The Highests and the Mosts

What. A. Week. Seriously. I´ve now started on the portion of my trip in which everything seems to end in "-est" or start with "most" so to organize this post I think I´ll structure it around that theme (sort of like "This American Life" Jess!). 1. The highest lake 2. The highest capital city 3. The most dangerous road and 4. the most fun. Corny? I don´t care.

1. I left Puno, Peru about a week ago and after a reasonably stressful border crossing (they raised the price of a visa the week before and I´d only brought correct change!) I arrived in Copacabana, Bolivia. I climbed the hill over the town to watch the magnificent sunset over Lake Titicaca and met Emma from Ireland. It was a pleasant surprise the next morning to find her on my boat to Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) along with two Dutch guys, Paul and Jocham, with whom I talked for the really long boat ride. Lake Titicaca was almost smooth enough to water-ski on (which was on my mind since family vacation started the same day) but with a temperature just above freezing water sports haven´t really become popular yet. The four of us hiked the length of the island together and saw the Incan ruins on the island. Incan legend says that the first two Incas rose from the island at a sacred rock shaped like a puma so we all touched the rock for some positive energy. We then hiked to the south of the island where we ordered some pizzas, having been assured by the owner that they would be ready well before our boat left for the main-land at 4:00. When this turned out to be false we ended up eating our entire pizzas literally on the run down the impossibly steep Incan stairs down to the water. Paul even hurdled a donkey. That night we had a fun night on the town and woke up the next morning to see a unique Copacabana tradition. Every Sunday people pull their vehicles in front of the cathedral all decorated in flowers and ribbons and the priest blesses every surface of the vehicle to protect it against accidents. Anticipating an upcoming adventure we made sure to receive a little blessing ourselves...

2. That afternoon we arrived in La Paz, the highest capital city in the world. The city reminds me of Quito a bit since it´s in a valley surrounded by snow-capped peaks but the atmosphere is much different. The boys had actually come from La Paz to Copacabana for the weekend so they showed us around the witch´s market, some churches, and ended with a meal in an open market. Emma was a little turned off by the relative squalor of the market but at Paul and Jocham´s insistance I had a plate of maybe the most delicious food I´ve had on the trip. It was just like greasy sausage and some yucca but I´m probably going back for more after this post. That night we enjoyed our hostel´s nice bar/restaurant and headed out for a wild night. The next day we visited the Coca Museum which provided a history of the coca plant with lengthy but informative displays. Coca leaves (cocaine is produced from coca but coca leaves aren´t, or rather shouldn´t be, considered a drug) are chewed throughout the Andes to help deal with the altitude and the museum gave a really interesting history of the medicinal use of this plant along with its more modern drug applications. We explored the city a bit more and reserved our spot for part 3.

3. Before I left for home there was only one thing my mom told me I couldn´t do: visit the most dangerous road in the world in any capacity. Oops. After seeing plenty of tourists throughout my trip wearing the famous "I survived" shirts and talking with Paul and Jocham we decided we couldn´t really be in La Paz and miss out on such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We booked through Gravity Tours, the oldest, safest, and most respected mountain biking company and set off at 7:00 on Tuesday morning. Unfortunately Emma came down with a pretty bad bug so she had to stay in La Paz but the boys and I had a fantastic day. The bike ride starts at like, 4,000 meters where the lakes are frozen over in the morning and the snow-capped peaks are only a couple 100 meters above. We got all suited up and watched a herd of 100+ alpacas run across the road as Alistair, our guide and the founder of the dangerous road bike ride (10 years to the day, which was cool), gave us the first of many "Fear of God" speeches. We started off down the newer highway which still afforded us views of spectacularly steep and high mountains and a pretty perilous drop off the edge. Within an hour we´d dropped enough to shed some layers and hopped onto the "most dangerous road in the world." Thankfully a new, two-lane road was built a few years ago but for several decades this one-lane, dirt road with 600-meter cliffs plummeting from the very edge of the road was the only connection between La Paz and the rainforest. The new road has more or less absorbed all of the traffic from the dangerous one but the road is still used by a few mountain bike groups and the more than occasional truck or car. Our bike group had amazingly nice mountain bikes with great shocks and brakes and set out. Heading down the cliff is on the left but you also have to stay on the left side because the up-hill traffic has the right-of-way and they´re coming up on your right. So for about 60 km I was flying down this mountain road with a 600 meter fall about a foot to my left. For obvious reasons we had to dismount on the right side of the bike...Although the road is certainly deserving of its title (two people started crying in fear at the beginning of the ride and one woman saw the road and stayed in the bus) it was a really fun day and for the most part I never felt too out of control or in danger. We never saw any traffic besides our own mini-bus and Alistair´s 800+ trips down helped assuage our fears. The trip ended at 4.

4. After the exhilerating and exhausting (psychologically more than physically) ride we ended up in La Senda Verde, an animal refuge outside of Coroico, Bolivia. The refuge takes in animals abused in the Bolivian trade in animals and tries to rehabilitate them. Right now the refuge has about 15 monkeys, an ocelot, 2 coatis, dozens of parrots and macaws, tortoises, dogs, cats, a boa constrictor, a goat, a donkey, and various other bird species. It was amazing. They also have a few cabins so Paul, Jocham, and I decided to stay. We´ve spent the past two days and nights reading and drinking beer by the pool and having a ridiculously good time with the spider monkeys and coatis. All of the animals are completely vaccinated and several have been raised by humans since they were born so they will just jump on you from the trees for a ride or pull themselves up and take a nap in your lap. We had a lot of fun and really bonded through the past 6 days. Unfortunately the boys are continuing on to the rainforest from Coroico while I had to return to La Paz to head south. We all became really close traveling together and I´m excited to get together again in Amsterdam, the US, or a more exotic locale.

And thus concludes this post. Thanks for hanging in there, hopefully I´ll still have a bed at home after Mom reads this. I hope the summer´s going well, I have about 2 1/2 weeks before head home so you´ll be seeing or hearing from me soon!

Coming soon: an interview in Cochabamba and Potosí, a city with a lot of "mosts" and "-ests"

Thoughts Cusqueño

Today I finally had an extremely successful meeting with Elena Pardo, director of an organization called CEPROSI which works specifically with rural schools to help indigenous students learn to value their own culture and language...basically exactly what I want to learn about. Unfortunately Elena has been traveling on business for the last week so we weren´t able to meet until today; the day before I leave. It was great talking with her though and she almost immediately suggested that I live with a Quechua family and do a few community talks in a cultural exchange. Why couldn´t this have happened a week ago?! I´m pretty sure that I´ll have to come back this year to take advantage of that awesome opportunity. I think Elena was as enthusiastic about it as I was too.

I´ve been in Cusco for over a week now and have gathered some interesting observations, anecdotes, and quotations. Starting with the quotations I´ve overheard on the street, ahem:

British girl: I´m going to have to go wash my face now, I can´t believe this!
British friend: Oh my god I know, that was probably the most disgusting thing I´ve ever seen.
British girl: Right?! I mean, he kissed me! I wasn´t expecting that, I´m going to go Purell my whole head right now.

British guy to street vender (in English): No, no thanks, I already have an alpaca sweater. Yeah, but it´s better than the ones you have.

American girl to mom: Wait, was this the Incas or Aztecs?
Mom: Oh come on sweetheart.

Angry Southern woman waiting for bus to Machu Picchu: They were saving seats for their friends! We couldn´t get on because they were saving seats, you can´t save seats! That´s not fair!

Same woman in line to Huayna Picchu: Hey, no cuts! Hey come on! We´re all waiting too!

Same woman as I passed her climbing Huayna Picchu (thankfully this was our final interaction): Well fine, if you´re in such a rush push me over the edge, see if I care!

Australian woman climbing Huayna Picchu: No wonder the Incas had a shorter life span; their knees went out by age 25.

American dad at Machu Picchu: So, do they have a Machu Picchu in Vegas yet?

...and finally and favoritely...

Woman to friend during a Machu Picchu tour: Do you think I can ask where the red-light-district was?

Although I have definitely enjoyed my time here in Cusco and absolutely intend to return (possibly even within the year) a brief respite from the blinding tourism of this travel epicenter will be nice. Even the beggars and people drawing business into restaurants are more tourist savvy. When you walk past beggars they call after you "come back, please, come back" while drug dealers call you "buddy" rather than "friend" when you walk by. The former is certainly more effective but both still surprise me.

Another interesting aspect of Cusco is the international/confusingly cosmopolitan feel it tries to cultivate. I´ve seen Korean, Turkish, Japanese, and Israeli restaurants and I´m pretty sure I´ve heard most languages spoken on Cusco´s streets. Also, I think one of the more memorable images I have from Machu Picchu would have to be the Japanese women carrying their high-heels and I´m sure complaining in Japanese about the Incas´ fashion insensitivity with their impossibly cobbled streets.

Finally, I´m staying in a hostal right now with 65-year-old American, Bill. He´s been an endless source of entertainment for the past couple days as he regales me with stories of his recent adventures and in general, crazy life. He says he´s traveled through every town in Canada and the US and is just walking around Peru until they kick him out for visa violations (which by most indicators will happen soon). For various reasons I sleep with one eye open but he´s been hilarious and informative.

And now I head to Bolivia. Chao amigos (or, buddies)!

Coming soon: Lake Titicaca, Islas de Sol y Luna, and probably La Paz

Alpaca-the other other white meat?

It´s only been about a week since I posted last but it´s definitely been one of those weeks in which I shouldn´t have procrastinated since now this will be a pretty epic post. I´m writing right now from Cusco, Peru which is a beautiful and historic city full of colonial buildings, Incan ruins, and foreign tourists. Ecuador is touristy but it always seems like at least the Ecuadorians out-number the tourists. I´m not so sure about Cusco. Nevertheless it really is deserving of its status as a tourist Mecca. Beyond even the obligatory Machu Picchu visit Cusco has several amazing churches and Incan ruins within walking distance that rival their more famous neighbor in many ways.

I arrived in Cusco 5 days ago and immediately tried to find out if I could join a group to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Apparently tours fill up around 6 months in advance (which I actually probably should have assumed) and so I had several humorous interactions with tourist agencies when I´d ask for an Inca Trail trip and they would ask when I wanted to go. I said "well, when´s the soonest I could go?" and they answered "um, October." I usually followed that up with, "so nothing leaving like, tomorrow then?" which received a wide range of responses. With that option scratched off my to-do list I set about tackling the sights around Cusco.

The first place I visited is a a site on the mountain just above Cusco called Saqsehuaman which was a large ceremonial complex. Although considerably smaller than Machu Picchu Saqsehuaman was mind-boggling for a different reason. The compound is composed of three terraced levels which lead to the top of the mountain where three huge stone tours stood before the Spanish arrived. What´s crazy about this place is that the terraces are about 10 meters high and composed of enormous blocks of stone weighing up to 30 tons. Obviously the entire place was built before modern machinery and imaging the process of cutting the stones only to drag them several kilometers over ramps and rolling logs is impressive to say the least. Saqsehuaman is also an amazing site because of the seamless stonework involved. Each stone is so perfectly carved to fit with the next one that it creates almost perfectly smooth walls that have survived centuries of earthquakes as the colonial buildings crumbled about them.

The next day was a huge national strike protesting the rising cost of living and failed promises on the part of the government to improve the Peruvian quality of life for its millions of citizens living on $1.50 a day. Since I was already in Cusco I only knew of the strike as a huge protest in the city with most of the shops closed but several travelers were stranded throughout the country due to the striking transportation workers. I´ve heard so much grumbling from people on planned tours whose entire vacations were messed up by the strike which made me feel better about traveling by the seat of my pants. The tourist congestion made Machu Picchu much busier when I finally got there, but I´ll get to that in a second.

After Saqsehuaman I bought my bus ticket to Aguas Calientes, the town closest to Machu Picchu. I arrived at the train station thinking I was just within the "30 minutes early" request for my 12:30 train but when I showed the guard at the train station my ticket he said, "you´re just on time, there goes your train." Apparently I´d confused my 9:30 return with my 12:10 departure and got to the station just in time to jump onto my moving train. Woops.

The next day I arrived at Machu Picchu at around 6:30 in the morning. It was really cloudy and misty but that really just made the experience that much more magical. MP is perched on this mountain with the Urubamba River roaring thousands of feet below on both sides. The place is so amazingly well preserved I could hardly believe it. When you first walk in you see the agricultural terraces that fed the city and then you enter the royal living sector and the temple section. Everything was just so beautiful,tragic, and alarming in its way thinking of how such an advanced civilization was toppled in a matter of months. I battled the tourists for the whole morning (between 1500 and 2000 people visit Machu Picchu every day!) and unintentionally disrupted tons of pictures. People didn´t seem to understand that with 2000 other visitors walking around they weren´t going to get their pristine postcard picture. I also got there early enough to be one of the 400 people allowed to climb Huayna Picchu, the mountain looming behind Machu Picchu when you picture the famous view, and it was amazing. It was a reasonably strenuous hike but it ended in this little tunnel that ends up at the very peak of the mountain. From the top I could see all of Machu Picchu (it was built to resemble a condor from above while Cusco was originally built as a puma with Saqsehuaman as the head) and the mountains surrounding. I have a ton of pictures to share when I get back but I can tell you that Machu Picchu is absolutely deserving of its hype. Hopefully I´ll be able to get back some day.

After all of the Machu Picchu hustle I settled into a café in Ollantaytambo for a quick lunch of alpaca kababs. They were actually really really delicious but I realized a couple minutes into my meal that an alpaca was actually staring at me through the window of the café. Although the cows at home obviously never bothered me, this alpaca seemed to understand what was going on and its piercing gaze was a little unnerving. I still finished the amazing kababs though.

Then I walked around the fantastic ruins at Ollantaytambo (a town in the Sacred Valley en route to Aguas Calientes) which were almost as inspiring as Machu Picchu itself. The Ollantaytambo ruins are situated really precariously on the cliffs overlooking the town and were one of the last outposts of Incan resistance after the Spanish invasion. The place was refreshingly empty after Machu Picchu and I had a great time walking around the terraces and climbing the mountain for a better view. Getting from Ollantaytambo to Cusco was almost another transportation disaster when I went to buy a bottle of water after the van driver told me they would be leaving in 20 minutes. When I came back 5 minutes later the van was pulling away and only stopped for me when I banged on the door and jumped out in front of it. People in the van were yelling for it to wait but I´m sure the driver thought he could make something out of the backpack I´d loaded before I left. Oh South American transportation...

Now I´m back in Cusco for a while hanging out and seeing a few more sights. Hopefully I´ll have another meeting with a friend of Juan Carlos who will be able to help me out with information on my research and maybe even a family to stay with for a few days. We´ll see what happens. Thanks for sticking with this post to the end, more coming soon!

Coming soon: "Overheard in Cusco," and Peruvian families or Lake Titicaca

Lima is for lovers (of smog and poverty and bad weather and...)

Well it has certainly been a whirl-wind couple of weeks. My mom and sister arrived in Ecuador last Friday night, a day late after they missed a connection in Houston. We had a great time traveling for a week and they got to see several of my favorite places in the country. I don't know how much they appreciated the extensive bustime and I had to remind myself at points to value safety over budget but I think all three of us had a fun, comfortable time.

The first day they were in Ecuador we hopped on a bus for the Saturday market in Otavalo. It was kind of an intense introduction to Ecuadorian souvenirs but they were much better at keeping their eyes on the prize than I usually am. After that we had a day of walking around Quito seeing all of the churches and whatnot before we had dinner with Charo and family. It was a really really fun evening seeing everyone again. It was amazing how easily, despite significant language barriers, Charo and my mom ganged up to get the "rest of the story" and jointly fret about my current travels. Apparently the maternal language transcends linguistics.

The next day we headed to Canoa for a couple days at the beach. It was super relaxing, just like every time I´ve been to Canoa and it was just cloudy enough to preserve our porcelain skin. There were some (just) complaints about the 7ish hour night busride but we agreed the end justified the means. We then had another day in Quito in which we had lunch with Martha, the director from my program last fall, and visited Sol de Primavera. I wasn´t really sure what to expect (I was pretty sure most of the kids wouldn´t remember me) but as we walked up the street and Gonzalo saw me from the balcony we were quickly surrounded by my kids yelling "Nata! Nata!" and, almost as frequently, "Zancos! Zancos! (Stilts! Stilts!)" We played new games for a bit and I tried in vain to explain why I couldn´t stay for longer than a couple hours. It was harder than I´d anticipated to see them again and see how they´ve grown physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Hopefully I´ll be able to visit again in August. The next day we went to Mindo for a visit to the cloud forest. The first day was spent walking around and visiting orchid farmers but the next day we had a lot of fun. We hiked down to a beautiful waterfall where Lauren and I jumped from the 9-meter cliffs and Mom braved the slide into the freezing water. We were tempted to jump the 12 meters right into the waterfall but at the time I couldn´t remember whether my traveller´s insurance covered repatriation or not. I looked it up and for future notice: it does.

Mom and Lauren flew back home (and arrived safely) on Saturday and I departed on my long and windy journey to Cuzco. Because originally we were planning on visiting Manuel and his family in Riobamba but didn´t have enough time, I made a quick stopover to say hi and mend any miscommunications/hurt feelings. Manuel actually wasn´t home but it was nice to see the rest of the family for a few hours. I dropped off a few gifts from home (including some rose quartz which is used in traditional healing) and tried to leave for Loja. Unfortunately the connection I assumed I could make in Riobamba didn´t stop there so I had to go round-about to Cuenca first. I arrived in Cuenca around 1:30 in the morning and resigned myself to sleeping in the bus station for the night. After a few minutes I decided to walk around for a bit and as I passed by the bus stop there was only one bus in the terminal. One bus marked ´Loja.´ The driver was just standing there like he was waiting for me and called me over. I was therefor able to arrive in Loja at 7:20 in the morn in time to leave for Piura, Peru at 7:30. The border-crossing went fine and I caught a sleeper bus in Piura to Lima. The woman sitting next to me was disgusted that I traveled in buses with "chickens and things" and described our bus (with beds, meals, and AC) as "more or less." We traded travel tips (her giving me the names of up-scale buses and hotels and me advocating travel on the cheap) and slept through almost all of the 14-hour bus ride.

So far Lima has been more or less what I imagined and had heard from others. At 8 million people it{s a sprawling metropolis and there´s a gigantics, visible division of wealth. Coming in to the city you pass mile after mile of run-down neighborhoods and slums while farther to the south are suburbs more reminiscent of Europe than other Latin American capitals. The weather during the winter (which is now) is mostly cloudy which does little to improve on the general feeling of smog and grime. My bus companion had also warned me that people in the city speak very quickly, which I quickly learned to be true. Today I walked around Miraflores (one of the wealthier suburbs and more or less the tourist center) to the ocean and then around Central Lima and Chinatown. It was a lot of walking but I saw a lot of the city. Even though Lima is unappealing to the passerby-tourist, it´s still a very interesting city and I´m sure it has a lot more to offer given more time and patience.

Tomorrow I´m heading off to Cuzco where hopefully I´ll spend one and a half to two weeks exploring the city, visiting the sites around Cuzco, and hopefully doing another home-stay with a Quechua family. In 2-4 days I´ll be at Machu Picchu! Very soon I´ll have more to update than bus schedules (which I realize are boring but are basically all I´ve done the past few days).

Coming soon: a little more Lima and Cuzco: An Introduction