for our wonderful 11 hour overnight bus ride on Cruz del Sur to Ica/Huacachina. We got the royal treatment (in the beginning) for our $28... a special bus terminal separate from the other crazy local buses, a fancy schmancy waiting lounge, baggage check (like at airpors!), meals on board, and movies. The only unfortunate part was that Rachel requested a vegetarian meal and they served her beef for both meals... and then a baby wailed the entire night long and I could hear it through my earplugs. Babies here are annoying, we've decided. In the morning we were awakened by ''The Hot Chick'' movie playing and another meal that included carne that Rachel couldn't eat (ham croissant). And then... we were there! More on Ica and the crazy Huacachina sand dunes next time.

Arequipa & Cañon del Colca remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Our trip to the lake started off with a lovely 6 hour bus ride from Cusco to Puno, the somewhat depressing port town on the lake's shore. The bus ride almost wasn't so, because just as we arrived at Cusco's bus station I discovered I'd thrown away my bus ticket while cleaning my purse out the night before. Smart move. With only a few minutes until our bus left, we tried to ask the ticket lady if she could give me another copy. For some reason, and we still don't quite understand, she couldnt. We asked her to explain more slowly, and she just repeated the same unintelligible Spanish just as rapidly as before. I ended up having to buy two tickets for Rachel and I on another bus with Tour Peru (I at least understood that part!), I guess a sister company. The bus turned out to be amazing! The seats were huge, we had a place to rest our legs, and we were essentially some of the only people on the bus so we could spread out and relax. Plus the bus was direct, and unlike most other buses, it didn't stop every 5 minutes to pick up crazy people or women selling water, soda, candy, popcorn, cookies, or alpaca meat and corn kernels in bags. However, one unfortunate thing is that I happened to be sitting in front of a very, very grumpy old man. He refused to let me pull the curtain across the window when the sun was beating intensely down on my head and arms, and everytime I'd pull it halfway shut (barely obscuring his precious view) he'd grumble and swear at me and then yank it back open. I was so incrediby pissed off at him. Especially when he received a phone call as we were arriving in Puno and was talking loudly about stupid gringos and how they buy everything, clearly assuming that we couldn't understand.

Anyway, got to Puno and explored the town a bit. It is a large port town, but was oddly enough a bit deserted, even in the main touristy streets by the plaza. It was burning hot in the sun, so I stripped down a bit and put on flip flops and a thin shirt... only to discover later that evening around dinner time that the temperature in Puno drops to the 30s in the night and I was so cold I hurt. Bad idea Kerri. I somehow managed to survive the night by eating a delicious pizza and drinking some yummy hot chocolate before I had to brave the cold again and go back to the hostal. Unfortunately, my luck got even worse once back in our bedroom because a giant citywide concert was going on and echoing throughout, well, the entire city. The music was terrible and Rachel and I felt terrible since we had to wake up at about 6am to get to the port and boat to the islands. The concert didn't stop until 3am. THREE AM. I only got 3 hours of sleep that night. We asked a guy at the hotel the next morning why the hell there was a loud concert going on until 3am and he just laughed and explained that it goes on every May 3 to celebrate (something unintelligible... a saint perhaps? This is where it would come in handy to know more Spanish). Either way, whatever it was, in my opinion it didn't deserve to be celebrated until 3am! Did nobody else in the city care about the terrible music interrupting their sleep?

After our sleepless night, we made our way to the port to buy our boat tickets to and from the islands. The floating islands of Uros were only 30 minutes away by boat, so wasn't too bad of a ride. I knew beforehand that they were a bit touristy, but I wasn't quite prepared to be serenaded by a bunch of Uros women in brightly colored traditional clothing serenading Rachel and I with some pretty bad renditions of ''My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean'' or ''Row Row Row Your Boat'' as we set off on a 5 minute boat ride around one of the reed islands in a reed boat. The boat was really awesome, though... it had the head of a puma (the name Titicaca means Grey Puma) and the tail of a fish, and apparently takes 3 months to make entirely out of reeds. We also got a small crash course lesson on how exactly the islands are built... each island is about half the size of a football field in size and is anchored to the bottom of the lake (which is shallow in this area). They cut giant squares of dirt out of the lake with the reeds still attached and sort of sew together each square, and then start piling a ton of reeds on top in a criss cross pattern. As the reeds at the bottom rot, they just pile on new reeds on top as needed. When you step onto the islands, it's almost like you're on a waterbed. The floating islands started long ago for defensive reasons, when some families lived on boats... eventually living on boats gave way to creating and living on reed islands. Each island even has a watchtower (made of reeds, of course!) The islands are also a good way to avoid problems caused on land by earthquakes, or so said the local guy we asked. All in all there are about 46 floating islands of Uros, 70% of which work entirely in the tourism industry now, while the other 30% are in fishing. The islanders make money by charging for boat rides and selling handmade textiles and arts and crafts. It was kind of annoying and sad to me that their entire lives are based on tourism... I was hoping for something more authentic than seeing a tour boat pulled up to almost every single floating island and hearing ''Frére Jaques'' and ''Hasta la vista, baby!'' carrying throughout the wind. But I guess they have to make a living somehow, and for them, tourism clearly brings a stable income since we're all so curious about the nature of the islands!

From the Uros islands, we headed off toward the island of Amantaní (a real island in the lake, not a floating one). Our boat made the 35km journey in a grand total of 3 hours. So long, so boring! Of course it didn't help that my book was so absorbing that I had stayed up the night before (okay I also couldn't sleep because of the damn concert) and I read the entire thing. So I sat, I slept, I sat some more, I stared at the water, and I sat in a different position. Finally we arrived at Amantaní. It's a beautiful terraced island, I believe I read that there are about 800 families living on it and they all make their living by farming their individual terraced land plots, cordoned off by rock fences (later during our stay on the island, Rachel had the pleasure of knocking down part of a rock fence while we were snooping through some backyards). There are no roads or cars, just terraced yards, houses, a small main plaza with a couple stores, and two Incan ruins on top of the hill. We were met at the dock by a bunch of local women dressed in their brightly colored dresses, embroidered button down shirts, and black embroidered shawls/head covers. Our boat captain pointed to a girl and Rachel and I, along with an older French couple, followed her down the shoreline to our new home for the night. Along the way we passed literally thousands of tiny dried fish strewn across the grass, pebbles, and rocks. I assume they were to eat later? I'm not quite sure. When you read what happened that evening, keep in mind that throughout everything, Rachel and I still thought that at some point we were going to get to play soccer with the women and we'd dress up in traditional clothing, laugh, get laughed at, and generally have a merry good old time that night.

Our house was cute and even had a nice flower garden out front, with gorgeous views of the lake and the mountains along the Peruvian shoreline. The girl showed us our room and then disappeared without saying anything else... you know, like perhaps she'd introduce herself and the rest of the family, tell us where the bathroom was and where we could wash and brush our teeth, tell us when and where dinner was, etc. All normal things. But no. She was gone. We unpacked our stuff and then discovered a cute 4 year old boy in the courtyard. He was to become our only entertainment for the evening, since nobody else cared to talk to us. We tried to talk to him but he was a bit shy. He smiled a huge smile and nodded, however, when we asked him if we looked funny.

We were served lunch in what would later become our jail cell. A potato, quinua and veggie soup (with about 3 pieces of tiny vegetables in it) to start, and a giant bowl of two types of potatoes, 1 piece of squeeky cheese, and a piece of tomato for our second dish. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. The one that looked like fingers was really sweet, almost desert-like.

The girl, who turned out to be our host sister (though we never met or saw the parents or really ever found out how many people even lived there), came into our room and plopped down a giant bag. ''Look,'' she said, and unwrapped it. We expected to see an animal perhaps, but no, it was a giant bag of beanies that she wanted us to buy. When we said no thanks, since we already had hats, she seemed upset. We tried to pacify her by telling her we brought presents. Would you like them now or later? we asked. ''Now!'' she said, and took our bags of plums, apples, bananas, and quinua without so much as a thanks. (Tourists usually bring gifts of fruits or cooking supplies since it's not so often that the locals can go to Puno to buy those things.) I tried to make conversation with her about the fruit, asking her what the Spanish name for ''plum'' was, but she just stared at me, half smiled, and then took the fruits and hats away.

At this point we just decided to take a walk and explore the island a bit since our host sister had taken our fruit and left us to hang out with her friends and we didn't really know what else to do. We walked up, up, up the dirt pathway... past some donkeys and sheep in people's backyards, past a small girl and boy shooing some sheep down the small road, and finally made it to the small, mostly deserted plaza. Some older men sat on a bench talking, a group of kids peeked their heads out from around a corner. We started to walk down from the plaza back towards the beach, but soon found ourselves in someone's backyard. Across the field a man saw us and came over to help us out. Oddly enough, he wanted to talk to us! Imagine that. Our host family should take a lesson. He asked us where we were from, about our lives, and what we'd been doing in South America. Finally he told us that even though we were in someone's backyard and there was no path to the water, we could just walk through all the yards anyway and it would be fine. We started down the hill and on the way a man and his daughter decided to also start talking to us and lead us down to the water, even though it was completely out of their way. We chatted a bit as we made our way through the fields of corn and flowers and along the way became friends with the man's 4 year old daughter, ALI... son (it's how she pronounced it). She was so excited and happy to see us and immediately grabbed my right hand with both of hers and started swinging it up and down while she skipped next to me. She posed for a few pictures for us along the way. Once we got to the water, the man and his daughter left us and went back the way we'd come back to their house. Afterwards, we walked along the waterfront a bit (all pebbles and rocks) and then headed back to our house for dinner. Plus it was starting to get preeeetty chilly as the sun was going down. Uh oh.

Once back home we played kickball with our 4 year old friend in the front yard for a good 30 minutes. It soon got dark and we couldn't see much of anything, much less ourselves or the ball, but we kept playing with him anyway. He loved it. We asked him absurd questions like whether he had cooked dinner himself, or whether the pet guinea pigs could play ball with us... he just smiled and said nothing, the same answer he gave us for even normal questions. We were ridiculously hungry but still no word from any of our host family as to when we could eat.

Finally dinner arrived. We were served in our cell again, and the French couple in theirs. Not very well designed for any interaction between any of us, which made us a bit sad. Guess what our meal was? The first course was potato soup, and the second course was potatoes and rice. Incredible. At least we had a really delicious tea with a sprig of spearmint in it.

After dinner, we were left alone. And it stayed that way for the rest of the night. The children in the house closed their doors, the women disappared, and it took us a while for it to finally sink in that there would be no soccer game or playing dress up. Or even a conversation, any kind of cultural exchange. Even worse, we had no light in the room and had to make do with my measly flashlight and a candle. We resorted to staging a photoshoot, telling as many random stories as we could, calling our parents and laughing hysterically at our bad luck while we tried to explain our experience to them (thanks Mom and Dad for thinking we had taken drugs!), and then, well... I just laid in bed since there wasn't anything else to do. Rachel read a bit and then we both crashed at about 9pm. Late night for us crazy girls.

The next morning we had some hard bread, a tiny flat pancake, and our favorite tea for breakfast before we had to go to the dock at 8am to catch our boat to Taquile, a neighboring island. On the hour long trip to Taquile we made friends with a couple on our boat. Turns out the girl is from Tecate, Mexico! Her boyfriend is from South Africa, they met while backpacking in Italy atop Mt. Vesuvius, and now they both live in Chile in the Atacama Desert (driest in the world!) where her boyfriend is working in a mine for 2 years. It was fun to talk with them and share travel stories. We arrived at Taquile a little while later, only to discover that we had to climb up 500 stone steps to get to the town... on top of the island. We huffed and we puffed and along the way passed some locals carrying 50kg bags of who knows what on their backs. We finally got to the top, where we realized the island was pretty sleepy. We had 2.5 hours before we had to be back to the boat so we spent our time wandering around the small cobblestone streets to the main plaza on the other side of the island. That side had gorgeous! views of the snow-capped mountain peaks of the Cordeillera Real in Bolivia. The water was also cleaner and more turquoise on that side of the island (as it supposedly also is on the Bolivian side of the lake, which unfortunately we couldn't go to as planned because the Bolivian government recently imposed a $100 visa for Americans to enter the country. Boohoo!). Men and women in traditional clothing hung out around the church and along the paths selling fruits, knitting, and herding sheep and donkeys. The clothing here is a bit different, I noticed... the men had interesting, wide, embroidered belts and vests, and also wore really long, sock-like beanies that hung partially down their backs. A female tourist in the plaza wore a black tube top and really stood out and looked quite awkward compared to the locals.

After our short morning exploration of Taquile we got back in our boat and made the long, boring 3 hour journey back to Puno. Once back in town we walked down the main street to the bus station to buy our tickets for the next day's trip to Arequipa. The road was crazy and bustling with people doing everything imaginable... from driving tuk tuks with the Batman logo on the back, to a tailor sewing clothes on the sidewalk, to two gross old men peeing on the sidewalk in front of everyone. Stray dogs criss crossed the streets, expertly dodging cars, buses, and tuk tuks, and women sat at stalls and on the ground selling fruits, bread, candies, you name it.

All in all, glad we went to Uros, could have skipped the other islands since we just sat around alone in a jail cell most of the time (and had to boat 3 hours there and back to experience it!), and kind of glad to be away from Puno's cold, cold weather and midnight concerts! More on Arequipa, The White City, next time.

Lago Titicaca. Titi side is not all it's cracked up to be! remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

-So there are some weird breeds of dogs here. What prompts me to write about this first above any other strange stories is that this morning,while eating breakfast at a way too expensive restaurant in Aguas Calientes, Rachel and I realized that the entire town of A.C. is populated by a really odd type of mutt. They must have all come from the same male or female. The dogs are all long and skinny like dachshunds, have the face of a pug/pekingese, and some have the curly hair and coloring of a cocker spaniel. Some of them are incredibly ugly and look like aliens, but others seem to have gotten all the cute genes.

-Nobody has change here. Not in Ecuador, not in Peru, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that it's the same in every other Latin American country. Today alone we had to apologize to 4 different businesses because we didn't have anything smaller than a 20 or 50 sole bill (about $10.40 and $25.60). And this is when we only needed about 6-10 soles back in change. At the restaurant we had dessert at tonight, the poor chef grabbed my 20 sole bill and began to run back and forth between all the businesses in the street to see if someone had 7 soles in change... all the while wearing his white uniform and tall chef's hat. I apologized, but what am I to do when the ATM only gives me 50 and 100 sole bills? (I don't even want to think about how I am going to manage to get my four 100 sole bills changed in the next few days when I run out of smaller bills... haha.)

-Comments of the day:
¨OH... MY... GOD!¨as Rachel and I walked past a teenager on the street corner.
¨Hey baby, you need some dinner?¨as I walked past a restaurant.

-Everything has the word ¨turistico¨in it... and it´s considered a good thing here. Restaurant turistico, Bus turistico, Clothing shop turistico. I guess it's higher quality when it´s ¨touristy¨so the locals here think that tourists want to go to a place that´s blantantly labeled ¨tourist spot!¨. Not quite.

-Hassidic Jews are everywhere... standing on a street corner, walking on a hill in the middle of the Peruvian countryside, strolling through the bus station in Quito.

Odds and ends remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

We were good little girls and followed the ¨no food¨ policy... though we did bring a ton of food since it's ridiculously overpriced at the cafe up there, we checked it all at the storage room before we entered the ruins. However, later we realized that everyone else had brought food anyway and they got to have nice little picnics on top of Huayna Picchu and we didn't. Boo. So much for rule following. I really liked the other rule printed on the back of the entrance ticket, though, which specifically stated that walking sticks could only be used by ¨old people¨. Way to be blunt.

Experts aren't actually quite sure what the purpose of Machu Picchu was, and can only made educated guesses. Past theories have included the belief that it was a city of chosen women, since many female skeletons were discovered there, but later it was found that the city had close to a 50/50 ratio of males and females. Other theories are that it was built as a prison for people who had committed terrible crimes against the Inkans, that it was a defensive retreat, or that it was the original birthplace of the Inkan people. Today many people believe it was the estate of Inca Pachacuti. It was built around 1450 but was abandoned only 100 years later. It's believed that the Inkans there were wiped out by smallpox before the Spanish conquistadors even arrived. The Spanish never discovered the ruins, and so they remain very well preserved compared to other Inka sites. The jungle grew over the ruins and it was only in 1911 that they were ¨discovered¨again by Hiram Bingham (even though some local Quechuans were living amongst the ruins at the time) while he was on a quest to find the last refuge of the Inkans during the Spanish conquest. Because of the vast numbers of tourists who visit each day (sometimes up to 2,500 people), Machu Picchu has been placed on the most 100 Endangered Sites in the World watch list We're just some more tourists added to that giant mass... but at the very least we tried to respect the rules and minimize our physical impact on the ruins, as should every other visitor.

Anyway... once we got through the gates, we made our way up to The Hut of the Caretaker of Funerary Rock from where the classic Machu Picchu postcard picture was taken. Of course we had to take the same picture.

We also chanced upon some strategically placed photogenic llamas, who may or may not have been placed there on purpose for the tourists. They patiently held position as I photographed them gazing over the ruins in the background. There was a baby llama, too, which was super cute Llamas, alpacas, vicuñas... Peru has most of the camelid family and it makes me happy since they're all so funny looking. Down below us to our right we could see some of the cultivation terraces going down the hillside. The greens were so vivid. The terraces seemed to go down forever, and I later discovered that there are actually still some more terraces way down below, almost at the river, which are still being excavated. All around us were those beautiful, jagged mountains again, this time mostly covered in jungle growth... some far away mountains were snow-capped and since the sky was incredibly clear so early in the morning we could see for miles and miles.

Despite the fact that there were more tourists at 5:30am than we were expecting, I still think it was a great time to view the ruins and surrounding landscape just because the sky was sooo clear and the morning light striking the ruins was so amazing.

We then made our way down into the main ruins area through the prison, industrial, and residential areas. It was almost maze-like at some points. I couldn't quite tell where I was within the ruins since I was just surrounded by stone walls and there were a lot of twists and turns that just led to dead ends/empty rooms.

Again I somehow managed to lose Rachel again... at one point I discovered her a level below me while I was videotaping, but by the time I made it down to where she was, she had disappeared. We finally bumped into each other again and decided to head toward Huayna Picchu (the large, steep mountain the background of the ruins) before it reached the maximum of 400 hikers per day.

We had to wait in line to register to hike up Huayna Picchu. It felt a bit like Disneyland, like we were waiting in line for the Matterhorn, ¨jungle style¨... especially with the large group of Japanese tourists in front of us. While in line we met a 20 year old guy from Newport Beach who was touring around Peru with a group of photographers to build his portfolio... and as an added bonus, our new friend Philip introduced us to his hilarious guide, Marcos, who just happened to look like a Peruvian version of Donny Osmond and Richard Simmons. Philip told us how even though they'd traveled just about everywhere in Peru already, Marcos always seemed to know everyone... to illustrate this point, Marcos happened to disappear just as Philip was telling us this, and suddenly he reappeared in the registration booth and closed the gate on us, telling us he was terribly sorry but there were too many people on the mountain and we couldn't enter. Marcos ended up adopting us on our hike up Huayna Picchu, producing an Andean flute out of the blue and serenading us with some cheerful music as we hiked up and up and up the Inkan stone steps. I felt like I was on another planet... Richard Simmons prancing along the trail behind us, background music to our hike? Haha.

The hike to the top was steep. Our guidebook said it was steep, yet you did NOT have to be related to a mountain goat to climb it. I disagree slightly and I think Rachel does even moreso. I am smiling here, but my thighs were hurting and I was covered in sweat. Machu Picchu was getting smaller and smaller in the background the further up we hiked...

After an hour of climbing up and down (but mostly up) tiny Inkan stone steps, ducking under a rock, and climbing up a small ladder, we made it to the TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN! The view was absolutely amazing... you could see the tiny ruins of Machu Picchu below, the river even further down, as well as all the majestic mountains surrounding us. I couldn't stop taking pictures. Well, actually I could since my camera battery started to die very unexpectedly and I had almost filled up my SD memory card that I'd just bought the day before. But at least I'd already taken pictures of almost everything at that point. Once at the top, Richard Simmons directed a photo shoot of Rachel and I on a rock that had a prime viewpoint over the ruins of Machu Picchu.

He then hopped and skipped about the rocks a bit, mysteriously produced some bottles of water out of nowhere, before asking us if we were ready to go with him and Philip on a second hike to the Temple of the Moon on the backside of the mountain. We went along, not quite knowing what we were getting ourselves into. Richard assured us the hike was all downhill, even the return bit. He was true to his word, partially... it was all downhill to the ruins. Just not back up. As we hiked down, down, down I could feel the air get thicker as we trekked into the cloud forest. Here and there we came across some steep ladders and 30 or more tiny stone steps carved out of a single boulder that we had to walk down. Donny pointed out the tinest orchids in the world on a tree branch as we paused to take a breather... the flowers were about 1/4 the size of my pinky fingernail. We finally got to the ruins, which are really well preserved for how old they are. The temple is essentially a giant cave with ¨cleansing¨areas carved into the rock inside... we weren't clear if they were for spiritual or physical cleansing. Our floutist friend said that once he'd spent the night there (though I thought it was illegal to sleep over in the ruins) and watched the moon rise while hanging out in the cave. He also mentioned that he'd managed to run (not walk) the Inka Trail in 8 hours during a competition once. Normally it takes hikers 4 days to hike.

Our return journey turned out to be entirely uphill. From the lower backside of the mountain all the way back up and around to Machu Picchu again. Richard lied! He said the Peruvian tradition was to just enjoy the surroundings and not think about the actual hike itself, which makes sense, though I still couldn't help wondering when we'd ever get back to the registration gate. It had to be a good hour and a half hike up tiny stone steps... and up some more... and some more... neverending! I was soaking wet with sweat, and even though my thighs were screaming ¨help me!¨I was enjoying the hike just for the adventure of it and once we got up out of the cloud forest again and could see the views of the mountains it was just so gorgeous. I kept pushing myself to go further and faster because there were people on the trail who were older than I was... some in their late 50s or 60s... and I thought if they could do it, I should be able to, too! For some reason I only drank about half of my water bottle during the 3.5 hours of hiking... I'm not sure why I wasn't thirsty, but it seems to be a common thing for me on this trip. Rachel drinks about 2 bottles of water for my 2 sips. I hope that nothing is wrong with me, but I just don't feel thirsty very often and I don't seem to be feeling bad from it, so I'm guessing it's okay. Just to be safe, though, I drank a whole bunch after we finally finished the hike.

Anyway, after that hike we were pretty much pooped. It was only noon. We had originally planned to do another hike to the Sun Gate, but at that point Rachel's hip tendonitis was acting up and she was not in any shape to do another hike and hurt herself even more. We enjoyed our cheap lunch on the picnic benches outside the entrance gate while everyone else around us ate $10 sandwhiches and drank $7 drinks. I am so excited that we had the chance to visit Machu Picchu and do those insane hikes... the only things I regret are not bringing my Nikon camera (South America is not as dangerous as I thought it was) and not having another day to go back and explore the ruins some more. I feel accomplished that we managed to hike Huayna Picchu and see the Temple of the Moon, and I am really lucky to have had the chance to see the Inkan ruins of Machu Picchu. Even though they are a bit too touristy for my liking, the entire complex is incredibly fascinating and beautiful... because of its interesting Inkan history, complex stonework, and perfect location in the mountains. I need to go back... next time with a better camera and more time

Machu Picchu! (Added bonus: hike of death & Richard Simmons) remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Salinas is about 6km outside of Urubamba. It's essentially a few hundred rectangular salt pools in a small valley that are used to create salt for cow licks (guess they have a lot of cows here!). Salt laden water is diverted into the salt pools, and then the water eventually evaporates leaving giant pans of salt. Our taxi drove us down into the valley on a thin, windy road, and as we arrived we were treated to a really cool view of the entire salt pan valley from above. We were then able to walk down onto the actual salt pans themselves and see them up close. Some pools were still pretty watery, while others were already hard, white salt. There were a few local workers scattered throughout the salt pan area, occasionally whacking the ground with giant shovels (it seems like they were trying to keep the salt pools level). We walked along the irrigation channel, which was particularly interesting because a lot of salt had built up on the sides of the channel and all the salt crystals looked just like snow.

After we'd had enough salt for the day, we got back in the taxi and headed off to Moray. The countryside on the way there was gorgeous... high, jagged Andean mountain peaks surrounding us, some still covered in snow, and the rest was just rolling hills with cows, sheep, donkeys, and the occasional indigenous woman carrying large sacks trying to flag down a ride. We passed through a small town called Maras with most of its buildings built entirely out of clay and straw and soon we were at our destination. Moray is a series of three terraced, bowl-like holes in the ground that the Inkas created centuries ago. From above the terracing looks like a bunch of huge, concentric circles. Nobody is exactly sure what their function was, but the concensus seems to be that they were used to figure out the best growing conditions for different types of crops. Each terraced layer apparently has its own microclimate. At the very bottom, some traditional Inkan crops have been replanted to give an idea of what they might have looked like before. We climbed down to the very bottom, only to realize that we actually had to climb back up in the burning sun. We were drenched with sweat by the time we got back to the top where our taxi driver had fallen asleep waiting for us.

Once we got back to Urubamba we caught the next colectivo bus heading to Ollantaytambo, our next stop in El Valle Sagrado. I can't remember how pronounce the name of that town for the life of me and it's really embarrassing... especially when we had to ask at the bus station when the next bus to ¨Olly.... oya... ollytah.... uhh....¨was. Taking the colectivo bus meant squeezing into a minature bus/van with a bunch of school children drinking liquid chocolate from a bag. It looked weird, but they seemed to like it. Our bus was full as we departed, but halfway through 5 little schoolboys flagged us down and they somehow managed to squeeze on in! At least the ride was only about 30 minutes long.

Ollantaytambo is a really cute town in a beautiful valley surrounded by a ton of nearby Inkan ruins. Its also the starting point for the 4 day Inka Trail hike, but we ¨cheated¨ according to my mom and took the train and a bus to Machu Picchu instead. Ollantaytambo has tiny cobblestone streets that are so small that cars can't even pass through, and a lot of the buildings are actually made of stone as well. It was also the site of a major Inka battle fought against the Spanish conquistadors. The Inkan fortresses and temples were built high up the slopes of the mountains, and when the conquistadors entered into the valley below, Manco Inka flooded the valley with pre-made channels built for that purpose and was able to slow down the conquistadors and their horses. Unfortunately, the Spanish later returned with more men and defeated the Inkas anyway in the end.

We spent our first evening at our hostal watching Man on Fire, Ratatouille (HILARIOUS... seriously, a rat who dreams of being a chef? And who cooks by controlling a human by pulling on his hair from under a chef's hat? Who thought of that?), and playing with the hostal owner's two white cats... one wearing a knit sweater, and the other with a cast on its broken foot.

On our second day in town, we walked the two minute walk to the ruins and explored them for most of the morning. We got pretty winded walking up the never-ending steps to the top, but so did all of the other elderly tourists (why were we the only young ones?) so I didn't feel too bad. Even with our few days in Cusco and time spent in the Sacred Valley, I guess we still didn't quite become acclimatized. The view from the top was a beautiful panorama of Ollantaytambo at the bottom of the valley surrounded by insanely high, jagged mountains and a few more ruins scattered around some of the slopes. At one point I lost Rachel within the ruins and thought she might have climbed up the hillside a bit further. I started up a path, only to suddenly hear a loud whistle and discover that a guard was furiously whistling and waving at me to get down. I somehow managed to go into an off limits area on accident. Oops. Once I found Rachel, we discovered a path that hugged the mountain side... we followed it to another set of small ruins and then made our way down the terracing to what looked like residential housing and baths below. Amazingly the Inkan watering system was still working and water from the nearby river was flowing through tiny channels and out of water spouts all over the place. Those Inkans were some smart cookies.

(Really sad side note: right when we got to the top of the ruins, Rachel tried to change her photo settings to a higher quality picture, only to discover that by pressing ¨format memory card¨she had instead deleted ALL her pictures from southern Ecuador in Cuenca up until now!!! At least I took mostly the same pictures of everything, but she still felt terrible.)

In the afternoon, after our amazing find of lunch for just 4 soles ($1.60ish) in some random woman's house (everything else was ridiculously high tourist prices for the same exact food), we headed toward the train station to go to Aguas Calientes. Almost to Machu Picchu! We had to take the more expensive Vistadome train since ¨supposedly¨the backpacker train was booked. But I won't complain since we were treated like royalty, complete with airplane style meals (except delicious, rather than disgusting) and windows on the ceiling of the train so that we could appreciate the views of all the impressive mountain scenery just a bit better The train employees wore wore one professional-like uniform to serve us our snacks, but later changed into a hilarious tour guide type get-up, complete with a khaki vest and large khaki hat when they came back down the aisles to try to sell us Machu Picchu tourist shtuff. Did they think it made them seem more believable, hence we'd be more likely to buy overpriced picturebooks, baseball hats, and postcards from them? We followed the path of the Rio Urubamba and after about an hour and a half we arrived in Aguas Calientes, aka Machu Picchu Pueblo... the tiny, oh so touristy town that marks the start of everyone's Machu Picchu journey... well, those of us who are too poor and/or too lazy to arrive in Machu Picchu on the Inka Trail instead. Even though the town is almost microscopic, we somehow got lost after leaving the train station and ended up on the local's side of the river rather than on the crazy touristy side. Thanks again Lonely Planet, this time for your great mapping skills.

The town itself is in a great location, right at the base of the cloud forest, surrounded by beautiful green mountains and straddling the clear river that cascades down through the middle of the town. However, the town thrives on tourism since so many tourists pass through here to take the bus up the hill to Machu Picchu... so you really can't get away from all the people trying to get you to eat at their restaurant every step you take. ¨No thanks, no, no, no gracias, no, we already ate, thanks, no, no no NOOooooo!.¨Funny thing is, it seems that all the restaurants serve the exact same food and are all decorated similarly inside with slight variations. They all offer 4 for 1 happy hour drinks to entice you to come in. We allowed one of the waiters to convince us to eat at his restaurant for dinner (don't tell anyone)... well, he DID give us a 3 sole discount and threw in an offer to give us free wine the next night if we came back. Wouldn't you eat there, too? We shared one menu del dia for dinner (appetizer, soup, main dish, drink) since we had been fed so well on the train a few hours prior... the waiter thought we were a bit odd, especially when we started slurping soup from the same bowl, but that didn't stop him from talking to us and becoming our new buddy. We even taught him the word ¨clumpy¨in English, which he can now use to his heart's desire. After dinner we had to pass back and forth past his restaurant another 5 times or so since there is only one road up to our hostal, which was a bit awkward, but each time we passed by we received another compliment from the other waiter in training.... he started with just a simple ¨Hey ladies¨, but by the end he was saying ¨Son hermosas!¨(You´re beautiful!).

Anyway, fell alseep to the lovely sounds of something (animal? lost child?) pitter pattering across our tin roof and some loud Americans in the hallway trying to speak Spanish to each other in terrible accents. Great way to prepare for our early morning wake up the next morning at 4:45am and visit to Machu Picchu.

Salt flats, giant Inkan holes in the ground, y ruins galore remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

We started off our visit to the Sacred Valley with a stop in the small market town of Pisaq. It's not much more than a few blocks of tiny crisscrossing streets... except on Sunday, which is market day. We happened to be there when everyone and their mother came to sell their alpaca slippers/hats/gloves/scarves/shawls/wall hangings, watercolor paints, corn, inka calendars, silver jewelry, woven belts, you name it in the central Plaza. Our hostal window looked right down over the plaza, too, which was awesome. I took a lot of stalker-ish pictures of the people below from my window. It was really fun walking around... I bought a few things here and there, but really enjoyed spending my time taking pictures of everyone in their traditional costumes in the food section of the market. Women sat around on giant piles of potatoes, or in the middle of every type of fruit imaginable, and children ran around screaming (there is an unnecessarily high proportion of screaming children in Peru I´ve noticed). In the middle of the madness, I managed to meet a student from SDSU! A woman tried to convince me to buy some watercolors from her, but I ended up buying some corn seeds (of about 25 different types). I told her that we don't have corn like this in the US, and she was so excited to tell me that I could actually plant them and grow a ton. Wahoo!

The best story of the day happened when I was stalking another indigenou woman. Well, I was really just taking a picture of a cute cobblestone street and she happened to walk into the frame. As I stood there with my camera pointed down the street, the woman paused, turned around to look in my direction, and then squatted. I thought she was just mad that I was photographing her and was sitting down in protest. It took me a moment to realize she was peeing in the street. She soon stood up, ruffled her skirt, and set back off down the street like nothing happened. I still can't figure out why she even bothered to look behind her to see if anyone was watching, since clearly I was standing there with a camera pointed in her direction and I know she saw me.

That evening the market winded down and people started dismantling all of the stalls around dinner time. We went out to eat at around 8:30pm and the plaza wasn't much more than a bunch of kids kicking a soccer ball around and some women and men sweeping up trash and wheelbarrowing some wooden stakes away to an unknown location. (Oddly enough, the next morning we awoke to discover that at some point in the middle of the night they had entirely rebuilt the stalls and another giant market was going on! Why they took everything down only to put it back up, I really have no clue.) We went to a really cute restaurant for dinner, which seemed to be the only place open at 8:30pm. It was called Ulrike's Cafe. Of course there would be a German cafe in the middle of a tiny Andean town.

That night we didn't sleep well because the air was so dry. It didn't help that at 6am the church bells started ringing non-stop. I believe it was a 10 minute affair, possibly even longer. We were PISSED. I don't think the town wanted anyone to sleep in. I mean, it was another market day, after all. We should be shopping at 6am, not sleeping.

We watched the men set up their stalls thorugh the window as we ate breakfast in our hostal. I also spent most of my breakfast staring lovingly at a cute, white mutt dog who was trying so hard to sleep under the stall closest to us. He kept changing his position every few seconds. I don't think the cobblestones were very comfortable. I told Rachel I wanted to take him home with me, along with all the other billion street dogs. I asked what kind of dog she thought he was. She said probably a mix of 100 different dogs. I'm confident that in time I can manage to mate enough dogs together that I'll end up with his type.

Speaking of street animals, I really can't stop my desire to want to pet them and give them some love... even when they look rabid. (Just kidding, none that I've cuddled with have actually been rabid.) The hostal we stayed at had a cute white cat that unfortunately had a dreadlock problem. I don't know if it ever learned how to groom itself. I had to urge to give it a bath, and I probably would have if I didn't think the hostal staff would think I was a complete psycho. The cat had one blue and one amber colored eye and was really sweet. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that one night in Lima I spent my entire walk home petting every street dog I saw. They were all curled up on the sidewalk, alone and shivering, and it was a really sad sight so I figured it wouldn't hurt to make them feel loved for once in their lives. My hands turned black afterwards (from their dirty coats), but... oh well! Haha.

Anyway, more to come about our adventures in Salinas, Moray, and Ollantaytambo soon...

El Valle Sagrado de los Inkas (The Sacred Valley) remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Arrival in Cusco... also not fun. We'd been warned that the second we got there, people would be trying to sell us things. Well, they were right, multiplied by 1000. We got off the plane and before we even got to the baggage area, our poor ears were bombarded with loud Andean music from a live band. At seven in the morning. We were not happy, not happy at all. We kept asking ourselves, ¨What the hell?¨and declaring to everyone that ¨This should be illegal!¨. We were so tired we could barely even think. I felt like I'd been hit by a train. But somehow we managed to get our bags, rent a cell phone for 10 bucks (what a steal! Unless we lose it), and haggle in our sleep with some taxi drivers for a cheaper fare to the city center. They all tried to tell us it'd be at least 25 soles (too much) to the center, but after sleepy arguing, we somehow got it down to 10. Our taxi driver had a travel agent escort, which we thought was odd. I made a point to ask them squarely why there were two of them, so they'd know that we knew it was weird (you know?)... but in the end the travel agent turned out to be super friendly and made sure we got a room at our hostal of choice, Osiris in the cute, hilly San Blas neighborhood.

Even though it was only 7:45am and we had the whole day to explore the town, well... we didn't. We passed out and didn't wake up again until 3:30 in the afternoon. We walked around our neighborhood a bit and decided after only a few hours that Cusco was our new favorite town. The San Blas neighborhood is in the hills above the main square. It is very artsy and laid back, there are countless wonderful cafes with delicious food and baked goods, and it´s incredibly cute because all the streets are so tiny a car can barely fit through and the streets and walls are all cobblestone. It's a great mix of Spanish and Inkan architecture. A lot of the building walls still have their original Inka stone foundations and it was pretty amazing to see the stones up close... you can't even fit a credit card between them because the fit of the huge, interlocking stones is so perfect. Cusco was once the capital of the Inka's from which they spread out and conquered lands to the north and south (all the way up past Ecuador and as far south as parts of Chile and Argentina!). The town is apparently designed in the shape of a puma, too. Another great fact that I just discovered online... I guess in 2006 Cusco was found to be the point on Earth with the highest ultraviolet light level. Isn't that nice?

We spent our first evening at the South American Explorers Club, conveniently located just down the street from us. (It's an informational club for travellers that hosts weekly events, too.) They were having an unlimited cocktail night. We were still pretty tired but figured we'd try it out anyway. It ended up just being mostly the club staff and a few of their friends... and sleepy party pooper Rachel and Kerri in the corner on the couch. We drank our first pisco sour (the national drink, made with pisco [grape brandy], egg white, and some other odd ingredients). It's supposed to be smoother than a margarita, but I can't say I liked it that much. We also had some great baked potatoes with yucky South American chunky cheese along with our alcohol. They all kept trying to serve us more drinks (in miniature cups), thinking it would wake us up, but our eyelids just kept getting heavier and heavier. We were highly entertained, however, by a 41 year old British man who we can only describe as being similar to a young British fraternity boy. He was the most hyper person I think I have ever met, perhaps because of all the whiskey he had been drinking. He was the DJ for the evening and everytime a song came on, he jumped up and smiled and yelled like it was the first time he'd ever heard music in his life. TLC´s ¨I'm Pretty¨came on at one point and he deemed it his most favorite song ever. We realized there was a problem when we found ourselves reading a magazine in the middle of the party... at that point we knew we had to say goodbye and just go to bed.

The next days we spent wandering around town, snapping photos of every cute cobblestone street we passed and saying ¨no thanks¨to all the women and children (dressed in their traditional clothes with their most photogenic llamas and baby goats) who asked us to pay to take a photo of them. We went to the main plaza, Plaza de Armas, and snapped a billion more photos of the two churches and the plaza itself because it was all just so beautiful. We visited the Inka Museum, which thankfully included artifacts and information from all the pre-Inkan societies (who the Inkans conquered) as well as the Inkas. We later walked down Avenue del Sol to the Cathedral of Santo Domingo/ruins of Qorikancha (Temple of the Sun). Qorikancha was once one of the most important Inkan temples, dedicated to the Inkan sun god Inti, with floors and walls covered in sheets of gold and with a garden of golden statues. But when Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro came in the 1500s and conquered the Inkas he and his men took most of the gold with them. (At that point they had one of the last incas held hostage. Pizarro told him that if he surrendered the gold of Qorikancha, his life would be spared... but even after allowing the Spanish conquistadors to steal and melt down all the gold, Pizarro decapitated the inca anyway.) Qorikancha was later turned into a monestary of the Dominican order. Some of the stone ruins of Qorikancha are preserved within the monestary walls, giving the whole compound a really interesting dual history. In the 1950s a large earthquake destroyed most of Santo Domingo, but the Inka walls of Qorikancha withstood it all.

Our favorite restaurant was called Cafe Ritual Cultural... it served up some great banana pancakes and 3 course lunches that stuffed us silly. I'm not so sure they liked us so much, though. Everytime we tried to pay, something was wrong... either they thought we were giving them counterfeit 5 soles coins, or we gave them too big of bills and they couldn't make change and had to run across the street with our money and buy rice or something. It's annoying how the banks give out 50 and 100 soles bills, but most of the time people don't even have change for a 5 sol coin and ask you over and over if you´re suuuuure that you don`t have anything smaller. Same thing with Ecuador. Bah!

Anyway, we were going to go visit the Inka ruins at Sacsayhuamán (remember how to pronounce it with the catchy phrase ¨sexy woman¨), just a few kilometers north of our hostal (up a billion flights of stairs), but we decided we'd try to see the ruins when we come back to Cusco after our visit to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. Plus we were still a bit worn out from not sleeping well the previous nights and didn't feel like that much exercise. Instead, we spent our last day buying our train tickets to Machu Picchu before we caught a local bus to the nearby town of Pisaq in the Sacred Valley.

Oh, one last thing. As we were walking back to our hostal one last time after breakfast on our last morning, we saw a GIANT dog the size of a horse prancing down the street ahead of us... with a tiny plastic bag in his mouth filled with biscuits. It was the funniest/cutest thing. The dog kept glancing back every so often to make sure his master was following him, and then once he was satisfied he'd turn around and continue on. I want a dog that does that! That's the crazy thing about Ecuador and Peru... nobody has leashes here, their dogs just are so loyal that they follow their owners wherever they go. I'm not sure I want a dog the size of a horse, though.

Bye for now, Cusco! I´ll be back in a few weeks...

Qosqo... I love the Quechua spelling :) remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

We were picked up from the airport by a friendly guy with a car named Herby (don't ask me the name of the driver, we only asked for the car's name). But there was a slight problem... Herby looked like he had been through a war. Maybe even two. And he was still somehow chugging along. For some unknown reason, there were slash marks all over the interior of the car (did someone have a knife fight in there? Silly Peruvian boys) and a lot of the metal was exposed. We were a bit worried Herby would die on the way to our hostal, but somehow he made it to our destination... though we did stop and start about 20 times during the drive and our 35 minute ride was accompanied with the nice smell of fresh gasoline. I casually asked our taxi driver how old Herby was, and he said he was born in 1993. That's as old as my Volvo and it does NOT look like that. Hmm. Something fishy was going on. Anyway, back at the hostal later that evening, two girls from Canada arrived at around midnight. They told us about how their taxi driver's car had broken down on a cliff (on a curve), and they had to wait and hour while the driver and another male passenger pushed the car around so that the gas tank would be facing downhill so the car could start again. We asked if their car had a name. You guessed it... it was good old Herby.

The next day we spent in the historic old town, which was a surprisingly long drive from Barranco (I kept forgetting how huge Lima is). We checked out the catacombs in the Monestario San Francisco, which is still to this day a church of the Dominican order. The catacombs were the first public catacombs, intended for public burials and viewings. The benefactor, of course had a giant tomb all to himself, and everyone else had to pay as well to get the ¨good¨burial spots. Though they were buried 12 to a plot, stacked one on top of another, so I don't really know why they were so excited to be buried there in the first place. The rest of the monestary itself was really gorgeous... from the rooms with giant religious paintings in the Ruebens and Cusqeño styles to the beautiful tiled walls around the central garden (in the moorish style, from the Spanish influence), to the central garden itself. It was also really neat to see the different rooms used for washing and dressing, meetings, as well as the choir room. Their dressing room had drawers for everyone, carved very elaborately, and above each dresser was a saint or a martyr (with the way they were killed depicted graphically... stabbed, burned alive, hung, etc). One dresser was actually a secret door to the catacombs below. The library was the best of all... it had fun winding staircases going up to the second level, beautiful carvings on the walls and ceiling, and old books from the 16th century onwards. Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures of anything

Lunchtime was next. We had a buffet lunch, served to us by French nuns! Supposedly for dinner they gather around and serenade guests with a rendition of Ave Maria, but we opted for the cheaper lunch menu, which was delicious. We even got to try chicha morada, a traditional Peruvian drink made from purple corn among a lot of other fruity ingredients. It was really good... and really purple.

We spent the rest of the day wandering a bit more around old town. A few boys catcalled us (they either hiss, whistle, or yell sweet nothings like ¨queen!¨ or ¨princess!¨) as we walked around, and we decided our new response was to make a really terrible, ugly face instead of just walking by and pretending we didn't notice. Or we laugh hysterically like hyenas. This either causes most guys to burst out laughing along with us, or they just shut up. It's fun.

Later we walked along the cliffs from Parque del Amor (Park of Love) in Miraflores and almost made it back to Barranco before we hit the end of the cliffs and had to take a taxi the rest of the way home. Parque del Amor has a giant statue of a couple making out in the middle of it and some neat tiled benches (kind of like in Gaudi park in Spain). Delfin, the famous Peruvian painter and sculptor, designed the park and its statue of love. I'm actually going to live at his house when I return to Lima (and maybe even meet him!) because my friend Garrett was nice enough to buy me two nights at Second Home (where Delfin lives) on the cliffs of Barranco (www.secondhomeperu.com).

That evening we sat around talking and drinking with all of our hostal mates. One girl named Jahan, from New York, told the most hilarious stories. She had us cracking up all evening. I particularly enjoyed her description of Cusco... ¨This was the first place I really felt like ´Wow, I´m in Peru, man!´ I mean, it was like New York City with all the great nightlife, but then I'd walk out of a club and there'd be a fucking llama standing outside the door!¨. (Now that we've been to Cusco, I can vouch for that odd sight, too!) The woman who worked at the hostal was also really young and fun and she organized a night out at a nearby club for all of us. A Peruvian guy started talking to me there, and even though it was a bit hard to understand his rapid Spanish in the loud club, I still managed to talk to him in half-Spanish for most of the evening, which was good practice.

One of our dorm mates was a guy who´s traveling the world for a year with the Watson scholarship... it's basically $25,000 of free money, and the only stipulation is that you don't come home until a year is up. He was using the money to study music in different South American countries and had some great stories to tell about his experiences so far. He even got to live with a Guatamalan pop star for a while... and had to look the other way when the singer would bring in his 25 different girlfriends. Our new friend was pretty hilarious, though I have to note that he had some, err... disgusting bathroom and eating habits, haha.

We wandered around the beach near Barranco later in the day. An chubby older man bicycling around a box of ice cream kept following us along the beach, thinking that if he waved to us just one more time we might cave in and decide we wanted ice cream. Then he changed tactics and started asking us where we were from. We ignored him and started walking back up the cliffs to our hostal... and waaay down below on the coastal highway we could still see him, just a tiny speck now, waving furiously at us. Haha. He just didn't know when to stop. We then went to Miraflores, a nice area of town just north of Barranco. We chatted with a man in the park (in Spanish!) about visiting Colca Canyon in the south (2x deeper than the Grand Canyon), got some ice cream and dinner (in that order, we really confused out waiter), went grocery shopping at an amazing grocery store (it had purple corn and biodegradeable bags, what more could one want?), and that was about the last of our adventures in Lima.

Lima (bean), Peru remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Right before the border we stopped randomly. We thought it was the border, but it turned out it was just a dinner stop. But the only place to eat dinner was a tiny stand on the side of the road serving beans, rice, and chicken on a stick. Rachel opted for the safe beans and rice and I got the chicken on a stick with some mayo... deeeelicious! Finally got to the border, which was straddling a river, where we saw a rainbow, a goat with a tumor in its udders, and a tiny monkey. It was pretty laid back and easy to get across, just a bunch of stamps and back on the bus we went.

The rest of our bus ride from the border to Piura was fairly uneventful. It was just extremely hot. We were drenched in sweat for 3 hours. The moon was full and beautiful and that´s all we could see for miles.

When we got to Piura in the evening on our first day in Peru, we couldn´t see much since it was almost 10pm. All we noticed was that the taxis here are really cheap, midget sized Daewoos that seem like they are about to fall apart. Somehow our taxi fit 4 travelers and 4 giant bags on the way to our hotel (we traveled with a Canadian couple we met on the bus). Magic. We went to get some pizza down the street for an extra late dinner with the Canadians. During the meal, we tried Inca Cola, which is the Peruvian soda of choice. It's neon yellow and has an aftertaste like bubble gum. Odd, yet somehow it tastes pretty bueno. We had a little problem after dinner when we tried to pay in US dollars and the owner wouldn't accept our 5's because they were too old looking, but it worked out in the end.

The hostal we stayed at was a bit weird. There were a lot of shirtless men who liked to walk by our room at 8am repeating Rachel´s name over and over in high pitched voices.

The next morning, Rachel aquired a Peruvian boyfriend. A woman told us we could get some small change from a mysterious black door across the street, so we took her word for it and walked over to the door and Rachel asked through a hole in the door... the guy inside said he couldn't make change for us but told us about some casas de cambio a few streets over. We thanked him and then sat down for a bit in front of our hotel to look at our map real quick. A few minutes later a woman ran across the street and handed us a piece of paper. It turned out to be a hand-drawn map of the location of the casas de cambio from the guy across the street. But best of all, it included his name, phone number, and the words ¨OK. Baby.¨ Yay Rachel. Classic.

We then decided to go to Colán for the day, which is a beach town an hour and a half away from Piura. After a bus ride through the desert (the north of Peru is all dirt and shrubbery... and HOT) we found ourselves in the wild wild west, aka the port town of Paita. This town is ridiculous. I don't think I saw a single plant in the entire town, it was just dirt, more dirt, mountains of dirt, shacks, buses, and tuk tuks. (It was a big surprise to see the tuk tuks here as soon as we crossed the border! I had no idea they were popular outside of Asia.) A nice policeman showed us where to find a colectivo taxi that would take us the rest of the way to Colán. There were 5 of us in the taxi, ready to go, but the taxi driver was adamant about fitting in one more person. Rachel ended up in the front seat sitting above the stick shift next to a Peruvian man with a load of brooms. She made a joke about how it was so squished up front and her new friend assured her that it would be fine because she was ¨thin, just like Barbie!¨.

Colán, the supposed resort for the jet set of Peru, turned out to be completely deserted except for Rachel and I. We were the only people there other than the actual residents, dogs, and crabs. We somehow always seem to find the most deserted towns and hostals. And again, the town was all dirt. At least it had some interesting dirt cliffs to mix things up a bit. We stayed at a hospedaje, or a family home with some rooms to rent out, right on the water, literally. There was no beach, just the water up to our back porch. The owner was a bit scatter brained, ADD, super friendly, and confusing. Half of the time we didn't understand what he was telling us even when he spoke in English, and the other half of the time he was repeating himself. Our room was in the back of the house and we had a nice ocean breeze blowing through. Or so we thought. Antonio (I think that's his name) tried to sell us on the room based on just that, yet the nice breeze mysteriously disappeared at night and it was the most hot, uncomfortable, and restless sleep I think I've had on this trip so far. To top it off, I was eaten alive by mosquitos on every appendage of my body, including all over my face! Who do those mosquitos think they are? Speaking of mosquitos, we discovered a bit too late that the northern coast has malaria. Yet everyone there assured us that ¨los animales¨were harmless and we'd be fine. I guess we'll see soon enough!

We took a walk around the dirt road our hospedaje was on. Well, more like we walked 100 feet in one direction, saw an endless sea of more dirt road, one empty, lifeless restaurant after another, and it was hot... and then we turned back. That was the extent of our exploration of the town, minus our mad dash along the shoreline to view the backsides of all the deserted beach houses and see some funny looking crabs. I slept, Rachel read a bit, and we had some lunch at our place... delicious delicious fish. I inhaled mine. Dinner was more fish. We chose to eat at one of the 20 deserted restaurants on our street and were served by a cute abuelita (tiny little grandma). We ended up chatting with her in Spanish after our meal for a good 20 minutes or so. She was hard to understand sometimes because she was missing most of her teeth, but we were pretty proud of ourselves for being able to talk to her for so long. We played with her son's dog and her cats for a while but after I screamed after seeing a giant grasshopper, they ran away (oops). And so we went home, too.

The next morning the woman running the place assured us that we could just go outside on the dirt road and wait for a camioneta that would pass by ¨right now¨and take us back to Paita so we could catch our bus home. We waited outside in the hot, hot sun for a while. No sign of life, much less a camioneta. Some random woman with a bucket from across the street came over to us, sat down, and asked, ¨Why aren`t you getting on a camioneta? They are right there in the street going past us.¨Well, they weren´t, and she apparently a bit loco. She left, and finally a few minutes later we heard some manic honking coming towards us in the street. It was our camioneta, coming to save the day! It honked a good 20 times more before it realized we wanted to hitch a ride. We hoped into the old white van and soon we were cruising the streets of Colán honking at every human being. Occasionally the driver whistled at the ladies. After we'd squeezed in some more people and were at maximum capacity, we headed up the cliffs toward Paita.

Our bus ride back to Piura proved to be quite entertaining. It included a salesman who spoke for about 40 minutes on the dangers of intestinal worms in children and he even had some great, extra large, color photos of worms ´n kids to show us to illustrate his point. After his speech, he tried to sell us some natural laxatives so that we could clean our intestines out the recommended 4x per year. A few people actually bought the packets. After he was satisfied that he had sold enough, he launched into another spiel about a vitamin powder that you can sprinkle in and on anything you eat... nobody ended up buying that one.

We unfortunately had to go to the airport asap once we got back to Piura because here in South America they give your flights away if you don't show up 2 hours before your departing flight (this goes for local flights). We hailed a cab on the street and ended up having a lovely chat with our taxi driver about how beautiful we were. It was actually really fun to speak with him in Spanish, and he was impressed with our ability to actually understand him since he said most tourists have no idea what's going on. But as we got closer to the airport, he suddenly asked us if all the girls in the US were beautiful. This turned into him telling us how ugly every single Peruvian girl was, and that compared to them we were ¨reinas¨(queens). I asked why, since I think there are a lot of beautiful Peruvian women. He said it was because of our faces. I guess he`ll be moving to the United States soon...

Once at the airport, we realized that we were super early... the lights weren`t even on in the building! There were two guards who were nice enough to turn on the lights and fans for us. Then we just sat around for 2 and a half hours. I had a grilled cheese sandwich when the restaurant finally opened. That was about it. Our flight to Lima was pretty smooth and we got there in about an hour and 10 minutes... not too shabby. San Diego-Berkeley style. But even better, the plane was the most modern one I'd ever been in, the snacks were delicious and choclately, and all of the flight attendants were young attractive males. Haha. More on Lima next time!

The ice cream in Peru is no bueno remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

We took the world's fastest hike in Saraguro before we caught our bus home. We happened to stumble across the tourist office in town on our walk around the streets and the nice woman in the office managed to convince us it was a good idea to take a hike to a nearby waterfall. (¨How long are you staying here? Oh, not even for one night? Why? There are some nice things to do around here...¨said with a sad puppy dog face.) She called a camioneta who whisked us away to the waterfall, well, after he got lost and asked for directions. The ¨walk¨to the waterfall, called Baños del Inka, turned out to be an incredibly steep, muddy hike. The waterfall at top is used once a year, I believe in June, for ceremonial baths. Our driver said he´d be back for us in 40 minutes. Somehow we made it there and back just in time to meet him as he was pulling back up. Perfect timing. The hike was beautiful, if not a bit hot and muddy. There were some gorgeous views of the valley below and all the little houses and farms.

We got back to town just after the 5:30 bus was about to leave. The incredibly bored man working the Viajeros bus office told us that the bus was a bit late so we could still probably make it. Then a few minutes later he changed his mind and told us it wasn't coming and we'd have to take the next bus at 6:45. So we went to the store to buy some snacks, only to glance back down the street after a few minutes and discover that there was a bus in front of the office! We ran down the street, pushing down any locals in our way (maybe not) and made it just in time. We had a lovely (scary) 2 hour ride to Loja from there. I happened to sit next to a strapping young lad of 19 who was singing along to Aventura (Puerto Rican pop band that sings in bachata style) songs blasting through the bus´ speakers. To make conversation, I asked him what he was singing and that turned into a long conversation in Spanish lasting for the rest of the bus ride. I got to practice my Spanish, but since the music was loud and the bus ride bumpy, I had to ask him ¨Que?¨more times than I want to admit. However, he understood me overall and it was nice to get to practice my Español! (Warning!... you don't want to know this Mom and Dad, so cover your eyes for these last few sentences): The bus was a bit bumpy towards the end and was lurching a bit from side to side, so I casually asked the kid if there were a lot of bus accidents. He said yes. I asked if there were a lot of deaths. He said yes. Then he made a motion with his hands indicating a bus tumbling over a cliff. That made Rachel and I feel real great. Luckily we made it to Loja without incident, but we were really glad to get off the bus!

Unfortunately, Loja wasn´t as amazing as our guidebooks suggested it was. The descriptions in both of our books painted a picture of a picturesque town in a valley surrounded by green mountains (which it was). The books also said it was super clean and cute and had won numerous awards for its trash and recycling programs. Let me tell you a secret... Loja's not that clean. The streets had a lot of construction with dirt flying around, there was trash on the streets and by the river, and just a lot of cars and exhaust. We were a bit disappointed and started to miss Cuenca at this point. Not to mention that when we ventured out after 8pm to go find some dinner on our first night, everything was closed and the city had turned into a ghost town. Where the people had disappeared to, I really couldn't say. Bedtime at 8pm? Playing cards? No sé. We managed to find a nice Mexican restaurant, however, and had some trusty burritos (they were good here). Y guacamole! Wahoo! We soon discovered that we were the last customers, though, and the poor owner was waiting for us to finish our meal so he could close up.

Later that night we met a lone traveler from Portugal who was hitch hiking throughout Latin America. Rachel was tired at this point and read a bit before goin to sleep, but I decided to go out and try to find some signs of life in Loja (a bar) with my new friend Miguel. After walking through some deserted streets and stepping in some yellow paint on the street (I guess they didn't think to put a warning sign out since nobody goes out after 8pm anyway), we found a tiny hole in the wall place with a few people called ¨El Viejo Minero¨(the old mine) and talked a bit in there for a while. My new friend had grilled cheese and fruit juice. What a crazy guy. I learned a lot of odd facts about Portugal that night, such as the fact that the entire university system is huge on hazing its incoming freshmen as a giant group, from the first two weeks up until the entire year long. Plus the freshmen are forced to wear the graduation robes to differentiate them from the older students at the same time they´re made to do all sorts of silly things.

The next day Rachel and I walked to Parque Japiro, a ¨15 minute walk¨from the edge of the city center. It turned out to be a bit longer walk and it involved walking a main road with cars belching fumes into our faces the entire time. Once we arrived at the park, it turned out to be quite odd... it had everything from a skate park, a pool, and a basketball court... to a playground including a replica of St. Basil´s Cathedral in Moscow complete with slides (wee!)... to ducks, miniature horses, llamas, and OSTRICHES. Hmm...

That night we went to our favorite mine and managed to make friends with the Ecuadorian bartender and a Swiss German volunteer who speaks fluent Spanish and made me jealous. Again, it was great to have the chance to practice our Spanish and the guys were both very nice. The bartender enjoyed Rachel very much, I think he could have cared less about me. Perhaps it was because I started to fall asleep while he was talking to her later on in the evening? They spent most of the time trying to convince us why we should stay in Loja one more night so we could see the musical performance the next night (playing hits by U2 and all our favorite 90s bands), but we had to refuse... Vilcambaba was next on our list! The guys told us that it was filled to the brim with tourists, but it turned out to be anything but...

When we arrived the next morning, Vilcambaba turned out to be a tiny little town in the junction of 5 valleys... with NO tourists but us! Interesting. We got some curious stares as we took a tour of the tiny 10 street town. Just like in Loja, I was the only blonde one there. On our way back from the river, we stopped to buy some water at a mini market and somehow ended up caught in a conversation with an old, drunk New Zealand man who told us he was trying to teach his daughter and her friends about the dangers of talking to strangers. Then he proceeded to ask us to go on an overnight trip on horse to his cabin in the mountains with his Swedish and British friends, and then to come to his house ¨just down the street¨so he could cure our colds with ¨something¨. After asking him 5 times he finally let on that that something was a bitter tea, but we politely refused... and refused again. We walked away with him muttering ¨I didn´t frighten you guys, did I?¨. Turns out that this guy is written about in our guidebook, as he runs a famous horse rental place and apparently has great tours in the mountains. I am not quite sure what to think about that. Ironically, as we were trying to avoid him, we discovered that his tour shop was right across the street from our hostal. Oops.

Speaking of which, our hostel was one of the best we´ve stayed at so far. The rooms were great and they all were situated around a central garden. Breakfast was included and there was a restaurant with awesome Mexican food (finally!). The cooks also made some delicious homemade oatmeal chocolate cookies and orange chocolate cake. Mmm mmm. Plus, there was a TV room where we spent a good deal of time watching our favorite trashy TV show, The Girls Next Door... though here it´s called ¨The Girls of the Playboy Mansion¨(said in a very thick Spanish accent).

On our last day we went on a ridiculous hike in the Rumi Wilco reserve (part of a hostal with the same name). We felt like bushwhackers yet again even though we were on marked paths that even had little tags hanging from the plants with their names on them. I don't think the trails had been walked or cleared in a while. It was all fun and games, though, until I walked into a spider web. I screamed, Rachel screamed, and I ran away down the path. Rachel made fun of me. It was my turn to laugh hysterically when just 10 minutes later she walked into a spider web and this time the spider was actually on her. She screamed and ran away, trying to get the spider off. I think we scared the living daylights out of the poor thing. Granted, it was kind of creepy looking because it looked like a black crab.
On the way back to town after our adventure in the jungle, we came across the saddest dog I think I've ever seen. I am not sure what was wrong with it, but it seemed to be asking us for help and kept hoping up to both of us, clearly in some kind of pain. Something was wrong with its hips/back legs and it seemed to be squatting as it hopped along (it couldn't even walk normally). We had to leave it because we didn't know what else to do... I don't really want to think about it anymore, but I hope it's okay...

That night there was live music at our hostel. Turned out to be live folk music... played by French Canadians and some hippies. All the middle aged, hippy tourists came out of the woodwork that night and were there watching the show. An old hippy who looked a bit like Jesus got a bit drunk and started demanding that the musicians play ¨Yellow Rose of Texas¨every five minutes. Then he tried to dance with all the women but he didn´t succeed in wooing anyone, probably because he was a drunk Jesus. I sat and had milk and cookies, Rachel ate her cake, and everyone else got drunk. They played a few popular songs, but always reverted back to good old folk. We finally had enough of it and went to watch some more trash tv.... only to discover that Dexter had arrived in Ecuador, so we watched a few episodes of that and scared ourselves silly. When we finally went to bed, we heard a noise on our roof that sounded like a rodent gnawing on wood and were so scared after watching Dexter that we didn't fall asleep for quite some time. Eek.

The next morning we woke up early and started to make our way to Peru... this involved busing back to Loja, only to get on another bus to go back south again to cross the border at Macará in the jungle and then end in Piura, Peru. More on Peru next time!

Mas South! Saraguro, Loja, Vilcambaba remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

We got facials in Baños at a slightly overpriced place on our last morning. Then we took a short hike through the city with our giant backpacks in the hot sun as we tried to find the bus station. We finally got there and discovered that we couldn´t take a direct bus to Cuenca like we´d thought! We had to take a 2 hour bus ride to Riobamba, then catch another 6 hour bus to Cuenca from there. However, once we got to Riobamba, we found out that we´d missed the bus to Cuenca by 20 minutes. Grr. Rather than waiting around to take a night bus, we just found a hotel and spent the night in Riobamba and decided to take the 5:30am bus the next morning. Not the most interesting town. Our guidebook said it was cute, but it wasn´t. Plus it decided to start pouring rain as soon as we got there. We ate dinner at a place called Club Valentin or something, which was kind of like a 50s diner but with a lot of drunk, screaming Ecuadorian teenagers. They were literally screaming the lyrics to songs at the top of their lungs. It was great background music to our dinner. We watched some terrible TV for a while before we went to bed. You haven´t seen bad TV until you´ve visited Ecuador. They continuously play cheesy soap operas, amateur lip synching and dance videos, and cooking shows that feature techno dance breaks and a scary looking muppet.

The next morning we woke up dark and early at 4:45am so we could catch our bus. When we arrived, we discovered we were the only white people there and our bus was entirely filled with indigenous people carrying large sacks filled with food and things to sell at the market. They looked at us like we were aliens. We tried to sleep on our 6 hour journey, but since Rachel was on the asile for the first part of the trip, she had to deal with random women sleeping on top of her. They seem to have different standards here about personal space. I once had a woman leaning on my head on another bus trip, and I tried to jab my sunglasses (which were on my head) up into her arm a few times so she´d realize that she was leaning on me... but she didn´t even flinch. During the bus ride, we stopped at an unknown town for a food break, though nobody told us it was break time and we only figured it out once the bus driver jumped out of the bus and everyone else gradually started filing out and disappearing. We asked a kind woman carrying a puppy if it was our break and she said yes. (I think I mentioned this before, but everyone here carries puppies around in their hands. You don´t need a leash. You just carry your dog like a baby, whether you are taking a stroll in the park, eating lunch, or riding on a bus.) Rachel stopped outside of the bus to blow her nose and I took a really great picture of an indigenous man sticking his head out of the bus window, gawking at her as she blew into the tissue. We tourists are very exciting to watch.

Cuenca is a very cute, old town in the southern sierras. We stayed in the city center, which basically looks the same as Quito´s ¨centro historico¨but minus the pollution and crime. The streets in Cuenca are all cobblestone, there are a bunch of beautiful churches and pretty parks/main squares, the buildings all have cute, flower covered balconies, and there is a gorgeous river on the border of the old town and new town with green tree- and flower-covered banks. Of course the rain followed us to Cuenca as well, but at least it only seemed to rain in the evenings for an hour or so and then it stopped. During our two days here, we visited the Banco Central museum, which is supposedly the best in Cuenca (almost all other cities have their own Banco Central museum). It had sections on paintings, ethanography (about the indigenous communities here), money, and there was also an archeological park behind the museum with some ruins, rescued birds, and a garden re-created in the Inka style with corn, yucca, and other typical plants they cultivated. We also visited the Cathedral in the main square, which kind of looks like Notre Dame from the front, but it is more of a tan color and has two blue tiled domes in back. The inside was very open and simple. We noticed a cartoon on the wall of the church and moved closer to get a good look... and realized that it was an anti-abortion cartoon. It basically said ¨Mama, I am not a tumor! I am your baby boy!¨and then had a bunch of cartoon depictions of really bloody, exaggerated abortions and a baby saying ¨Don´t kill me!¨. In one picture, a baby was getting his head chopped off with a machete with blood was spurting all over. I can understand that the Catholic church is anti-abortion, but this cartoon was a bit too weird to be placed inside on the walls of the church. As we stared at it, an Ecuadorian man came up to us and said, ¨Yeah, it´s a little odd, isn´t it!¨. The abortion cartoon turned into a random conversation starter and we made a new friend.

On our last day in Cuenca, we wanted to send home a package of odds and ends to make our bags a bit lighter. We went to the post office at around 9am with all of our things only to discover that the woman who sold the envelopes wasn´t in yet. Yes, here in Ecuador the post offices never have any envelopes, stamps, boxes, etc... you have to buy them from a different store, usually located nearby. While we waited for the woman to arrive so we could buy an envelope, we asked where we might find a box. We were told to ask the security guard, who for some reason was the keeper of boxes as well. He went into a tiny closet where I saw about 4 old boxes piled up, and selected one for us. We then asked for some cardboard pieces to protect some paintings we had, and once the guard finally understood what we were asking for, he had to search the entire post office before he was able to find 3 pieces for us. By this point, the envelope woman had arrived. I got an envelope and then asked if there was a marker lying around that I could borrow to write my address with. The security guard said I had to walk upstairs and find the secretary´s office and see if she had one. She had the only marker in the post office, apparently. The whole post office is incredibly inefficient and we were there forever trying to mail our stuff even though we were the only people there for most of the time! I still can´t figure out why the security guard was in charge of the boxes, or why they don´t sell boxes in the first place or have more markers. I asked the security guard if most Ecuadorians come to the post office with their own boxes, and he said no. Which confuses me even more... where do they buy their boxes then? Do they use one of the security guard´s 3 boxes? Do they just not send packages? Things here in Ecuador are quite curious.

Anyway, onto our next bus trip! They are oh so fun. After our interesting morning at the post office, we caught a bus to Loja, about 6 hours further south. This was our first really nice bus (inside), though that had nothing to do with the type of driver we got... he was still a bit loco like all the others. We decided we´d had enough of the bus after 4 hours and an unexpected wait while they rebuilt the road or something and our bus driver decided not to tell us anything about what was going on and he just hopped out for a while. So we stopped in Saraguro, a small town where the indigenous community still dresses in their traditional black clothing and brightly colored jewelry. The indigenous community here is descended from the Incas who were forced to move into Ecuador centuries ago. We ate lunch at a restaurant near the main square and the waitress didn´t really understand anything we were saying and took about 20 minutes to realize we were asking for the bill. During our lunch, a cute little 2 year old girl decided it was amusing to stare at us through the window, so we started making faces at her and taking pictures of her and she really enjoyed seeing us act surprised or scared to see her pop up in the window and especially liked seeing herself on the camera!

Hm, must go now, but more to come about Saraguro and Loja later...

Southern Ecuador! Cuenca, Saraguro and Loja remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

To get to Baños, we took a 3.5 hour bus ride south from Quito in the afternoon through the Avenue of the Volcanoes (I think there are 7 or 8 of them on either side of the main road). We shared the bus with some crying babies and a dashing young man carrying a tiny white puppy in a plastic sack (to prevent any unwanted accidents, I´m guessing). I took 100 pictures out the window and Rachel tried to sleep. Unfortunately for her, everyone who came on and off the bus bumped into her as they made their way down the aisle and for some reason all of them had mud on them and managed to cover Rachel´s arms in dirt. I ate some peanuts and took more pictures. Then an old woman walking down the aisle paused near Rachel and somehow covered Rachel´s head with her shawl on accident.

We are staying at a pretty cute hotel here called Plantas y Blanco. It literally means Plants and White, such a creative name. The rooms are great, we have free internet (though it´s practically useless for me since the computer here won´t recognize my portable hard drive with all my pictures on it), and a beautiful roof top terrace restaurant with awesome food.

We woke up early today and took the obligatory bike ride along the ¨Ruta de las Cascadas¨, or the route of the waterfalls. We rented some bikes for $5 and took off at about 9am through town. The road we took is on the way to Puyo, in the jungle, so we essentially biked a third of the way to the jungle. We biked a good 20 or so kilometers. For a while we shared the road with trucks and cars, biked through a pitch black tunnel with no lights (I am starting to think the Ecuadorians are a bit crazy), and became covered in sweat. I managed to take some video while I was biking because I couldn´t pass on capturing the beautiful mountain scenery around us. We stopped every so often to look at the waterfalls along the side of the road. Our main destination, however, was Pailon del Diablo, the most famous waterfall on the route. I just Googled it for more information, and you might be excited to know it was featured in the movie Proof of Life with Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe at the end. It is essentially 3 waterfalls in one, but for a long time nobody could figure out where its origin was and only the last part of the waterfall could be seen shooting out of a cliff. It´s gorgeous. We had to hike down the mountain for about 15 minutes to get to the view point. The all uphill climb afterwards wasn´t so nice. Rachel and I were panting and sweating like pigs. But we kept passing old ladies being escorted by their grandsons and giant French women in ballet flats on the trail, and this was a bit baffling to us.

Before el Diablo, we went on a short 50 cent hike to see the two other feeder water falls, San Pedro and San Miguel. (I could have the names wrong.) Our new, super friendly drug addict friend Antonio collected our 50 cent entry fee at the start of the trail (he was giving everyone a discount, so he said). We thought that we´d pay and then be off on our little hike. Not quite. After he discovered we were ¨California angels¨he could not stop talking. He somehow got on the subject of the 3rd and 11th dimensions and paintings that would be hung along the trail that would be like a giant puzzle to the story of the waterfalls and anyone who ¨understood¨would understand the real, deep meaning of it all. He made us promise, as well, if we ever met Robert DeNiro or Quentin Tarantino that we would tell them that he was waiting for them in Baños. We promised.

We took a camioneta back into town rather than biking back again. We tried to get some money out of the bank and the ATM wouldn´t work. Rachel only had $12 at this point and I had none. At this point we thought we would have to survive on $12 for the next few days until we could figure out what to do or how to get our cards to work. Everything turned out to be okay in the end and Rachel´s other card ended up working at another bank, but it all gave us a little scare and reminded us that we can´t be spending too much money anyway. We´ve been splurging at bit and buying $4 meals for dinner. Oh, so expensive! Shame on us. I just have to make sure I have enough money at the end of my trip to cover another 3 months down here in South America.

As we were typing in our blogs just now, some Argentinian and Colombian guys just introduced themselves and asked if we wanted to go to the thermal baths with them. We said we wanted to just stay on the internet and go to bed. They must think Americans are so boring. Perhaps we are. At least tonight.

One more random story before we are off to bed... there was a parade earlier today while we were using the internet cafe. I am not sure of its purpose but I saw a bunch of young boys jumping and twirling around in the street in purple and red shiny pantsuits to the tune of a marching band. I missed video taping it. Later in the afternoon we were walking along the same street and I saw a mass of people coming towards us in the street and heard some music. I took my camera out with lightening speed and yelled out excitedly, ¨I am going to video tape this!!!!¨. Turns out it was a funeral march. And the whole entire town was mourning the loss of this man. Oops.

Cuenca tomorrow... 6 hour bus ride... yay.

Bathrooms, bathrooms everywhere... yet I can never find one remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Anyway, back to post-Floreana. After our beach stop, we traveled by boat to Isabela, the largest island. The boat trip was really crazy because the wind was exceptionally strong that day. I will spare you all the details, but to give you an idea of how rocky it was, there was an Israeli guy who I thought was just looking at the nice view of Tortuga Island as we passed by, but then when I took a closer look I realized he wasn´t gazing at the scenery... he was throwing up overboard. Oops. I, on the other hand, somehow managed to read a book during it all. It calmed me down a bit and I didn´t pay so much attention to the rocking of the boat. Or the fact that we were in deep, deep water!

The next day on Isabela, we piled into a van and drove up to the highlands. For some reason our driver turned the A/C on for the first 10 minutes, which was wonderful, but then he mysteriously turned it off for the rest of our 40 minute drive and we all sat in the uncomfortable heat as we bounced up the dirt road toward Volcan Sierra Negra. Once we got to the horse ranch, we were all given a small horse that would be ours for the day. I never caught the name of mine, but all I can tell you is that he liked to bite other horses, he refused to run except when all the other horses around him started to gallop, and he didn´t like it when other horses overtook him. He also made my butt hurt, well, the saddle did... after about 4 hours of riding on his back! Our horses took us to the rim of the Sierra Negra crater, which is the second largest volcano crater in the world after one in Africa. It´s about 10 km in diameter and you can still see some steam coming up from the flat expanse of lava if you look closely. We road along the rim and then stopped for a hike to the nearby Volcan Chico, which last erupted in the 1970s. We walked across the lava flow, which looked like the moon. We had a picnic lunch under the shade of a tree (yay, shade! It´s rare here) and then hopped back on our trusty horses to go back. My horse started off in front along with the two Norweigan girls and two Danish guys, and we were galloping along and my lunch was bouncing around inside my stomach and it was a bit uncomfortable... Rachel´s and the rest of the group´s horses started off after us at a slower pace and soon we couldn´t see them anymore. But then out of the blue, my horse decided he didn´t want to run anymore! I was left in the middle of the two groups as the others quickly ran off in front of me and left me and my nameless horse in the dust. Well, in the mud, actually. My horse slowed down, nibbled some grass here and there, and soon it was just me, the mud, the volcano, and my horse. It was kind of nice to be alone for a while, but then I started to wonder what would happen if my horse decided to take off and race down into the crater. So I started hoping that the other group would catch up to me, and soon they did.

Later that afternoon, our butts were hurting like crazy, my knees felt like someone had hit them with a hammer, and it was hot. Rachel wasn´t feeling too great overall, so she stayed in the hotel and took a nap for the rest of the afternoon. I decided I wanted to see some more of what Isabela had to offer because we´d be leaving the next day, so I walked to the beach with Flavia (my German friend) and Phillip (the funny 6.5 foot tall Swedish guy). I forgot to mention earlier that when we met Phillip, his lips were gigantic. He made a point to tell us that he´d been stung on the lips a few weeks earlier by a mystery bug while in Banos and so his lips were normally not so huge. Sadly, his lips never made it down to their original size and he is still having to cover them with lip gloss and bright white sunscreen. He also got the most sunburnt out of all of us... his poor back was lobster red, and his feet were so burnt that they swelled up, too, and he couldn´t even put his flippers on to go snorkeling. Then his lips started to hurt from the salt water and snorkeling mask, so he had to sit out on one of our best snorkeling trips with the sea lions. He is really funny and good humored, though, and even though he´s clearly suffering I don´t think I ever heard him complain except when we forced him to complain because he deserved to! And when you see him with his glasses and giant lips with pink berry lip gloss smeared all over them, you just can´t help but smile a bit.

Anyway, back to the beach... it was really beautiful and relaxing. I took some more pictures of a bunch of marine iguanas lounging around on some rocks in a pile of about 100. There were also some bright red crabs but they were a bit too shy and I could never get close enough to get a good picture. We swam a bit, watched the beginning of the sunset, and enjoyed our time to finally relax a bit

That night we went to a really neat bar on the beach with our entire group. It was the first time we all hung out together at night (the other nights just a few of us would go out to different places), so it was nice to have everyone together. We got the chance to get to know each other a bit better and the Israelis became a bit less shy and then we ended up dancing with our boat captains until 1;30am. They appeared out of nowhere and it was really hilarious to see them try to dance. Flavia, the Norweigan girls, and Mathis (Danish guy) all ended up dancing a bit of salsa for a bit. If only I were good enough, too. At the end of the night it was just Flavia, me, Matan, Oskar, and Sofia (our silly travel agent... why is it that Rachel and I always end up going on our tours with the agents who sold us the tours? Haha). As we walked home, we looked up and realized we had never seen so many stars before. It was beautiful.

The next day we had the chance to snorkel with penguins! The penguins in the Galapagos are the only tropical penguins in the world. They are too cute. And very speedy! We spent a while in the water trying to chase them down so we could actually see them up close. They just flew through the water with the greatest of ease, I cannot figure out how they managed to move so quickly. We also saw an octopus and blue footed boobies.

After our swim with the penguins we went to Tiburon Islet and hiked around a bit. It is a small little island that we easily walked the length of in a half hour or so, formed completely of black lava. We saw those crazy red crabs again, more iguanas lounging around on rocks and spitting salt water out of their noses at us, and some really cute sea lions that were total hams for all of us photographers. There was a mother and baby who flung themselves out onto the rocks in front of us and just started striking a bunch of poses. They are so playful and fun... can we have one for a pet Mom and Dad?

In the afternoon we sailed (okay, I mean we flew across the ocean at lightening speed) to Santa Cruz, the last island stop on our tour. We stayed in Puerto Ayora, the main town in the Galapagos with about 12,000 inhabitants. We were there for 3 nights. We ended up changing around the next day of our tour because nobody seemed to like the idea of waking up at 4am to take a 45 minute bus ride to the north of the island and then take a 3 hour boat ride to Bartolome Island (it is the island that is always in the typical Galapagos Island pictures.... very beautiful, apparently full of penguins, but we already had the great luck of swimming with some on Isabela). Instead, we bused to the north of the island and then went to North Seymour Island instead, a short boat ride away (on a much calmer, slower boat this time with plenty of room to lounge around on). This island is very small, but it is a great place to see the magnificant frigatbird. At the time we went, there were also a ton of baby frigatebirds and they were really cute. They also let you get so close to them! I took a picture sitting right next to a baby frigatebird, who kind of just stared at me a bit and wiggled its throat in a weird way (perhaps it was hungry?). The male frigatebird has a large red balloon like pouch on its throat and it puffs it up to attract females. It's pretty funny looking, but the bright red color is definitely very striking agains the dark black color of the rest of its body. The males and females take turns sitting on their eggs, and while we were there we mainly saw the males in the nests.

We then snorkeled a bit more, though this time we didn't see many interesting things except a bunch of different types of fish. I believe we were supposed to see some sharks but either way it felt amazing to jump into the water since it was so hot and humid outside during our hike! I lost my snorkel, though, unfortunately and had to buy a new one later.

On our last full day, we drove up into the highlands again our bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. Turns out we were going to see some lava tubes on someone´s private property. There is a ranch on the property and the owner´s cows started mysteriously disappearing one day. When he went to investigate, that´s when he discovered the gigantic lava tubes... the cows had been falling through the ground into the lava tubes the whole time! Oops. Lava tubes are formed when the lava flowing down the volcano cools faster on the outside than in the inside. We walked through one of them and it was enormous! In some parts the ceiling was at least over 100 feet tall, and in another part we had to shimmy on the ground and get a bit muddy. After the lava tubes, we went to see... you guessed it... MORE turtles. (One of the guys on our trip wrote ¨no more turtles!¨as a complaint on his review sheet at the end of the tour.) We went to the Charles Darwin Center, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the islands and their flora and fauna. It´s run entirely on donations, mainly from tourists. Around the center are some tortoises, iguanas, and other endemic species to the islands... and good old Lonesome George is one of them. In Spanish, he´s called ¨Solitario Jorge¨... heehee. So amusing. We just saw his butt, unfortunately. He didn´t feel like turning around to greet us. He lives with two females from neighboring islands, because they are the closest match to his species, but he doesn´t want anything to do with them. Sadly, there aren´t any more females of his own species left, so he is essentially the end of the line.

We went out every night on the islands to local bars, and well... of course we had to go out on our last night, too! Right? We all went to a nearby bar to have a drink and talk one last time. The bartender made Rachel and I margaritas that tasted like salt and ice. They sure don´t know how to do Mexican ANYTHING here in Ecuador! Regard everything ¨mexican¨with suspicion here, take my word for it. We ended up meeting these South African boys that we had danced salsa and merengue with the night before and talked to them a bit again. Unfortunately, they weren´t quite bright in the head, but the guy I danced with somehow turned me into a professional dancer and was flipping me and twirling me all over the place. When we chatted with them again, we discovered that they didn´t believe in evolution.... hm, maybe their visit to the Galapagos might change their mind? They are sailing across the ocean on a private yacht, from Panama to Galapagos to French Polynesia. I think they´re insane. Nice, but insane.

We went to go dancing next and turned the club into a foreigners only party. They were playing salsa at first, but I was sneaky and requested some electronica and dance music without the Ecuadorians knowing... soon the floor cleared and it was just Philip, Rachel and I shaking our booties on the giant dance floor. It´s okay, though, because I am pretty sure that we looked great. Or perhaps we didn´t, because soon the salsa music started playing again and everyone crowded the floor. We didn´t have our great South African sailor dance partners again, though, so instead we all sat and watched an Ecuadorian couple dance the salsa and it was quite mesmerizing. They were our age, but they looked like they´d been dancing together since they were 2 years old. All of us sat there with our jaws open, looking like complete idiots. They were really fun to watch. If only I could dance like that. Someday. Must take more lessons.

The next morning, on our last day, we stopped off to view Los Gemeles, aka The Twins. I believe they were the largest (now collapsed) lava tubes to be found in the Galapagos. They are enormous, at least a few football fields wide and just as deep. Afterwards, we continued on north to Baltra island to the airport... where we waited for a lovely 2 hours to board our flight. You have to get there early so that they won´t give your seats away to someone else. It was hot, humid, and they only had A/C and fans in the employee rooms. How nice. We browsed some stalls with overpriced trinkets, gazed longingly at the computers with overpriced internet, and I drank a nice cold coke. Finally we boarded at 1245 and we were off. We didn´t get home until around 6pm, even though our travel time was only 3 hours total.

I was a bit sad when everyone was saying goodbye at the airport. I really liked getting to know Flavia (from Germany), Matan (Israel), Philip (Sweden), and the Danish guys and Norwegian girls. I made extremely vague plans to visit all of the Europeans this fall when I go to Germany... it would be nice to visit Scandinavia for the first time and have some local friends to show me around Matan, however, is actually following a similar route to ours and will be in Peru later on... so perhaps we will meet up with him again.

Anyway, the Galapagos trip was amazing overall and I really enjoyed everything (minus the humidity, which I wasn´t expecting... okay, or the crazy speed boat rides and the choppy waters). I was surprised by how green some of the islands were... I was expecting the islands to be mainly lava and cacti from the bits I´d heard about the iGalapagos before we arrived, but in some areas of the islands I really felt like I was in a cloud forest. Everything was beautiful in its own way, from the cloud forest areas to the lava moonscape near Volcan Chico to the deserty areas to the beaches. The animals were so fearless, especially the baby frigatebirds (well, perhaps this is becuase they couldn´t exactly fly or run away from us yet!) and the sea lions. My favorite part of the entire trip was definitely having the chance to swim with the sea lions. I wonder what they thought we were with our funny looking googles and snorkels? I can´t wait to get my underwater camera pictures developed... I took a whole roll of just the sea lions as they dive bombed our faces and swam in circles around us underwater.

Sad to be back on the mainland now that we´ve left the Galapagos Islands behind, but also excited for the rest of our trip south... we´re in Baños (teehee... bathrooms) now as I write this, and its gorgeous...

Galapagos pt. 2 remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

It´s our 6th day here and we´ll be flying back to Quito on Wednesday after lunch. I´m not ready to go yet. Although the sun is ridiculously hot since we´re at the equator and we´re running around in our bikinis every day and snorkeling, so it´s a bit uncomfortable, especially with our small sunburns we got the other day. But other than that, it´s been an awesome trip so far.

We arrived last Wednesday after a pretty smooth 3 hour flight from Quito. We spent our first couple of days on San Cristobal Island, which if I remember correctly is the oldest island of them all. It´s fairly large, but the main town itself is pretty sleepy, cute, and extremely safe. And yay, no pollution like in Quito! We first went to the information center and learned a bit about the islands and conservation efforts. Then we went on a little hike behind the center to a beautiful viewpoint and then after we were good and sweaty we hiked down to a small bay where we could jump in the water for a bit. There was a male bull sea lion in one of the coves, however, so I didn´t want to stay in the water too long in case he got angry with us. We then spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening hanging out at a nearby beach and relaxing before dinner.

On Thursday we drove up to the highlands and passed through four different areas of vegetation. The people on the islands grow coffee and other crops. We ended up in the pampas area, which is normally a bit cooler and often misty. We went to the breeding center for San Cristobal´s tortoises and got to see a ton of little babies. There are only 12 species of giant tortoises left in the world, and most of them are native to the Galapagos Islands. However, their populations were reduced almost to extinction by sailors who brought them on their ships for meat as well as by many introduced species on the islands that either eat their eggs, eat or destroy the vegetation they feed on, or harm them in some other way. The breeding center raises baby tortoises in cages until they are 5 years old (and at this point, they are hardly bigger than your hand), after which they can let them go into the wild because their shells have hardened enough to protect them from predators like goats, cows, rats, etc. It takes them a good 150 years to become full grown. We got to see some large tortoises at feeding time and they also put on an impromptou mating show for us! They are so enormous, wrinkly, slow, dinosaur-like, and awkward looking. But I love them.

We got to snorkel again later at Los Lobos island and Leon Dormido, both small nearby islands. The first stop involved... get this... snorkeling with sea lions!!!! It was incredible. I was afraid at first because they are so playful and curious and they dart towards your face underwater and then swim away in another direction at the last second. But my god, they are just so cute. Then above water, they are just like dogs, barking and curling up in little balls to sleep, or staring at your with their wide brown eyes. It was so much fun to be able to be so close to them in their natural environment. Our second stop involved snorkeling that was a bit more advanced because it was in very deep water and there were about 100 sharks below us. I believe they were harmless reef sharks of some type, but our guide Jorge assured us that there is such an abundance of food in the Galapagos that they wouldn´t be interested in dining on us anyway I wasn´t quite sure what was going to be beneath me when I first jumped into the water, but as soon as I looked down and saw the sharks, I screamed and made a beeline towards my German friend Flavia... because if I was to be devoured by 100 sharks, I didn´t want to be devoured alone!

On Friday we woke up early and took the Costa boat (our speedy transport between islands) to our next destination, Floreana Island. I love the history of Floreana, because it involves a bunch of crazy German colonists interested in creating a utopian society, a husband and wife who removed all their teeth before arriving and then shared a pair of metal dentures, an Austrian woman who came with her 3 lovers and called herself the Empress of Floreana, stories of murder, disappearances, general craziness, and, of course, pirates.

Floreana only has about 80 people living on it. We landed at the sleepy port and took a billion photos of the marine iguanas lounding around on the black lava rocks near the water. They are black and completely blend in with the rocks, so it´s often hard to spot them at first, and are the only species of iguana that live on land and water. They are vegetarians, feeding on just the algae in the water, and have developed a neat adaptation to help with all the salt water that they consume... they kind of spit water out of their noses ever so often, and this is their way to rid their bodies of the excess salt. We then did a bit more snorkeling, where I saw a sea turtle briefly as it flew through the water. I was also bitten by thousands of tiny, bright blue plankton type things that were floating in the water all around us. Good times.

Anyhoo... time for dinner, but more to come later about the rest of our trip

Kerri

I´m in the Galapagos!! remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

We were looking for a jungle tour very last minute on Thursday... as in the night before we wanted to leave. The jungle tour we wanted to go on turned out to have some problems, so we were left scrambling around La Mariscal trying to find a cool, cheap, last minute tour that had everything we wanted to do. We popped into a random tour agency run by an Australian man who had just started working there that Monday, his tour sounded good even though he didn't know what exactly he was selling since he hadn't yet been there himself, but we bought it anyway! The kicker was the fact that he was going to come on the tour with us and he agreed to be our chauffer to and from the jungle so that we wouldn't have to take another one of those crazy Ecuadorian buses driven by wannabe race car drivers.

The tour turned out to be an awesome adventure. We drove to Tena on Friday night with Julian, our tour agent, who is actually pretty close in age to us (25)... though he's married to an Ecuadorian woman. We were driving on the dirt roads through the Andes mountains and down through the foothills to the jungle at night, and it was a pretty scary journey. Mostly because Julian spent a good deal of time telling us scary stories and we all freaked ourselves out every time we turned a corner and discovered a creepy looking, deserted shack of a house. But the road itself was also a bit dangerous since we were driving in really terrible fog and there were constantly giant tankers and buses zooming past us. The rule of tonnage applies here in Ecuador, I guess, as it did in Vietnam... at one point we came face to face with a giant bus bound for Quito and it kept edging towards us without giving us time to back up and get out of its way! Crazy drivers. We also passed a family of 10 llamas lounging around on the side of the road. We tried to nudge them off the road but they must have had a death wish because they wouldn't move. We finally arrived in Tena at around 11pm, found a hostel, Rachel got scared of a black and red bug in the bathroom, we isolated it, put on our pjs, and crashed for the night.

The next morning we met up with the owner of the Sachapakari Lodge. He bought us some palm tree larvae... which were these giant, fat, white wriggling larval worms... and we got the chance to eat them. I was a bit disturbed by tehir heads because they had tiny prickly things on them, but after a minute of trying to actually put the thing in my mouth, I sucked it up and chomped off a big, delicious bite. The thing was actually really good! Rachel then tried to take a bite, and actually succeeded at biting the thing in half before she suddenly had a delayed reaction of disgust, flung one piece to the ground, spit the other one out, and ran away screaming. All of this is caught on video

After our larva feast, our guide took us to the Jumandy Caverns a bit outside of Tena. Jumandy was an indigenous leader in the 1500s who fought for his people against the Spanish conquistadors. He is a legend in the town of Achidona and there are statues, large naked paintings of him (?), and other references to him all over the town. He hid from the Spanish in the caverns and they were never able to find him in there because the cave system goes on for so long and is pitch black inside. We met up with two Ecuadorians from Santo Domingo who were joining our tour, Diego and Diana (who supposedly were not dating but it sure seemed like that was a lie!) and all went on a really exciting tour of the caverns. We went in barefoot, but it was actually a lot easier to grip the slippery wet, muddy rocks with our feet than with shoes on. We jumped around rocks, swam across giant, bottomless pools of dark water, found some stalagmites and stalagtites, as well as the giant 10 foot tall penis of Jumandy (a stalagmite formation). Deeper in the caves, there were some waterfalls and a 15 foot deep hole filled with water (similar to a small well). Julian was the only one who was able to touch the bottom! (I was too nervous to try swimming down there.) We hiked up and up some muddy rocks to get out of the cave, trampled across some muddy fields, and finally made it back to the start covered in mud and completely soaking wet. It was really fun

We then met up with some other people from the lodge who were already in the middle of their tour. We hiked to a lagoon on the other side of the Rio Napo where we went bird watching for a prehistoric-type bird. It has a really weird croaking type of call and looks kind of like a giant turkey... at least that's all I could tell as I tried my hardest to see it among the trees. Later we went to a family's house where we learned how to make chicha, a fermented drink that is made from the yucca plant. Traditionally it is made with human spit, but it wasn't this time. Women always are the ones to pound the yucca and prepare the drink. The indigenous people often drink chicha morning noon and night, sometimes even substituting it for a meal. The drink had a pretty bitter taste... didn't really like it much. On our hike back to the boat, I discovered that two of the girls in our group were from Germany so I tried to practice my German on them after not speaking it in a year and discovered that yes, I still can hold a conversation. Amazing. Though I found myself responding with ''Si, si!'' every time I wanted to say yes instead of ''ja''.

We then took a 40 minute drive through the jungle on a new road to get to our lodge in Misahuilli. Previously, Misahuilli had been THE cool jumping off point for jungle tours, but then Tena became a more popular place for tours to base themselves out of. However, Misahuilli still has some of the best jungle in the area so it was great that our lodge was in that area. We were really far our there... on our 40 minute drive on the rocky road all we passed were some random houses here and there, we forded a few rivers, and then had to hike another 10 minutes through the jungle to get to our lodge. It was really a beautiful place and I would definitely recommend the lodge and their tours to anyone! Everything was clean, beautiful, the food was amazing and they made sure to stuff us full for all our adventures. The guides were hilarious and really friendly.

That first night at the lodge was definitely very interesting. A shaman visited and demonstrated the soul cleansing techniques he often uses on family members and friends in the neighboring villages. He had been a shaman for 53 years (he started to learn from older shamans when he was 20), and he had a few sons, one of which was studying to become a shaman as well. Shamanism runs in families, apparently. He drank a cup of ayhuasca, a hallucinogenic plant that shamans use to alter their state of being and help them with their rituals. He passed around a cup with a few drops in it and we all got to try a teeny tiny sip. We all sat around the fire and listened to him as he chanted for a good 3 or 4 minutes, took a few drags on a cigarette, and then started hitting one of our fellow travellers on the head with a bunch of dried leaves about 100 times, all the while continuing his chanting. His assistant then lit another cigarette for him, he inhaled, then proceeded to blow the smoke onto the top of the man's hair. He then sucked a bunch of spit into his mouth, took another drag on the cigarette, and I could have sworn he spit on the poor man's head. Well, I soon found out for myself that the shaman did NOT spit on the guy's head.... for a minute later, Hugo pointed to me and said ''Come''. I was kind of confused, but went and sat in front of the shaman. I got the whole shebang! I was beaten on the head with leaves, had cigarette smoke blown into my hair as the shaman kissed my head, and... he didn't actually spit on me! Yes! But now I smelled like smoke. The entire time he was beating me on the head chanting, I had to try really hard not to imagine what Rachel was thinking as she watched me. I knew if my thoughts wandered to her... I would burst out laughing and offend the shaman. Didn't want to do that. I can't say he actually cleansed my soul, but I can say that I had an absolutely wonderful time during the next two days of the tour, so maybe I have him to thank for that?

After our shaman experience, we all drank some ayusca tea with rum (not the same as ayuhasca... this tea is just a normal tea) and we all sat in a circle around the fire and played some really silly group games for the next hour or two. Some of the games were so funny I started crying I was laughing so hard. And they were all great for practicing our Spanish! One of the games involved everyone counting off and taking on the name of ''1 limon 1'', ''2 limon'' and so on up until 11. The first person to start had to say their name first, then ''Medio limon'' and then call out the name of another person. It went really quickly and the point of the game was to not accidentally say ''melon'' as you fired out the phrase ''10 limon, medio limon, 2 limon!''. Later we played the game where someone says a word, and then each person afterwards has to repeat the word then add on another and gradually a really ridiculous sentence forms. Our best sentence ended up being: ''You and I are going to my house to fuck a rat, but nothing more, and if you would like a reference, ask my penis''.... aka ''Yo y tu iramos a mi casa chagar un rato, pero nada mas, y si tu quieres una referencia, preguntale a mi pene''. We played a few more games along those lines, and then went to bed to prepare for our crazy 5 hour hike the next morning.

So our hike. It was crazy, it was fast, it was really steep and involved a ton of rocks, boulders, puddles of mud up to our knees, slippery moss, fording across rivers in our boots and getting soaked up to our waists, crossing ravines one at a time across precarious bamboo bridges, swinging on jungle vines like Tarzan, swimming in the river, jumping off 30 foot cliffs into the water, and generally having a really fun jungle adventure Our guide, Hugo, literally ran through the jungle and up and down all the steep and muddy rocky trails... and somehow I was able to keep up with him. He told me I was a very good, strong hiker and wondered where I had learned to hike so well. Maybe I belong in the jungle and should start to work as a tour guide myself. Meanwhile, Rachel and Diana were hiking a bit slower and at one point we realized they were a good 10 minutes behind us all. Along the way, Hugo pointed out the medicinal uses of many jungle plants and trees and then we finally reached our destination... the waterfall. We swam around for a bit and I had some fun scaring the living daylights out of myself by jumping off some cliffs into the river below with our guide, Diego, and Julian. Then we started on our hike back, thankfully a bit shorter this time. Once we got back, Hugo joked that we were going to do the hike again later that night. I definitely don't think Rachel wanted to, and I just wanted to take a shower and get all the mud and sweat off of my body. It was a hard hike, but it is one I will remember for a long while.

Later that night, Diana and Diego left to go back to Quito since they had school the next day. Everyone else had left too, so it was just Rachel, Julian, and I and all three guides. We rested a bit, napped and read in the hammocks, had a delicious traditional fish dinner, and then settled down at the game table for a few hours of some crazy card playing. We played spoons, I taught everyone egyptian ratscrew, and then Julian taught us a really silly but hilarious game where each card represents an action (i.e. 9 means running around your chair and sitting down, 8 means slap the card, 3 means whistle, something else means moo like a cow, and so on) and each time the dealer flips over one of those cards, the last person to do the action loses and has to take the pile of cards that has built up. We were all doubled over laughing because it got to be so ridiculous. A similar card game involved everyone taking on a bad word or an animal sound as their name, and the dealer went around in a circle dealing everyone a card. If you got the same card as another player, you had to be the first to yell out their bad word name or make their animal sound or else you lost. For a while all you heard was moo! ballsack! cockadoodledoooooo! some bad word in Spanish I can't remember! meow!... it was great. Hehe.

As we played by candle light, of course we attracted all the bugs of the jungle to our table. A few of them had death wishes, like the llamas, and flew straight into the flame. Others tanned themselves. Then suddenly, I heard a rustle of leaves behind me. I turned around but couldn't see anything. Hugo noticed me turning around, so he looked as well and shined his light in the direction of the noise. Then he shouted to everyone ''Don't move! It will kill you!'', took his shoe, and stepped on the head of what looked like a giant moth with owl's eyes printed on its wings. We thoguht he was joking about the ''it'll kill you part'', but he had a very serious look on his face and so did all the other guides. Turns out it is the deadly Machacha moth that can kill a person within 2-3 hours if it stings you. It is literally the most hideous looking insect I have ever seen in my life because it has the head of a freaking devil serpant. A picture of one can be seen here... http://www.miputumayo.com/secciones/variedades/sabiausted/1127/machaca.jpg . Don't say I didn't warn you. I had nightmares about that thing! According to our guides, the only way to save yourself is to have sex continuously for 12 hours straight. We didn't know whether to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, or to scream and run for our lives. Except more of these devil moths could have been anywhere, and we didn't really want to die, so we settled on just screaming and jumping around like little girls. The guides all laughed at us, but kept to their story of it's deadliness. We decided game night was over at that point. Meanwhile, Julian was scared out of his mind as well, and happened to discover a giant spider the size of a dinner plate running along the ground. He screamed, we screamed, and then he flung it at us with his shoe. We screamed some more, hopped around, yelled about how we wanted to leave the jungle because we didn't want to die from the sting of a serpant moth, and generally acted like idiots. The guides were really excited, however, because apparently the moth is extremely rare. They had only seen about 2 or 3 of them in their lifetimes. According to them, the last time they had seen one, they were eating dinner at the lodge and one of the moths dive bombed their table and everyone was so scared that they all ducked and plopped their faces into their soup.

The next morning, we woke up somewhat refreshed, a little less scared of the Machaca moth (since it only comes out at night), but we were super paranoid about the bot fly that we had seen flying around on our previous hikes. This fly is also really scary... it targets your ears and shoulders, lays eggs, and then a giant, hairy larval worm grows in your skin and its incredibly painful not to mention DISTURBING. Oh, isn't the jungle wonderful? Well, minus the insects, I say yes. We went on a morning hike to ''The Lookout'' and literally ran through the jungle again. All the while, Hugo kept stopping every so often and smacking Julian on the head because he spotted a bot fly on his ear. Rachel and I then doused our heads with bug spray. As we were climing up a hill, suddenly Julian screamed and almost jumped backwards onto me. He had seen a snake. Hugo laughed hysterically. He must think we are all so silly, screaming at every bug or animal that comes our way. I'm sure he'll remember us fondly. Again, along the hike he explained some really neat medicinal uses of different plants... one of them you can use to make a poison to kill monkeys with, another you can use as a numbing agent if you are bitten by a scorpion, and so on. We also got to eat some ants that taste like lemon, which live in the base of certain leaves. On the way back we got to swing from some jungle vines like Tarzan again All in all, pretty neat but quick hike. Later we went tubing on the Napo River, came back for lunch, showered, and then we said goodbye to the lodge as we headed off for home.

Before we started our long drive home, however, we stopped off in Archidona to see some monkeys! My main goal for the trip! Hugo brought some red onions that apparently the monkeys love to rub on themselves as perfume. They all pounced on us out of the trees and were delighted that we brought them such wonderful presents. Two of them stole Rachel's AND Hugo's ice cream cones and then proceeded to enjoy them in the trees high above. One moneky jumped on Julian's shoulder and wouldn't get off. They were all just SO cute! They looked like creepy little humans, but still... they were cute. We heard some horror stories about how with other tourists, they would grab their cameras and smash them up in the trees into little pieces, or snatch their jewelry off their bodies. But I think they were content with our onions.

The ride back home was gorgeous during the last hours of daylight. The jungle and cloud forest area is one of my favorite parts of Ecuador so far. We had a few territorial dogs actually run AT our car as we were driving a good 50mph as if they actually thought they could scare the car away. We decided that the dogs really just had death wishes, like everything else on our trip did. I can't believe the dogs here. Words of wisdom to any future travelers to Ecuador... stay away from the dogs guarding cows and houses! Around Papallacta area, or halfway through the drive, it got REALLY foggy again to the point where we couldn't even see the road. The stupid thing about the country and jungle roads here is that they don't have reflective lines or anything, so you can't tell if you are on the right side of the road, or even if you are ON the road. It's terrible and incredibly dangerous. But we made it home safely, in part I think to all the Manu Chao we listened to on the way home that kept us all upbeat and alert.

Going back a few days prior to our jungle trip, on our last night at Cecilia's... we went to see an Ecuadorian film titled ''Cuando me toque a mi'' (When it's my turn) at the nearby independent theatre with our housemates. It was a very depressing and weird film with no clear cut ending, but at the same time I really loved it. Plus I was excited that I understood over half of what the characters were saying! Rachel and I are getting really good at understanding Spanish, though our spoken Spanish is still a bit basic since we just only recently learned some new tenses and direct and indirect object words. But even when we were in the jungle we were able to have some basic conversations with Diego, Diana, and our guides. Yay!

Anyhoo, Rachel and I are off to buy a bathing suit for her before we fly to the Galapagos Islands tomorrow morning at 9am sharp. I am so excited for some more sun, snorkeling, and animals.

Besos!
Kerri

The moth of death... aka Our trip to the Misahuilli jungle remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

The views on the way to Papallacta were really great, though. I think that area of Ecuador is definitely my favorite so far. It´s almost in the cloud forest, so there are always clouds lying low over the green hills. The town itself is tiny and probably only has a few hundred people. The thermal baths there are supposedly some of the best in Ecuador. Anyway, we got some lunch once we arrived and were served by a completely incompetent waitress. She came to take our order the second we sat down and we said we weren´t ready and asked if she could come back in a minute. But she didn´t come back for 10 minutes even though we stared her down with pleading eyes. Juliet finally went up to her and reminded her we needed to order and she said she´d be right over. She didn´t come. Juliet went up to her again and asked if we could order and the waitress then said, ¨But I already came and asked you if you wanted to order and you said you weren´t ready!¨... as if she had completely forgotten her conversation with Juliet a few minutes earlier. We finally got to order, only to discover that they were out of the tamales I wanted. Juliet and Rachel had ordered trout a few minutes earlier, but I had to re-order and decided on chicken. The trout came right away and I watched as they ate the entire thing. My chicken still hadn´t arrived. I was starving. Rachel and Juliet were done eating. The waitress seemed to have forgotten my meal entirely. Juliet went up to ask her what happened and she made up an excuse that there were 3 chicken orders in front of my order and that´s why it was taking so long. I watched the 3 chicken orders come out to the other tables and the people finished their chicken and I still didn´t get mine! At this point it had been about 30 minutes. Juliet went up to the waitress again and asked if maybe she´d forgotten to put in the order since she didn´t write it down initially. The waitress assured her there was no problem. Finally another waitress came and asked us if we wanted the bill and we pointed out that I still hadn´t actually eaten yet. She gave a little shout in surprise and ran to the kitchen... and came back with my chicken. It had been sitting there the whole time and nobody brought it out to me. I have to say, it was definitely good chicken, but I didn´t want to pay for it... so when a different waitress came to give us our bill I asked her if I could get my chicken for free. She looked at me like I was an idiot, but once we explained what had happened she said she´d go ask. She never returned. We looked around the restaurant and realized that the entire restaurant staff was having a meeting about my chicken and whose fault it was... at that point we realized we´d never get an answer so we just left... and didn´t pay for the chicken.

Other than that, Papallacta was great. We took a hike through the town and the hills with Juliet before she had to bus back to Quito that afternoon. We passed by a soccer field, a giant pipe carrying water up the hills (to Quito area?), a lot of pigs, and a whole lot more stray dogs. And again, there were a lot of people carrying around puppies like dolls. Still don´t get it.

We stayed the night at El Viajero, a small family run hostel on the ¨main¨dirt road through town. You can walk the length of the town in about 10 minutes. Our first view of the hostel included a view of the neighbor TORCHING A PIG WITH A BLOW TORCH... I am not quite sure why he was torching it, perhaps he likes the taste of crunchy, charred pig skin. I took a picture because I couldn´t believe what I was seeing. Later on that day after we came back from our hike, we discovered a pig head hanging from a giant hook on the porch and another pig with, er, half it´s body left, hanging from another hook. A little boy was skipping down the road carrying a bloody pastic bag filled with the pig´s feet. Other than the bloody and charred pig carcasses... the old man and woman running our hostel were so, so cute. They were probably in their 60s and had been running the place for at least 30 years. The woman was about half my size! We were the only guests so we got the chance to talk to them a lot and practice our Spanish. They cooked us some really delicious trout for dinner (trout was a theme dish that weekend) and asked us what type of animals people had in California. I think they thought that we lived in a place similar to their little farm town They had a chicken coop across the street and some cows on the hill that they tended to.

We went to the thermal baths that night and had to take a camioneta (small truck) up the hill to the nice hotel where they were located. He charged us $5 for the mile drive and we thought he was ripping us off since it was supposed tobe $2. We told him to come back to pick us up at 10:15pm but later realized we didn´t want to pay $10 to get to and from the baths so when we went home later we ended up getting a free ride from the hotel workers (¨as long as you say thank you, it is free!¨they said). Three of them piled into the truck with us, bombarding us with questions about ourselves and why we were in Ecuador on the way home. Somehow they misunderstood us or we misunderstood them because suddenly they were yelling out their windows at a bus bound for Quito, thinking that we needed to catch the bus and go home that night. We got home, watched some of the Miss Ecuador pageant (even cheesier than our pagents in the US), and fell asleep to the sound of large trucks, tractors, and buses with bad breaks passing through town all night on their way to the jungle.

We finally got a nice breakfast the next morning that didn´t consist solely of dry bread and jam. Yes! The woman told us that she and her husband had to leave to ¨tend to their cows¨for the morning but that they´d be back by 1pm. Rachel and I decided we´d go on a hike again to explore more of the hills. We started to walk down the main road, only to discover a mean looking bull around one of the bends staring us down. He didn´t seem happy to see us, and we didn´t know if he´d charge us once we got closer, so we changed our hiking route because of the darn cow. We started down the same path we´d taken with Juliet the day before. We suddenly heard some barking and saw a cow pasture in the distance in front of us and realized that the dogs who were guarding the cows had spied us on the trail. The path went right by the pasture, and we weren´t sure if it was a good idea to walk past the dogs... but we hiked on towards them anyway. Bad idea. As soon as we got to their hill, one of the dogs spied us, Rachel screamed, and then 5 large dogs FLEW across the pasture, through the fence, and were suddenly right in front of us, barking like they wanted to kill us. Rachel threw her stick away (that she was going to use to protect us), I yelled ¨NO!¨at the top of my lungs, and the dogs kind of stopped for a second at the sound of my yell. Then they decided they still wanted to eat us and started running towards us again. I screamed at them again, they finally decided I was a big, bad dangerous human not to be messed with, and they trotted back toward their cows. Meanwhile, Rachel and I tried to slowly walk away back up the path we´d come down on, which was a bit hard to do because my legs felt like jelly. So, um, lesson learned... don´t mess with dogs in Ecuador, at least the ones who have cows to guard. They will eat you.

On the way home from Papallacta Rachel and I hailed down a bus in the middle of the road, jumped on, and realized there were no seats available. We had to stand in the ailes for an hour as the bus driver drove like a maniac back to Quito. Just like the bus driver to Otavalo, this guy thought he was driving a race car. We were swerving around corners, I was convinced the bus was going to tip over and we´d all die, we were passing cars going the normal speed, and to us in our magic race car bus it seemed like the cars were driving at a snail´s pace. Rachel and I were bouncing all around the aile of the bus along with another woman who was carrying a newborn baby. I still don´t know why nobody got up for her and offered her their seat. We finally got to sit down after an hour for the rest of the ride back to Quito. Buses here are hit or miss. Too bad we have to take about 20 more bus rides during our trip here.

Ooookay... so back in Quito, we had a ¨ladie´s night¨at our Irish friend´s bar on Monday night... then we spent an hour the next morning trying to find a fax machine for Rachel so she could fax her job contract to her new employer. However, apparently there is only one fax machine in all of Quito. We went into about 20 internet-telephone places that had signs advertising fax machines, only to discover that they actually didn´t have a fax machine or their machine was ¨broken¨. When we finally found one, it cost Rachel $16 to fax her papers! Ridiculous. After she faxed her stuff, we finally had the chance to go up the TeleferiQo on Volcan Pinchincha to get a view of the entire Quito county. The TeleferiQo is a cable car system that takes you up the slopes of Pinchincha to the top. It has a really cheesy themepark at the base called VulQuano Park. Hehehaha. It was a ghost town, but with really terrible rap music filtering through the park. It took about 8 minutes to get to the top, where again it was kind of a ghost town and none of the 10 or so restaurants were open. But the views were amazing! It was really cool to be able to see where we were living in Quito in relation to the rest of the city and all the nearby towns. We could even see Cumbaya, the town in the neighboring valley to Quito. However, we didn´t have much time to spend there since we had to get back to class at 2pm

Last night, Juliet´s African dance instructor invited us to his house because he for some reason wanted to cook dinner for all of us. He is half Benin, half French, and so is fluent in French as well as Spanish. He cooked us a traditional meal from Benin, which was delicious, and then told us that he wanted us to help him become the first singing president of Benin in the 2011 elections. He wanted the help of me and Rachel specifically becuase we majored in political science and he figured we could help him learn political theory. He kissed our hands because he was so excited that we could help. He said in return for our help, he´d cook for us every night. After dinner we watched about 100 music videos from African-French artists, some from Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and Benin. These videos are ones that we probably would have never seen in our lives if he hadn´t shown us! Definitely interesting. But also very confusing since they were all in French... too many languages at once! My brain was hurting. Then Revelejo (that´s really his name) forced me to dance some sort of dance called Zuklove to the music of a Colombian singer and suddenly we were all dancing in his room. I felt very silly because I don´t dance. But it was a fun night overall

Anyway, I doubt anyone has even read this far... this is all for me to remember my trip, too, so I don´t mind if you only skipped down to this last line

Tschuessi!
Kerri

Un mescle de cosas from the past few days! remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Among all the purple robed people, crosses, and marching bands, there are also a lot of people carrying dogs around like purses. Don´t quite understand that. Also, don´t forget the women and men shouting at us to buy umbrellas, hats, water, gum, sugared corn treats, and chips. It´s all so Easter-like.

After we´d seen enough of the parade and a good thousand purple robed people and 50 Christ´s, we decided it was time for lunch. Somehow we stumbled into a Hari Krishna temple while they were having their own religious celebration and started talking to a nice Hari Krishna guy from Colombia who told Rachel she had a good aura about her personality (I guess I don´t). He told us that if we so desired, we could sleep at their temple for free and medidate each morning at 3am. We ate vegetarian hamburgers with him while all the little Hari Krishna kids who lived at the temple giggled at our attempts at speaking Spanish. He asked me why I wasn´t talking as much, if maybe I didn´t know as much Spanish as Rachel. I started to respond, but one of the little girls who was listening to our conversation chimed in and said, ¨Because you can´t!¨ (speak Spanish). When kids start to make fun of my Spanish, it´s time to run. But he then tried to convince us to go to the jungle with him and other Hari Krishnas instead of going on the other tour we were hoping to book today through Sacha Ursay. I think it involves a lot of meditating and converting us into Hari Krishnas

Now we´re in an internet cafe while the men running this place are standing at the door watching the parade pass by. It´s been a good 3 hours already and this parade has no end in sight. They are probably wondering why we are not as excited to watch and would rather be on the computer.

This evening we´re going to go to another salsa lesson. Hopefully this time my instructor won´t be mute and unhelpful, like the one I had a couple days ago. I don´t know how to dance or count beats, but despite telling him I had two left feet he continued to twirl me around in circles without explaining anything at all. At one point he laughed at me but wouldn´t explain why. I´m beginning to notice a trend of people laughing at me here in Quito.

Last night we went to Vista Hermosa to eat dinner, a restaurant in Old Town that has an amazing view of the entire city. It was very fancy schmancy, and even had an elevator boy to take us up to our table on the roof top. However, as nice as the restaurant looked, the food was absolutely disgusting. Rachel and I got ¨chicken lasagna¨, but when it arrived we discovered that they´d decided to add layers of sandwich style ham meat in it in addition to the ground up chicken. Apparently ¨chicken lasagna¨means chicken AND ham. How stupid we were to not know. It was the worst tasting lasagna I´ve ever eaten in my life. However, the view of the city at night with all the churches lit up was absolutely beautiful, and our waiter wasn´t too bright and left 3 things off our check so we didn´t end up spending too much on our terrible meal after all. Plus, the warm wine was a nice drink in the cool weather.

After dinner, we walked around old town with Juliet and her friends and visited all the cathedrals. I´m guessing because of Semana Santa, they were all open to the public and lit up all night long. They were packed to the brim with people, but still very beautiful to see at night. One of the churches had bird noises blasting throughout the main hall... I guess they wanted to make us feel like we were in the jungle.

The night before, Rachel wasn´t feeling too well after her salsa instructor had spun her around and dipped her down one too many times, but we had made plans to go out and dance that night. I was still hoping to go out dancing so I called up Hannah, the girl from Berkeley who is here working for the English language newspaper that we were originally supposed to work with on our trip, The Ecuador Reporter. I went to a fun club with her and her international girlfriends (from Germany, Norway, and Austria) and we had a really fun night playing pool (very badly, however our opponents were equally terrible) and dancing a bit. It wasn´t so fun when punk music suddenly started to play and we found ourselves in the middle of a mosh pit, but let´s forget that part. Speaking of the Ecuador Reporter, we´ve met most of the people who either work for it or provide the financial backing for it. One of them is an Irish guy who runs a Vietnamese restaurant (Uncle Ho´s, delicious!) in Quito. That makes a lot of sense now, doesn´t it? He´s nice, though. Everyone here we meet is oddly connected to that paper. Is it a sign that we should work for them? Hm.... I think we will have had enough of Quito by the end of next week.

Anyway, time to push past the crowds, find the Ecovia (trolley), and make our way back to New Town in time for our salsa lessons. A visit to Papallacta, a nearby town with hot springs, is next on our list for the weekend. Looking forward to that

Semana Santa in Quito and Hari Krishna hamburgers remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

On a happier note, Rachel and I are taking salsa dancing lessons 6 times this week and the next... private lessons for $5 an hour at one of the best places in La Mariscal. Hopefully we´ll master the dance by the time we get home

Dinner at Cecilia´s remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

On another note, our Otavalo trip was really amazing. Minus our first bus ride to Otavalo. The bus driver thoguht he was a race car driver. He took hair pin curves at top speed and I swear at times we were only driving on two wheels. At the same time, this scary clown music was on top volume in the bus, like a sick soundtrack to our imminent death. Even though I was convinced we were going to die, I still found the confidence to make a video of our ride.

We got off the bus after 2 hours and went to Lago San Pablo, a beautiful lake at the base of Volcan Imbabura. We took a boat ride around and the weather was finally nice for once. Rich Ecuadorians often go to the lake for weekend trips. There were a few alpacas lounging around the lake, as well, soaking up the sun.

After the lake, we crowded into a bus to go to the Otavalo market. We had a 3 course lunch for $1.25 and then had 3 hours to browse the stalls at the market. I bought a few things, my most favorite purchase being an empanada filled with apples It started pouring rain, then stopped, then started again, then stopped. Everyone kept running for cover and the vendors were constantly covering and uncovering their goods with plastic tarps.

We crammed into another bus after our time at the market to go to a nearby waterfall, I think it is called Peguche. It was really beautiful. Our guide, Vincicio, then decided it would be a great idea to scale the almost vertical hillside next to the waterfall in the mud and pouring rain. I am not sure how we made it, but we got to the top. And then we kept going. There was a giant gorge with another waterfall, and at one point we crossed a 3 foot wide mud bridge that was the only thing between us and one waterfall on our right side and the other waterfall on our left. Vincicio was quite the gentleman, though, and helped all 5 of us girls every step of the way to make sure we didnt fall to our deaths. We continued our hike through the hills and I felt like what we were doing was actually bushwacking instead of hiking. We were soaking wet and covered in mud and sweat and at times it seemed like we were forging our own trail! The hike was really fun though, despite being one of the hardest and probably most dangerous I hike I have ever been on.

After our hike we crammed into yet another bus and again there were no seats left so we had to stand until we got to the base of the hill that Vinicio{s aunt lives on. Then we all climbed into the back of a pickup truck for the bounciest ride of our lives to the house we would be spending the night in. We stayed in an indigenous village in a house made of mud. Vinicios family lived there and I believe they farmed corn and raised chickens. We made dinner together in their kitchen and washed everything in the water that they had collected in buckets that were sitting out in the courtyard amongst the cow patties and, well, the cows themselves. We were worried we would get sick from the water and the dirty knives, etc... but we popped a pepto bismol and it was okay! Our dinner, which we ate on a mat on the floor (there is no table) consisted of potatoes, tomatoes, cheese, lettuce, and.... guinea pig! The entire guinea pig was cooked, feet, head, and all. The head is the best part, I hear. Its a special meal for weddings and other celebrations, I guess our visit is included in such important fiestas. The sad thing was that as Iris (a girl in our group) was helping to cut up the guinea pig to cook it, all of its little guinea pig friends were under the kitchen table squealing, like they knew what was happening to their friend. I guess they just roam free in the house, as do the other animals there including their 2 dogs, cat, chickens, turkey, and 2 GIANT cows that hang out in the house. We slept on beds that were basically wooden tables and I my hips were bruised in the morning! I was scared to go to the bathroom at night because you had to walk through the mud past the two giant cows in order to get to the outhouse... which, weirdly enough, was at their front gate and had holes in it so you could say hello to whoever was paying you a visit that day! Haha. All in all, though, staying at Vinicios aunts house was really amazing. The funny thing is, in our rugged, rural house... there was a TV and a CD player.

Vinicios aunt lives with her husband and their grandson, Luis, who is 9 years old. Luis really liked all of us girls and tagged along everywhere we went and was extremely interested in our digital cameras. He was so excited when I asked him if he wanted to take a picture with me. Whenever he was with his other little friends, though, they were all constantly whispering and conspiring in Quichua to sneak up on us and we had no idea what they were saying or laughing about. All the boys in this community wear their hair down their backs in very long braids, and in general they are a very, very short population! Even Vinicio himself commented on how short he was, and thought it was hilarious that Jonna and Iris, the two Dutch girls, were about twice his height. He was constantly making jokes about how that was so wrong. Hehe. In the morning when I was getting ready for the day, Vinicio and his uncle were mesmerized by the idea of contacts and watched me very intently as I put them in my eyes. His uncle just kept laughing and shaking his head as he watched me intently.

We took a hike around the community in the morning up towards Volcan Imbabura, again sloshing through the mud from the rain and dodging thousands of cow patties. Luis tagged along as Vinicio explained to us about the community and how there are actually never any tourists there besides us, the people he brings from Yanapuma. Along the way we passed some houses and entire families would pour out of these small houses and stare at us. The men always were the ones who were excited to come up to us and shake our hands and ask where we were from, and the women and girls stayed back and whispered and laughed to each other while pointing at us. Everyone was really friendly though and genuinely excited to hear about our lives. They asked us what crops we grew in our towns When we explained a bit more about what our modern lives were like, they told us that our lives must be so hard compared to theirs. The views as we walked around were incredible because we were on the slopes of Volcan Imbabura and so looking around us we could see Volcan Imbabura in front of us, Volcan Cotacachi behind us, and the beautiful green farming valley in between the two.

Later we said goodbye to our host family for the night and caught another truck down the hill. We hung out in the main town square for a bit while Vinicio tried to convince another guy with a truck to drive 5 white girls with giant backpacks to our next destination. We browsed around some stalls in the main square to see what food they were selling, and discovered that everyone was selling pig heads and fruit. Delicious. Then we hopped in the back of the random guys truck and made our way to Laguna Cotacachi, a deep, clear volcanic crater lake that is part of Cotacachi. The highest peak of Cotacachi, covered in snow, provided a nice background to the lake. We took a boat ride around the lake and saw its 2 islands up close. When we stopped the boat, we could see bubbles coming up from the bottom of the lake... the volcano is still active!

After another ride in the back of a truck, lunch at a hole in the wall place, two more bus rides, some unexplainable traffic on the curvy mountain road back to Quito, and a taxi ride back to La Floresta, we finally arrived back home. We were covered in mud and sweat, had been wearing the same clothes for two days, our bodies hurt, and all we wanted to do was take a shower, eat dinner, and pass out. Fun adventure we had, though

(I am happy to say that after 35 minutes on the phone someone finally answered at WaMu and told me that I can only put travel alerts on my card for 30 days. Yay. Means I have to put a new one on my card every month. So inefficient. I love banks.)

Anyhoo, back to Quito happenings. We are a bit annoyed with the food we get at Cecilias house because we are paying the same as another girl is for her host family, but she gets more food than us plus laundry. She gets soup, a main dish, and dessert for dinner each night whereas we only get enough food to fill half our plate and there are never any leftovers if we are still hungry. Cecilia only makes the bare minimum for everyone. Granted, dinner is not the main meal here in Ecuador, lunch is. But still, it is frustrating for us because we are always so hungry after dinner and we know other host families are different. Then to top it off, in the morning for breakfast all we get is a piece of dry, tasteless bread and the same guyaba marmalade every day. Plus fruit juice (which is great) and tea. But I cant survive on dry bread every morning. Rachel and I have complained to our Spanish teacher at Yanapuma, but we feel really awkward making any real complaint because it would be very obvious to Cecilia that it was us two who complained since everyone else has been at her house for a longer period of time and they havent complained yet. Plus our Spanish teacher just thinks we eat a lot and thinks it is kind of funny that we are like men. So instead of telling Yanapuma or Cecilia, we instead just went to the supermarket (which is called Supermaxi... hahahaheeheehee) and stocked up on fruits and snacks to supplement our breakfast bread. We snuck some instant oatmeal to breakfast today and ate it secretly from our tea cups. We are also going to go out to dinner more often to get bigger, second dinners... but unfortunately Cecilia still gets paid the same $13.50 per day regardless of if we eat her food or not. At least it is just another two weeks. We will be leaving Quito on the 28th to go on a 3 or 4 day trip to Tena in the jungle, and then well be going to the Galapagos as soon as we get back and then make our way south to Peru.

On another note, the music of Quito is also a bit annoying... especially when it wakes us up at 6am each morning. The neighborhood dogs bark constantly for about 3 hours straight starting at 6am, the indigenous people who live in Quito drive up and down the streets in our neighborhood in trucks filled with fruit and fish with a megaphone that blasts the same unintelligible phrase over and over again in a monotonous voice urging everyone to come out and buy their food, aaaand everyone else in our house gets up at like 7am and talks loudly and uses the bathroom which is right next to our room. Weeeee.

Oh yes, and guess what? The sun DOES exist in Quito. Yesterday it was hot and sunny and wonderful. Kind of intense, though. I am on the equator, apparently. Good to know. I was actually sweating as I walked around town all day... granted, I was also practically running from place to place trying to get everything done before class at 2pm. And everything was going wrong and I was a bit stressed out. But eh... then the rains came on cue at 3pm and washed all my worries away. Thunder, lightening, all the regulars came out to play. Today its sunny again but Ive finally learned my lesson and have my umbrella with me in my purse.

Ive been sneezing up a storm the past few mornings. I think I am allergic to Quito.

Toodle loo!

Otavalo remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Our Spanish classes are going well. We´re learning a lot, but 4 hours a day is a really long time! I can tell even our teacher gets a bit tired at times. She´s our age, about 25, and is really sweet and intelligent. She works 8 hours a day here AND somehow goes to university. We were talking about life in Ecuador and she told us that basically she only makes $2 and hour for her work. She doesn´t have any extra money left over to travel or buy nice things, so Rachel and I feel especially bad when she asks us about our upcoming travels to make conversation... here we are, these two ¨rich¨American girls who get to go gallavanting around Ecuador and even go to the Galapagos. And Betty, our teacher, hasn´t even been to some of the nearby cities we´re hoping to go to. It´s really frustrating to know that everyone here works just as hard and as long as we do in the United States but they make so much less money. Betty told us that 60% of Ecuadorians make less than $2 per day and do not even have enough money to cover their basic needs for one month. On average, a ¨well off¨person makes $400 or more per month.... and here´s a shocker, the president himself only makes $4,000 a month. That´s considered ridiculously rich.

Jonna (the Dutch girl who lives with us) and I wanted to go shopping the other day to buy some warmer clothes since we both wear every article of clothing we own to bed as well as to class... we ended up walking around for hours in La Mariscal area going into various stores and local markets but didn´t find any warm clothes! We found a ridiculously expensive bookstore (the books cost more than the US price!) and then walked a bit around El Parque Elijido where a bunch of sketchy men of all ages stared at us, and then found ourselves in a very odd mall called Espiral. It´s named Espiral because it´s actually a spiral about 10 stories high... you walk around and around in circles until you get dizzy, or at least that´s what happened to us. The mall was filled with tiny gaming centers where boys in their bright blue school uniform sweats were playing video games with their friends, and there were also a ton of phone stores. But still, no warm clothes to be found! We finally gave up looking because we´d become dizzy and were falling asleep. We then looked around for a good place to eat lunch and almost fell asleep in our bowl of vegetables (I guess we stumbled upon a vegetarian restaurant). I´ve never seen beans that big in my life!

The other night a Norweigan guy arrived at our house. He´s very tall, has dreadlocks down to his waist, wears beachy clothes since he just arrived from the coast, and his name is Knut. I don´t really want to write much about him because during his first dinner with us, he put me on the spot and then made fun of the way I spoke Spanish. Nobody could believe he did that because 1) I had just told him I had only been learning Spanish for a few days and 2) he´s not even a native Spanish speaker anyway. He also called our host mom ¨tu¨instead of ¨usted¨when he first met her, so all in all he´s just an inconsiderate and rude guy. Really arrogant. Glad he´s only at our house for a week! Speaking of which, now that he´s at our house, we have a grand total of 8 people to one bathroom. Knut takes long showers and I noticed he placed a book in the bathroom to read on the toilet. Haha. This really is not a good sign, because there are 7 other people who need to use that bathroom, too! Oh, Knut... I don´t really like you. I hope other Norweigans are nicer than you.

Last night was really fun... Rachel and I met up with her friend Juliet after class and took two buses to a nearby town called Cumbaya (Cumbayaaaa my lord, Cumbaya... yes, like that). It took us forever to get there, going down a ton of windy roads, but we finally arrived and discovered that the town was MUCH warmer than Quito. If only we could live there right now, we wouldn´t be human icicles. Juliet´s other Fulbright friend Sarah lives there in a huge, nice, beautiful apartment complex that´s (get this) right next door to the amassador of Bolivia´s house (which, by the way, is an enormous 4 or 5 story mansion surrounded by a high electric fence. Too bad, because we wanted to knock on his door and bring him some of Juliet´s homemade chocolate cake and become friends with him. Well, at least that´s what Juliet and her friends are planning on doing so they can get invited to his parties). There were a bunch of other Fulbrighters there and we all had a delicious potluck for dinner and listened to cumbias music (the Ecuadorian equivalent of bad country music). The Fulbright people are all going to make up a silly ¨boy band¨dance to a cumbias song, inspired after a night in Cuenca when they saw an Ecuadorian boy band group perform in the streets... they seem like a fun, silly group of people They´re also friends with some Ecuadorians so I got to speak with them about life here... it´s good to meet actual locals instead of just travelers all the time!

Tomorrow we´re off to Otavalo, a town north of Quito, with a few other people from our Spanish school. It´s only $40 and we have all our transport covered, most of our meals, and a homestay with a local indigenous family in Otavalo (Otavalans are one of the largest idigenous groups in Ecuador). Apparently (attention Dad! just for you), we get to try cuy, aka guinea pig. I will be sad, but ´tis only a small bite. We´ll visit the nearby lakes and go canoeing, go on a short hike in the mountains, and visit the Saturday market in Otavalo, which is one of the largest in Ecuador.

I´ll write more about Otavalo once we get back next week. Until then!

Oh no.... damn it, it just started to POUR rain after a day full of sun. Bah!!! No umbrella today

The past few days... y manana vamos a Otavalo remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs

Rachel and I planned to go visit the old town, el centro historico, the other day, but somehow we ended up spending 2 hours on the internet trying to upload pictures unsuccessfully (it took about 5 minutes per picture, which is why I only posted a few ), then I got ripped off on the price and paid $3 extra for someones phone bill. We were starving by the time we left and thought, hey, lets go eat at that wonderfully cheap and delicious El Maple restaurant that Juliet took us to the other day! Good idea in theory, except that we got lost for about 40 minutes walking in circles trying to find it. Everyone we asked either said, ¨EL Maple?!!¨, as if it were entirely crazy that it started with ¨el¨, or they told us it was ¨very, very far away¨. We later found out from Juliet that we had walked right past it. Oops.

We wandered into a tour company office after our adventure getting lost and got some information on a cheap 8 day tour of the Galapagos from April 2 -9. When we walked in, it seemed that we were interrupting a party and about 6 people got up and left to go next door when we came in. I think they all then proceeded to get drunk and started to sing karaoke at the top of their lungs in really terrible off key voices, and we could hardly hear the travel agent over their singing.

Dinner that night was even more silent than before, if that is possible. Those who did speak a sentence or two did so in a whisper because it was so awkward to be the one to break the silence. We finished our food and then there was at least 2 full minutes of silence. Our plates didnt have a speck of food left on them and we{d drank all of our tea. We sat staring at our empty plates and I finally decided the silence was so unbearable I just had to say something to Rachel. I turned towards her to speak, and the second our eyes met we burst out laughing. I hope we didnt offend Cecilia too much, but really, I feel that she should be initiating conversation with us since we dont really know what is going on! (Sorry for the lack of apostrophes but I cant figure out how to type them on this keyboard.)

We went to another dance performance celebrating the day of women at the Casa de la Cultura that night with Juliet and her Fulbright and Ecuadorian friends. It was the opening gala celebration, which we didnt realize meant that we would have to sit through an entire hour of speeches in Spanish before we actually saw any dancing. I just about fell asleep because to me, all I could comprehend was that I was in a dark theatre, there were some women and men taking turns giving speeches, and everyone clapped every now and then. At one point they helped a man (who I think was some sort of ambassador from Colombia) onto the stage as if he couldnt walk, but then suddenly he was able to walk fine. Solidarity perhaps? Then everyone stood and sang the national anthem, they raised a big white sheet from the floor to the ceiling (apparently it was symbolizing peace?), and yes!... finally the dancing was about to begin! But no! it didnt. Instead a projector turned on and we watched a power point presentation with all the advertisers on it. Oddly enough, one of them was Applebees. By this time Rachel and I couldnt keep a straight face because our night had been so ridiculous so far beginning with our uncomfortable (but delicious) dinner. The dance group performing that night was from Israel and they were pretty good... once we finally got to see them. Their dancing was a mix of modern and ballet.

Later we went out with Juliets friends to a bar named after the musical Cats, though it was decorated with posters of ACDC and Fiona Apple. Makes perfect sense. We played foosball for the rest of the evening. From what I have seen it seems to be a really popular game here.

Hilarious story time... yesterday morning, Rachel and I did something very authentic. No, we did not eat guinea pig, nor did we take a salsa dancing lesson... no, instead we went to a step aerobics class in the park. There were a couple hundred people of all ages flapping their arms and jumping side to side to the beat of the loud techno music... grandpas, grandmas, little 3 year old girls, a puppy, even teenagers... all following the directions of the older male teacher who was wearing tight, bright blue spandex shorts and bouncing around on stage with the two other aerobics leaders who were wearing matching blue outfits. We took video, don´t worry.

After we were thoroughly worn out from exercising in the high altitude, we went back to Juliet´s apartment and made the most delicious tacos I´ve ever had the pleasure of eating, then a teeny tiny little car pulled up out front driven by Juliet´s Ecuadorian friend Fernando, we all piled in, and he drove us to the hills overlooking old town to visit the incredibly popular water museum. The museum itself was pretty cool, from what I could understand of our tour... we got to make bubbles in the bubble room, slide down some slides representing condensation, and then learn about water crystal formation in response to positive and negative sounds, phrases, and music. I was really surprised they included that in their museum. But the really wonderful part about the museum is that it has the most amazing view of all of Quito, plus all the other valleys and volcanoes around it. I took about 40 pictures of the same view. We all crammed back in the car again to go down the mountain into old town, where we ate an early pre-dinner (since Cecilia´s are kind of small) at a cute cafe and tried some interesting food and chocolate drinks that had some weird grains that you were supposed to pour into it. Then we wandered around old town in the rain... it´s really an entirely different world than new town. The buildings are so old and cute, the roads are all cobblestone and quite narrow. We peeked into a few of the churches but couldn´t go into the oldest one because it was Sunday and mass was going on. The guy who was driving us around that day acted as our unofficial guide and was really excited to tell us all about the history of his hometown.

As soon as we crammed into the car again, the clouds opened up and it just POURED rain... we had to take a taxi back home since it was raining so hard even our umbrellas wouldn´t protect us on our walk home. Good thing taxi rides are only about $1.50-3 here!

Last night all 8 of us at the house gathered as a ¨family¨ after dinner (which actually involved some talking this time) and watched.... wait for it... Sound of Music. Dubbed in Spanish. Cecilia knitted some socks for her daughter while we watched and made us some popcorn while the rain poured outside.

Random fun fact... people keep their dogs on the roof because they often don´t have yards. This becomes scary when you are walking down the street and think you see a giant dog statue, only to realize it´s actually a huge, living doberman pinscher when it starts barking at you like it wants to kill you.

Also, I told you how cold it was last time I wrote. Well, it somehow got colder. Rachel wore two pairs of socks, gloves, a beanie, 3 shirts, and her sweat pants to bed last night. And she was covered by five blankets. And she was still cold. How is that possible?

Besos,
Kerri

Un poco mas de Quito remains copyright of the author KerriBerri, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

Comment on this entry | Tweet this | Your own free travel blog | More Travellerspoint blogs