ex 2 comm 460

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.

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!

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.