This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Peru, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
La Luna de Miel Larga
Chris and Aviva's travels through South America and beyond
About
Chris and Aviva got married in September of 2007 and immediately abandoned everything they know to move to Cuzco, Peru for a little over a year. Aviva is conducting her fieldwork towards her PhD in anthropology and Chris is bumming around shooting some short films and trying to look busy.
June-July Visitors and Travels
July 3rd, 2008 by AvivaSorry 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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