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10 8th, 2008
10 8th, 2008
07 9th, 2008
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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07 9th, 2008
here we will talk about Inti Raymi.
07 4th, 2008
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.
07 3rd, 2008
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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03 29th, 2008
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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01 21st, 2008
A friend asked if we could put some “everyday” pictures on our website to give you all a feel for our surroundings. So, here they are. Also see posts such as Our apartment and We’ve moved to Peru, and Christmas Travels around Cusco and the Sacred Valley for shots of the city and our home. (Sorry no grocery store photos!)
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01 18th, 2008
Chris was invited in early December to give a talk at a conference on 3D and visual effects technologies, put on by the local university here. Although he was first told that he would be speaking in front of 500 people in Spanish for an hour, and he had only 12 days to prepare a presentation, they ended up moving the conference to January 17-20. With a sigh of relief, we promptly got caught up in all our holidays travels, so we got back to Cusco last Sunday (January 13th), with only a few days left for him to prepare. Luckily he had written and translated about 2/3 of his presentation, and was set to spend the week working on his slides and the other 1/3. That was until we received a phone call on Sunday night that they wanted Chris to come to a press conference on Monday morning. And so it began. A press conference and three tv interviews—it turned into quite the publicity circuit. The conference organizers were really pushing his name and credits when trying to get people to come to the conference. They said that if it is a success, they want Chris to put together a proposal to teach a few different classes at the university. He is thinking right now of doing a two-month introduction to Maya in February and March, then doing more intermediate and advanced stuff when we come back at the end of May. We’ll see.
The press conference was a bit overwhelming, since they said his name every other sentence and he had no idea what they were saying about him. He sat in this big throne next to the university president and conference organizers and I sat off to the side and supplied him with words every once in a while. He ended up explaining to the audience what movies he had worked on and what he would talk about at the conference. Afterwards, a bunch of reporters took statements from him (basically wanting him to invite people to the conference) and one took a video of me answering questions about his motives for being in Peru (that was an awkward question to field, since the university is making it sound like he is here just for them…INVITADO CHRIS PAUL!!!!).
The first tv spot on Monday night was a little rushed, but Chris did really well and they showed his tank and some of his other work too. (Our friend Mario sat next to him and helped him understand the fast-talking tv host.) Besides Chris, they have been interviewing the conference organizer and another invited guest from a Lima 3D company called Peru3D.
Tuesday’s spots were slightly more difficult because Mario couldn’t be there. The early one was hard because they asked such vague and general questions that Chris had trouble coming up with interesting answers (even in English). That was about five minutes. The second spot was much better: a longer interview with a nicer host. They showed Chris’s reel in full and gave him an opportunity to explain it (which he had prepared notes for in Spanish). And they asked everyone for general words and Chris had time to look to me for guidance on what to say while the other two were answering. He froze a bit at the end, but it came off well overall.
At the conference on Thursday there were only about 150 people, but Chris’s talk got such good reactions (he fielded about 10 audience questions and then had about 4 people take their pictures with him), that he was asked to give the same talk again on Friday. They rearranged the schedule for him to speak again, and said that they were sure more people would now come when the word was out by word of mouth. He was awesome: he had them clapping for him from the beginning when he asked them to be patient with his Spanish, and everyone seemed to enjoy the slides and film clips he showed.
Go to this website and click on the DIGITAL RAYMI link (ver notas) and see how they have advertised Chris (unfortunately, all the press misspells his name as Christ).
PS: And from this link, you can see the commercial work that he did as a result of some contacts he made at this conference.
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01 18th, 2008
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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