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01 18th, 2008
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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01 18th, 2008
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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01 17th, 2008
In the second week of December, one of the other volunteers at the center I work at had the idea to bake loads of cookies to sell in the streets for Christmas. Coinciding with our excitement about having an oven, she and I spearheaded buying ingredients and throwing several baking parties at our house. Our poor oven held its own, although since there are just three general settings (and no temperatures), it was a bit of guesswork at the beginning. We used up a whole balloon of gas in 9 days (there are supposed to last for months), but I guess that is what happens when you have the oven on for four hours a night! It was fun having other volunteers over, and everyone got into the spirit, making their favorite kind of cookies from their country. We had no-bake chocolate peanut butter cookies, regular chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies from Denmark, coconut cookies from Germany, banana bread…we all subsisted off of broken cookies for a while, but we also sold a few thousand cookies and made a significant amount of money for the center.
Every year in Cusco on December 24 there is a big fair called Santurantikuy that is held in the main plaza. People come from all over Peru to sell handicrafts, food, and general supplies. Many of the volunteers also dressed up that day and went out into the Plaza selling cookies. The goal of the sales was not only to have fun and make a bit of money, but also to promote the project and the restaurant that is attached to the project. In that we were also really successful: the restaurant reported making three times the amount of money it usually makes in the weeks following our efforts.
The Christmas season also saw us attending tons of parties. Although, many of these parties were also “workâ€: they were parties that we were throwing for the kids in the project. We were also preparing the kids to do presentations on what they had been learning about December holidays around the world. One group presented on Hanukkah, another on Chinese New Year, another on Pongal (Hindu), another on Christmas in Russia. We had a series of events at the restaurant and at the school where they presented their plays and we gave them treats, gifts, and clothing. We also had a party for the volunteers, and we attended a party for another friend’s project. We did a gift exchange and we received some movies and candy and a beautiful scarf.
As some side notes: Sometime in the middle of December, we went to a futbol game, where we got poured on! There are photos from that attached to this post too. Also some photos from New Year’s Eve, where a bunch of us went to the Plaza and tried to avoid getting hit by fireworks.
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01 17th, 2008
We moved into our new apartment on Friday, December 7. The move turned out to be a lot less painless than we expected, because when we arrived in the morning to drop our stuff at our friend’s house (we have friends living in the same complex! Well, but they are leaving this Saturday…), our landlord was actually ready for us to move in. There were only a few things to be concerned about (an apparent leak in the ceiling, oven light not working, etc) and he was very responsive with saying he would fix everything on our schedule. We really like our new place! We have a big fridge and an oven with four gas burners (ovens are pretty rare in Cusco; most people just have a two-burner camp-stove deal), and lots of counter space in the kitchen. There are two large skylights in the roof, so because the apartment is loft style, the whole place gets plenty of light. The views from the upstairs are really good too (we are up in a district called Nueva Alta, so up on a hill above the city center, but only a five minute walk away from the main plaza). Although the furniture is all a little delicate, there is plenty of it so it’s easy to have people over. We had internet and a phone line installed, and we bought a bit of extra furniture (it was already furnished)—like a desk and an extra bookshelf for clothes—which makes it really comfortable for us to live and work in. We have two bedrooms, so we have an extra two beds for company (although Kathie and Silas can attest to our pillows not being the greatest!) and an office area separate from our bedroom. The shower actually has hot water (if you work it right), although it floods sometimes. The ceilings are really low upstairs, so that has been a bit of a problem (one week, Aviva hit her head five separate times, pretty hard), but mostly it has just taken some getting used to. We do describe our place as “delicateâ€â€¦the first time we had more than 5 people in the kitchen (see next post about Cookies), a volunteer put a hole in the floor. But, generally it’s a great place, very conveniently located, and we are really happy here.
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01 17th, 2008
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!
11 28th, 2007
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.
11 16th, 2007
Last night it rained all night long. Luckily it did not rain on us…in fact it was just starting to drizzle when we got home around 10pm. But it poured for the rest of the night, and I had a hard time sleeping because of the racket it was making on the roof. I’ve never seen (heard) it rain so long in Cusco. We must be getting more into that rainy season everyone talks about for December.
It feels like it has been a long week, although our routine has not changed much. We did indeed spend last weekend running errands or watching movies bought at the black market (Molino), but we also got to go out a few nights and make some friends. We both went to the South American Explorers Club pub-quiz night last Thursday (Nov 8th) and although it wasn’ t that busy, we met a few people and had a good dinner of popcorn and beer/wine. Then Chris went to their poker night on Friday while I went out (after Quechua classes–the other official language here, from Incan times) with some volunteers from the center where I am working. We went out again on Saturday night for yummy Japanese food. Ah, to have a good sushi place to go to…it made us very happy.
This week I have been teaching the kids in my class about Hinduism (part of the curriculum at this particular center). First we talked about the diversity of religions in the world, then we learned a bit of specifics about India. We also went over the continents again, because I guess education on the outside world is a bit lacking in regular school curricula. Here they teach South and North America as one continent. All the volunteers seem to think this is very weird, but I think they are ahead of the curve with a “Las Americas” perspective (which Latin American/Latino Studies in the US is working towards). This afternoon, the kids will perform their version of a Bollywood music video. I cant wait.
11 9th, 2007
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.
11 7th, 2007
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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