We're on our way home! This trip is over. Crazy. More on that later. First, we have a lot of catching up to do, so excuse the exaggerated length of this post.
We last left off in Cuzco, Peru, which seems like forever ago. Cuzco is a nice city, but bone chillingly cold. From there we explored the surrounding Sacred Valley of the Incas with our German friends Kai and Nadja while we planned our route to Machu Picchu.
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| We spent the days exploring the valley on foot, taking long hikes through small Andean villages and checking out the ruins along the way. |
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| This as an ancient salt something. Something something, something. Yeah. We didn't really figure this one out. The salt is PINK! |
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| There are several ways to get to Machu Picchu: Perhaps the most common way is the Inca Trail. A 3-4 day group trek which takes you through the valley along what is called the Inca Trail, ending up at Machu Picchu at sunrise on the last day. This option requires a small fortune, but even more important for us, months and months of advanced planning, which you may have gathered from this blog, is not exactly our “thing.” The next most common way is to take a train from Cuzco to the city at the base of Machu Picchu. This however also requires a small fortune. So, the four of us headed out on what we dubbed “The Poor Man's Inca Trail” and followed the train tracks on foot. This turned out to be fully awesome, as you are able to take in all of the scenery etc. with none of the cost, and 100x more danger! |
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| We got to Machu Picchu on one of the first buses of the day and were able to watch the fog clear and reveal the ruins at sunrise. Kind of the most spectacular thing you can witness with your eyes. |
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| There's a lot about Machu Picchu that nobody ever tells you. For example, there are tons of little chinchilla-like creatures scurrying around and hiding between the ancient rocks. |
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| Even funnier than these little guys was Alayna's impression of them, which, for her sake, we omitted from the blog. |
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| There's also a llama petting zoo! So. Frikkin. Soft! |
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After Machu Picchu we got an early start the next morning, retracing our tracks from the day before. This is the first of two tunnels we passed through on our way. Just before entering the second tunnel, Alayna and Nadja both expressed their concern about going in. Meanwhile, Nick and Kai both insisted that this tunnel was very short and that according to the schedule the train shouldn't be passing through for a while still, and that there was really nothing to worry about. So this is us, heading into the tunnel. Right in the proper middle of this tunnel, equidistant from the beginning and the end, we hear a a very train-like sound. We all pause for a moment in disbelief, searching for some kind of explanation or reassurance on the face of the person closest to us, who of course we couldn't see. All of a sudden the train's powerful headlights cut through the darkness of the tunnel and we all take off running like our lives depended on it, cause they actually did. We made it out, but just barely in time. It was incredible!!!!
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The narrow escape.
We made it back to Cuzco and hopped a night bus to Puerto Maldonado where we would spend a few days in the Amazon Jungle then take a boat across the border and enter into Bolivia in the north.
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Puerto Maldonado is a really fun port town. Probably the coolest thing about it is that it is still relatively unvisited by tourists, so its charm is still intact.
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We contracted some young local guys to take us into the jungle for 3 days and show us around. We saw tons of monkeys, birds, caiman, piranha, flora and fauna. We also spotted some giant river otters and got the chance to watch them for a bit while they fought over a fish. It was amazing.
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| (Just to clarify, this is not in the jungle, but rather at a rescue center nearby working to raise awareness of the threats to these animals and their habitats) |
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| The Crew |
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Here we are at the best spot in town to wait for your cargo boat to Bolivia.
All along we knew that crossing the border into Bolivia by boat was going to be a complicated matter. We ended up waiting in Puerto Maldonado for days while the guy who agreed to take us got his act together. We even got to bribe someone for the first time!
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| Our Ride. Although he never told us once, our captain Freddy was planning all along on shuttling 14 other people and crates upon crates of supplies up the Rio Madre de Dios into Bolivia with us. An unimportant detail he insisted. We made our nest between the months worth of yogurt supplies and the barrel of spare gasoline. |
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| Captain Freddy. All joking aside, this was a beautiful voyage. |
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| At the border. This is where a shirtless soldier gave us our entrance AND exit stamp, complete with the date written in by hand. As we learned when we were trying to leave Bolivia, this stamp was completely and totally illegitimate. Shocking. All we had to do to fix it was pay 100 bucks! Not so shocking. |
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We disembarked at a tiny village in the north of Bolivia. Place was packed!
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| From that tiny village we caught a bus to a slightly less tiny village where we parted ways with Kai and Nadja, and made our way to La Paz. This is La Paz. |
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The first thing you notice about La Paz is that almost everyone is of indigenous heritage. The next thing you notice is that it is really hilly. Then you notice that you just walked a block and you can barely breath. La Paz sits at 11,975 ft above sea level! Vibrant colors, lots of markets, and good bit of superstition mixed with religion, La Paz is cool.
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| Dried llama fetuses. What? They're good luck. |
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| In Bolivia we stayed mostly in central cities because we were on a serious time crunch. All of them were nice. It's a shame cause we were really excited about Bolivia, but then again, now we have a reason to go back. We did take a day off from flying through the country to ride some ponies in the desert. This is supposedly where Butch and Sundance came to retire. Not bad, not bad at all. From here we booked it to Iguazu Falls. |
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In Iguazu we met up with Nick's parents, Reuben and Denise, and went to the falls with them. Good times were had, as the bottle of wine implies;)
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| The falls are amazing. Two times bigger than Niagra they say, and you can't help but laugh at how good it feels to have your mind blown like that. Like Machu Picchu, pictures do not do this place justice. It's more about the feeling when you're somewhere so incomprehensible. It just makes you wanna shout. |
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| We got on that Boat!! |
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One more night bus from Iguazu and we were finally in Buenos Aires, our final destination. Our plan in the beginning was to travel for three months, live in BsAs for three months, and then we'd have a month and a half extra to play around with. We ended up traveling for six months and staying in BsAs for almost two. We stayed in a nice apartment with Nick's parents for a week while we explored the city with them, then we found our own place and started getting settled.
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San Telmo: Our barrio. Supposedly the neighborhood that's most typical of Buenos Aires: cobblestone streets, plazas and shorter, older buildings. We loved the old-timey feel of our neighboorhood, but apparently so do the tourists- A starbucks was being erected in the main plaza on our last day:(
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| Calle Defensa at night. |
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Sunday night Feria.
Life here was great. We found a nice room and our schedules were wide open. On Sundays we went to the "pulga" (flea market) in Almagro early in the day, then we would go to the "feria" (artisan fair) in San Telmo in the evenings. It makes for a fun day because all the Argentines are out drinking their mate, wine or beer and enjoying their weekend. Ideal for drinking beer, relaxing all day and buying things for 2pesos.
We also went to free tango classes once a week and made some progress in our tango skills. Our teacher was a typical porteno: extremely passionate... about himself. Alayna took pilates and ceramics classes at a cultural center downtown and worked with a small NGO that's just getting started here in BsAs. Nick finally landed a restaurant gig that turned out to be really cool. Aside from that, we pretty much spent a lot of our time here wandering around, catching buses and undergrounds, criss-crossing the city and her neighborhoods, searching for and finding the things we like.
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Our building. We lived on the ground floor of this handsome old building which we shared with folks from Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil. Good times.
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| Do they look like just some tourist scheme? No way. Tango is alive and well. We promise. |
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| This giant sculpture opens and closes with the sun. |
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| Just an hours train ride away from BsAs exists the fantastical land of Tigre: a giant delta full of small islands connected by canals where people build their houses on stilts and buy their necessities from boats that circulate selling their wares from the water. |
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Even though BsAs is good, most of its people are less than friendly. We decided to go to Cordoba because of its reputation for a warm and playful population, and to take a visit to the campo once more before we left for home. It's true what they say about the people there too: we had a guy invent a joke on the spot about us being from San Francisco. The joke bombed, but the point remains: they've got a good sense of humor.
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Before leaving Cordoba we spent a day in the campo in a pueblo called Mina Clavero. It's full of small town charm and tons of little swimming holes. It was the perfect place to kick back with some sandwiches, soak up some sun, swim, and then get ice cream and take a nap. It was good to get out of BsAs and see more of Argentina before we left. Just before Nico jumped, all the kids at the swimming hole asked Alayna what his name was so they could start calling him a wuss in spanish. The power of peer pressure...
BANSAI!!
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| And that's it. That's us on that little airplane, flying back to the states after 231 days, 7 countries and more than 3,000 games of Boggle for iTouch... |
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Oh right! And a lifetime of beautiful memories of the most rewarding experience of our lives.
We're Back!
See you guys soon. CIAO! |
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