Inca Trail -Salkantay

We're alive! We just finished 2 and a half days of hardcore hiking, and now we're in Aguas Calientes, the town just outside of Machu Picchu!!!! We're going up to the ruins at 5:30 tomorrow morning :)

So our hike was basically amazing. Our group was just 5 girls: 3 girls from New York, and Sam and I, and our guide Henry. The first day we got up at 4 am and caught a bus around 5 to go to a town about 3 hours away. We arrived in Mollepata (molle=tree, pata= high place... I'm learning all the Quechua I can!) and had breakfast, then we started our hike! There were a lot of flat parts on dirt road, but also a decent amount of uphill parts that were somewhat tough. We stopped and had a nice lunch with soup and chicken and rice, and all the tea we could ever want (with coca leaves! oh snap). We kept hiking all the way to our camp, at the bottom of a glacier on a biiig mountain! It was so pretty :) But that night was pretty cold...

The next morning we had to hike very very uphill to a mountain pass between 2 glaciers. It was hard, and we just kept taking about 3 or 4 (very slow) steps and then stopping to rest/breathe. We finally got to the top of the mountain pass, had a snack, and then started our descent into an ever-changing climate. We had lunch while it was raining, and put our ponchos on preparing for the worst, but it just kept getting nicer out, and it stopped raining about a minute after we left from lunch. We started to get into the jungle... and I saw some amazing flowers (lots of WWPD pictures, Zack) and the river below us. We got to our camp and played some cards, then we got some rest in a much warmer climate, which was nice :)

The next morning (today, actually) we woke up and started our last uphill/mostly downhill hike through the jungle. In the morning it was cold, but it got much warmer within a few hours. There were lots of waterfalls along the way, and whenever we stopped our legs hurt a little, but the hike was just perfect. It was a lot of flat walking and some uphill and downhill, and especially a perfect temperature in the shade. We finally arrived at a small town (the end!) for lunch, and then took a van to a train station.

We got on the train to go to Aguas Calientes, the town right outside of Machu Picchu. It was really stuffy, so I did a little exploring and found a spot by an open window and a place if i wanted to sit down. I met some women from Colombia and guys from Switzerland and Amsterdam. The European guys spoke English (and probably some other language, just not spanish) and the Colombians spoke pretty good English and obviously Spanish, but I did a little translating when they were talking and wondering what a word was in English, heh.

So now we're here in Aguas Calientes and we're waking up eaaaarrrrly and going to MACHU PICCHU!!!!! I just can't wait :)

Chaos!

Cuzco!

So we made it!

After staying in Puno for about a day, and going to some sweet floating islands on Lake Titicaca (thanks workers strike!), we took a bus to Cuzco. On the bus we watched some Bride Wars, Seven Pounds (P.S. the title makes way more sense in Spanish - Siete Almas, or seven souls), and a hilarious made for t.v. movie called Her Best Move (featuring Luke from Gilmore Girls and Miranda from Lizzie McGuire). After the movies were over we had about 2 hours more of bus ride that was scary because we had seats right in the front, so we could see out the window when our bus had to swerve around rocks in the road. The rocks were put there by the people who were striking (actually agricultural workers, not miners, my mistake) to block transportation... apparently stopping work isn't enough to make an impact, which sucks :( But we got to Cuzco safely and found a hostel right around the corner from the one Dekel (I spelled his name wrong before, this one's right) met his other Israeli friend at.

Yesterday we went to a small town outside of Cuzco called Pisac, which was definitely worth the trip. It had a huge market where I got a few things (some gloves for our hike!) and a ton of Incan ruins up on the hill/mountain above the town. We got a taxi up and walked around with some friends I had met in Lima from Canada, and we had been emailing to try to find each other. We hiked back down to the town and then took the bus home, and had a great dinner at a restaurant right across from our hostel. I was stupid and didn't have enough money with me for dinner, so Sam paid with a combination of dollars and soles, which worked out okay, because they pretty much take dollars everywhere around Peru.

So today we're going to some museums and probably a few more incan ruin sites, and then we leave for our hike to Machu Picchu via Salkantay tomorrow morning at 4:30 am! We do take a bus for a little while, and don't start hiking until 8 am. I bought some good hiking boots today that are real comfy and weren't too expensive. I'm so excited to see Machu Picchu!!!!!

Chao for now :)

At the moment...

We're staying the night in Puno, next to Lago Titicaca. We met a really cool guy from Israel, Dakel (i think that's how you spell it?) on the 24 hour bus ride, and we're all staying in a hotel and going on a short tour to the 'Floating Islands' tomorrow. Our bus company said the strike will be over tomorrow, so we're getting on a bus with them at 4pm to get to Cuzco.

EXTREME DETOUR! But we're making the best of it :)

Carolina en Peruuuuuu!

I’m in Peru! Actually, I have been for a while, I’m just very slow at updating the blog… But I left Quito after my last day of volunteering and my last day at school (I had to take an ‘extra credit’ final online for marketing) on and overnight bus to Guayaquil where I would meet my friends Jen and Steph, who were flying there in the morning. We met at the bus terminal and then had to go outside to another office to get our bus tickets to Lima… a 26 hour trip! We thought the bus would leave at 2pm, which gave us a good few hours to eat lunch and hang around the bus terminal, but it turned out Lonely Planet was wrong, and the bus actually left at 11:30 am. So we had to rush over and we got on the bus just in time.

The bus was actually surprisingly nice, the seats turned into semi-beds, with a footrest type thing. It was 2 floors, and the bus actually didn’t fill up at all, so we were each able to have a seat to ourselves. They gave us hot meals on the bus, and it ended up taking 30 hours in total, but it was pretty interesting to ride through the desert in northern Peru and see the coast occasionally.

We got to Lima and shared a taxi with some nice foreigners to Miraflores, a really nice neighborhood in Lima. We picked a hostel in LP called the Flying Dog, and arranged our things and then went to the internet café and wandering around. There was a big park right outside the hostel, and it had a little nighttime market in the middle. There was also Starbucks, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Pizza Hut… but we wanted some Peruvian food, so we came back to a restaurant right next to the hostel where there were some guys from Virginia who we had met in the hostel. Steph actually ate some goat, and we tried pisco, the liquor from Peru, and then we tried chicha, thinking it was ‘fermented corn beer’ and therefore alcoholic, but it turned out that there are 2 kinds of chicha, and we were drinking the non-alcoholic one, which was pretty funny.

We had a good night’s sleep in the hostel, and Steph and Jen caught a flight to Cuzco early in the morning, leaving me for a day until Sam arrived at the airport that night from Chicago. I spent the day relaxing and talking to a lot of awesome people in the hostel, from places like Israel, France, England, and Canada. I went out to get coffee (Starbucks Caramel Frappuchino!) with a girl from Florida, who had finished school and was working on some archaeological digs around Peru. We talked for a while about that because I had just finished my class on Andean Archaeology that covered some of the stuff she was working on.

I also took a walk to the coast, which was a little hazy, but pretty looking. I didn’t go down to the beach, but just went to a lookout over some cliffs that looked out on the ocean.

Later that evening, I went to pick up Sam at the airport, and there were tons of teenagers waiting around and screaming occasionally when certain doors opened, because apparently the JONAS BROTHERS were coming on a flight right around the same time. OMG! haha. I wanted to stay for a little and see what sort of madness ensued, but when Sam got there we just headed back to the hostel. We dropped her stuff off and went out to get food. There wasn’t actually much open because it was Sunday, but we walked down a road with a bunch of restaurants where everyone was pleading us to go in. We walked right past that, feeling a little annoyed, and decided we shouldn’t go to McDonald’s because that would be “too American”… so we went to Burger King instead! hah. Back at the hostel we listened to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me before going to sleep, planning on wandering around downtown Lima the next day.

Monday (May 18th) we got up and had breakfast with some women from Israel, and a guy from San Diego, and then we took a taxi to go find out about buses to Cuzco, that we wanted to get on that night so we could arrive late Tuesday in Cuzco (another long bus ride... at least 22 hours). The bus company only left for Cuzco at 4:00 pm, so that didn’t give us much time to see Lima before we had to leave. Also, at first I thought the bus was terribly expensive, because when I asked them how much it cost they said ‘160’. I assumed she meant dollars, as I had just been reading Lonely Planet where everything was in dollars, but she obviously meant the Peruvian currency, soles, which equates to about $50 (3 soles to 1 dollar). So, after realizing I was a silly gringa, we bought tickets and then went to see the Plazas and churches in the centro.

We ate lunch at a nice little restaurant, and I made Sam try yuca frita and choclo con queso. After seeing the sights we then rushed back in a taxi, grabbed our stuff (I left my big maleta in a closet in the hostel! thank god I don’t have to lug that thing around) and got to the bus station. Now I’m writing this post on my laptop on our bus ride to Cuzco! But we just found out that there’s a mining strike on the road to Cuzco… but there might be another way to get through. So we’re actually on our way to Puno (by lake Titicaca! hm, didn’t expect to be going there… but I guess we’re making a stop) and the bus company is organizing a car for us to either make it to Cuzco tonight or tomorrow morning. We still have 3 days before we have to be in Cuzco to leave for our hike to Machu Picchu, so it actually isn’t a horrifying set-back. Thanks Peru! Oh… interesting travel experiences.

Playa! (Freedom, reading – NOT for school, and spending time con mis amigos)

Once finals were over, and after mother’s day (which I spent with my host family out in the ‘campo’ having a picnic and going swimming) I went to meet Zack and Elizabeth at the beach! We were staying in Puerto Lopez again at the same hostel, and we met our friend Galo who works there. The first day at the beach we went to Los Frailes and hiked around to the beautiful beaches. The water was much lower than it had been when we were there before, so the waves weren’t as big, and we were able to walk to some caves that had been half underwater before. We also (mostly Elizabeth and Zack) built a sand castle, which was washed away right after we had taken a picture of it. We had an awesome dinner at Bellitalia like we had the last time, along with Galo and a friend of his (Joanna, I think).

The next day, we went to a small town south of Puerto Lopez called Las Tunas, which had a huuuuge beach that we played Frisbee on and went swimming for a little while. As we were getting off the bus we had met a group of Canadians who were building a retaining wall on the other side of town as part of a community development class. We went with one of them, who was an older student in her 40s or 50s, to her host family, which was very welcoming, and the host mom offered to make us batidos (smoothies) yumm. We spent a good amount of time just sitting in the shade talking with the woman, who had actually lost her eyesight about 3 years prior, and then later talking to some of the other volunteers who were more around our age. We went back to Puerto Lopez, and I was planning on going to another beach (Canoa) to meet other friends, but Galo had told me that it was really difficult to get there overnight, so I ended up just going home with Zack & Elizabeth to Quito.

It was a perfect, very relaxing way to spend my time after being done with finals :)

Finals

After the Quilotoa weekend, I had a full week of pure insanity, academic-wise. I had a monografía (research paper) for sociology due that Tuesday, then a final quiz on Wednesday in Andean Anthropology (which didn’t turn out to be that bad, partner quiz! love you Angelica Ordoñez…), which I had to study a lot for because for me it would count for double since I missed the last quiz for the funeral. Then Thursday I had 2 finals, Lit (Cuento Hispanoamericano) and Soc (Problemas Sociales en Ecuador), and Friday another monografía (8 pages, 1.5 space… ewww) for Anthropology.

But then, at about noon on Friday after I had turned in my paper… I was freeee! I am now ¾ of the way through college…. WHERE HAS THE TIME GONE?! I have one year left of school… oh goodness.

Quilotoa Bike Trip!

I'm going to go baaack in tiiiime... before finals were over... and tell y'all about my awesome bike trip May 1st through 3rd (Friday, Saturday, Sunday):

My friend Steph took the liberty of looking up some trips online to go to Quilotoa, a big volcano crater-lake not too far outside Quito (about 3 hours). She found a great 3-day bike trip, and so 5 of us from the program went together: Me, Steph, Eva, Pierce, and Zack.

We left Friday morning and were picked up by our awesome tour guide, Lincoln, in a jeep with our bikes on the roof. I got picked up in Cumbayá, but apparently in Lumbisí while he was waiting for half the group, some Lumbiseño (gente from Lumbisí?) asked if he was stealing those bikes… He said no, he was waiting for some people, and why would he put the bikes on top of the roof if he were stealing them? It sounded like a strange story, but Lumbisí is just such a close-knit community that a strange guy with bikes is very out of place.

Anyways, we had a nice ride in the car to the first part of our trip, Cotopaxi! We drove in through the National Park up to the volcano (farthest away from the center of the earth thank-you-very-much) and half-wayish up to the parking lot. We climbed from there up to the refugio, which was quite a hike… mainly because it was super steep and there was very little oxygen for me to breathe…but we made it, and then trudged back down through the volcanic ash that had been really hard to climb up through.

When we got back down to the parking lot, we put our knee pads, elbow pads, helmets, and biking gloves on, and prepared to bike down the volcano (!). We took a few pictures of us in our hardcore outfits, and then went gliiiding down on the dirt road. I decided later that this was my favorite part of the trip, but not by much, because there were so many other amazing parts too. We went back and forth a bunch of times until we got to the bottom, and then we biked through the national park all the way to a restaurant where we stopped and had a picnic lunch while it was raining of awesome sandwiches, with the only ají I’ve ever liked in Ecuador (I’m not big on the spicy stuff). Luckily it stopped raining and we kept biking all the way to a river just before the entrance to the park. Lincoln had followed us in the car the whole way with our stuff, so we packed up our bikes and drove to Quilotoa that night.

We got to our hostel and had a nice big family-style dinner with everyone else staying there. We had some tea and made a fire in our room, and we listened to music and hung out for a while before going to bed.

The next morning, we got up and went to the Quilotoa crater. You walk through a little cavern in the side of the crater, and all of a sudden you come out and see the huge lake and mountains around it. It was sooo beautiful. We climbed down to the lake, and Pierce, being Pierce, went right ahead and jumped in the cooold lake. When we saw him shivering as he rushed to get out, we all decided against it, but we did go kayaking around the lake (trying to avoid the loch ness monster that popped up occasionally…)

The hike down was really, really steep… and so I wasn’t about to hike back up it when we still had a whole day of biking ahead of us, and we had heard many suggestions that we should take horses/mules back up the crater. So Eva and I shelled out the $5, me for a horse and her for a mule, and we rode back up while Zack, Pierce, and Steph hiked up. They ended up beating us (they got a head start… we had to wait for the aminals to come), but I was really glad I did it, my first horse ride since I was 8 or so! And I only sneezed 7 times, and then took a Zyrtec from Pierce when we got back up.

Then we started our bike ride to the next town on the loop (about 2-and-a-half hours away). This was only about 60% downhill, as opposed to the previous day, which was probably 90% downhill. In the beginning, we all went up a hill and thought that Steph was behind us, but it turns out she had gone the wrong way and Lincoln had to drive back and find her.

We were warned about dogs that might attack us on this stretch of the trip, so Zack went prepared with a stick in his belt loop. Lincoln also told us a strategy to either, if you’re going downhill, just keep going because the dogs are just protecting their territory, so they probably will just bark at you as you pass by, or, if you’re going uphill and can’t go fast, you should get off your bike on the opposite side of the dog and use the bike to protect yourself. Luckily, I didn’t have any run-ins with dogs that day, but Eva had a pretty traumatizing time when 3 dogs tried to attack her. I came up behind her just after she had escaped them. Thankfully they didn’t bite or anything, but it seemed like it was a scary experience.

We got to the next town, Chugchilán, and took our stuff into the very nice hostel right before it started raining a lot. We took some nice hot showers, and after a while we found another group from USFQ (mostly gringos, some friends of ours and a few people we didn’t know) that was staying at the same place, and we all hung out (some, literally so, in the hammocks) for a while listening to music and talking, and then we had dinner (with mashed potatoes?! hardly ever exist in the Ecuador) and sat around for a while more talking to Lincoln about how he wants to start his own business, because the one he works for now is owned by this guy from Holland who makes the tours kind of expensive and geared towards tourists rather than students.

On Sunday, we woke up and set out on one more bike ride (again, about 2 ½ hours) to Sigcho, the next town over. On this one it was about the same uphill/downhill deal as the last time, and the same warning about dogs. I got chased a little this time, but I stopped and used my bike to shoo the puppy away, and a few other times I just got barked at.Eva, Steph, and I stuck together for a good chunk of the time, so we were all fine… and we were all equally tired and incapable of biking up hills, so we walked together up some of them as Lincoln followed us in the jeep.

The boys reached the town way ahead of us, and we all ate lunch there before heading back to Quito.

As one last hurrah, Lincoln told us that there was one stretch right after the town that was all downhill and it was, guess what, asphalt! (as opposed to the dirt roads we had been on the whole trip… playing the pothole avoidance game…) This was my very close second favorite part of the trip. It was a really smooth ride all the way down the side of a hill to a river, and then we just packed up the bikes and went on home. Really, this was one of the best trips I had been on in Ecuador… and I had really missed biking! (and kayaking for that matter)