Alive and well...

Short post. Bus ride from Puno to Cusco was jolly. Hooked up with two British blokes on the bus, Tim and Jon. Spending the night at Pariwana hostel with them. Taking off trekking in the morn. Going with the company formally known as Gravity Peru on a mountain bike ride down to Olatambany or something. Should see Macchu Pichu Thursday morn if all goes well. No time to check, need sleep. Wish me luck.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Chance encounters and other shenanigans...

Past few nights have been rather solid for bizzare meetings, oh, and today I was on a floating island. Four different floating islands actually.

After my last post I met some Cali kids from Los Angeles back at my hostel. I bullshitted with them for a while and we agreed to go out and get some dinner later that night. We ended up going back to Colors for dinner on my recommendation. I ordered an Andean cheese fondue for the whole table. It was awesome, ´nuff said.

Afterwards we headed to a place called the Rock Pub. Very cool laid back bar. That´s us in the first pic. Daniel is on the left and Jason is in the center. It was already shaping up to be a good night when we met this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Vroemen

Yes, we met a former Olympian from the Netherlands while we were chilling in a bar in Peru. He was there with his fiance whom he had proposed to while they were traveling. We ended up talking to the couple for almost 2 hours. Very cool guy and his wife to be is kinda smokin. He mentioned he had gone jogging on the beach in Copacabana that morning. Jogging!? Copacabana!? That´s at like 13k ft! Athletes are amazing.

After Simon and his fiance departed Jason and Daniel broke out the Jenga blocks they had at the bar while I snapped photos of them building ridiculous towers. We ended up at one other bar that had a bathroom lit by blacklight only for our last drink. We wanted to go dancing but couldn´t really find a satisfactory place. That´s fine, I think I may be able to find a place to shake my ass in Cusco.

Yesterday, I shopped til I dropped for most of the day as well as visit a museum with some very cool and creepy mummies. The crafts here are wonderful and cheap too. I can´t mention everything I bought because that would be telling, but I did pick up two cozy alpaca sweaters for myself to keep warm in the high elevation nights. I also walked through the main outdoor market street here in Puno. I suspect walks like that will never get old.

I had an early dinner with a Swiss woman. She was 38, a computer programmer, and rather beautiful. She was on sabatical from work for, get this, 6 months to travel. She had already been in Peru for 2 months and was headed to Bolivia next. She was also traveling alone which makes her ballsy and slightly reckless...I think I´m in love. She took the picture of me in one of my new sweaters and with my cuy dinner. Yes cuy, I had guinea pig again and it was delicious.

To cap last night I headed over to another restaurant for dessert and a live music and dance show, traditional Ande´s style, pan pipes and all. My dessert was amazing of course; white chocolate cheesecake with flavoring from a local berry whose name escapes me, but the real highlight was the show. One of the pics gives you an example of the costumes that the dancers wore.

I ended up chatting with a Lithuanian couple, Laura and Raymond, after the show was finished. I discovered that Laura´s father was friends with Žydrūnas Ilgauskas´s father and that she knew him when he was a child. Yeah, ´Z´from the Cavs. The world just keeps getting smaller. We talked snow skiing the rest of the time and they recommended northern Italy for a skiing destination if I can someday make it out there.

After the show I wondered around town to check out the Saturday night scene before I headed back to my hostel. I got up early this morning to take a boat out on Lake Titicaca.

I ended up getting on the wrong boat. I paid for a day trip out to the closest floating islands...I should probably explain this whole floating island thing.

So there is a tribe of people that live on Lake Titicaca called the Uros and their island is named the same. They moved out there hundreds of years ago to keep away from other more aggressive tribes in the area. They make their floating islands out of reeds that grow in the Lake. They also make about eleventy billion other things out of those reeds, as well as eat them. So yeah, now you know...

Anyway, I got on a boat that was stopping at Uros, but then heading out three hours to another Island called Taquile and spending the night with families there. I was only going to Uros and then back to Puno. The tour operator handled everything though. I stayed at the small island the boat dropped me at and our guide told me another boat would be along to pick me up. He then shook my hand and said, ¨Good luck!¨ Despite that, I did get another boat back to Puno just fine. Some details of the day; Uros is actually broken up into a bunch of small islands, so my tour group got to hitch a ride on a boat made of reeds from one island to another. Some island girls came along and sang to us for tips. The men demonstrated exactly how they used the roots of the reeds to build the island and then made a walking surface with the stems. A small island usually lasts about 30 years before it is too rotten to be used. All in all a very cool experience and I´m glad I went.

I wanted to buy a bus ticket for tomorrow morn for Cusco but the bus line I want to take didn´t have any seats left. I reserved a seat for Tuesday morn and I think I will use tomorrow to go further out on the Lake. It will only cost me nine dollars to get a round trip ferry out to Taquile island and I can´t think of a reason not to go.

With that, I´m off to find a tasty Pisco sour. Adios!

I like Puno...

Or more precisely, I like the restaurant I found. It's called Colors and Lonely Planet hit the nail on the head with this place. Chicken with grilled veggies and a pot of herbal tea for lunch, and a brownie with strawberry sauce and sliced apples for dessert. All for less than 14 bucks US. I usually don't go to the same place twice, but I'm coming back here for breakfast. The free Wifi is nice too.

I am staying at the Duque Inn in a tiny little room but at 7 bucks a night I'm not complaining. I have my own bathroom and the view from the roof is lovely.

The elevation here is about 12,500 ft and the streets are hilly and narrow but after my recent adventures I'm not particularly bothered. There are a couple nifty of museums I want to hit up next. I also expect to find myself at a club one of the next two nights. After a couple days here I'll be ready to climb another mountain...just kidding Mom.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Climbing El Misti

I think my career as a high altitude mountain climber is over. That was brutal. The day started at 8am when a jeep picked myself and Jennifer up from the hostel. We took a quick ride out to the base of the mountain and the elevation at the start of the hike was 3415 meters. That´s 11,201 feet for those of you keeping track at home. We could feel the elevation immediately and sure enough, Jennifer and the guide were soon blowing me away. Towards the end, when we were hiking north of 13k ft, the two of them were so far ahead of me I couldn´t see them. We needed to make it to base camp at 4600 meters for the night, about 15,000 ft.

A little background information. The highest elevation I´ve been at is a little over 13k ft while skiing at Aspen. The highest elevation I´ve slept at was a little over 10k ft at Vale pass in CO while trucking. The mountain I climbed today was 19,101 ft...I was a little worried going into this.

The climb up to base camp was mostly uneventful until the end when we met another group of climbers. Ben and Nick joined us as well as a German couple. Ben and Nick were 18 and 19 respectively. Nick had run a marathon in the past 2 years and Ben grew up in Durango, CO and liked to do extreme skiing for a leisure time activity. Awesome, more people to make me feel old and slow. All 4 people were actually great company and Nick and Jen have me convinced that I need to visit Vancouver, B.C. asap.

Our guides, Alberto and Aldo, cooked for us over propane stoves and the food was good, although at that point I would have eaten anything. The sunset at base camp was glorious, sleeping there was not. I´m pretty sure I didn´t sleep a wink the whole night. The elevation made my head hurt, my feet were freezing, and the pad I was sleeping on did little to make me forget about the rocks beneath me. The schedule called for us to go to bed around 8pm and get up at 2am to start climbing in the dark. Yeah, climbing in the dark. We used head lamps for that part. The harsh landscape and flat night lighting made it seem as if we were hiking on the moon. We could see the lights of Arequipa off in the distance. It seemed as if we were looking at the city from an aircraft.

The climbing was technically very easy. We didn´t need any ropes or anything like that at all. It was basically a long, hard, up hill hike. However, it was at 15k ft plus. I´ve experienced the shortness of breath that comes with high elevation but this was a whole new level of pain. Jen actually dropped out and returned back to the base camp with one of the guides about 2 hours into that morning´s hike. I felt bad for her as I was the one who asked her to do this with me. She was freezing and looked like hell.

Around the time Jen stopped, Nick and Ben jumped ahead of the group and were soon out of site. I continued hiking with one of the guides and the german couple. The man´s name was Fabian and I think the woman was named Anchik.

Around 18,000 ft I kinda hit a wall. From that point on I was stopping for rest every 15 minutes. I considered quitting many times but I knew I would regret it. I had put myself through too much to make it to that point. With encouragement from Aldo, I continued hauling myself through each field of boulders, each plain of volcanic ash, the smell of sulfur occasionally stinging my nose. It sounds nuts I know, but I now understand that urge to reach the top of a mountain just to say you´ve done it.

I did finally reach the top. Well, not the tippy top. I´ll admit there were ridges surrounding the crater and I probably could have climbed up another 500 ft or so, but I was done. I had reached a physical limit. Sitting on the ground was strenuous. I had to purposefully pant like a dog to stay conscious. Aldo gave me a big hug and took pictures for me. I really don´t have very good pics of the top because I was too exhausted to walk around and take them.

Aldo then told me to sit and rest while he went to find Nick and Ben. At the time we didn´t know that they had already gone down. The german couple was up on one of the ridges and completely out of site. Aldo was gone for a while and I soon realized that I was slowly suffocating. I was literally exhausting myself breathing hard enough to keep from passing out. I almost did pass out a couple times. I figured it was a kind of a bad idea to take off back down the mountain without the guide, but I figured it was a worse idea to stay there and die, and I really did think that was a possibility.

Thankfully, getting down the mountain isn´t that tough if you take the right path and I sorta kinda knew where I was going. There are these shoots of volcanic ash down the sides of the volcano and walking down them is very easy and not strenous at all. It´s actually quite a bit of fun; like running down a huge hill of sand. After loping down the mountain about a thousand feet I felt worlds better and didn´t have to work at breathing any more. Unfortunately, I only kinda sorta knew where I was going. I was aware that I had left the guide at the top of the mountain without telling him where I was going, which is a bad move albeit a neccessary one in this case. I was worried and actually got to the point where I was taking stock of what I had on my person in case I really did need to hike all the way off the mountain and go find a road or something. Aldo did end up catching up to me though, and he told me I did the right thing by getting to a lower elevation.

I made it back to base camp, where we packed everything up. Jen was mostly recovered from her altitude sickness and we hiked the rest of the way back down the mountain. Making it back to 12k ft elevation felt amazing. I could walk again!

This probably sounds like a masochistic toture tale but it was far from that. Being that high up was special somehow, the fact that I was able to do it was also special. I don´t think I want to do it again any time soon, but I´m very glad I did it.

I climbed a 19k ft volcano.

Details later.  I´m beyond exhausted.

It´s official, I am climbing a volcano...

I´m going with a girl named Jennifer and a guide. She rock climbs regularly, has run 2 marathons, and once did a triathlon on the spur of the moment....fuck me. I´m already bracing myself for the blow to my ego. Wish me luck!

Gotta get my ass moving.

I now have a facebook friend who doesn't speak english. How cool is that? I kinda hit a rut here in Arequipa with the food poisoning. I've been here a week and really haven't done enough. Not that anyone should feel bad for me, and I'm sure no one does. Every day here is beautiful, my room is comfortable and only 17 bucks a night, and I've just had an amazing meal which will soon be topped with dessert. Pic of meal up top. Grilled lamb with mint, fettuchini, and asparagus. This will probably be the most expensive meal I eat in Peru. I'm almost ashamed but not really. The entre was about 20 bucks US and I had a cocktail and dessert too. That really is absurd for Peru, but whatev.

I may leave for Puno tomorrow or hang in Arequipa a few more days. I'd like to travel with a father and his daughter that I met here. They were in town for a wedding. Need to finalize that with them tonight.

Oh wow, just got dessert and it's pretty! I swear, I'm not gay. Pic attached.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Don´t eat the alpaca...

Ola! I spent the past two days recovering from food poisoning. It was pretty solid too. Not the longest bout I´ve ever had, but Wednesday night was probably the most severe. For a little bit I was really contemplating medical help, to the point where I was checking out my travelers insurance papers. All is well now though, my stomach has been relatively well behaved for about the past 24 hours. I just need to get my sleep schedule worked out again as I haven´t slept much the past two nights.

I think I´m headed off to Puno soon to aclimatize myself to high altitude for a possible mountain climb. I´m currently at about 9k ft but that isn´t good enough for the treking agency. The volcano I´d like to climb is over 19k ft and Puno is about 12k ft so they want me to spend a few nights there. Lata!

I ate a guinea pig...

It wasn´t too bad either. I wouldn´t order another one only because there isn´t a lot of meat on the little buggers. It tasted like a lean game meat. It was a little creepy pulling the thing apart on my plate but whatever. When in Rome...

I had my first spanish lesson today as well. I´ve pretty much decided to make that a regular thing while I´m here and I´ll probably be in class 3 hours tomorrow. I really do need it. My teacher´s name is Miguel and he is probably several years younger than me. We´ve started pretty simple but I keep pushing him to move faster with different verb tenses. Really the best part is just for me to be speaking spanish with someone who will put up with my poor pronunciation and will repeat things over and over for me. Locals are nice and generally helpful, but I don´t expect them to have the patience of monks or anything.

After class I had a delicious bowl of ceviche at a local restaurant. I´m not gonna get tired of that part of Peru. Miguel used to work in a fish market when he was younger and he made sure to tell me that the fish in Arequipa is still amazing even though we are 5 hours inland.

My touristy activity for the day was to visit the Monasterio de Santa Catalina. A 400 year old HUGE convent. It is so big it has streets. I had an english speaking guide named Susie. She was a local girl who used to work on a cruise ship. I ended up coming back at night after a short break at my hostel to do spanish homework. Many of the convent rooms were lit up with candles and I ran into an Indian man (dot not feather) named Amit who was taking awesome pics with a sophisticated camera and a tri-pod. He offered to take a few pics with me in them and email them to me. I feel like I lead a charmed life.

Tomorrow is frozen mummy day. Hopefully I can set something up to climb a mountain over the weekend too.

Alive and well

Bus ride was fine.  I slept some but not much so I crashed for like 3 hours after I found a room in Arequipa.  I´m staying at a nice place called Hostel Nunez for like 17 bucks a night US.  Currently trying to set up spanish lessons.  More info later.

Dear Diary, Peruvian girls are cute.

So I tend to prefer short, dark haired women with nice butts. Guess what Latin American girls look like? A pic from last night.

Managed to get a taxi out of Huacachina, buy a bus ticket to Arequipa, get some dollars changed, and eat lunch, all without falling over or anything. I´ve moved from hungover to exhausted. I´m gonna sleep like a rock on the bus ride.

Yesterday started as a very chill day that quickly became a little wild. I woke up and stared at the dunes that towered over the town for a good 20 minutes or so. After gawking for a while I meandered down the steps from my room with a banana, a bag of nuts, oranges, and some water for breakfast. I ate in the court yard and wandered around the little lagoon that the town was built around.

I had a glass of pisco pura at lunch and chatted with a Dutch woman who could speak 5 languages, Dutch, German, French, Italien, and English. Ironically, her spanish was about as bad as mine. She wandered off to go climb dunes while I finished my lunch and got rather buzzed with my glass of pisco. They say to never drink and drive but I don´t think they include paddle boats when they say that, so I rented a little craft to tool around the lake and sober up.

I headed back to the Hostel and signed up for sandboarding and a dune buggy ride and eventually took a little nap in my room. I lead a hard life I know.

At this point, things changed quickly. My relaxing day went away. Really can´t say enough about the whole sandboarding experience. The dune buggy was the best part. It was a real life roller coaster ride and the driver was a little crazy. I could tell he enjoyed making us scream as he tore up the dunes and dropped down the other side.

Boarding was fun too. Most of the time we laid down on the board and rode it down like a sled, but we all tried to stand on it too, with varying levels of success. I had a couple decent moments trying to stand on the board, but I think I´ll stick to skis. I was completely covered with sand by the end of the day and I even lost my room key. Oops. Got a new one no problem back at the hostel though.

I was thrilled to find some cool people to go with too. Ended up having a great night with them too. Colt, Ashley, and Sadie, thanks for a great evening/early morning but lets drink less next time. We got back at dusk and they shared some wine they had bought earlier in the day with me. They met two Peruvian girls, JoAnna and JoAnna, earlier in the day and they joined us for dancing at the club. No need to go into details about that night. We started drinking at about 7 30 pm and didn´t go to bed until 4am. ´Nuff said.

So yah, now I´m sitting in an internet cafe with some kid playing Starcraft next to me trying to stay awake until my bus leaves. Wish me luck!

Huacachina is awesome, annnnnnd I´m hungover

If I attempt to make a long detailed post right now, I will come off as illiterate. Yesterday was good, just a few too many Pisco sours to finish it off. To make a long story short; dunebuggy, sand boarding, local wine, discoteque(sp?), everybody got kissed, the end. Perhaps I´ll make another update when the spins go away. Trying to get to Arequipa next.

Ica not Nasca

Made a boo boo. Getting off the bus at Ica not Nasca and headed from there to Huacachina. Wanted to post that. Currently on a bus grabbing a random wireless signal. Peace...

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Lima rocks! And stinks unfortunately...

So yah, the pic is from Museo Larco. Gold is pretty. I took a ton of pictures. Museums aren't really the reason I came to Peru but pottery, textiles, sculpture and jewelry are pretty damn awesome. It also didn't hurt that I was hanging the whole day with a professor of anthropology from Chicago. Thanks Curtis. You are the man!

Got some necessities purchased this morning. I didn't bring a towel cause I'm an idiot, also picked up a sleeping bag. 

I took care of my next destination as well. I leave on a bus for Nasca tomorrow at 4:30pm. The company is Cruz del Sur and they are supposed to be one of the best bus companies in Peru. I even got to choose pollo for dinner during the ride. So dune surfing is next.

The day really was awesome. My legs hurt like hell from all the damn walking but it was worth it. The Museo Larco really was the highlight. Even Curtis was highly impressed with quality of the pieces and he's been to hundreds of museums. We were also both amused by a separate display they had of a bunch of pottery that depicted sex acts. Yes, they had butt sex pots. Classy...

Plaza de Armes and Plaza de San Martin were beautiful, especially at night. We just don't have places quite like this in the US. We have beautiful cities but they just have a different feel. Lima feels, and is, much older.

Curtis and I had dinner at a local restaurant that has been there since 1905 and has served every Peruvian President since then. It was called El Cordano and I see why the Presidents like it; it's right across the street from the presidential palace. Food was good but my ceviche was better yesterday. Curt made a better choice than me. I had picante mariscos con arroz whereas he had filet mignon.

We made one more stop that night at Parque de Reserva where they have a light and fountain show that was quite lovely. I especially enjoyed it because it was very much a local scene. Very few gringos and mostly locals with their families.

We walked from downtown Lima all the way back to our lodging in Miraflores which wasn't a great idea in retrospect. Peru doesn't have the emission standards of the states and the streets reek of exhaust. I'm so ready to get out of the city.

Tomorrow's agenda? Possible para-sailing sprinkled with a few more museums.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

I will not go hungry...

My command of the language may be tenous but I've got the eating part down. Ceviche is as good as I thought it would be.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

I have purified water Mom

Here is the proof. Bought some fruit and nuts at the supermercado as well. Just like trucking.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Failure and success..

This morning I went down to get some breakfast. Couldn't understand the hostess in the kitchen at all. She seemed amused and faux angry about this. I heard her say after I walked away, 'Como si dice este, como se dice que!'. That was a fail.

Two really cute girls come down from their room. They both speak french, spanish and not a lick of english. I was able to wish them a good day, let them know I spoke a bit of both of their languages, and that was it. FAIL

However, I just sat down at a cafe, ordered my food, kindly corrected the girl when she gave me coffee instead of tea, ask for a fork, and paid the bill, all without seeming too too retarded. Sorta kinda success?

Gotta tear myself down to build myself up right?

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

My first room in peru

Well, I'm here. I arrived last night after an enjoyable flight. I helped a middle aged woman and her mother find the flight out of Houston. The mother spoke almost no english at all but the daughter's english was ok. By the end of the flight we exchanged emails so she could practise her english and I could practise my spanish. 

Also met a hair dresser named Omar from Scottsdale, AZ. He was going on a 10 day guided tour of Cusco at the exorbitant price of $4k. I'm glad I'm not spending that much. 

The fellow next to me on the flight was Luis and he spoke very little english. It ended up being a perfect oppurtunity to work on some spanish. We played a game on the video screen set in the seatback in front of us. Luis wasn't very quick on the uptake so I was able to relearn my colors in spanish as well as some simple instructions.

I was surprised how smoothly everything went at the airport upon arrival. The check in line for passports and such was long but not a problem. I had to wait a long and agonizing 15 min or so for my checked bag to come down the baggage ramp, but it did, and I had a fellow waiting for me at ground transport. His name was Antonio and we made small talk in a combination of broken spanish/english.

Ok, so my Spanish is bad, but so far it seems like I know enough right now to make it all the way through this trip. One would hope I would get better.

I'm starving and a breakfast of some sort is supposed to be waiting for me downstairs. I met a traveling college prof named Curtis who mentioned he was planning on doing some museum and market hoping today. He seemed ok with the idea of me joining him.

Hasta luego!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypC9zyyk8As - My first room in Peru

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

I'm BACK!

Stopped blogging at all or even keping track of my workouts for quite a while. I broke my phone while trucking in Dallas and when I finally got the new one I was too busy and lazy to start again.

I haven't stopped working out though. That has been a regular thing.

I'm currently on a plane using wifi and headed back home after a wedding in the Twin Cities. Technology is cool.

On Tues I leave for Peru and I plan on using this blog to document some of it. Hopefully that works out. It will require discipline, something I've gotten better at over the past 3 years.

I'm hoping to post vids on You tube as well. I believe my phone is capable of that.

Either way, it should be a blast...

-- Sent from my Palm Pre