Follow-up pictures to Wednesday´s post

Now that Jeff and his camera are home, and I´ve got internet time while he´s writing up his experiences in Choquequirau, I´ll get some of the pictures up of the places I talked about in my Wednesday post (http://astrojeffandkate.blogspot.com/2010/08/party-time-in-kates-digestive-and-upper.html).

First, Moray:


These are the agricultural experimentation terraces - I like that Incan experiments were so pretty.


And big. Jeff´s in the middle of the circles - waaaaay down there:


The famous Incan staircases, proving that the Incans had really long legs, even though they were short:


On our way from one site to the other that day, we had to get through a few traffic jams. Here´s one, through the rear window:


Salinas, the salt harvesting valley:



There was one person harvesting while we were there:


Me, for scale. I´m walking along the aqueduct that brings the water from the spring to all the salt ponds:


On our way out, we were treated to a pretty sunset over a beautiful landscape:


While I was finishing up my paper and presentation, Jeff took an afternoon to get some pictures of Cusco and it´s architecture. The city is built on the remains of the capital of the Incan empire, so there´s still some Incan stonework walls left at the base of some buildings, wherever the Spaniards didn´t deem it sacrelidge.


The walls are incredible. No mortar, just huge stones cut very precisely to fit together - at least, they were done that carefully for the palaces of the Incan kings. There´s one rock that´s especially famous, since it´s got many corners, each with a perfectly fitting rock tucked in:


Some people for scale:


Of course, after a lot of the impressive stonework had been destroyed by the conquistadors, someone realized that it was actually pretty cool, so they decided to repair it:


Nice try, guys...

Also, a few pictures from last weekend´s trip to Tipon. Tipon was the terraced gardens with channels of water running through:



Jeff got to wash up a bit in the regular people´s shower:


The Incan king´s shower, however, was chained off, but our guide got our picture in front of it. That´s Sarah, our roommate, on the left.


And finally, what blog post that has pictures from me is complete without a few what-the-heck pictures?

First, the traffic in Cusco ain´t just sheep and cattle, so they need traffic cops. Most traffic cops are normal looking police officers. This one wanted to make sure everyone knew she was a she, not just a cop:


Nice chaps, ma´am, and those high heels must be great for chasing the bad guys. At least she´s got a gun. We´ve noticed that many of the women police officers here, traffic or otherwise, don´t have guns as often as the men. So there.

And finally, local elections are coming up in a couple months, so there are people driving around with loudspeakers a lot, and signs. I can´t get over some of the signs. Anybody seen the movie Dogma? Buddy Christ? Neh?


Just for a little unnecessary background - papa means potato, but papá means - well, papa, as in dad. Quite the little play on words. These signs really confused me at first, since there´s always a little cartoon at the bottom with an x through it, like this guy´s potato cartoons - on one candidate´s sign, they have a picture of bread crossed out, another has a picture of a shovel crossed out, and another has a condor crossed out. At first, I was wondering what they had against potatoes, bread, shovels, and condors, and then I realized that the ballots have symbols for people to check if they can´t read the names. Duh. Anyway, it brings a little smile to my face when I see these pictures of creepy, smiling, thumbs-up politicians and their crossed-out foodstuffs.

And there you are. This will be my last post from South America, I assume, since tomorrow is our last full day, and Sunday we fly out at 2 pm. -Sniff!- Two and a half months seemed like such a long time when I booked the trip. Now I can´t believe how much I haven´t seen yet. More adventures await future trips!

Party time in Kate´s digestive and upper respitory systems

Hello all,

This blog post is a little earlier than it should be, as I should be on a trail on my way back from Choquequirau (for those unfamiliar, the article that started our journey: http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/travel/03inca.html), four days into the five day hike. However, I caught a cold about a week and a half ago, then a few days later got some kind of stomach infection, so the cold got worse from me not eating much. Voila - no five day trek for me. By Saturday afternoon, I was in bed, and Monday we called for a doctor (house calls are normal here - I wasn´t on my death bed or anything). Now I´m all medicated and feeling mostly better, and tomorrow night, Jeff should be getting home tomorrow to tell me all that I missed! I have gotten a book and a half read, socks and pants mended, and two pairs of pants hemmed. So there´s that. And I´ve learned a bit of fun cultural stuff about sickness in the Andes.

Our host mother, Maike, has told us about some of the interesting differences between Peruvian medicine and our medicine that she´s discovered since she´s been hosting students. First of all, Peruvians tend to consider doctors good only if they prescribe western medicines -and- local herbal medicines. Apparently, my doctor wasn´t too great, because he prescribed three western medicines, oral rehydration fluids (yuck!), a bland diet, and three cups of herbal tea with each meal. At least there were some herbs in there somewhere - whew!

Hot water and herbal tea are good for everything, but only specific herbal teas for specific ailments - coca or boldo for the stomach, but boldo is bad for a cold, so no boldo for me. Manzanilla (chamomile) or anis for the cold, neither of which have any effect on the stomach. With nine cups of herbal tea prescribed per day, though, I´ve got all the flavors covered. Besides boldo, of course.

Today I was told that I had to either leave for the internet cafe before three o´clock in the afternoon, or after four, since from three to four there are strong winds that bring lots of viruses and sickness. Well, then. You´ll all be happy to know that I made it here by 2:30, and it is now a little after four, so I´ve been inside and away from the winds. Oh, and I was told at lunch that my zodiacal sign of Taurus says I should have many headaches, but not so many problems with colds. My head, however, is feeling just fine...

I don´t have any new pictures to post for you, since Jeff has been taking his camera along in Cusco and I´ve been leaving mine behind, and he´s got his still now. But I can tell you what we´ve been up to. That way, when we post pictures later, the blog post won´t take hours to write up...

The last couple weeks of school got basically entirely taken over (except the weekend trip to Machu Picchu) by a five page paper and a 20 minute presentation I had to do for my university credits. There were still things we really wanted to see around Cusco, though, so I snuck out on my studies one day to check out Moray and Salinas, about an hour drive from town. Since we were trying to get to see the ruins between lunchtime and dark, we only has about three or four hours. So we decided to forgo the local transportation and all its switches and waiting, and get a taxi to take us to each place. It was more expensive, sure, but it was still only about $30, and the taxi driver had his family with him. His wife and 2-ish year old girl were there in the station wagon when we got in, playing in the back. When we took off, they left the little girl in the back and the mother rode in the front seat. We rode that way for a few minutes, with us turned around making faces at the little girl, until we accelerated to go up a hill and the little girl rolled over backwards. She was still in sitting position, just on her back, with her feet up in the air, looking at us like, "Now what?" Not a peep, though, so we couldn´t help but giggle. The parents asked if she had fallen, stopped the car, and the mom brought her up to sit on her lap in the front seat (this country has no carseats, for sure - seat belts are still a few years off, I believe). Every time we got into a "Peruvian traffic jam" of animals being herded in the road, the little girl would point at them and name each kind. When the dad asked us how to say "vaca" in English, the little girl repeated "cow" in a perfect American accent. I couldn´t believe how much patience she had with the ride, the car, everything. If only all children were so chill...

Moray is an archaeological site, Incan, of course, with bowl-shaped terracing. Apparently, there´s a large difference between the temperature at the top and at the bottom, although we didn´t notice it, and this difference allowed the Inca to use the terraces as an agricultural experimentation station. It was pretty cool looking, with Incan staircases all over the place, which are just rocks jutting out from the terraces at (large) step intervals. We kept joking about how long Incan legs must have been, which is only funny if you realize that Jeff and I would be fairly tall in the Incan world.

Near Moray is Salinas, a working salt farm that has apparently been used since Incan times. There´s a spring there with warm, -very- salty water, which flows through a huge system of mini salt pans in terraces on a very steep hill. They let water from the spring run into a shallow pool, cut off the flow when it´s full, wait about 30 days until the water evaporates (it´s quite windy, which helps), and then scoop up the salt. It´s pretty thick, probably somewhere from one quarter to one third of the original depth of the pool, I´m guessing. That´s -very- salty water.

After my big break of freedom from papers and presentations on Friday, I felt the need to do some fun stuff, despite feeling like I was coming down with the stomach bug. Saturday, we went to Tipon, another archaeological site about an hour from Cusco. It was absolutely beautiful. Again, it was mostly terraces, this time in open rectangles, with channels running along the bottoms of the walls and waterfalls in the corners. The stonework was incredible. There were two places for showering, one for most people in Tipon that looked pretty good, and one for the Inca king that had three spouts and a grand channel leading to it. And the best part was - almost no other tourists. Peaceful. Aaaaaaaah. Unfortunately, I couldn´t handle all the walking that day (which is how I finally completely opted out of leaving for Choquequirau the next day), but Jeff and our roommate Sarah did. I got to see a fair amount, though.

So for having no pictures to post and for not having done anything for the last four days, this has become an awfully long blog post. I´ll be off now to get some more mundane work done, then be back to my bed. Hope all is well, and I can´t wait to see Jeff tomorrow!

Arequipa to Huacachina and back

While Kate tells some of the strange anectdotes of our trip, I´ll give a picture summary of the last week. On our last day in Arequipa last week, we went to the market, which was gigantic. There was all kinds of food, but we are always impressed with the sheer number of types of potatoes available. There are hundreds of types local to the area, and the market is full of them:There was also a church and monestary whose cloisterwalk had been converted into an upscale shopping center and cafe location. Most everything was closed, but we enjoyed walking around:
At the end of the day, we wondered how we might get a photo of El Misti behind the cathedral in the town square. There are restaurants all around the square, so we randomly chose one that was in line with the cathedral and the mountain. When the waiter saw us taking pictures from the table during sunset, he asked us if we wanted to go up to the rooftop for a better view. of course we took advantage of that offer, and we took a whole bunch of photos, but here´s one with Kate:
After we came down to pay, the waiter directed us into the kitchen and started explaining things to us. We had seen before that the restaurant called itself "pre-incan" food, but we just had a salad, chicha (local maize beer that tastes somewhat like vinegar and smelly feet), and some pudding that we had never heard of before, so we didn´t really know what we were eating. He explained to us that the owner had researched indiginous pre-incan food and he used only ingredients and methods available to those people. No cooking oil, no metal pots, no garlic or other european food. It was quite interesting. He started by showing us the diversity of potatoes again:
Here you can see them cooking in earthenware pots, and on the other side they had a charcoal grill covered with large round stones:
it was a pretty neat dinner experience, so we vowed to go back for a real meal one of these days. But first, we had to catch our night bus to Nazca, which is about a 9 hour drive or so. We went first class (about $30 or so), which was kind of this funny capsule on the downstairs part of the bus with cushy reclining seats. It was not a good sleep on a bumpy bus, but it made for good smiles when we started out:
We did a whirlwind tour through Nazca the next morning. We did not do a flight because they are expensive, somewhat dangerous, and I´ve seen all the pictures already--I mostly wanted to see what the natives saw when they made their famous drawings. The famous Nazca lines were formed in the desert by removing the top rocky and oxidized layer of the desert floor. It´s actually pretty easy to make very visible lines due to the geology there. You can see the effect very well from a hill that we used as a lookout over the desert:
Because the slightest path creates a very visible line, the government has rightfully outlawed all ground access to the archeological site, which covers hundreds of miles of the driest desert you can imagine. They get less than a centimeter of rain a year here, so any line made in the ground lasts for thousands of years. And last they did. The Nazca people covered the desert with amazingly straight lines, some of which still remain a mystery. Certainly some would have been used for travel or transport, but others seem to align with the stars, perhaps as a form of a calendar, or perhaps as part of religious beliefs:
The most famous and perplexing part of the desert, though, is where the pre-historic people drew figures in the ground, some only visible by airplane, without any high-tech help. We went to a lookout tower to see a few of them. Below is the tree:
It´s actually hard to see it´s a tree from the photo, but it was quite striking in person. There are also other crazy figures, like monkeys, hands, and even the so-called astronaut, which we did not see.
Instead of spending more time in Nazca, which is honestly quite a dusty and depressing little city, we went to the resort of Huacachina, which is nestled in a field of huge sand dunes. Here´s Kate traversing the very steep side of one of the biggest ones, on the way down to our hotel:
Of course, we took a cab to the hotel, but we played on the dunes afterwards. It was actually quite a vertigo-inducing experience, since the leeward side of a dune is very steep and one of the largest dunes dropped down leeward right onto the edge of our hotel. I eventually got the courage to climb to the top, which was about 1000 feet above the resort. There are a bunch of hotels around this little lagoon there, we´re in the one that has the blue pool right touching the edge of the closest dune in this picture:
And from the top of the dune, you look out over a sea of seemingly endless dunes. They apparently go for about 70 kilometers until they meet the Pacific Ocean. There are apparently some very untouched beaches at the end of the dunes here because it is only accessible by a long ride on a large dune buggy. We did not do that ride, though.
Instead, we tried out sandboarding! First, we took a few practice runs by walking up the dune next to the resort (that´s me boarding down the dune):
The next day, we went on a dune buggy tour where they drove us in a group to the top of the dunes. Kate is showing off her sandboard here:
I took a video of Kate doing a belly board down a big dune (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl7kmilcTKw), and then one of our fellow tourists, Brenna, showed us just how fast you can go (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkuQayzkrhU) and ended up with some skinned elbows at the end and a lot of sand in the face. As our luck would have it on this trip (remember our radiator blowing up on the Uyuni trip?), we blew out a tire just before heading up to view the sunset:
It almost knocked the tire off the rim, so we had to call in another buggy to bring us a spare.
Although we missed the proper sunset, our guide gave us an extra hour after the tour, and we got to do some more sandboarding in the twilight. Here´s me with my board:
Our last day in Huacachina, we took a private taxi tour to two vinyards in the town of Ica. Ica is not much of a pretty town, but it has a lot of agriculture, especially wineries, and it is famous for its Pisco, which is a type of brandy that is clear since it is not aged in Oak. Did I mention that all the while in Huacachina and Arequipa we´ve been enjoying the local specialty, Pisco sour? Well, we got to see how they make their wine and Pisco here. Here´s one of their stills for distilling the wine:
They had a warehouse full of big oak barrels that are not used anymore. I believe they were 10,000 liter barrels. They also showed us their modern concrete-lined 100,000 liter containers, but the warehouse full of them was not as photogenic.
Kate posed in front of the newer-style barrels for aging wine, and in the background are the clay barrels that they used for fermenting the grapes. The newer vinyard that we saw did everythign on an industrial scale, so they only have them as museum props in the background, bu the artisinal vinyard we saw still made everythign the old-fashioned way.
Our last day in Huacachina happened to be July 28, which is a huge independence day festival for Peru, so there were parties everywhere. There was a big party at the vinyard, and Huacachina was gearing up for another party. We saw them inflate a giant beer bottle at our hotel as we were checking out to catch another night bus back to Arequipa:
That was yesterday. After a long and half-sleepless bus ride (and smelly too, because someone did not hear the directions that the bathrooms in the bus are for "urination only"), we made it back to Arequipa for a lazy day of catching up on sleep and internet updates. We have a couple days left here to see some museums and enjoy the beautiful weather before heading up the mountains to Cusco on Saturday (another night bus). Then we will make ourselves at home for another 3 weeks of Spanish lessons. We´ve been using Spanish as much as we can here, (did all our tours of the winery and Nazca lines as well as restaurant and hotel stuff in spanish), but our last few weeks have nonetheless been somewhat touristy, so we will be back to hard work again in a few. But there´s lots to see in Cusco, too, so we´ll keep the updates coming. Hasta la proxima!

The randomness of Bolivia and Peru

While Jeff discusses the news of our last week or so, I´ll fill you in on some of the more random stuff from our trip. We take a lot of pictures of things that make us go hmm, but when we go to write up a blog post, we generally overlook most of the more random things - so here´s a blog post dedicated to just them. At least, just those since La Paz, since the pictures from before La Paz are on memory cards that are no longer in our cameras since they are full. We take a lot of pictures...

A quick note - the pictures of the very weird are often taken through car windows, from far away, or on the sly. The quality of the photos is not quite to the standards of what we normally put on our blog, but it´s more about the subject than the picture when you´re trying to hold the camera still while laughing.

One of the major subjects of randomness are signs and company names. For example, the bus in front of ours in this picture is named "Aroma." I´m sure it had one - that of deisel exhaust - but do they need to call that much attention to it?

Weird-hance!

A trend I noticed in Tanzania (and really, there, how could you not) was that of custom stickers on rear windows. The trend is continued in Bolivia and Peru. Although not as common, it is often just as random:


Apparently, this guy really likes his Toyota, but mostly because of its sound system. Which is not surprising - many of the cars around here have sound systems that are worth two or three times as much as the vehicle. Reminds me of high school.

Some of the more touristy places don´t seem to hire very good translators before spending a lot on a fancy sign:


Are they making soup from the bones they discover, then? ...and...


They even have weird signs advertising companies that make signs. Why, exactly, does this sign need a chick in a bikini? It´s for a sign-making company, not a bikini-making company. This is one of the more, um, modest of the "gigantografias" (big-sign-making company) signs we saw.


Then there are the signs that I wish more people would pay attention to. The drivers here love their horns, so much so that a couple different taxi drivers have mentioned it to us on their own. It´s insane how much they honk - as bad as Chicago, actually. They don´t really have traffic laws here, per se, so the general agreement is apparently that whoever honks first gets right-of-way in an intersection. Really. I guess whoever lives/works at this intersection got tired of it:


Of course, there are -things- that are just weird, not just signage. For example, a recent trend in regional entertainment around La Paz, Bolivia, is a twist on the WWE-style wrestling that has been around for some time. Now Cholitas, women in traditional dress (skirts with petticoats and double braids), are entering pro-wrestling, with all the campy showmanship and fake characters and storylines to go with it. And tourists can go see!


The food here is mostly carbs and mostly fried, but they do like to fry chicken, as well. The most common name for fried chicken is pollo broaster, which one place translated to - you guessed it - Kentucky Fried Chicken.


That actually didn´t surprise me much, since whenever people ask us which state we´re from and we say Kentucky, they say fried chicken. (Of course, whenever we say Washington, they say DC or Obama, and are -very- confused when we say no, the state... Not that that´s any different than most of the US).

Another cultural oddity is the proliferation of saints. They have saints everywhere - restaurants (in the little shrine next to Jeff - also note the weird sofa he´s sitting on - it was supposed to be a model of a woven reed boat, since it was in Copacabana on Lake Titicaca):

... wineries (the statue of the saint is inside the giant wine barrel):


...on the top of pretty much every hill, in most pay-parking lots, etc, etc, etc. Some of the more important, public shrines have little plaques thanking the saint in question for "favors received." Well, then.


Then, there are the brand names. They have their own soft drinks down here, including a copy of Coca Cola that´s called Coca Quina.


This one´s for my Battlestar Galactica obsessed friends - you know who you are (Janet!). Just fyi - Frac cookies are actually very good.


On the you-know-who-you-are track, this one´s for Gina:


And this one´s for the lunch crew in Huntington. I almost wanted to go in and order the pollo ranchero, but I´m not sure they had it:


We´ve mentioned a couple times our obsession with taking pictures of the dogs down here. We keep saying we´ll spare you the pictures, and then put one or two in because they´re hilarious - just like now:


Dogs aren´t the only funny animal here. Check out the fancy hotel´s lawn service in Copacabana:


There were a lot of donkeys on Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca, and so there were a lot of donkey herders. This guy was chilling while on guard, and must have been playing some game on his cell phone for how long he was on it:



I don´t know why I find the mix of traditional and technoligical so funny, but that one struck me as a little funny. I guess I was tired that day or something.

We have previously included a few of the weird pictures, like the llama fetuses for sale. Here´s a new take on the llama fetus:


Sorry for the crappy photo quality - hope you can see what´s going on. If you can´t, it´s mariachi llama fetus. Very nice. I guess it brings good luck to that particular market stall...

Speaking of market stalls, we often wander town for hours trying to find some particular thing. Today, we looked for bread for some time, and never did manage to find the cheese. I´m sure at some point, we´ll find a street totally covered in cheese venders - but as it turns out, we managed to find a street completely covered in alcohol venders:


I still haven´t totally figured out how the supply and demand system works here, since each stall has a different vendor, but they all sell the same thing for the same price.

Vendors are, of course, everywhere. Including right outside the most impressive ruins we´ve seen, Tiwinaku. Pre-Incan monolith with a hoard of vendors not 20 feet away...


The graffiti here is also very interesting. Most of it is political, but occasionally you get one that´s not as easy to figure out:


That particular graffiti got a round of earworm songs stuck in my head.

This one is for Aaron Walters, if he ever sees it:


Speaking of Che, we saw a strange sculpture of him through a bus window in La Paz:


I have lots of pictures of statues from here, but most are to show the sheer number of pigeons. Coming from an area with not many pigeons, it´s pretty amazing:


A few last pictures. Last Saturday, we were wandering Arequipa, and notice that there were an awful lot of weddings going on. Every church (and there are a lot of churches here, all very grand) had fancy-decorated cars outside and crowds of people. Occasionally, we´d get a glimpse of the bride and groom, but generally, flower-bedecked cars were enough to know what was happening. In this case, though, they were a bit skimpy with the car decorations compared to the others:


That boquet is slapped on there with packing tape. Awesome.

Oh, and on Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca, I was noticing how much stuff was made of the reeds that make up the famed reed boats and floating islands of the lake. Well, we got a new idea for their use when we got to our hotel:



One other random thing I´d like to rant about a bit - I thought Tanzanians had interesting taste in movies and music for buses. I mean, Celiene Dion´s live video for hours? Yuck! Anaconda wasn´t too great, either. But they´ve got nothing on Peruvians. Our first day in Peru, we were treated to one guy who apparently thought that his horrible taste in music (crappy Peruvian rap) was worth sharing with the rest of the bus passengers via Ipod integrated speakers (I´d really like to have a talk with the Mac engineers on making it so easy to play Ipods out loud, rather than on earphones. Not such a great idea, guys), but that wasn´t all that unusual. When the bus finally filled up, we got treated to a movie. Child´s Play. Yeah, the 80s horror flick with the psychotic doll, Chuckie. Anyone who knows my taste in movies knows that´s about the worst choice possible. I don´t do violence, I don´t do blood, I don´t do any of it. When the movie finally ended and I was able to take out my headphones that I had up loud enough to drown out the screaming from the movie, we got treated to ... the same movie over again! When it ended the second time, guess what? They started it a -third time-! Fortunately, someone had enough sense to turn it off about a half hour into the third round. Welcome to Peru, Kate and Jeff! Then, last night on our ride back to Arequipa from Ica and Huacachina, we got to see a Denzel Washington (okay, could be worse, I´ll admit) bloody thriller as a bedtime story, and were awoken to the fundamentalist Christian movie, Fireproof. (If you don´t know about it, look it up.) Never figured I´d actually see that one. Of course, I´d spent quite a lot of my life not having seen Chuckie, so you never know what new experiences you´ll have when you travel in Peru.

And finally, here´s the picture that got deleted from the Lake Titicaca post of the path we followed:


So it doesn´t fit well into this post. At least it´s pretty.

Hope you all are doing well! We´re having a great time, when not having to watch really bad movies on long bus rides...