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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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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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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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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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 “work”: 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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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 “delicate”…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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