La Luna de Miel Larga

We’re on the tail-end of a crazybusy trip encompassing a large section of the west coast of North America.  We returned to the States April 15th, flying into the utterly exhausting LAX on separate flights after parting ways in Lima the night before.  I picked up a rental car and drove around a bit waiting for Aviva to arrive, then we headed north to Santa Barbara to visit my sister Hannah and her family for the night.  It was really just a break on our longer road-trip up to San Francisco, where we spent Passover with Aviva’s family and visited with a lot of old friends for a week or so.  Then it was back down to LA to attend the fabulous wedding of Aviva’s cousin Alex and his bride Rebecca.  The whole weekend was fantastic, and we had a great time seeing everyone, catching up, and partying hard.

Leaving LA for what would hopefully be the last time, we drove back up to Santa Barbara with Aviva’s folks, this time staying for a few days to have a proper visit with Hannah, Chris, and the kids.  Then it was back up to San Francisco for another visit with friends and family before flying up to Portland to spend time with my parents.  After a few days, Aviva and I drove up to Vancouver, BC, for a couple of days of reunions with friends and old professors.  Then back down to Seattle/Tacoma to visit friends and go to my brother’s college graduation weekend.

This last week has just been wrapping up last-minute errands here in Portland before we head back to Peru for another 6 months.  That’s about it for the past 6 weeks or so, with a lot of details missing, but once we get our photos organized we might have some more to tell.  But we also have some pretty exciting stuff coming up in the next few weeks, not to mention the rest of our time in Peru, so we’ll keep you posted (hopefully with a bit more regularity)

Cheers,
Chris

Coming soon (ish)

Although the end of January was relatively quiet, work really took off again at the beginning of February, with the reopening of the original center I was working at and my beginning work with a second center. We started having a lot of social dates too, but unfortunately right around Valentine’s Day, we both got sick for the first time! We spent about four days in bed with stomach flu-like symptoms, but it was probably from something we ate and not necessarily from a virus. We recovered and started going to Pub Quiz and Poker nights regularly (Chris more at the latter than I). Two weeks later, I got sick again and this time, went to a doctor to be tested for parasites. It turned out that it was just the same bacterial stuff from the middle of the month, but since I am now more like a “local”, I had to take a longer dose of medicine than the standard traveler’s dosage. Still, I bought a hot water bottle which became my new best friend to deal with the stomach pains.

Early February was Carnival (lots of kids out of school for summer break, throwing water balloons at you wherever you go), and I went with a local friend to visit her brother and sister-in-law’s house in Calca, which is in the Sacred Valley. The first few photos on this post are of their grounds and home, and the fifth one is of the town’s beauty pageant, part of the Carnival festivities. The tree on the left in the photo, with all the stuff hanging on its branches, is planted each year anew, and during Carnival people dance around the tree and then cut it down, treating it like a piñata as everyone runs to gather what they can from the fallen tree. Unfortunately I did not stay late enough to see this part. The seventh photo is of my friend’s super cute niece (who seemed to take to me, probably for my blond hair, which makes me look more like her Swiss mother than many of the other women around).

At the end of February, we hosted an Oscar’s party at our house where we made some delicious nachoes (photos 8 and 9). In the time leading up to the Oscar’s, Chris bought almost every movie that had been nominated (at the black market) and we watched our way through most of them. Naturally then, Chris won the Oscar betting pool we had, with 14 out of 24 right answers).

Early March was pretty quiet, with lots of research work and some parties on the weekends. In mid-March, Chris’s friend from film school (Guy) came out to visit us. I stayed in Cusco and worked, but the boys took off for a Machu Picchu trip the first week and then for a jungle trip the second week. Guy’s visit coincided with Semana Santa (the week leading up to Easter), and on his first day in Cusco, we helped the locals celebrate Dia de Señor de los Temblores (Day for the Lord of the Earthquakes, also known as “black Jesus” because of the color of the wood of the icon). The story goes, that back in the 18th century there was a big earthquake in Cusco and the priests took this particular icon out of the church and the earthquake stopped. He has been Cusco’s patron saint ever since, and on “his day”, there is a long morning mass (we went to about an hour of it) and then he is taken out and paraded around the city for a few hours. He returns to the Catedral amid a huge crowd of devotees (see photos 10-24, but particularly photos 15-24 to see how the crowd grew…I don’t know if I can remember ever being somewhere with so many people…it was even more packed than New Year’s Eve in the Plaza (see Cookies and Parties post)). Of course, Dia de Señor de los Temblores was also St Patricks Day, so we had to celebrate that holiday too (see photo 25).

For Easter, I went back to Calca, but this time with Guy and Chris in tow. We had a relaxing day of hiking and eating and playing Andean musical instruments and playing with my friend’s niece. Guy left at the end of March, and so did I: him for the US and I for Quito, Ecuador (see Quito post).

PS: Chris and Guy took some awesome photos of their travels with Guy’s digital SLR (Chris now wants one). Hopefully Chris will get a chance to wade through the over 3000 photos and put some up on this website.

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After recovering from New Years Eve and seeing a bit of the Sacred Valley in the Cusco area (see Christmas Travels around Cusco and the Sacred Valley post), we hopped on a night bus down to Arequipa to check out the Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world (well, actually another nearby canyon is a couple hundred feet deeper, but they’re both twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, so you get the idea). We stayed in Arequipa at a really helpful hotel named La Casa de Mi Abuela (My Grandmother’s House) who also run a travel agency through which we booked a Colca Canyon tour. We had a day to kill in Arequipa, so we went to the local university museum where they have one of the Incan ice mummies on display (usually Juanita, but we saw Sarita), then we spent a lot of time wandering around a local monastery which was absolutely huge and beautiful.The next morning we headed off to the Colca Canyon, passing over the mountains and hitting the highest point so far in Peru, at around 4800 meters. At the pass, we stopped to make an offering to the mountain gods (done with three perfect coca leaves upon which you pile stones). We were chewing coca leaves on the way up to the pass, to help with the altitude. On the drive we saw a lot of vicuñas, which are a wild camelid which lives at high altitudes and has the finest fur of all the camelids, going for around $500/kilo. In the Colca Canyon we stayed at a nice hotel in a very small local town (Coporaque), going on a quick group hike and visiting the nearby hot springs on our first evening. The next morning we took a hike up to some pre-Incan tombs, where we found a lot of pottery shards scattered around among the bodies and skeletons that had been pulled out of the tombs. We also spent some time in the afternoon in Chivay, the capital of the Canyon and a town about 8 km from Coporaque.

The next day we joined back up with a tour and headed to see the condors soaring through the canyon at the famous Cruz del Condor. Of course, when we got to the lookout, there was so much fog we could barely see 20 ft. We headed back to another lookout to wait and see if any condors would show up, but after an hour or so with no appearances we started the long ride back to Arequipa for one last day before Kathie and Silas had to catch their plane back to Lima, and Chris and Aviva headed down to Chile.

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NOTE: Although this post says authored by Aviva, we actually wrote the post together, hence the switching of who “we” refers to depending on whose adventures the paragraph documents.

One of the things Silas wanted to do when he got down here was a trek to Machu Picchu, rather than just taking the train there. The most famous Inca Trail was pretty booked up around Christmas/New Years, so Chris and Silas decided to do the Salkantay trail, which is a bit more strenuous and adventurous than the traditional Inca Trail. After a bit of miscommunication with the trek organizer, we left at about 3 AM on the 27th of December, taking a treacherous van ride up a mountain to the first campsite. We had skipped the first day of the trek because of timing issues, so we ended up meeting the rest of the group that first morning before heading up to the Salkantay pass. From around 3800 m.a.s.l. we climbed a ridiculously difficult trail up to about 4650 m (around 15,250 ft). Despite Chris having lived in Cusco for 3 months and Silas being a college-level football player, we had to stop and breathe every few minutes. Finally making it to the pass, we headed down to the cloud forest on the other side of the mountains, dropping over a mile in altitude in a few hours. We immediately passed out once we got to our campsite, only getting up to eat dinner for a few minutes.

The next morning we hiked for several more hours before taking another gravity-defying bus to the small town of Santa Teresa, where we watched a cow get slaughtered across the road from our campsite, and soaked our aches and pains in the local hotsprings. The next morning we had to cross the raging torrent that was the Urubamba river at flood level in a tiny little basket dangling from a cable. We hiked to the local hydroelectric station, passing several rivers pouring straight out of the side of mountains (think of the end of The Temple of Doom) and then hiked along the train tracks to Aguas Calientes.

Kathie and Aviva got into Aguas Calientes earlier in the day (on December 29th) and checked into a nice hotel. Then we went to hike up the mountain of Putucusi before meeting the boys in town. Putucusi is a hard hike, mostly stairs and these giant ladders that stretch in a row (there were 7 different ladders, with, we think Kathie counted, 147 steps in one stretch of 4 ladders). It is an especially hard hike because you always think you are almost at the top, and then you come over the rise and there is another uphill stretch on a piece of the mountain you couldn’t see from your previous hiking trail. The people at the hotel told us it would take an hour, and when we had been going about 70 minutes and we met a couple who told us that it would be another 40 minutes, we laughed at them. But they were right, and it took us about two hours total to submit, and another hour to get down. It was getting late when we got to the top, but there is a fabulous view across the valley to the mountain Machu Picchu is on. Our photos didn’t turn out that great because the sun was setting right over it, but it was rewarding just to have made it up. We couldn’t linger too long, especially since Chris had called us that he and Silas had gotten to town around 90 minutes into our hike up. We raced the sun down, and got into Aguas Calientes just as it was getting dark.

We had a celebratory dinner all together, where our plates came with sculptures of the animals we were eating (see photo below).

The next day we all headed up to Machu Picchu on the bus, to meet up with Chris and Silas’s tour group and see the sights. When we first got up there, the whole place was absolutely socked in with clouds/fog, so we could see almost nothing, but by the time the rest of the group arrived the fog had started to burn off and we got some pretty spectacular views of the whole site. We wandered around a bit after the tour ended, taking a look at the Inca Drawbridge and some other areas that don’t get visited a whole lot. We headed back down to Aguas Calientes in the early afternoon and spent the rest of the day bumming around the town, something not recommended. Chris and Silas’s train tickets were supposed to arrive on the mid-day train from Cusco, and when they didn’t show up we started to get pretty concerned about the boys getting back to Cusco in time for New Years. The next morning, Aviva and Kathie headed back to Cusco on the morning train, leaving the boys biting their fingernails and getting really nervous until their tickets finally showed up an hour or so before they were supposed to leave. Everyone got back to Cusco safe and sound in the end, though, and it was a really great experience if you ignore all the random incompetence associated with getting stuff done in Peru.

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Kathie and Silas arrived early on December 24 and recovered quickly from jet lag and the altitude change. We all spent some time shopping at Santurantikuy (see Cookies and Parties post) and then had a quiet Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at home. We made a turkey and stuffing, and played Settlers of Catan most of the day. On the 26th, we got a late start as we were trying to finalize trekking plans for Chris and Silas, but by mid-afternoon we had taken a taxi up to Tambomachay, one of the Incan ruins above the city. The site used to be a waterworks, and it is closely located to another site called Puka Pukara, which used to be a temple and way-post fort/hunting lodge. From these two sites, we walked down to Q’engo, which also had some temple functions. The walk from there back to Cusco took another hour, and we took a short cut down a long set up steps. In total, we were hiking for about 4 hours or 9 km. We missed the big ruins of Sacsayhuaman, and although we had planned to get back to them later in the week, we ran out of time.

Chris and Silas left on the 27th for their three day hike over the pass of Salkantay (see Salkantay and Machu Picchu post) and Kathie and Aviva spent some extra time in Cusco (at the Precolumbian Art museum and around San Blas) and then headed to the town of Ollantaytambo. We spent the night (28th) there and the days exploring the ruins (a fortress where the Incas made one of their last stands against the Spanish). Then we took a train to Aguas Calientes, the town below Machu Picchu.

We spent the afternoon hiking, met up with the boys in the evening, and then spent the next day together at Machu Picchu (see Salkantay and Machu Picchu post), and had to spend an extra night in Aguas Calientes because of train ticket complications. In the end, we still had to split up to take the train home (on the 31st), with the girls getting in about five hours earlier than the boys. We all made it in time for New Years though, and we had a nice dinner at a restaurant called Incanto. New Years Day was quiet; we had some friends over for tea and coffee. January 2nd, Chris took Kathie and Silas to the Korikancha (the Temple of the Sun) and to the artesanal market. January 3rd was another quiet day at home and the next day we headed out to explore more of the Sacred Valley. We went to the sites of Moray (an agricultural site where they experimented with planting at different altitudes/temperature zones) and Salinas (salt flats set into a valley, but unfortunately a bit muddy from all the rain). On Saturday, the 5th, we ran some errands, explored more of Cusco, and packed for Arequipa. We took a night bus down there on Saturday night.

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Whew, time is flying by, and we have not updated our blog for over 6 weeks! Instead of writing one long post with every detail, we are going to post several different summaries of what we have been up to, and that way we can include some pictures with each post too. So our lives in a nutshell:

• Early December, we moved to our new apartment! (“Our apartment” post)
• Christmas season in Cusco was very hectic, both with work and parties. (“Cookies and Parties” post)
• Kathie and Silas (Chris’s mom and brother) came to visit from December 24 until January 10. With them we traveled around the Sacred Valley, to Salkantay and Machu Picchu, and to Arequipa and the Colca Canyon in the south. (“Christmas and Travels around Cusco and the Sacred Valley” post, “Salkantay and Machu Picchu” post, and “Arequipa and the Colca Canyon” post)
• Chris has been working all this week on a conference he presented at on Thursday. There has been publicity and hype galore. (“Digital Raymi” post)

See the following posts for more information!

We got back yesterday from five days in Lima, where we had Thanksgiving lunch on Friday and presentations on Monday with the Fulbright Commission.

We spent Thursday afternoon running back and forth to the computer store that will send Chris’s busted power cord to the U.S. and then send us a replacement cord. Everyone keep your fingers crossed on this one! We also ended up at a grocery store that looks like Whole Foods, where we drooled over the cheese selection but just had to buy New Zealand cheddar because that’s what I was really craving. (Its hard to get cheese variety here.) We were all set to have a dinner of bread and cheese when some other Fulbright fellows knocked on our door and invited us out to dinner with them. Friday we met more of the fellows at the lunch, but were surprised by how fancy the meal was and how many other random people there were: dignitaries from the embassy, past Peruvian fellows, business people somehow affiliated with the Commission. Friday afternoon we spent hanging out and then out to dinner.

Saturday we had planned to travel but got a late start so instead went to the Anthropology Museum and to see a movie (Beowulf). Saturday night we had dinner at an overpriced Mexican restaurant but we were pleasantly surprised to get chips before our meal (we are having trouble finding tortilla chips, or tortillas at all for that matter). Sunday we went to the Plaza de Armas (the main plaza) and went on a tour of a church with catacombs and to the Inquisition museum.

Monday was five hours of presentations on our various research, with discussants from anthropology, mining, and economics. The afternoon was again spent hanging out and eating dinner with all the other fellows.

We are happy to report that returning to altitude after only being gone five days was uneventful. We have a meeting today to sign a contract for our new apartment…we are supposed to be moving next Friday.

So our new apartment isn’t quite all it was cracked up to be. On Wednesday, while I was peacefully washing my hands, the sink in the bathroom proceeded to fall off the wall, breaking all the attendant plumbing and spilling nasty black gunky water everywhere. Luckily the sink itself didn’t break, so it was a pretty easy repair once the landlord finally got around to fixing it this morning. But to be fair, he probably couldn’t find anyone to come fix it yesterday as it was national strike day of the week or something. Prices have been going up across the board here, and the US $ doing so poorly isn’t helping as a large chunk of the economy runs on the US dollar, at least here in Cuzco. So people across the country took to the streets yesterday to get the government to do something about the inflation. There were marches, and on my way to school in the morning I was lucky enough to run into an impromptu roadblock thrown up by some yahoos with a bunch of extra tires to burn and bottles to break. Unfortunately I forgot my camera that morning, so no pictures, but it seems like it must be a pretty common occurrence judging by the reaction of motorists and the police, so hopefully we’ll see some more civil disturbance soon (fingers crossed).

This weekend will be the first we have to do touristy stuff, as we won’t be looking for an apartment to live in or moving at all. We anticipate lots of sleeping in and maybe a day trip or two to see some sights that we’ve been neglecting. Or we might just go to the black market and load up on DVDs.

We have finally found a bit of time to work on our website. While this used to be just our wedding website, we decided to make it more multi-purpose and use it as a type of blog for our time in Peru too. You can still connect to the wedding part of the site (where there are links to photos!), and we have also added a section on our honeymoon in Paris and parts of Turkey.

As far as settling into Peru goes, we arrived in Lima on October 17th, without our luggage (as expected, since we had sent it to connect between different airlines and without a complete list of stop-over and flight connections). Luckily it arrived later the next day so we had clean clothes to wear to our embassy security briefing. We arrived in Cusco on Saturday, October 20th, and spent the weekend adjusting to the altitude. We are at 12,000 feet/3,000 meters, and the headaches seemed to last longer into the weekend than Aviva remembers from past trips. We started Spanish classes on the Monday, and have been spending our time since then looking for a place to live, meeting new people and doing some volunteering, buying things like hangers and slippers, and watching episodes of Lost (that’s right, Chris got Aviva addicted over our honeymoon).

On the place to live front, we found a place that we like (close to the center, roomy and with nice sun, fully furnished also with kitchen stuff so we have very little to actually buy, even has an oven and a fridge), but…it is not available until December. So we are now renting a much smaller bachelor-type place, which will suffice until we can get into the bigger place in December. We have really enjoyed living with our host family (same one that Aviva has lived with in 2005 and 2006), but it is also nice to have our own space and be closer to the center. No address to speak of yet, but we both now have our cell phones set up (so email us if you want the numbers!). Of course email and skype are the best ways to communicate with us, so we hope to hear from you soon!

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