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.

Machu Picchu

So here´s the thing, I wasn´t even that psyched for this place. Yeah, I´m serious. I just figured it would be completely overrun by tourists and I´m not even a ruins guy in the first place. I mean, they´re just old rocks right? I was wrong. I just want that here on record. I WAS WRONG, FORGIVE ME INCAN GODS!!!!!!!!!!

That day was amazing. This was back on Friday and I´m so glad I waited for Friday. The weather was perfect; fluffy clouds and sun all day long. A lot of people told me to hustle and make sure to catch the first bus up there or hike up at 4am or even earlier to get the stamp for climbing Wayna Picchu. I didn´t have to do that at all. I rolled out of bed around 5am and didn´t get down to the bus station until after 5:30 and I was on maybe the 8th or 9th bus up there. I still got the stamp to climb Wayna Picchu.

Some background here, Wayna Picchu is the peak that overlooks Machu Picchu. Only 400 people a day get a stamp to climb up to the top for the awesome view. That sounds like a lot but a ton of people visit this place during high season. The climb takes about an hour and is fairly strenuous.

The sun still hadn´t crested over the mountain peaks when I entered the site and I immediately headed up to get a few pictures of the ruins from the classic postcard spot. I wandered around there in a daze for a while as the sun came up and eventually meandered down a path to something called the Incan Drawbridge, a gap spanned by several very old looking logs. The path was spectacular and clung precariously to the side of the mountain. After a brief chat with some Americans about choice places to ski in New Hampshire I headed back around the mountain and ran into Joe from Boston. Joe and I had dinner and drinks back in Puno. He´s a good guy and we played photographer buddies for a while so we could be in pics from our own cameras.

I had signed up to climb Wayna Picchu between 10am and 11am but Joe had signed up for between 7am and 8am. We decided to head over to the other side of the ruins and see if they would let me up early so we could both hike together. It didn´t end up being a problem so off we went. We chatted for a bit but as the path got steeper I left Joe behind, and by the time I was nearing the top I was drenched in sweat. The view was all worth it though, as you can see by the pic I got.

After I got to the top I saw the sign to go to the other side of the peak and see the Temple of the Moon and the Grand Cavern. It was about a 40 min hike, all of it downhill with a few tricky wooden ladders thrown in for good measure. When I made it down to the Temple I ran into two more British chaps, Dan and Harry. After talking with them for a bit and playing photographer for each other we started the hour and a half hike back to Machu Picchu together. I also determined they had very little water left, the hike back was almost entirely uphill, and I had over a liter left in my Camelbak. I didn´t think it would be very sporting of me to watch them die so I insisted they take a few big sips on the way back. They thanked me by buying me an insanely overpriced bottle of water at the cafe near the entrance of the ruins.

We lunched at the cafe and headed back in the ruins where I took my shirt off to dry it out and sunbathed on the grass. I made sure to put a healthy dose of insect repellent on to keep the pesky sand flies off of me. Dan and Harry wanted to walk around the ruins a bit more but I had already been up there over 6 hours and the weather was so nice that I wanted to go back to Aguas Calientes and take another dip in the hot springs. I bid them adieu and grabbed my bus ride back down. My original plan had been to catch the 12:30 train to Santa Theresa to ride the zip line over the jungle but Harry and Dan told me the walk was only 2 hours and flat the whole way, so elected to skip the train to have time for the hot springs.

The springs were a good decision as I got to meet a 23 year old German girl named Kerstin. Her Spanish was worse than mine but we´ll let it slide because she speaks German, English, and French. We helped each other take pics, kibbitzed about this and that, and enjoyed the pools until we were both hungry enough to go to dinner together. I actually needed to get going on my hike but I wasn´t about to pass up dinner with a lovely blond German girl. I was impressed by Kerstin´s chutzpah when she told me she really wanted to try cuy(guinea pig). I don´t think I know a girl who would really want to try that especially the way she dove into it as you can see by the pic. That is her playing with the poor little buggers head. On the way to dinner we ran into Boston Joe again who had survived his hike to the top of Wayna Picchu. After dinner I had to get my ass moving.

I definitely started my hike a little late but I ended up seeing other backpackers coming the other direction the whole time. I hiked with a Peruvian couple, a doctor and nurse, from Huancayo for a while too. I gotta admit, this part of my journey starts getting a little sketchy. I made it to the Hydroelectric dam where I expected to be able to find a cab. After a few conversations in broken spanish I determined that there would be no cabs until the next day. One of the ladies at the little snack stands told me that I could get a room at a small hospedaje just down the tracks. I ended up sitting down for some more food with a bunch of what looked like railroad workers who were highly amused at the gringo in their presence. We watched a spanish soap opera together on the TV and I eventually passed out in my tiny little room after a day of about 5 hours of hiking. The next day continues in this vein...

Alive and well....

and extremely tired.  Detailed post tomorrow.  Back in a hostel in Cusco.

Ok, so Machu Picchu tomorrow

My train didn´t arrive in Aguas Calientes until 1am and I set my alarm for 4:30am to get up and grab the bus to Machu Picchu. When the alarm went off my body gave me a stern talking to. ¨We road a mountain bike 30km yesterday over ungodly terrain and you wanna move after 3 hours of sleep? Yeah, you wish, go back to sleep buster, you ain´t 21 anymore.¨ It looks like I´ll have to push my plans back a day.

It has still been a good day. Aguas Calientes may be completely over run by tourists but all the gringos in the world can´t spoil the look of this place. I´m down in a valley that is probably only a couple hundred meters wide with tree covered mountains on both sides. I tried to do a short hike that was in my Lonely Planet guide but it looks like the flooding they had earlier this year knocked out the wooden ladders. There was a metal cable that I could have climbed up but it also looked like a spectacular way to kill myself.

I still had to hike around quite a bit to find this out and my bum was hurting from all the biking yesterday, so I headed up to the hot springs to soak myself a little bit. The pic shows just how picturesque this valley is. The water wasn´t piping hot, but it was plenty comfortable. After that I headed back down to town and had an AMAZING meal at a very nice restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet. Avocado and mango salad with a slightly spicy dressing; grilled trout with a garlic sauce, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, green beans and tomato; and caramel
crème brûlée for dessert. Yeah, uh huh.

Probably going to make this a very early night as I´m getting up at about 4am to make sure I catch the first bus to Machu Piccu at 5:30am tomorrow morn. Adios!

Tired and sore but happy and excited....

Mountain biking was awesome, but I´m getting ahead of myself.

After I made my last post Jon, Tim and I headed out to find a place to get our laundry done and then some food. I needed mine done by the next morning at 8am otherwise I wouldn´t have any clean t-shirts for my mountain biking the next day. It was already 8pm...tricky. Jon and Tim were great sports about it and ended up following me to about 5 different lavanderias until we found one that would have my clothes done by 8am the next morn.

We ended up grabbing a cheap but good dinner at a local place for about 3 bucks a person then headed off to find a place for some drinks and dessert. When it comes to food and drink in this country I tend to spend like a drunken pirate, so I suggested we head to a second story restaurant where a pisco sour was 18 soles and dessert was 20+. Jon and Tim thought that was a stupid idea so we ended up finding a place where dessert was 12 soles and we could get 2 pisco sours for 20 soles. It was awesome and our waitress had the largest breasts I have ever seen on a Peruvian woman. Score one for the Brits.

My head swimming with Pisco the three of us headed back to the hostal around 11pm where I needed to be up by about 6:30am to take a shower, pack my stuff, eat something, pick up my laundry, and catch my mountain bike tour at 8am. I suceeded at all these tasks and went mountain biking with Laura and Preeti, two lovely British girls, Liz and Blake, more Canuks telling me I need to visit Vancouver, and Judith, a Californian who works with special needs children. Our two guides were Miguel and Xavier and were, of course, super human biking machines who were completely immune to the affects of altitude, cold, rain, I´m pretty sure they could have run through fire had they wanted to.

The whole trip was one long photo-op. I wish I had taken more photos and I took a fair amount. Breathtaking mountain peaks precariously draped with misty clouds...I was biking through the set for Lord of the Rings. It was also a damn good workout. Most of the biking was downhill but there were enough uphill sections to get me huffing and puffing like a damn asthmatic, and then it started raining. Oh, that part was fairly miserable. The wind was blowing and I was freezing but I wasn´t about to stop. I changed into dry clothes and kept trucking. Appropo considering my job history.

We stopped for a bit at an ancient experimental farming site. The Inca culture experimented with terraced farming areas at different elevations to get different temperatures and wind exposure for their crops. The resulting giant, terraced pit was damned impressive and a great place to hike around for about 30 min and take pictures. I was glad for the break, I desperately needed to stretch my legs out. Mountain biking at 10k ft+ is hard!

We hopped back on our bikes and headed out. Thankfully it had stopped raining and the wind wasn´t blowing so fiercely anymore. Some more Lord of the Rings photo-ops and we biked into a small town for lunch. The food was, of course, delicious. A tomato and basil salad with two big, round quiches as well. I changed into dry clothes for the second time, the sun came out and we continued to the most difficult part of the ride.

We had already done some fairly difficult biking on steep rock covered paths and I´m not ashamed to say I walked the bike over one or two sections, but the last part of the trip was narrow with very sharp turns and a few 100ft+ drop offs on the side of the path...oh, and also steep and rock covered. I did some of it, probably more then I should have, but I was walking the bike quite a bit. Blake and Preeti were hardcore and managed to stay on their bikes for most of the freaky stuff, but Laura and Judith were even more catious than me and Liz was in the van with a nasty cold. Either way a good time was had by all and no one got hurt. I did take a pretty good tumble at one point when I was attempting to ride and sip water from my Camelbak at the same time. I failed at both endeavors. This was on completely flat ground.

We had one more bizzare thing to visit before the end of the ride. We biked to the edge of a very old salt mine type place. Something like a thousand pools of water had been cut into the hillside. When the water evaporated during the dry season, it left behind salt. It looked like a white rimmed honeycomb that belonged on the surface of the moon, not the earth.

We ended our ride at a small restaurant where our guides bought us drinks as you can see in the last pic. On the right side of the pic is Blake, Liz, Preeti, and Judith. On the left side is myself and Laura. I look about 40 years old in that pic. I don´t even recognize myself. I need new sun glasses and a replenished hairline. All 6 of us had a spirited bullshit session before we all hopped in the van to head out. The van stopped in a town and got me a taxi to Ollantaytambo where I am typing this up. I have a train ticket to Aguas Calientes and a room reserved for the night. I plan on getting up ass early, seeing Machu Picchu, grabbing a train and cab to Santa Theresa, passing out, waking up the next morning to fly 200 meters over the jungle on a zip line, and heading back to Cusco to shake my ass in the clubs Friday and Saturday night. Wish me luck!