Five hours by mule, six hours by bus from civilization... Colca Canyon!

Making our way to Colca Canyon was in itself an adventure. Being the smart and free-hippie backpackers that we now are, we headed to the Arequipa bus station at midnight to catch the 1am bus to Cabanaconde, the launching point to the Colca Canyon trek (the second deepest canyon in the world!). We hadn´t bought a ticket yet, but there are always a ton of seats available. Not this time!

The 1am bus was sold out, as was the 3am... we might not even catch the 11am! So, while Stacen slept onthe bus station floor (covered in a fleece blanket bought by Nicole in cold desperation at 2am), Nicole battled. She elbowed her way past 30 Peruvians, so happy she is at least a foot taller than everyone around her, and succesfully bought the last two tickets on the 6am bus!

A bumpy six hour ride later, we arrived at Cabanaconde, a little town with a few shops and hostels for trekers. We got some food, then started our trek down a hill for a 1100 meters descent, then back up another 450 meters to Malata, a tiny village with mud huts, no running water, and beautiful views. On the way up to the town, Stacen became incredibly weak and faint, stumbling happily into the arms of Modesto and Victoria, a kind older couple who would take us in (unknown to us!)for the next 3 days. Stacen quickly developed a fever and felt the wrath of some pretty vicious bugs (remember, just an outhouse!). The following day, he fluctuated between fevers and chills, and hefty tummy aches. Nicole dutifully cared for the ailing husband, reading outloud for about eight hours ¨Autobiography of a Yogi,¨ a pretty groovy book. Modesto and Victoria (the happy ones weaving in the pictures) kept us fed with a steady stream of eucolyptus tea and soups.

Sidenote: Stacen hates potatoes. With a ridiculous passion. In Peru (home to the potato), there are over 4000 varieties! Nicole has delightfully watched as Stacen has tried many of them. He also hates Peruvian rice. As you can imagine, the soups are always potato soup, with a serving of potato and rice as a second course :)

On the second full day in Malata, Stacen´s fever broke and he walked for half an hour! Nicole continued to read outloud for hours, and eat soup (she was getting pretty tired of soup too).

On the third day in Colca Canyon, we finally headed on an all day walk, to the town of Llatica, an even smaller and more remote town. When we asked where to go to the bathroom, we got got a smile and a point to the field. Nicole felt like she back home in Chirikayen again! We were served by an incredibly industrious woman in town, who ran the only store and restaurant in town. She also grew cuys... guinea pigs!! To our surprise we have learned that cuys are quite the Peruvian delicacy... we haven´t dared try them yet.

In Llatica, eveything is made out of mud, except for their beautiful, government built elementary school, where one dedicated (and incredibly nice) teacher teaches first through sixth grades to all the children in the village... all ten of them!We luckily had lunch with her, and got permission to use the sink and bathroom in the school. For the first time in almost five days we performed a ¨shower,¨ scrubbing ourselves in whatever way possibly with the cold water, absolutely loving it. We were actually able to show up dinner that night ¨clean¨!!! (which meant we could smell eachother by just sitting next to eachother). We had a great egg and rice dinner-no potato- happily chatting with the restaurant owner. She was especially intrigued by prices and how much things cost in the USA. Most awesomely, she let us play with her cuys, all 35 of them. Stacen also cooed at a four month old kitten that sat herself down in the middle of the cuy´s food. He loves his kitties.

The following morning, we woke up at 5am, on a mission to finally dominate the canyon. Breakfast took a while to get ready, at at 6am we got it: tuna and potato fried with rice on the side. Stacen also hates tuna.

We then headed to the town Lluhaur, a paradise of tourism (it had running water!)and hot water pools. We undressed and jumped in, delighting in the warm water.It was like a shower! Nicole especially enjoyed it, since she had been ravaged by moquitoes, broken out in hives and itchy bumps, which then had erupted in yellow blisters. So really, the water was NICE.

We then began our five hour climb 1100 meters back up the canyon. It was hard, but our booties are finally in shape! We were also tickled the whole way by the fact that every local we passed gave us times at least half asmuch as they were in reality. For example, gettin up a certain hill? The nice man with a donkey would say 15 minutes. In reality, 45 minutes! We are definetly not true canyon peaople just yet. Finally around 4pm, we arrived back in Cabanaconde, sad to leave the beutiful canyon behind. We had loved the kind canyon people: all friendly, curious, and none trying to mooch off our money! It was wonderful just to be around nice, humble people.

In Cabanaconde, we arrived starved, ready to devour a pizza. Nicole became angry and mean when we got our pizza-- it was microwaved, the crust was two pieces of bread stuck together, and it took a looong time. She bought a chocolate bar to cheer herself up. We then headed to an incredibly fancy hotel to check our email, and wound up hanging out in the hotel lobby for 3 hours playing cards (they were super nice there, even offering us tea!), until our 9pm bus back to wonderful Arequipa. We arrived at 4am, and happily returned to the lovely Santa Catalina Hostal...

Peru y la Ciudad Magica... Arequipa

AREQUIPA! Our winding bus journey through the Peruvian highlands brought us down into a valley that sees 360 days of sunshine a year...Nicole was in her element! Arriving into the bus station we had to fight off the taxi drivers so we could figure out where we were going, and finally settled on this place in the center of town that had a rooftop terrace and HOT WATER 24 hours a day in the showers! We quickly discovered that this is one of the places that tourists visit when they come to Peru to visit Machu Picchu, because there were Americans (and Europeans) everywhere! There were dozens of beautiful restaurants, some on ¨restaurant street¨, and about 10 of them with balconies overlooking the Plaza de Armas (every city seems to have a Plaza de Armas). There were people and pigeons everywhere, and at least in this part of the city, it was CLEAN! And also, all the historical buildings are built out of a white pumice-like rock that looks like styrofoam! It´s called the white city (La ciudad blanca). We spent the first day just walking around, and hit up the supermarket so that we could make our first dinner in weeks! That evening, sitting in the terrace of the hostel, we felt a tremor! Apparently Arequipa is one of the most sizemically active places in South America, with tremors several times a week. Turns out there was an earthquake 100 miles south, but no one was hurt.
The next morning we set out for the most famous attraction in the city--El convento de Santa Catalina. Built in 1579, it´s doors were closed to the outside world until 1970. Inside is a maze of streets, a city within a city, everything in bright colors and the cool rock again. The nuns certainly lived well...each one had a minimum of 2 servants, and they drank tea from solid gold teasets. It was the home of a few saints, so it is a kind of pilgrimmage site. We ended up spending 3 hours there! We walked around all afternoon again. That night while we were making dinner, Stacen was attempting to cut a carrot with a ridiculously dull knife. One of the guys who worked at the hostel asked what was wrong, and then called the other guy over to show that indeed the knife literally was not cutting. The guy pretty much said, ¨yes it does¨, then walked away. Stacen then turned to Nicole and said, ¨this knife is stupid¨. The first hostel worker, still sitting nearby, suddenly sayd, what country are you from? We say the United States and he goes ¨ahhhhhh¨. With trepidation, we ask why the ahhhhhh, and he answers, ¨I like to know where people are from who think they are better than me¨. Well you can guess that we were pretty shocked at this, and turns out he thought he spoke english and that we were insulting the hostel owner. Needless to say, it put Stacen in a pretty bad mood. We are on this trip in part with the mission of giving Americans a good name. The fact that Stacen speaks spanish has pleasantly surprised most people. It is ridiculously frustrating to encounter people with pre-determined and ill-founded ideas. So anyway, we will just have to keep trying for our remaining, get this, six weeks in South America.
During the remaining 5 days we spent about half that time on the terrace of the hostel, playing cards (Nicole is on a 2 week winning streak), reading, eating, and talking. One night we went out for some traditional Peruvian food and got Pisco sours! Pisco is a peruvian brandy, and the drink is addictive. After 2 sips, Nicole had declared them better than margaritas and Stacen had declared them his favorite mixed drink ever. We were inspired and the next night went to the store, bought the ingredients, and then made WAY too much that night haha, and Nicole made some sick guacamole even though the peppers she put in were crazy latino spicy.
We tried to go see a mummy, an human sacrifice of a little girl from several thousand years ago found on top of a nearby volcano, but the woman inside refused to believe that we spoke spanish, which was so frustrating that we left. You can see the mummy on google anytime.
On our last day, we got some school stuff done for back home, then went out to eat some amazing ¨soy meat¨, which we can only hope was tofu. Quickly afterwards, Stacen´s stomach began to voice it´s disapproval, but that is a story that will be continued in the next entry. We went to Colca Canyon soon after, and were gone from Arequipa for 5 days. Upon return, we took a much-needed nap, and went to an AMAZING restaurant, where we stayed eating and drinking for almost 5 hours. It was so nice to finally have some GOOD food, we had both lost quite a lot of weight in the canyon. We made a quick trip to the grovery store, dropped it off at the hostel, and then went out for pizza! It was an amazing cute little restaurant with tons of ambiance, and they were playing all kinds of alt rock, which gave us plenty to talk about all evening. We went back to the hostel, slept, and the next morning caught our 11 hous bus to Cusco! The only thing we will say now is that we were sitting in the very front, with a HUGE window in front of us the entire time. We had a blast. We´re in Cusco now and won´t be writing until after we see Machu Picchu next week. Until then!

Lake Titicaca... Lago puma rock!

Hola everyone! I believe we last left off with a description of Nicole being sick. Well, she got better, we went out for dinner, and then that night Stacen got the same thing! So we had ANOTHER bum day. Nicole made a stew and then went out and bought a bunch of DVDs! For those of you who don´t know, the only way to buy DVDs in Latin America is if they are pirated, so she bought 6 for less than $3! And then we began a 10 hour movie marathon in our hostel! We started with 40 year old virgin, then Alice in Wonderland, then Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Fourth Kind (a real-life documentary/drama about alien abductions and FREAKY!), and finally Shakespeare in Love. We were proud of ourselves for watching so many different genres in one day. The next day, we went to the Bolivian national art museum and walked around the city before we were to catch our flight to Rurrenabaque, the jumping off point into the Bolivian Amazon. We strolled the streets of La Paz, sad to be leaving. Little did we know...
We got to the airport and after arriving at the gate...saw the plane. It was one of those big sketchy old prop planes, the kind where you are proud of it for getting off the ground. The time came for us to board, then take off, then land in Rurrenabaque 50 minutes later, and yet we stayed sitting next to the gate, while the plane remained motionless. We busied ourselves watching planes take off, but finally got a little frustrated and all the passengers began to descend upon the gate to see what was going on. And do you know what they told us? It was too hot, so we were waiting for it to cool down! At first, we believed them, cause that plane looked quite capable of overheating. But then we were like, wait a minute, it´s 70 degrees outside! 2 hours later, they came out with an official ruling. The flight was cancelled, and rescheduled for early tomorrow morning, because it was now too windy! TAM apologized to us, explaining that they would not be able to reimburse us because it was not the airlines fault, it was the weather´s! So we went out to claim our bags, and spent half an hour arguing that the 2 big green backpacks were ours, even though we had thrown away our little baggage claim stubs. They had removed our ID tags from the luggage too! We tried asking them why it was all of a sudden so difficult to get our bags when if we had actually flown we would have just gone and picked them up off the carousel. They had no answer.
We dropped more money on a taxi back to La Paz, a hotel, and then we headed out for pizza and beer. Stacen was depressed because simultaneously, he was supposed to have found out about Med School acceptances that day and had not recieved an email. Nicole was trying to cheer him up. All of a sudden, the phone rang, and it was Stacen´s mom telling him that they had recieved a letter saying he had been accepted!!! Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine´s Problem-based Learning Pathway (LECOM PBL). That cheered the two of them up, and they stayed out way too late at a restaurant that had live flamenco talking to a girl from Denmark (where they discovered that in Denmark, the government pays you $400 a month to go to school, and it is EXPECTED that you take a year off to travel the world afterwards!
After 3 hours of sleep we trooped back to the airport, this time to discover that the reason the flight was cancelled was due to...rain in the destination airport! The bolivians on our flight were furious, one called his family in Rurrenabaque and found out that it actually WAS NOT raining there. Long story short, it took us 6 hours of complaining to the jefe of the airport, the headquarters in La Paz, and finally a miniature sit down strike in the president´s office (about 25 of us!) until they finally agreed to give us out money back. Never fly TAM. We did not go to Rurrenabaque.
We caught a bus out of La Paz that afternoon to Copacabana, Bolivia, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. At one point, we had to get out and take a rickety ferry over part of it. The bus looked like it was going to sink it´s ferry, we got pictures. We continued on to Copacabana, a sad little town all prepared for a tourist boom that never will come. There are probably about 100 hotels, and through our investigations, all of them were about 90% empty. There were dozens of people selling bus tickets for the same prices, food for the same prices, and souvenirs for the same prices. It was sad, because no one had learned to differentiate themselves, and all made just enough to keep them afloat, but extremely poor. Very few of the buildings were even finished. It was very depressing. The next morning we caught a boat to the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), the legendary birth-place of the Incan sun god (like Zeus). The 2 hour boat trip could have been achieved in half the time had they cranked up the engine, but instead they went at the pace of a brisk walk, which infuriated Stacen to no end.
We were heartened when we arrived on the island. They had it together, with guides and everything! We walked up out of town around the terraced hillsides and spent a couple of hours learning about the culture of the peoples of the island, and touring incan ruins. But then at the end, we found out that the guide was not part of our entrance fee. We had been duped! Angrily we didn´t pay him as much as he was requesting, and we are sad to say that we were looking forward to getting to wealthier places so people would start leaving us alone about money. Everywhere we went people were attempting toget money out of us, whether sending crying children our way or attempting to make us feel bad in any way possible. On top of that, we went to lunch and met this guy from Liverpool, who apparently was a spiritual man. Nicole thinks he looked like a big meathead. He was angry person, hated the west and didn´t believe a word he heard in the media. He didn´t believe in history. He didn´t agree with the reasons we were travelling South America. He tried to lecture Stacen on Buddhism, telling him he didn´t know anything and was confused. In the end, we ate as quickly as possible toget away from him. This is just one example of some of the strange people we have met down here, and we now realize that there are so many people travelling just looking for something but are so closed-minded that they never are going to find it.
We spent the night in a shabby but new building, and unsuccesfully watched for UFOs on the beach that night. The next day was the best day we had had in a while. We hiked about 10 km to the south side of the mountain before catching a ferry back to Copacabana. Our boat was full of Argentine hippies who were banging drums and discussing the intricacies of weaving bracelets. Back in Copacabana, we found out that the bus companies were all on strike, and we couldn´t leave until the next night. Believe it or not we couldn´t wait to get out of Bolivia! We spent the next day hanging out, discussing life, and caught a bus to Puno, Peru, that evening. 5 hours later and a very complicated border crossing later, we arrived at the most amazing hotel ever! It was run by about 5 of the nicest women imaginable. We hung out in Puno for a while, coordinating school stuff back home with the high speed internet that we had been lacking for our entire time in Bolivia.
We did go back out on the lake though. We caught a boat one morning to the Island of the Uros people. They have an interesting history, having been pursued first by the pre-incan people, then the incas, then the spaniards, so much that they had retreated out onto the lake and built floating reed islands out of the grasses! We got off on two of them, but of course we went to the touristy ones (some still don´t have contact with the modern world), and once again it was this sad thing where they did whatever they could to get our money through whatever kind of scheme possible, ride their boats, get pictures with them, sell us stupid souvenirs, or our favorite, money to buy markers for school. It is completely impossible to know when to believe people down here, so we have adopted a policy of not handing out money to anyone anymore. We moved on to Amantanì, a real island this time. We were sheparded up this steep path where the 2 of us were assigned to a homestay. No electricity, no running water. We used a candle in our room, so romantic! The family was comparatively well-off, with a big house and 6 children. The parents were so aged,you could tell that they were all pretty malnourished. We found out that they only grow quinoa and potatoes on the island, and all vegetables and fruits have to be bought in the weekly market. If they don´t have the money, they eat quinoa and potatoes. For lunch we had quinoa soup and get this, 6 species of potato with some very salty cheese and a minty tea. Not too bad. The women watched while the two of us ate. As soon as we were done, the mother brought out some rather ugly homemade textiles and attempted to make a sale (and charge more than triple what was charged in the mainland markets). By this time, if you can´t tell, we are pretty put out with this kind of stuff. We decline. Then the father comes in, trying to sell us alpaca skins. We decline. Then he tells us this sob story of how half the members of his family have died, and how they wish that we would pay them directly instead of waiting for the tour company to pay them. We excused ourselves and ran away. That evening we climbed the hill to watch the sunset. It was beautiful, and once again permeated with children trying to take your money, and women selling candy bars for $3.50 at the top. As long as you could ignore the locals who literally would grovel at your feet, it was a very fun climb. We climbed down in darkness, talking to some new friends that we had made on the boat ride that day, an Italian family and a Spanish couple (Lourdes y Oswaldo... awesomely spanish!). The family had two very personable children, a girl Gaila (10) and a boy Elio (4). They both spoke fluent italian, french, spanish, and Galla was about to begin english in school next year.
In the plaza before dinner we broke down and bought some food for our family, an extra candle, and some medicine for the mother who had been suffering from a cold for a month. The family graciously accepted the gifts, and then tried to sell us their family hearloom tablecloth. We declined. That night, we dressed in traditional local garb and went dancing! It was more like swinging around in circles but we had a blast, and we stayed out hours afterwards talking with the Spanish couple. The next morning we packed up, and just as we were leaving the family asked us for a tip! We declined. We caught the boat to yet another island, Taquile, on which we hiked, enjoyed the views, had an amazing lunch of trout and potatoes, and climbed down a 500 step stairway to the water. We got on the boat, got back to our hotel in Puno, and by this time Nicole had caught the mother´s cold! Stacen spent all of the next day feeding and reading to her, and she got better in one day. We felt bad for the mother on the island, and only pray that she took the medicine and did not trade it in for food.
After our 8th day on the shores of Lake Titicaca, we decided it was time to leave. We never were able to find a vulgar shirt (we couldn´t believe it!). All in all, the lake is beautiful, but the people that live there, whether in Peru or Bolivia, are so poor and desperate that it unfortunatley left us with a slight sour taste in our mouths. We caught a bus the next morning for Arequipa, Peru!

The chicas hit Argentina