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Yay!

New Place to Eat in Columbus

So my muffler pipe cracked on my Buick making it sound more monster truck than car. While waiting to get it fixed though I found a new place to eat in Cbus called Graffiti Burger. The one I ate at is on 5th west of Kenny road. My turkey burger was delicious but my favorite part was the bad ass painting of the Sweater Vest leading the Bucks out to kick some ass. It was done by a local artist too. Go! Eat there!

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Come to Peru

I just got an hour long massage for under 10 bucks. And get your minds out of the gutter. It was only a professional massage...unfortunately. She was really cute.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Bleh

Camera giving me fits but I got all my pics burned to DVD so all is well. Just went to a wonderful show and headed out drinking with Cali, a british girl. Should get a big post done tomorrow. Oh yah, para-sailing tomorrow at 9am. Wish me luck!

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Alive and well once again....

Update coming but I want a hot shower like a fat kid wants cake. The jungle isn't big on amenities.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Close encounters of the monkey kind...

Wow, they have internet in the jungle, although my space bar doesn´t work for shit. This post is going to be disjointed as all hell because I am beyond exhausted. I didn´t really sleep at all last night. Combination of a grumpy stomach and a sleep schedule not conducive to getting up at 5am. Luckily all I had to do was ride around in a van all day long and what a ride it was. I have pics but I didn´t bring any of my cables because I didn´t think I´d be able to upload pics out here. At one point the road, dirt road I mean, was blocked by a partial rock slide. After moving some of the rocks people just started plowing over the rest of the rock slide. That´s what our van did after we all got out first. I saw an old school VW bug go monster truck over some rocks. Quite the site.

Long, long, LONG van ride to get to the jungle from Cusco. Probably had something to do with the fact that we couldn´t go much faster then 25 mph once we got up on that crazy dirt road. I started fading in and out of consciousness due to my diminshed state. We had a couple stops in tiny little towns up in the Andes before we started to drop down into the jungle. Once we started down the speed dropped even more until we were going the speed of a good jog.

I´m gonna be short on details here but the rain forest road was ridic. Switch backs all the way down into the forest, trees everywhere. Once we got halfway down I realized I could no longer see the peak we came from because it was hidden by clouds. I could also not see the bottom of the valley cause it was hidden by clouds. Yeah....

Highlight...we saw monkeys, no, not me with my shirt off, like real wild jungle monkeys. And get this, one of the guys in our tour group fed two of them fruit, BY HAND! True story, I have pics. The monkeys took a half apple from his hand. Not a good idea, and I wouldn´t do it, but it was fun to watch.

Anyway, all is well. We are somewhere in the Amazon and dinner is being served in about a half hour. Tomorrow I´ll be on a river boat and right now I´m too spaced to type anymore. Later!

Day after Machu Picchu

Not gonna lie, this day kinda sucked. I slept like a bloody rock until about 8am which means I slept close to 12 hours. Upon waking up I wondered back out to the tracks where I was told cabs would still not arrive until about 1pm. It was a 2 hour walk to Santa Theresa and figured, screw it, I´m not waiting around. About a half hour into the walk though, I met some more construction workers who gave me a ride the rest of the way to Santa Theresa. They were odd construction workers as they kept getting out of the car to take pics of the river we were next to. Posted one of the pictures. They were excited about it too, like tourists or something.

Santa Theresa is not a very impressive town. It was basically my first experience of a real Peruvian town in the middle of nowhere. I kept looking around for a cab to take me to the zipline and none were to be found. I was getting kind of anxious because I wanted to try and make it back to Cusco in time to go out dancing as it was Saturday night. At this point I decided to try and cut my loses and get the hell back to Cusco.

I did find a cab that would take me to Santa Maria where I knew I could catch a bus headed back to tourist land, and what a cab ride it was. To give you an idea, I was basically in a valley and the road was hung on the mountains about halfway up the valley. I was in the front seat of a tiny little hatchback cab with the driver who was constantly amused by my white knuckles. In the back seat were three locals and behind them, in the hatchback, was an old Quechua lady and a young boy. Did I mention the front hood was tied down with a rope because the latch was broken, no? Ok, now I just did. Over the course of the cab ride we forded several small rivers, went over a bridge that looked like it had no business supporting cars, and honked before every hairpin turn to let traffic on the other side know we were coming. Yeah...

Santa Maria made Santa Theresa look like a golden metropolis. Pic posted of it. It was a dusty little shit-heel of a town and the bugs were determined to get through my wall of mosquito spray. They succeeded too, despite my constant use of spray to the point where I was getting light-headed, and I have the bite marks all over my ankles to prove it. Apparently they crawled inside my shoes to get at my flesh. Lovely thought. To add insult to injury, there was a nice big billboard advertising the zipline in the main square. Nice.

The transportation situation got worse too. I bought a bus ticket that said I would be picked up at 2pm for Cusco. Not true. The bus just passes through the town headed the other direction at 2pm. It comes back to Santa Maria at about 4:30pm. Not only that, but I soon found out the road towards Cusco was closed due to construction until 6pm. Basically, I wouldn´t be getting to Cusco until after midnight. Goodbye Saturday night.

I´ll admit, I sulked for a bit, but then I turned to the one thing that can solve all problems, or at least make you forget about them for a bit, ALCOHOL! I sat down at a local pub for a beer and was soon chatting with a truck driver, Herman, who thought it was awesome that I drove in the United States. We exchanged licenses and he pointed out his family to me. I was only halfway through my large bottle of beer when my bus arrived so I handed the rest to him and boarded the bus in much better spirits.

The bus ride was kinda like the cab ride only I couldn´t see where we were going. I´m not sure if that made it better or worse. We had to stop on the road for about an hour at the construction site. I bought some street food to keep from starving and up to this point I´m still alive so it must have been ok. Arrived in Cusco about 12:30am exhausted, surfed the net at the hostel because my head was spinning too much to sleep, crashed until this morning.

Not going to make a detailed post about today right now. Lots of shopping, lots of amazing food, and a dinner music and dance show that was quite lovely. Posting a pic of me, a Quechua woman, and her Alpaca and a pic of one of the dancers at my dinner show. I get picked up tomorrow at 5am for 4 days and 3 nights in the jungle. Going with an outfit called Macaw Adventure. Their address in Cusco is Plateros calle no 324. Look them up if you never hear from me again....just kidding! I`m sure I´ll be fine!

I really will be fine Mom. Expect a post Thursday night, although I will try to make a brief update if one of the jungle towns has internet.