on top of the world

my sister and i just got back from a weekend in aguas calientes/machu picchu. we took the train up on saturday and came back yesterday. it was kind of a crazy weekend, at least the first day, since our train broke down on the way up, which delayed us about an hour. and right when we were finishing lunch in town and planning to return to our hostel to go to the hot springs (there are hot springs in aguas calientes, hence the name which means hot water), it started pouring buckets of cold rain, so no hot springs for us. then we woke up on sunday morning, set for our day at machu picchu, only to find the water in our hostel didn't work at all, so there were no showers to be had or toilets to be flushed. d'oh.

BUT

we had decided to try to climb wayna picchu, which is the mountain to the north of the ruins of machu picchu (we were going to tour machu picchu after the climb). they only allow 400 people up each day, so we were awake at 4:30 am, on a bus up the mountain by 5:45 and in line by 6:30. we got in and it was seriously amazing!!

the line to climb THIS

it was a challenging climb
(especially for me, who hasn't had a gym membership since august and has been enjoying the culinary delights and drinks of peru for the past three weeks)
it took us a little under an hour each way

but we made it


and it was worth it - fantastic to be on top of the world!





machu picchu looks tiny, doesn't it?


my sister, jamie, with our canadian hiking buddies, virgil and nicki

so that was one of the highlights of my weekend. the train ride back also ranked pretty high, but more on that later. (let me just say there was a fashion show involved...) and i will get back to the jungle at some point, too, fear not.

My summer at camp - I mean, my Amazon jungle tour

Hi all
I'm back in Cusco with my sister. Sorry I have been so quiet, but haven't had much internet connection in the jungle. Hee hee. Anyway, here's the intro to my weeklong jungle trip. I will post more specifics about my activities and impressions of jungle culture in the next few days.
- H

What a crazy week I had in the jungle! I arrived in Iquitos on Sunday and was whisked off to a motorboat that took me an hour and a half down the Amazon River to the lodge where I would begin my jungle tour.

The Amazon is huge. I mean, of course it’s one of the longest rivers in the world (there are debates as to whether the longest is the Amazon or the Nile), but it’s ridiculously wide, too, at least to me someone who grew up on the West coast of the US where the big rivers probably aren’t even a third as wide as the Amazon (I’m guessing).

Pretty wide, huh?

The sun was about an hour from setting and there were lots of white puffy clouds that slowly turned orange and pink. It was truly fantastic.

On the boat ride, I started thinking about the fact that I was visiting the rainforest, a dream of mine since I was eight years old reading the kid’s version of the National Geographic magazine and obsessing over tree frogs and the environment. So we’re speeding downriver and I start to think about how wild the jungle really is. Anything can happen there, more so than at home, where life is predictable. Maybe because I keep it predictable, or maybe because routine just keeps it that way. But I could sense there would be an openness, a freedom in the jungle that I really looked forward to, no matter what came my way. (Though, luckily, I did not get bitten by anything worse than a mosquito, I didn’t get attacked by jaguars and I didn’t get any bad parasites from the water - I hope). But I fell in love with it. I haven’t slept as well as I didn’t when I fell asleep to the sounds of insects, frogs, nocturnal birds and the rain (because it is, after all, a rainforest, which means always expect rain). I didn’t even mind the cold showers. I felt at home with the green things all around me, the ferns and mosses, which reminded me of Seattle and the Olympic National Rainforest. There was something about arriving there that was like coming home, even though nothing was really familiar.

I had booked a tour that took me to three different lodges in seven nights. The first two nights, I was in a lodge where all of the buildings were open air (bar and dining area were screened in, everything else was not) and covered in thatched roofs. There was very minimal electricity that they only used for the fans, the blender at the bar and the power cords for charging camera batteries. My room was open - no individual ceiling, no window, no screen - and my bed had mosquito netting.

My room at the first lodge

At night everything was lit by kerosene lanterns, even the pathways leading from place to place. It was incredibly romantic. I had a private, attached bathroom with a flush toilet, but no hot water. My mom would have viewed it as her own personal hell. I loved it and felt like I was at summer camp for adults.

Since I had arrived so late (I got in just at 6, which was right as it was getting dark and starting to rain), there was only time for an orientation of sorts by my guide, Cesar, who would be with me the whole week, and some time to unpack and unwind before dinner, where I would meet the others in my group. We were a group of six, including a father, Jack, and his two kids, both in their early 20s - Sarah had just graduated from Lewis and Clark and this trip was her graduation present, and Nick had just finished culinary school. Then there were Russ and Rebecca, a married couple my age from England on vacation while Russ was back from Afghanistan. And me.

We had our dinner, which was fantastic - the food at this place was so good, always some kind of protein, rice and beans and veggies, always locally grown, fresh fruit and juices. Every lodge we went to, it was as good as before. After dinner we all wandered to the bar for a drink, beers and pisco sours. It was such a strange feeling, it being 8:20 pm and way too early to go to bed, but not having any electricity, television or internet to entertain us for the night. Russ made a joke, “What did people do before television? They went to bed at 8:20.” We actually did have live music - our guide and other staff were jamming, playing Peruvian and other Latin songs on the guitar, maracas, cajon (a Peruvian box that is beat like a drum). It was nice to slow down a bit - I felt much less overwhelmed than usual. And when I did get to bed, man, did I sleep well that night in the pitch black with the jungle sounds, especially with the soothing sounds of the rain outside.

Next post: itinerary, notes and more photos!
You can also find some photos on Facebook - http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=57768&l=43bb6&id=622011179

machu picchu

Here are some photos for you all of my trip to Machu Picchu yesterday... More will be up on Facebook as soon as I have a fast enough connection.

Me and the gorgeous view
(doing some nerdy thumbs up thing- I know...)

Una llama

The main town area

Some of the stepped gardens

More stepped gardens

Agricultural area

A cute lizard

The sundial is up there - very important for the Winter Solstice

Houses

For more photos, check out my Facebook album - http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=58538&l=79a17&id=622011179

a national peruvian dish at an irish pub?

Don’t laugh, but it’s not even been a week and I’ve already visited an Irish pub.


Call me lame but my guidebook said the food, especially the steak, was really good. And this evening I was craving some good food and beer, though not necessarily traditional pub food. (Good thing, because, though the menu was a crazy mixture of Peruvian dishes, pasta, pizza, curry and hamburgers, there was no fish and chips or shephard’s pie to be found.)

I totally hit the jackpot with the lomo saltado, ‘jumping beef’, one of the national dishes of Peru.

It’s a fairly simple dish of sautéed beef with tomatoes, onions and cilantro with French fries. Mine came with rice, too. And my guidebook wasn’t wrong about the steak - it was damn tasty (especially with beer)!

what exactly am i doing in peru?

(From Sunday afternoon... Just getting back online.)

It’s siesta time here in Cusco, so I’m taking a break from the hot sun and the crowds. Today there was a big celebration in the Plaza de Armas that involved bands, parades of different army/military personnel in uniform, flag raising, schoolchildren and speeches. (I have no idea what it was for - I keep forgetting to ask someone.)


I’ve been seeing the sights here in beautiful Cusco and wandering a bit, but have some other plans cooked up for the rest of the five weeks here in Peru. For about the next week I’m in Cusco, during which time I will continue to explore the city and the surrounding ruins (Macchu Pichu, Sacsayhuaman, Tambo Machay, Puca Pucara and Qenko).

Next weekend I fly back to Lima, where I’ll meet my sister. (That will be the day that I miss the USC-Ohio State game. Don’t think I’m not going to try to find a way to watch it, but I know it’s probably just a pipe dream.) My sister and I will go to Iquitos together, which is in the Northeast area of Peru and home to the Peruvian Amazon. I’m doing a week-long jungle tour, which promises such activities as canopy walking, piranha fishing (I know!), hiking, sleeping in huts, boating and searching for pink dolphins. And the last three nights are in a resort-type lodge with a pool and wi-fi, to ease my way back into civilization. Isn’t that nice? When the tour is over, we’ll be in Iquitos for an afternoon and night, which just so happens to be the last day of the annual raft race when everyone returns from a multiple-day float down the Amazon, so we’ll be there just in time for those post-race celebrations!

Back to Lima we’ll go for a few days to see a soccer, sorry, football match before flying to Cusco. We’ll take a little under a week to see Cusco, Macchu Pichu (I’ve heard I’ll be happy to see it twice) and the surrounding Sacred Valley. My sister is into markets, so I'm holding off on shopping until she arrives. At some point we'll take the train to Puno, which is the Peruvian city closest to Lake Titicaca and the floating islands. We’ll be there for a few days before returning to Cusco, then to Lima so we can head down to Buenos Aires and start a new adventure!

If anyone has any recommendations, suggestions, questions, comments, I'm all ears!

Bienvenidos a Cusco! (finalmente)

Here I am in my first days in Peru!! It’s day 2 in Cusco. I’m stealing wi-fi from someone somewhere so I have the luxury of being in my hostel bed typing this blog. It’s kind of awesome!

(Here I am on the map.)

Cusco is pretty cool, too. It is insanely beautiful, surrounded by these lovely green high hills and has fantastic narrow streets with lots of Spanish colonial architecture.


I slept all day yesterday (between being up late packing and not sleeping much on the airplanes, I had 5 hours of sleep in 48 hours) and had to repack today so I could actually find things that I needed, since I didn’t organize very well while packing late into the night. But I did get out on the town last night, which was fun. I went to a great reggae show in San Blas with a couple of people from my hostel, which was awesome! I didn’t get to see the whole thing because we took off for a house party. It was kind of a cool group of people who work at this school for underprivileged children - half Peruvians who work there and run it, and half foreign volunteers (mostly Americans but I met a couple people from San Martin, which was randomly cool). It was an intimate group of 15 or 20 in a really cool loft apartment. We danced the night away and good times were had by all.

The beauty in this first night in Cusco is that I was really sad to leave my friends in San Francisco. I’m the type of person who mourns an end before it’s really over. I started being sad about leaving San Francisco in June or July. I know at least ten people who can tell you stories when we’d be out, a group of friends, hanging out at a bar or a show or someone’s house and I would realize that it was all going to end. All of it. And I wasn’t ready for it to be over. I kept thinking, ‘What am I doing? Why am I leaving this to go be alone in an unfamiliar part of the world?’ And my friends, good sports that they are, would talk me off the ledge and tell me how much fun I would have, what cool people I’d meet, etc. And I knew they were right. (And thank god they were.)

Next post - my Peru itinerary, which includes such activities as piranha fishing, Macchu Pichu and football in Lima

surround yourself in your own reality

hi all

i have a few other blogs to post later when i can get my computer on wi-fi, but, for the time being, i want to pop in and give a little update. i left for sea-tac (the seattle airport) at 6:15 this morning and am now (after a short stop in st. louis) waiting for a plane to LIMA!! which boards in about two hours. once i arrive and get through customs, i hop a plane to cusco. so as of 9:00 am EST tomorrow (sep 5) i will be in peru and starting the trip! which probably means sleeping a lot to adjust to the altitude.

speaking of sleeping all day...
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back," wrote novelist John Barth in The Friday Book. Consider using that approach, Aries. Retreat may be the strongest move you can make right now; surrender could turn out to be a masterstroke. But in order to get the most out of this strategy, you've got to keep your ego from injecting its agendas into situations. Don't act out of shame or pride; don't humble yourself excessively or be burning for revenge. Be objective, neutral, poised.
i love rob brezsny's weekly horoscopes. especially his random references.

more to come later...