La Luna de Miel Larga

Sorry to those of you who we left hanging after Peru! The last few months have indeed been hectic, what with wrapping up there, moving back to California, and getting back into the swing of school and work. Yet, we don’t intend to let this website fade into oblivion! When we travel, which we are bound to do, this will be the place we post photos and stories.

So here begins a new chapter: adventures in the U.S.! We don’t often travel around the U.S. for reasons other than visiting family or friends, or attending special events. But our year in Peru, and all the time we spent outdoors there, has left its mark and we have vowed to get “outside” more often: camping, hiking, and road-tripping. This past week we did just that: a 9 day trip to Bryce Canyon National Park (Utah), Zion National Park (Utah), Las Vegas (the big city stop), and Grand Canyon National Park (Arizona). [It doesn’t hurt that we have now invested in a National Parks Annual Pass, so we have the extra motivation to make this the big year of the outdoors.]

We left on Saturday, March 21st, around 6:30am, which believe me was an effort. But we made great time, driving through the Central Valley, past Mojave, and through Las Vegas up into Utah, arriving at Bryce before the sun set, around 7pm. We bought lots of firewood on the way into the park, as the lady at the general store looked at me incredulously and recommended an extra bundle when I said we were camping. It was supposed to snow, and snow it did, although luckily it let us settle in a night first. To reward ourselves for our early arrival time, we decided to cook dinner that night instead of finding a restaurant. We snuggled into our first night of sleep, which wasn’t all that bad, if a bit chilly. We awoke to beautiful sun, and set out on a combination loop hike from Queen’s Garden Trail to Peekaboo Loop to Navajo Loop, what they call the “Figure 8”. We descended 1800 feet into the canyon, and wound our way around the beautiful “hoodoos” (the rock formations left behind after freeze-wedge erosion…from canyon walls to “fins” to “windows” to “hoodoos” after the top of the window has collapsed; basically the hoodoos are the funny shaped spires you can see in all our photos below). You can also see in our photos how the weather turned on us: our sunny day got cloudy and then snowy and then snowier (and windy). We finished the 7 mile hike in about 4.5 hours without stopping for lunch and scampered back to our tent to change and eat sandwiches there. By this time it was about 4pm and as we warmed up, we drifted off on an unplanned and much-resisted nap, awaking at 7:15pm! Oops…we decided to brave the weather and cook dinner anyway, and had quite the cold night as our wet clothes frooze outside. In the morning, we drove along the park’s main road, stopping at viewpoints for hurried admirations, as the wind and cold quickly drove us back into our car. We got some nice expansive views though (see photos). Around 11am, we gave up on enjoying any more of Bryce, and headed south for warmer weather.

So Monday mid-day saw us driving through the East entrance to Zion National Park, the next step down on the “Grand Staircase”–geologically speaking–of this region (Grand Canyon is the third step down, if I learned it right). The East entrance drive was very impressive, but we took more video than photos. [We’ll all have to remind Chris to put together the video of our trip: we took 3 hours of film!] We passed through the longest tunnel I have ever been in, and came out into the main part of the park. We set up camp, and visited the Visitors Center to get the lay of the land. Despite Zion’s Winter “Park Planner” being much more somber in tone than Bryce’s (basically: all paths are dangerous and frozen, seek extra information before hiking), the weather was turning to spring already and the crowdedness of the park could attest to that. We took in a small, easy Riverside walk for an hour and drove along the canyon for a while. We were warmer that night, but it was still cold! In the morning, we decided to head up Angel’s Landing, a steep 1500 foot ascent. See photos–there were lots of families up there with young children, and quite a few people turning back after trying out the narrow traverses, but we didn’t find it that challenging. We made it up in a little over an hour, and ate lunch on the top. We realized that the sole of Chris’s hiking boot was coming off–so we improvised with some cord from our compass. Luckily he made it back down, but by the time we reached the car, the other sole was coming off! We spent some down time reading by the river and wandered around a bit before starting dinner early. The next morning, we decided to fit a few more hikes in: Weeping Rock (a short, steep ascent to a rock that seems to have a stream coming out of it), and Emerald Pools (a three part hike, between Lower, Middle, and Upper Emerald Pools, which actually didn’t seem to all feed into each other). We reheated pizza at a campsite grill, before heading down to Las Vegas.

Wednesday evening, we arrived in Vegas around 4pm and checked into our hotel, the Paris. We were badly in need of showers, but the dry climate got the better of us: even after we should have felt “clean” we continued to feel dry and crusty and a bit gross. It didn’t help that the hotel shampoo wasn’t strong enough to get the camp fire smell out. No matter, we set out for a walk of the strip, which felt a lot longer than it looked, and then had dinner at our hotel, on a patio outside in front of the Bellagio, watching the fountain shows every 20 or so minutes. Early to bed, early to rise: I had a conference to be at and my panel started at 8 a.m. This was the original impetus for the trip, and my paper went well. Chris picked me up at lunch time and we went to the Bellagio buffet–quite impressive range of food and we gorged. We finished eating around 2:45pm…just in time for a quick lie-down in the hotel before going out to dinner with Andrea and Joel at 5pm! We had tickets to see Cirque de Soleil’s “Ka” at the MGM Grand at 7pm. We had a great Italian dinner, complete with all you can drink/eat house wine, pasta, and bread, and made it to our show just as the lights were dimming. Ka was fantastic–not Cirque’s normal “physicality” but the ever-impressive in costume, art direction, music, and the coolest was the rotating stage that had artists performing at all angles. I loved this shadow puppet part and a battle scene on its side (us looking “down” at the heads of the soldiers, since the stage was hanging in mid air and the artists were fighting on it at a horizontal angle…okay, hard to explain: go see it). It was a very “in-air” show, and had a complete story-line too, another non-traditional element for Cirque.

Friday morning, we were done with Vegas after some crepes and shopping. We headed on the longish drive over to the Grand Canyon. We arrived in time to set up camp and see the sun set, but our real exploring came the next day, as we hiked down into the Canyon on Bright Angel trail (we are doing a lot of hikes with “angel” in the name). We headed to the 3-mile refuge, but arrived too early for lunch. So we headed back up the Canyon to the 1.5 mile point to eat our spaghetti and hot dogs. The total hiking time for the 6 miles was 3 hours–not so bad at all considering how steep it was. Hiking up mountains and canyons doesn’t seem quite as hard after Peru, even when doing it at 7,000 feet. Even Chris thinks I am keeping a better pace, and not quite as many people “lap” me. The rest of the day was spent checking out viewpoints and museums, which I found quite impressive: on geology, indigenous peoples of the area, art. We watched the sun set from the recommended spot–Hopi Point–and had a yummy dinner of stew and garlic bread.

Sunday morning was an early start to break camp and see the sun rise. After a quick meal of oatmeal and changing out of our warm clothes, we set out for home. The drive home was a little longer than we had hoped…some traffic and concern about one of our tires. We stopped for dinner in Modesto and then got home shortly after 9:30pm (so 14.5 hours later, including lots of gas stops and dinner). I am doing three loads of fire-smelling laundry, and getting ready for school to start again tomorrow. Chris is already back at work.

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy the photos!

Well, since we last posted it has been two weeks and we have covered alot of ground. Since we are now back in Cusco, we can also add some photos to go with our stories.

We left Iguazu on the night of August 21 and took a night bus to Resistencia. Because we had splurged on “bus cama” (bed bus) seats, we actually got a decent night of sleep. In fact, I was so tired from the humidity and activity of the last two days, that I fell asleep at 9pm right after we got on the bus and didn’t wake up until we arrived the next morning at 7am. We spent the day wandering around Resistencia, a nice little town with sculptures everywhere, lots of quirky museums where the staff are really excited to show you around, and some decent cafes.

That night, we took another overnight bus to Salta. This ride was less comfortable but we arrived early and made our way on the public bus system to the small town of Chicoana. At a bakery there, we asked a lady to call our hosts for the weekend: the owners of the hacienda/finca/estancia (ie ranch) Los Los. As a first anniversary treat to ourselves, we splurged to stay the weekend in a luxurious bedroom, to have our meals by the fireplace, and to go horseback riding. We spent lots of time sleeping, reading, and enjoying the wrap-around patio. While we found it incredibly relaxing (especially after two nights on buses), we were a bit disappointed by the food: it was more like fancy plate service and small portions and not like the huge piles of BBQ meat we were expecting. In fact, we didn’t get much meat at all: we had lentil soup (which I guess is a signature dish of that region) and vegetarian ravioli. We did enjoy all the tea and alfajores (a type of cookie with carmel in the middle) though. On our last day in Salta, we wandered around town, seeing some more museums (more Incan mummy children, found in a glacier in northern Argentina…see post about muesum in Arequipa) and churches and eating the last of our Argentine meat. Then we got on a night bus to the Bolivian border.

So its all well and good to hear the fun stories about what we have been doing, but I cant leave out the (retrospectively funny) stories about our trials and mishaps…and Bolivia is the perfect place to have lots of these. Lets start by crossing the border. Although guide books say the border is open 24 hours, we arrived at a freezing cold 6am and had to wait an hour. Because I am in Peru as an American, I had entered Argentina as an American. So I left Argentina as an American. But when I tried to enter Bolivia as a Canadian (to avoid paying the hefty visa tax that we already had to pay for Chris’s entry), they said that I needed to use the same passport that had my exit stamp from Argentina. In thinking about this later, Chris and I realize that it is so easy for me to switch between US and Canadian passports when travelling in North America because those countries don’t track citizen EXIT. I was floored that Bolivia cared about me having left Argentina, but I solved the problem by entering Argentina again on my Canadian passport (luckily this guy just gave me the look: did you parachute out of nowhere into the area between our borders? Because my Canadian passport was void of any stamps) and then leaving again and entering Bolivia in the end as a Canadian. While I agree with the principle behind Bolivia taxing Americans (that Americans charge Bolivians), we just couldn’t afford two visas and I was also annoyed at the border agent for asking for more money than the official channels say we should be paying. One American girl ended up having quite the fight over what she perceived as a “bribe”, but we all eventually got through okay. We met some British guys while waiting for this other American girl to sort herself out (they wouldn’t take her dollar bills because they were creased, people are very concerned about American money looking clean; I spoke more Spanish so tried to help her out) and then we all ran to the bus station. Chris and I were okay with the altitude change again, although the cold was a bit sudden, but our companions were reminding us that we were back in the Andes by huffing up the street. Of course, how could we not be reminded we were back in the Andes, because everyone was suddenly in Andean clothing again, and with Andean style shops and bathrooms and bus stations.

We caught a bus from Villazon, the border town, to Tupiza, where we stopped for gas before entering town and heard a bus driver calling for Uyuni (our next destination). I asked the price and it seemed high to me, so we just went on to the bus station, where we found out that the was the last bus to Uyuni. Luckily they called it for us, and the bus waited while we (and one of the British guys) took a taxi out to meet the bus on the edge of town. So it ended up costing us the same anyway. The bus was a local deal, with people’s luggage (ie parcels of potatoes and boxes of products to sell, like gum) in the aisles, and no shocks, and men drinking in the back and then peeing out of the moving bus. We were the only tourists and it was a hot and bumpy few hours without having had time to eat or pee, but we stopped once on the way and spent some time talking to a little girl whose dad was the driver and mother was the fare collector. Chris and I felt like we knew how to travel in the Andes and were okay with it at this point in our trip…until our bus to Potosi…but keep reading to find out more about that.

So we arrived in Uyuni and found a hotel and booked a three day tour to the Salar de Uyuni (Salt Flats) for the next day. We went to dinner at Minuteman Pizza (a guy from Boston owns the place; it is rightly touted as the best pizza in South America), where we also had breakfast the next day and dinner a few days later before we moved on. We felt no guilt about not jumping back into Andean cuisine. Our trip to Uyuni was fantastic…we were on a tour with the British guy and three French travelers (a couple, and another guy). We stayed in cold hostels and our tour guide didn’t talk much, but our jeep didn’t break down until the third day (a record, I think, for trips to the Salt Flats) and we played cards at night with our companions and the food was good. We hadn’t realized that the region was so geologically diverse, so we saw a lot more than we had anticipated. You could literally day dream and come to yourself 10 minutes later in a completely different landscape. Still we spent lots of time in the jeep, and the trip was more about taking photos and enjoying the view than doing anything active like we usually enjoy. Only the photos can give you an idea of the place…check them out below.

So after our Uyuni tour, we had a night bus to Potosi (this is the night of August 28). We were supposed to leave at 7pm and arrive at 1am, so we had made a hotel reservation and were preparing for a cold six hours on the bus but then a warm eight hours in a bed. No such luck. This is the part where Chris and I started realizing the differences between Peruvian and Bolivian transport, and being grateful for living in Peru. Something happened to our bus (maybe to the wheels?) during our 15 minutes rest stop at 10pm, and so it was 1am before the bus started moving again. We were freezing and cramped, so couldn’t sleep (this was another local bus, no reclining seats, people’s merchandise including big tangles of hangers practically on top of us) and the man behind us decided to spend his 3 hour delay drinking. So he hiccuped from 1-1:30am and then threw-up the rest of the journey. Because of the problem with the wheels, they drove very slowly and stopped often to bang around some more, so we arrived into Potosi at 7am! So much for sleep in a nice bed. We went to our hotel and slept for three hours before getting up to shower because the hot water was being turned off around 11am (and the clerk kept bothering us to shower too, which was a bit weird…she seemed unhappy to have us arrive during the day since our reservations had been for the night).

So we got a bit of sleep and then went to find a tour to the silver mines, our main reason for wanting to stop in this town. We had some food and had a pretty good 3 hour mine tour that included a stop to buy coca leaves (miners don’t eat their whole time while working in the mines, and coca helps stave off appetite) and dynamite for the miners. Our guide knew a lot and patiently answered questions, and the tour wasn’t as
“scary” (hot and claustrophobic) as others had said it would be.

Not willing to trust any more buses, we took a taxi that night to get to Sucre (it was only a couple hours away) where one of my Fulbright friends lent us a whole apartment to stay in! We had a wonderful few days with her, seeing the town (more museums and churches and colonial architecture) and learning more about her fieldwork, eating good food, and we even went to a festival in a nearby town where we watched bull running!

Still scared of the local buses, we decided to fly to La Paz (12 hours on a bus or $160 for a one hour flight…we splurged). We spent a day wandering around La Paz (the Witches Market, a very good tour of a San Franciscan church, a nice dinner) and then spent our anniversary on a tour of Tiwanaku, which is an archaeological site (pre-Incan) a few hours outside of the city. We had dinner that night at a Quebecoise restaurant, and woke up on Wednesday morning (September 3), ready for our 12 hour bus ride back to Cusco.

No such luck again. We got to the bus station early, to be told that “all of Peru” was on strike, so the borders were closed and no company was leaving for Cusco that day. Flights only leave on Tuesdays and Thursday so we were literally told to spend another 24 hours in La Paz! This wouldn’t have been SO bad if I didn’t have a very important fieldwork meeting at 10am on September 4 (the meeting only happens once a month, and I am missing next month because we will be travelling with my parents)! So we decided to take our chances and got on a bus to Copacabana, which is at the Bolivia-Peru border on Lake Titicaca. In getting off the bus in Copacabana we learned that the problem was only with Cusco, so we could grab a bus in an hour to cross the border and get into Puno (on the Peru side of the lake). We had some yummy trout for lunch and then got on another three hour bus to Puno. Border crossing was easy and we decided to take a short tour of the floating Uros islands before getting on our 8pm bus to Cusco. But the bus didn’t leave at 8pm. In fact, it didn’t arrive at the station until 10:30pm and all us stranded La Paz-Cusco travelers were pacing the station in anxiety for getting back to Cusco for our respective work on Thursday morning. The truly tragic part was that we had all jumped on board with the Copacabana-Puno company because we thought they might be our only option, but we had to watch countless other buses leave on time for Cusco as all the companies were all of a sudden back in business. We finally were on our way, and only had to stop half a dozen times for police to confiscate all the products piled in the aisles that a group of women were trying to bring back with them, tax-free. We arrived in Cusco at 7am…just enough time to grab a shower and get to my meeting. Except the fuse for our shower heater had broken, so Chris helped by heating water for me to bathe navy style. Whew. So here we are, back to normal life…at least for a few weeks until my parents arrive and we are off on more (hopefully undelayed) adventures.

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We’ve just had a great couple days at Iguazu Falls, up in northern Argentina where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina all come together.  The Rio Iguazu drops a few hundred feet in about 270 different waterfalls, and puts Niagara to shame.  It really is an amazing place.  They’ve constructed a series of walkways out over the falls and to different vantage points so you get some really incredible views, especially looking straight down into the Devil’s Throat, a narrow slit the river pours into from both sides.  We also took a boat trip up under some of the falls, and got completely soaked, which didn’t change a whole lot for a while because it’s so humid and hot here.  Once we get somewhere we can download photos, we’ll put some up here.

Tonight we’re heading to Resistencia, and from there to Salta where we’re staying on an estancia and having asados (barbecues) and going horseback riding on the pampas.

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Here we are, traveling again! This is the big trip we have been waiting all year to make (and that I have been wanting to make since I first started coming to South America regularly in 2005). We flew last Wednesday to Lima, where I gave a talk at the Instituto del Peru at the Universidad San Martin de Porres. This was my first big presentation of my research in Spanish, and the crowd was small (about 15 people) and friendly, and a great way to start dialoguing about some of the points I want to make. We spent the night in Lima after watching Batman Dark Knight in a MOVIE THEATRE (sorry, we don´t have theatres in Cusco) and then flew to Buenos Aires the next day. We are staying here in the apartment of our friend Sarah, who has been living here doing research for the last month. (This is the same Sarah who came with me to Peru in 2005 when we realized that we both needed to learn Spanish for our respective degrees.) She has been a great hostess and guide, and she started by taking us to the best steak restaurant in town, where we ordered 1.5 steaks, and still had leftovers two days later. Apparently, just one of these monster steaks would have been enough.

On our first full day in the city, Chris and I headed to San Telmo and La Boca, which are the older (“colonial”) parts of town (used to be wealthy areas then were immigrant areas then became touristy areas). We wandered the street markets and looked at lots of jewelry and antiques and other things for sale. We sat in Plaza Dorrego where I had my first “submarine” (hot milk with a chocolate bar to dip in it)…my first of many. That night, we went to Cafe Tortoni, one of the city´s most famous cafes, where we met Sarah and had a light dinner of cheese plates (yay!) and watched a tango show. The show was surprising in that it wasn´t just dancing but also tango music (a singer and a band, alternatively being the focus of the show as much as the dancers). We saw the dancers do about 6 numbers, each time wearing a different beautiful outfit.

On Saturday, we went to another market in Plaza Seranno, and then to the Evita and Modern Art Museums. We had dinner that night with a friend we had met in Cusco in February (who has been living in Buenos Aires for the last few months) at a great Italian restaurant. Sunday, Chris and Sarah and I took a complicated and long city bus ride to the outskirts, to the market in Mataderos. We saw horse tricks and dancing from cowboy days, ate chorizo sandwiches and tamales, and we bought a mate (tea) gourd and Chris paid about 17 dollars for the heaviest butcher knife you´ve ever seen. It felt a lot more “local” than touristy, which probably can be explained by the difficulty of navigating the bus system to get there! It was tons of fun. That night, we had dinner at a sushi restaurant, followed by gelato.

Monday (I think that was yesterday), Chris and I left Sarah to work while we spent hours exploring Recoleta Cemetery. I hadn´t realized it would be the “world´s best example of necropolitan architecture” and we had a blast taking all sorts of photos (to be posted here at a later date). We also got to see the weekend only market (apparently yesterday was a national holiday?) and see the giant flower sculpture whose petals close at sunset. Last night was parillada (bbq) night. We had ribs and tenderloin and chorizo. We are in meat heaven. Oh and I haven´t mentioned the pastries we have been eating every morning or the red wine we have been drinking every night.

Today, Chris and I took a train to Tigre, a vacation town by the coast which opens into this cool delta region of many waterways and islands. We walked around a lot (its pretty quiet during the week) and took a short boat tour along some of the waterways.

Tomorrow we leave very early for Iguazu Falls…we are flying because no one felt like taking an 18 hour bus ride. We´ll have plenty of those coming up soon, as we make our way back from Iguazu to Cusco, through Argentina and Bolivia.

PS I forgot to mention we have been on Buenos Aires time: sleeping in until 10am, eating dinner at 10pm, watching movies (Horton Hears a Who is the funniest!) until late into the night/morning. Its been incredible. Did I mention we like the food?

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This past weekend (July 10-13), we went on a four-day hiking trip to Choquequirao. These Incan ruins are being touted as the next Machu Picchu—you can see this New York Times article about them. But they aren’t as developed (for tourists) yet so you can only get there by foot: with over 4 vertical miles of altitude change throughout the hike.

The first day we got an early start in Cusco leaving on the 6am bus for Ramal de Cachora, but a late start for hiking as we had to take the three hour winding bus (we were a little carsick and the ride, which is on the road to Lima, definitely clinched it for us that we are never going to bus to Lima) and then a 30 minute taxi from Ramal de Cachora to Cachora, and then wait for our mule driver to get everything redistributed weight-wise and get the mules loaded. We were traveling with an American couple that we met here, and although we had decided not to hire a guide (we heard that the route is very straight-forward) we didn’t want to carry our stuff, so a friend here had helped set us up with our mule driver. We started hiking around 11:30am, mostly flat through fields and forests and along a ridge, where we could see this gorgeous range of snow-covered mountains. We arrived at the first lookout point around two hours later, and stopped for lunch and to check out our route. From that lookout, we could see switchbacks all the way down the valley to the river, and Choquequirao in the distance on a mountain on the other side of the valley. We started our descent, from 2900m to 1800m, where the first campsite was located. It was all pretty much downhill switchbacks, with another cool lookout where we saw condors flying right over our heads. We arrived at camp around 5:30pm, after a little less than four hours of downhill hiking. Our nice muler driver had already set up our tents, which was nice considering it was getting dark and not in his job description. The campsite had about six other groups there, and sold drinks and had bathrooms, as well as a lot of animals. The next morning we awoke at 5am to leave at “6 en punto” (6 sharp), but left more like 6:30am. We hiked down the rest of the way to the river Apurimac, which is at 1500m. Then we hiked up and up and up. We reached the second campsite for a little rest around 9am, and then the third campsite at the “top” by 11:30am. The third campsite is at 3000m. We had lunch and rested and set up camp, and then headed off to finish the last hour hike up to the ruins shortly after 1pm. It actually took more like 1.5 hours, and Chris and I were alarmed to reach the ruins at 2:45pm and see that they were only open until 5pm. But it turned out not to matter that much. Although the ruins are supposedly bigger than Machu Picchu, much of the site still is not excavated and it is very spread out. There aren’t the same level of “grand architecture” buildings like in Machu Picchu, but the site is equally impressive as it is perched high on a mountain top with spectacular drops to the Apurimac River. And it is cool to be one of ten tourists visiting the site. Chris and I (our other travel companions were a little ways behind us) wandered in along the terraces without seeing another soul and wondered where we were supposed to pay the entrance fee. We finally came to the Lower Plaza and walked right past the man in the INC vest, sitting on the grass at the side. We walked up the ceremonial hill and were rewarded with a great view of the whole site and a condor swooping past 30m directly below us. When we came down, we realized that the man in the INC vest was collecting entrance money…talk about the opposite of the control exerted over Machu Picchu! We explored the rest of the site, hiking up to the Main Plaza to hide in the top part of the ruin and watch the sun set over Salkantay mountain. We left as it was getting dark and windy (and cold) around 5:30pm. Our mule driver actually came looking for us around 7pm in the dark because he was worried because we weren’t back at camp yet. Day three we insisted on sleeping in and woke up with the campsite to ourselves. We made pancakes, making jealous a group who hiked in early as we were breaking camp. I think we were on our way by 10am and we made good time, getting down from our 3000m back to 1500m at the river within 3 hours. But our knees weren’t thanking us. We had lunch by the river and soaked our feet. Our friends decided to go swimming and Chris and I decided to face the uphill hike first, and then do our relaxing at camp. It was a grueling 300m climb with the sun beating down on us and every step steeper than the last. I think it was the hardest part of the hike for me, because of the sun. Still, we made it in about an hour, and then got to spend a few hours relaxing at camp before dark. We all had more energy and better appetites that night, but knew that we had to get up the earliest of all the next day, because the sun comes out and shines directly on the cliff face we had to hike back up. We were up by 4am and gone by 5:45am. This last upward push wasn’t nearly as bad as the others because of the coolness of the dawn, and us already having made significant progress up the day before. We stopped occasionally to eat snacks and tell stories, and made it back to the first lookout point by 9:30am. Not knowing where else to kill our time, we had lunch (yes, lunch at 9:30am) and took some naps. Around 11am we started the last bit of our hike back, which I also found difficult because of being so exhausted from the previous days and with the sun now out in full force. But it was mostly flat, and we took our time, arriving back in Cachora at 12:30pm. We bought some “cold” beer, after not being able to find any restaurants, and hung out in the main plaza for a few hours. Everything about the trip had gone smoothly and according to plan, including the food we had packed and consumed, EXCEPT that we really over-estimated how long we would be hiking each day. As a result, our bus tickets back to Cusco weren’t until 7pm, so we had lots of time to kill. Not being able to find anyone to serve us in town, we cooked our last package of pasta on the roadside in front of our mule driver’s house at around 4:30pm. Luckily, our taxi driver showed up reasonably on time to take us back to Ramal de Cachora, and we waited by the side of the highway for only an hour, wearing 4 layers because now we were back at 3600m. Our bus was on time (ish) and here we are, trying to get our leg muscles to recuperate after washing four days worth of dust off our tired bodies. Back to regular life!

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here we will talk about Inti Raymi.

Here’s a little video of our time on the Apurimac River near Cusco. We arranged to have a 4 day private trip, rowing our own boats. My dad Joe and stepmom Jane had arrived in Cusco a few days before, so it was just the four of us and four guides. This was definitely the biggest water any of us had run, and the rating system seems a bit looser down here, so the 5+ rapids we ran would have definitely been 6’s in the States (the standard rating scale for rapids is 1-6 from least to most difficult/dangerous). The video looks a lot more tame than it really was, because this was really powerful water. Several of the rapids the guides wouldn’t let us, or anyone else, run because of the danger involved, but we did convince the head guide to let us run Toothache with him, a difficult 5+, which Aviva managed to do part of standing on her head as you can see at the beginning of the video. All in all it was a fantastic trip and we had a great time, and the owner/head guide wants me to come back and guide for them later this season as they’re really busy, so there might be more videos in the future.

Sorry it has been so long since we updated! We got back to Cusco at the end of May and jumped happily back into our everyday lives. I made some good progress on research and Chris worked at putting the finishing touches on our next weeks’ itinerary. Joe and Jane (Chris’s dad and stepmom) arrived on June 12 and we spent a few days hanging around Cusco while they acclimatized. I got to keep up with a bit more research and we celebrated Chris’s 26th birthday early with some of our local friends at a collective party meant to be for four people’s birthdays. On June 16, we left for our river adventure, which Chris describes in the above post (see Apurimac Rafting post), where you can also see the video which the guiding company made for us. We arrived back in Cusco on June 19 (Happy Birthday Chris!), exhausted and a little sick, but pleased with our experience.

My brother (Kal) arrived on June 21, but he didn’t get to spend his first days taking it easy. We were immediately off on the Sunday to visit the ruins and market of Pisaq, and from there we headed to Calca, another Sacred Valley town. We stayed for an afternoon, night, and the following day in Calca, at my friend’s Cultural House, where we learned lots about Andean cosmovision, rituals, music, and traditional medicine. We met a local Andean paqo (priest) who did an offering ceremony for us, and we got to eat delicious Pachamanqa (a meal prepared by burying food in a collapsed earthen oven; ours had four types of meat—alpaca, cuy (guinea pig), chicken, and beef—as well as countless types of potatoes, plantains, salads, and sauces). We also had an Andean music concert, and learned how to diagnose ourselves using eggs. We highly recommend one of their workshops to anyone coming to Peru and wanting to learn more about where they are visiting. We plan on taking my parents when they come visit in September.

We got back to Cusco in time for the Inti Raymi celebration on June 24th. It deserves its own post so see above (see Inti Raymi post). We went out that night to celebrate Chris’s birthday again, at a nice wine bar restaurant with unremarkable service but good food. Then Kal and I headed off on a three day hike through a portion of the cloud forest to reach Aguas Calientes, the town below Machu Picchu. We saw lots of tea and coffee plants, not to mention peppers, pineapples, roosters, and lots of tall grasses that made hiking a bit difficult as you couldn’t tell where the cliffside was. We also went to the hot springs at Santa Teresa, although we just dipped our feet. Meanwhile, Chris and Joe and Jane headed off to do their own Sacred Valley tour (Chinchero, Moray, Salinas, Ollantaytambo) and met up with us on June 27th. They climbed the mountain Putucusi that day, while Kal and I limped (well, Kal walked and I limped: I had rolled my ankle the day before) down the train tracks for our last day of hiking. We all went up to Machu Picchu on June 28th to spend the day seeing the ruins and hiking the mountain Wayna Picchu. We got back to Cusco late that night.

Joe and Jane spent their last day in Cusco seeing the ruins of Tambomachay and Q’enqo, while Kal and I spent some extra time recuperating and preparing for our next trip: to the jungle. We went out that night to the most expensive hotel in Cusco for a drink, and then to another nice restaurant for a final dinner. Joe and Jane made it back to Portland safely, while Kal and I left for Paucartambo with my biologist friend who does research on beetles at different cloud forest elevations. The four of us (including her assistant), caught a bus to Aojanaco, where we hung out for a few hours at the Manu Park guard’s station, waiting for someone to show up. When they did finally show up, they told us that we couldn’t stay as we had planned because they had “special visitors”. So we caught a taxi to Wayqecha, a really nice biology research station at around 2900m. We spent two nights there, catching beetles by headlamp gleam, hiking around to pick up beetle traps, and eating good food. On Wednesday (July 2), we spent four hours by the side of the road, playing variety puzzle games and waiting for some sort of transportation. We finally were able to flag down a truck, and we rode in the back (quite bumpy!) until San Pedro (1500m), where Kal and I had reservations that night at Cock of the Rock Lodge. (We left our friends at their third research site, further up the road.) We went on a hike and saw lots of monkeys, and the next day we awoke early to see the Cock of the Rock birds doing impressive territorial displays. Then we waited on the side of the road again, this time for only an hour, before catching a ride back up the road to Rocotal, meeting up with our friends at their fourth site. We had lunch and did some walking around with them, seeing the landslide that had crippled traffic for days last rainy season. Then we caught a ride back to Cusco (and the people we drove with had a monkey in a backpack…which is sad news for the monkey but good news for Kal who really wanted to hold one during his time in the “jungle”). We got home a day early (July 3), which was lucky because the shack at Rocotal wasn’t quite big enough for four people. Kal and Chris spent the next few days shopping, and I did some work. Unfortunately, Kal had to leave early this past Monday, because of a national strike going on today (Wednesday) that threatened to paralyze the airports.

So that’s our last few weeks…we posted photos here from Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu and jungle trips. See the other posts for photos/video from the Apurimac and Inti Raymi trips.

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