La Serena, Chile, and you can call us tonight or tomorrow

I love the place where we´re staying in La Serena. It´s a private house belonging to a woman named Iris. She lives here, and also rents out three or four rooms. We have full access to the kitchen and the clothes washing machine. And we can receive calls on the telephone! It is expensive for us to call you (and we can´t do it from Iris´house) but it´s very cheap for you to call us from the U.S. So if you want to catch up with us by phone, tonight or tomorrow night (Halloween) is the time. The cheapest way by far is to buy an international phone card for $5 or $10. You can call us from the US at 011-56-51-225175.

We are one time zone east of the U.S. Eastern time. And it´s best to call us after 8 our time. So that means between 6 and 8 p.m. Central time, or 5 and 7 p.m. Mountain time.

We´re really happy to hear from you by email, or by blog comments, too.

So about the place we´re staying: It´s really nice to be able to cook our own meals after so many restaurants. I have really missed Gary´s delicious cooking! Yesterday he made spaghetti with Chilean vegetables like sapayo, which is a type of squash. The kitchen is clean and Iris showed us how to clean the vegetables with a beach disinfectant. You have to do that when traveling because many vegetables are irrigated with contaminated water (probably contaminated with sewage) so it´s important to cook them or peel them, and to be extra safe you can disinfect them. The disinfectant contains bleach and so is probably not healthy in the long term, either. Clean water is really not to be taken for granted. Water pollution is one of the biggest problems worldwide.

The house is just a regular house with no sign or advertising. Iris fills her rooms by going to the bus depot every day and approaching tourists as they get off buses. That´s how we met her.

We share a bathroom with a French family. Two parents and two kids, ages 5 and 2 1/2. They are traveling for 3 1/2 months, on a route similar to ours. They have been to Peru and Bolivia too. It would be nice to be fluent in multiple languages like my mom is! The little 2 1/2 year old and I just say "hola" to each other. Yesterday we played a game involving pointing at pictures of animals. I say the name of the animal in Spanish, then she repeats it perfectly. She says the name in French and I try to repeat it. She corrects me and I try again. I´ll never be able to say horse in French. Then I point at the tiger and roar. She laughs, then points at the horse and says hee-haw, exactly like a donkey! I guess she must have seen some burros in her travels.

There is wonderfully hot water here, any time we want it. When we want hot water, we light the pilot light on the gas water heater. The water becomes instantly hot. We turn off the gas when we´re done, and the water is instantly cold again. I don´t understand how it heats the water so quickly. It doesn´t store a tank of hot water, as our hot water heaters do in the U.S. Some hotels have an electric water heater in the shower. It´s a device attached to the shower head. In my experience it didn´t actually work. But the gas one is great.

I uploaded our latest pictures, on Flickr. Just go to flickr.com/photos/kimigary and look at the photos for Antofagasta, Chañaral, Pan de Azucar and La Serena.

Hasta luego!

Chañaral, Chile

Hi from Chañaral! In Chile, we´ve been traveling on the Pullman bus line, which has very nice service complete with a sandwich and soft drink at lunch time. From Iquique to Antofagasta, we rode on the top level of a double decker bus, in the very front! That was a nice view. I´m reading an Isabel Allende novel, La Ciudad de las Bestias. It´s easy to read while riding through the Atacama desert, because there are no curves in the road, and very little to look at!

We are eating lots of soup here, especially seafood soup! We´ve eaten tons of seafood that we can´t name, in Spanish or in English.

Chañaral is a tiny little village on the coast. When we arrived, we walked down to the beach where we met our new friends Ricardo and Sylvia, from Santiago. Ricardo is an engineer for Codelco, the local copper mine that´s owned by the Chilean government. He showed us an expanse of greenish sand on the beach, and told us that it´s caused by pollution from the mine.

Since the 1910s, the mine was owned by an American company, first Anaconda and later Andes. They had a canal that brought the tailings down to the beach in front of Chañaral. The tailings contained that greenish contaminant, which settled all over the beach and in the ocean. The tailings were mixed with sand. Eventually, so much sand and tailings were deposited that they raised the beach, causing the shoreline to move away from the town of Chañaral. Now, you have to walk across the greenish expanse of sand to get from Chañaral to the beach. The contaminants killed off all of the marine life. This contamination went on until 1970, when Salvador Allende nationalized the mine and it became Codelco, owned by the Chilean government. Codelco continued to dump contaminants in the same way until 1990, when they changed to a new and supposedly better system. Now, the marine life has come back but the beach is still heavily contaminated.

Another local told us that a lot of people die of cancer aroud here, and that Codelco built the decorative lighthouse that is above Chañaral in order to appease the local people. The lighthouse is nowhere close to the shore and is supposed to draw tourists, but I don´t think it draws very many.

Sylvia is from the southern tip of Chile, Punta Arenas, and is descended from Croatian immigrants. Sylvia and Ricardo offered to give us a ride back to town, and ended up giving us a tour of the area. We drove toward Pan de Azucar park until we could see the island from the distance. We saw cactus (so there actually are a few plants in the Atacama desert!) and a dried plant that´s like a wooden coil. Then Sylvia and Ricardo invited us to their house for a delicious meal of toast with fish, avocado, scrambled eggs and fruit! They live in Barquito, an area of housing built by the mine. They are only here part of the year, and their main residence is in Santiago. Sylvia sometimes stays in Santiago, and sometimes comes to Chañaral and paints beautiful ocean scenes.

After dinner, Ricardo and Sylvia gave us a tour of Barquito. Barquito is mining housing built when the mine was American-owned. It was segregated. The American workers lived in one section which consists of individual houses. The Chilean workers lived in another section, more barracks style. All of the housing is built of Oregon Pine, brought from the US and unusual here where there are no trees and people build of stone, cement or adobe. Termites are devouring the Oregon Pine. Now, the mine has few employees because it subcontracts everything to other companies. So the mine sold the housing, and the houses are mostly owned by individuals now.

Ricardo and Sylvia drove us back to our hotel (and the downtown area where a street dance happened to be in progress -- and the band was staying at our hotel) but not before loading us up with good food including canned fish and herbal tea. After spending all of our time with each other lately, it was nice to spend the evening with another couple, and to make new friends.

Today we went to Pan de Azucar National Park, in hopes of seeing penguins. We weren{t able to see the penguins, but we did see jellyfish! I´ll post pictures of our day at the park later, but the connection here is too slow. Tomorrow we leave for La Serena, where we plan to spend a couple of days before heading south to Valparaíso and Santiago! In Santiago, we´ll visit my friend Olga from the World College!

Meanwhile, my mom did a bit of research on the Uros islands, the reed islands that we visited in Peru. Here is what she found: Wikipedia says: The Uros Islands were built for defensive purposes. If there was danger (probably from invasion?), the islands could (with difficulty) be moved to a safer place. There are 42 islands in the group. Each island lasts about 30 years before it rots away, and they keep adding new reeds to the tops constantly as the undersides rot away. There are about 3000 members of the Uros tribe, but most live on the mainland, and only a few hundred live on the islets now. The Uros were a pre-Incan tribe. They traded with the Aymara tribe on the mainland, and then interbred with them, and finally abandoned their language (about 500 years ago) and spoke Aymara. Then they were conquered by the Incas. Of the 42 islands, 10 are tourist showcases. About 10 families can live on each of the larger islands, with only 2 or 3 on each smaller one. They do not reject technology (hence the sheet metal buildings you saw!). They have elementary school on the islands, but must go to the mainland for higher learning.

Imagine moving your island!

Iquique, Chile

We´ve been sitting on the rocky shore of the Pacific Ocean, watching the waves crash on the rocks.

I keep being amazed at how nice people are to us as we travel. For example, we arrived in Iquique with only a few dollars worth of Chilean pesos. We had enough for a cab ride to our hotel, but not enough to pay for our room. So I looked at the room, told the young clerk that we would take it, but that we didn´t have the money. We would go to the ATM and then we could pay. No problem, he said. He gave me the key, told us to make ourselves comfortable, and pay later. I don´t think that many US hotels would let a person, especially a foreigner, do that.

The same clerk is letting me use the computer behind his desk to write these blog entries, and I´ve been on for several hours uploading photos! He told me I can stay all night if I want to, just turn the computer off when I leave.

Compared to where we´ve been, Chile feels much more like the US. For example: Many of the vehicles in the street are private cars, not all buses and taxis. Bikes are ridden by kids, for fun, rather than adults hauling things to market. There are motorcycles, and people in shorts. To get to the waterfront, we walked past some rundown apartments that look like the projects in any American city. They are covered with gang graffiti. Homeless people live in cardboard structures by the ocean. Some of the kids are chubby (though not like in the US!) I saw a car start by remote control. There is increased observance of safety: fire exits, runaway truck ramps, signs in Spanish and English saying what to do in case of tsunami). Babies travel in strollers rather than in blankets on their mothers´backs, and the sidewalks are wide enough to accommodate the strollers. The sidewalks are not crowded with people and vendors. Nobody is trying to sell us anything. We bought bottled water and it was cold, as in refrigerated! People go to the mall, rather than to the old downtown area. They are trying to revitalize the old downtown, but it mostly looks empty and reminds us of a Disneyworld boardwalk scene. In the showers, the hot water is actually hot, not tepid! I even had to tone it down with the cold faucet. And there is water pressure! There are marked prices in stores, lanes painted on the streets, and people use turn signals. There is more racial diversity, yet few Indigenous people. There are advertisements for credit cards, and for websites. There is a market, but it is semi-empty and looks like it´s fading the way of U.S. downtown businesses, in favor of supermarkets and the mall. In the market, there are regular toilets with toilet seats, not squat toilets like I used in Peru. The public toilets flush with a handle, not by dumping a bucket of water down them. There is a sink, and soap for handwashing!

Disturbingly, there is also white supremist graffiti. For example, we saw graffiti that said "No somos drogados, No somos comunistas, somos rapado, somos racistas.¨ This means "We are not druggies, we are not communists, we are shaved, we are racists." Another said "nacismo al poder" or "nazism to power" and another said, in English, "skinhead". All of the racist graffiti contained swastikas and another symbol that looks like a circle with a plus sign in it, extending to outside the circle.



Aside from seeing that graffiti, people in Chile have been wonderful to us. We saw a communist party office, and they were having a women´s meeting as we walked by. There is delicious seafood. It´s amazing to see the ocean on one side, and huge sand dunes if we turn and look in the other direction. Chile is an extremely long country, and in a few days we will begain to travel south!

Bus ride to Chile

The bus ride from Oruro, Bolivia to Iquique, Chile is 10 hours. The Bolivian part of the trip, which was quite a few hours, was mostly on a one-lane gravel road through land that looks like Wyoming, with llamas instead of cattle. You can see why Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came here to rob trains. When we met an oncoming vehicle (usually a huge truck or another bus) one of us had to pull over to let the other pass. Once we had to back up until we reached a wider spot in the road. And this is a fairly major highway in Bolivia! After the first two hours we came to a toll collector. After that there was a short paved section, and then it was back to gravel. But there is cell service here. People on the bus received calls.

You never know what the bus temperature will be. This bus was very cold at the beginning of the trip, and very hot at the end. We dress in layers and bring hat, scarf, gloves and a blanket.

In Bolivia there seem to be taxes and tolls for everthing: to enter particular towns or cities, to enter the bus terminal. But usually the tax is only about US 15 cents. I guess the government doesn´t fund the infrastructure, and so this is how they support it. The bus system seems to be great, and as elsewhere in Latin America we´ve never had to wait more than a few minutes for a bus to anywhere we wanted to go.

It´s very, very dry here and people build houses and fences of adobe bricks, like in New Mexico. Mostly it seems to be open range, with no fences. In a few places there are fences made of stones or adobe bricks. Nothing is built of wood. We´ve seen no naturally-growing trees in Bolivia. (There are trees in the plazas). I wonder if the Spanish colonists cut down all of the trees, as they did in parts of Mexico.

In Bolivia and Peru, people on the street call us amigo or amigo, as someone would call out maàm or sir in the US. It´s nice and feels friendly.

The bus stopped at the border and we all walked through immigration. We changed our 140 Bolivianos for 9,000 Chilean pesos, which is less than US $20. On the Chilean side, the road was paved, with an actual dotted line between the lanes, and lines on the edges. There were even signs indicating no passing zones!

After the border we descended in altitude rapidly, and it got drier and drier. First, it looked like Wyoming. Then like Utah with cacti. Then it looked like a gravel pit. Not a plant in site. The land can´t possibly be used for anything except for digging out gravel. Some places are flat, some are hilly, all made of brown dirt.



Then we entered the real desert, with sand and a few desert plants. We descended more and more, until we saw the ocean, the sand dunes, and we were in Iquique!

Something I forgot to mention about Oruro, Bolivia. In the plaza we saw the band KISS, or more likely some guys dressed like the band KISS. I wouldn´t be able to recognize the real guys, but these guys were speaking fluent Spanish. I am guessing that they are not the real KISS, but tons of Bolivian teens were getting their autograph and taking their pictures. So we took their picture, too!

Also about Oruro, it was very easy to ride the local buses, which come every few minutes. We never waited longer than two minutes. The buses are really more like vans. You stand on a corner on the route, watch for a bus with a sign in the window that says where you want to go, and flag it down. Pay about US 20 cents, and get a seat if you can. By the time the bus reaches its destination, you have given your seat to an elderly person or a woman with a baby in a blanket tied to her back, and you are standing in the aisle amid women carrying huge packs of something wrapped in brightly colored blankets. When you want to get off, you shout "a la esquina" or "at the corner" and the driver will stop and let you off. You have to squeeze through all the people and the blanket packs in the aisle until you finally pop out of the bus!

In Bolivia there is a kind of giant popcorn called pasankàlla. It is sweet (flavored with sugar) and you can buy it on the street. You can also buy corn on the cob on the street, and the kernels are huge! Maybe that´s why the popcorn is so huge. In Mexico, popcorn is palomitas. In Peru it´s manà. And in Chile it´s polulo. Pasankàlla in Bolivia. You can see why it´s hard to keep track of the names of food!

We`re in Chile! But now, about Bolivia

Today we watched the sun set over the Pacific Ocean in Iquique, Chile. In a few days we went, by land, from Lake Titicaca at 11,000 feet to sea level. So, I´ll try to catch you up a bit:

I uploaded photos of the Uros Islands, the islands made of reeds (totora), onto the Flickr site. The islands are really a tourist trap, but worthwhile to see anyway because they are so unusual. We were given a little tour, and also invited to eat the bottom part of the reeds, which are starchy and taste good!



Click on the photos to go to the Flickr site to see more.

Back on the mainland, in Puno, we got to ride in a bicycle taxi. I want to drive one of those! But the driver had to work really hard transporting us straight uphill, away from the lake.

The fiesta in Chucuito was amazing, like carnaval. Huge marching bands, traditional Andean flute music, dancers in traditional and modern costume, some swinging rattles made of dead armadillos, I think, men in costumes that look like wedding cakes or maybe hoop skirts, women in short skirts and very tall boots ... the official parade went on for about six hours. After that, the judging was over but the people continued marching. The parade went around and around the plaza late into the night, much later than we stayed up by the looks of it. I took tons of pictures, on Flickr. The Chucuito fiesta goes on all week, but we left after a couple of days. We actually liked the quiet town of Chucuito better before the fiesta started. So we went on to Bolivia.




We crossed Bolivia quickly, on our way to Chile. We really liked Bolivia, but we are going back there in December with friends Bertha and Harald. Bertha is a friend of mine from the United College, and is from La Paz. We´re really looking forward to seeing Bertha and Harald, and to traveling with them! Meanwhile, they live in Europe so we won´t see them until they return to Bolivia at Christmas time. For now, we are on our way to southern Chile to meet friends, and we are looking forward to returning to Bolivia.

The bus ride to Copacabana, Bolivia, was beautiful. We were next to Lake Titicaca for most of the time. For awhile, the lake was on both sides of the highway, as we drove on a mountainous ridge between water. I wondered how we would cross the lake, and eventually we pulled up in a tiny town and everyone got off the bus. The bus crossed the lake on a barge, while we crossed on a motor boat. We met a traveler from Israel during that bus ride. So far, we´ve met quite a few Europeans, a few Canadians, people from other countries in Latin America, but very few people from the U.S.

You can see right away that Bolivia is very poor, even compared to Peru. For example, the gas stations in Copacabana don´t have gas pumps. They have plastic containers of gas, with handles. I didn´t see them used, but it looks like the attendant picks up the container and uses a funnel to fill your tank.




In La Paz, the tourist police met our bus and helped us get into a safe cab to the bus terminal. Within 20 minutes of arriving at the terminal, we had bought tickets and were on a bus to Oruro.

I liked Oruro. There were few tourists, and a pretty plaza. We spent half a day sitting in the sun on the plaza watching everything. There is a scam in Bolivia in which someone spills a vile liquid on you and a "good samaritan" steps in to help you clean up, but actaully steals all your money. In the plaza in Oruro, a vile liquid landed on my arm. I quickly looked around for the "good samaritan" until I realized that the liquid came from the pigeons in the tree above!

One thing we´ve noticed everywhere is that people are watching American TV shows. Kids are watching Barney, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, all dubbed into Spanish. While eating at a restaurant in Bolivia, we saw Barney sing a song about the cowboys in Wyoming dancing the polka. I wonder what effect this massive exportation of US culture to people as young as toddlers all over the world has.

There are much fewer throw away products here than in the US. For example, instead of giving you butter and jelly packets for your bread, they put a dollop of butter and of jelly on your plate.

In Bolivia, the toilet paper is hot pink! We really liked Bolivia, and care looking forward to going back. Also, it´s extremely cheap to travel in Bolivia (which will be good to restore our budget, because Chile is expensive!) In Copacabana Bolivia, we paid about $8 for our hotel room. In Chile, we´re paying $34. But we´re checking into couchsurfing.com.

Hi from Oruro

This is Gary. We are in Oruro, Bolivia. Oruro is in the altiplano. beautiful day this morning. lots of sun and not too hot. We wanted to take the train from Uyuni, bolivia to the Chilean desert, but the train is no longer in existence. So tomorrow we take a bus to Iquique, Chile which is on the desert coast. WE are hoping to see some penguins farther south.

We enjoyed are stay in Chucuito,Peru. The town has a week long fiesta or carnival. Bands and dancers come from as far as Oruro, Bolivia and from towns in Peru to participate in the festivities. The drumming starts early in the morning each day and then the bands play and dancers arrive in the small plaza. Lots of beer and food are passed around. We were invited to eat food at one of the locals houses one morning. Really nice people. All the bands and dancers then move to the main (big) plaza. One after the other marches around the plaza as spectators watch . The area was jammed with people. We were the only tourist present! The costumes were outrageously different. The womens coustumes were beautiful with many different colors.
This happens every day and night for a week! One afternoon we went to Puno,Peru to visit the reed islands in lake titikaka. Most of the buildings were made of reeds. The people anchor the base of the reeds to the bottom of the lake and shore. Very interesting life style. It would be fun to stay out there over night! The locals do weavings and reed crafts to sell to the tourists. This is most of there income! We went from one isand to another by reed boat. The steering of the boat by one back oar was interesting to watch. The islands are made of reeds also!
It was hard to leave Chucuito, Peru.
Our next visit was to Cocacabana, bolivia. Nice little tourist town on lake titikaka. we only spent one day. We may go back with our friend bertha to visit the Island of the sun. There is ruins there and some good hiking. Beautiful drive by bus to La Paz. We had to cross lake titikaka by ferry. All passengers had to get off the bus(too heavy) and cross the lake in a smaller boat. it was a beautiful sunny clear day, the lake looked gorgeous. La Paz is in a big valley with high snowy mountain peaks above. The city is huge with people and buildings everywhere. After being in small towns and villages, La Paz was overwelming. I thought driving in denver was bad! we did not stay long however, and took a bus to Oruro!

Tech problems

For some reason the pictures I added don´t show up, at least on my screen, unless you click on them. If you click on a photo, it will take you to our flickr account where you can see all of our photos from Chucuito. And sorry, the photos are not in order with the text, since I couldn´t see them as I was posting them.

Chucuito, on Lake Titicaca

We are in the tiny village of Chucuito, on the shores of Lake Titicaca! It´s 19 km outside of Puno, still in Peru. We are staying in a lodge called Albergue Las Cabañas, which is beautiful. We have a big room with our own bathroom, and a sunroom in front. That´s really nice after Cusco, which was cold and shady since it´s a big city. Now we can bask in the sun and our room stays warm because of the sun room, too. None of the hotel rooms have heat around here. It´s nice to be in a room that is warm and cozy and clean. We can see the lake out the front window. They also have a dining room, and serve really good vegetarian soups.

This village is small and dusty, with dirt (or grass since there are no vehicles) streets between stone walls. Everyone is friendly. Most travelers only spend a night here, I think, because there is nothing to do. But we have been here for four days because we were looking for a place to relax and settle into this new pace of life. We have been reading books (my friend Sue gave me Eat, Pray, Love which is a wonderful book to read while on a journey) and walking to the lake and just generally hanging out. It´s perfect.

We went to a wedding yesterday! The bride was the daughter of the people who own the cabañas where we are staying. It was outdoors, and informal, and really nice. The alcalde, or mayor, performed the ceremony which consisted of reading from the Peruvian civil code for marriages. He lectured the couple about abuse, told them that psychological abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. He told them that now they must make decisions together, and that if they have problems during the marriage they should try to work out the problems but if they cannot work it out, then a judge will decide who gets the children, and it´s best to avoid that. I thought it was interesting to hear such a lecture during a wedding!

Then they had a feast, and we got to to try some of the many varieties of Peruvian potatoes, as well as converse with the other wedding guests. It was fun to hang out with a family and get to know people in that setting. The wedding was small and simple and really nice. No cake, but plenty of champagne, whiskey, wine and beer.

Chucuito has a ruin: the Temple of Fertility. To represent fertility, it´s full of stone phallic symbols!

The plazas are quiet. Yesterday we watched a woman wash her hair in a bucket in the middle of the plaza in front of the church.

On our first day here, we met an Aymara grandmother named Jacinta. We were walking down to look at the lake, and the path ended leaving us looking at Jacinta´s flock of sheep. (everywhere here, in the middle of town, are women tending flocks of sheep). Jacinta speaks Aymara and Spanish, and raises sheep and a cow. She also plants potatoes of several varieties. Her husband used to fish, but she´s a widow now. Jacinta liked my purple crocs that MJ gave me, my most comfortable traveling shoes. She said she wished I had brought a pair for her. Mine would never fit her, nor do I want to give them away, so I gave her a pair of earrings that I had brought from the U.S. So that is how we ended up drinking beer and dancing with Jacinta at 8:30 this morning!

It turns out that we accidentally happened to arrive in Chucuito a few days before their biggest annual fiesta, which lasts for a week, and today was the first day. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. hearing drumming and Andean flute music. By the time we made it to the plaza at about 8 a.m. the fiesta was well underway with the drummers and flute players, a band, dancing, and mostly a lot of beer. Jacinta spotted us and invited us to hang out with her group of friends. She was wearing a beautiful full skirt and petticoats and a beautiful embroidered shawl, all gold. Even gold shoes. She was with a friend who was dressed the same. The main thing to do during this fiesta, it seems, is to drink beer. Jacinta pours herself a tiny bit of beer in a glass, then hands the bottle to me, says "salud" and drinks some, dumps the rest of her glass on the ground. (must be some significance to that -- I´m not sure). Then, she hand me the glass and I do the same, passing the bottle to someone else, and so on. I cut myself off at 9 a.m. Fortunately, you don´t have to actually drink a lot of beer since you can get away with dumping most of it on the ground if you want to. Not everyone at the fiesta was going for that. We met a Belgian journalist who has been touring South America by bicycle for 3 years, and we all danced. The party seemed to go on, pretty much the same, and we´re taking a break from it now.

Tonight there will be fireworks. We saw them setting them up. Huge contraptions, with wheels that spin, etc, similar to fireworks I´ve seen in Mexico. Today there were also many gunpowder explosions. Someone draws a line of gunpowder in front of the church, and after awhile someone lights it on fire. We almost stepped on the gunpowder by accident, not knowing it was there! (we´ll watch out for that next time). This fiesta will go on all week. Since everyone was drinking so much this morning, I wonder if anyone will even be awake this evening for the fireworks!

This town does seem to have a problem with alcoholism. Even before the fiesta started, we saw people passed out in the street, or staggering down the street, every day. This town is very poor with no industry except for subsistence agriculture. We´ve been approached by drunk people on the street, but they didn´t seem dangerous.

There are no real stores as we would think of them here, just houses with a front door open to the street, stocked with a few things you can buy. Mostly Inca Kola, their version of coke. And the restaurants don´t seem to have anything to cook with except vegetable oil, which Gary can´t eat. So we´ve taken to bringing our own bottle of olive oil to restaurants, which works great. So far, people have been happy to specially prepare Gary´s meal in our olive oil. Everywhere we´ve been in Peru, people have been extremely friendly and helpful with everything. I´m so glad we came here.

Leaving Cusco

Tomorrow morning we will leave Cusco and head to Puno! We will travel by train all day, and then stay in a cabin in a tiny village on Lake Titicaca. It sounds like it will be beautiful, and we´re ready to stay in a quiet place for awhile after the bustle of Cusco, which is known as the capitol of the gringo trail!

I´ve started a flickr account, because uploading all my pictures to blogspot is too cumbersome. You can see it at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimigary
I have made some of the photos private, to be seen only by my friends and family. Soon I´ll send out an invitation, but in the mean time send me an email if you´d like to be added. I´ll still post photos on the blog every now and then, but not all of them.

We´ve had a really good time in Cusco. We discovered a vegetarian restaurant, complete with PETA propaganda, which was really nice. (No guinea pigs!) And we had a delicious dinner at a German restaurant, just for a change. The downtown area of Cusco is small enough that we run into people that we have met before, in the train station, etc. It makes it feel comfortable. And Gary has been using basic Spanish, which is really cool. (by asking him to run errands, I´m actually helping him practice!) Today he had a 30-minute conversation with a kid on a park bench in the plaza, all in Spanish! I am learning to be quiet and let him struggle through it.

By the way, you can sign up to receive an email every time we add a new post to this blog, if you want to. We have had excellent internet access here in Cusco, but I don´t know if we´ll have any on Lake Titicaca, so don´t be alarmed if you don´t hear from us for a little while. I would like to stay on Lake Titicaca for a couple of weeks if we like it, to slow down the pace and get used to long-term travel.

Thanks for the emails -- we enjoy hearing from you!

More pictures from Cusco

These women with their llamas are everywhere asking to be photographed for the price of one sol.

Inca stonework. They are famous for perfect fitting stones, with no mortar.

A restaurant menu

The Plaza de las Armas (main plaza) in Cusco

baked guinea pig! My mom looked it up, and the guinea pig is indeed native to this area and for a long time has been raised for food. Alpaca, which is similar to a llama but smaller, is served at most of the restaurants here, too.

Our guide at Tambormachay, the first ruin we visited. This ruin is on the Inca Trail, the famous path where the Inca (emperor) and royal people accompanying him would travel to Machu Picchu. They would cleanse themselves in these spring-fed fountains before entering the trail.

TamborMachay from above

Llamas everywhere, even grazing in Machu Picchu

Captions added

I just added captions to my earlier entry, First Photos from Qosqo. I didn´t finish that post before because the internet cafe closed. More photos later when I have a better connection!

Machu Picchu

We saw Machu Picchu yesterday! It is so amazing, nd I feel like pictures can´t even begin to capture its mgnificence. (the a key barely works - plese excuse the missing as)

we hiked up huaynapichu, the mountain next to MP, and looked down on MP from the very rocky top. the mountins re different shape here! then we went down to the temple of the moon, and finally into MP itself. The hiking was amazing becuse the trils are old Inca trails with mny rocky steps nd ladders. i don´t know wht is more amazing - the ruins or the mountains surrounding them.

the experience with the shaman was really nice too. I admit that I was more thn a little nervous bout it, nd i agreed to do it becuse gary relly wnted to. i reminded myself of what the book Vagabonding, a guide to long-term world trvel, said. you should do things that tke you out of your comfort zone, and let things happen spontneously, and you will hve the most mazing travel experiences. doing ceremonies with Q´ero shaman definitely ws like tht for me. Going to his house ws really nice. Basilio lives on the outskirts of Cusco in an adobe house that he built. it has a dirt floor. there is electricity, but no running water. the field behind the house serves as the bathroom. Basilio and his wife hve four children, the smllest just a baby. after the ceremony, Basilio´s wife Sabina served us potatoes that she had cooked in a dirt pit covered by a fire, in her field. She put a cloth on the dirt floor, and the pottoes on top of it. We sat on tiny stools or the floor and peeled the pottoes by hand and ate them there. they had cheese too, from the market. Sabina speaks only Quechua. The Q´ero nation is very high up in the mountains, above treeline. you have to wlk for two days from the nearest town with bus service in order to get there. they grow pottoes nd rais llamas. there is an elementary school, and the teacher only comes for a couple of weeks per month because he lives in the town from which he walks two days to get to the school. I will let Gary write bout the ceremoni9es:

The ceremony at Bsilio´s house was for our helth. he used scred rocks to help us. both cermonies are to thnk mother erth for everything. the coca leves are very importnt. they give energy nd help with digestion which is importnt in the high ltitudes. in the cermony you use the three leves to call the spirit of the mountins. ech person clls the mountains by blowing into the leves three times. Basilio t his house used flowers, seeds fo the coca, cndies, mize nd figures to bless us nd offer to mothererth. fter he blesses us he burns the offerings. while in machpicchu we used liguid of flowers to clense our hnds nd face to keep the ill winds way before tking the trail to huaynapicchu. we also bew into the coca to sk the mountain for pssge nd bring the spirit of the mountains. on top of huaynapicchu we meditated with the help of basilio´s scred rocks and stones. we thanked the sun for shining on us. at the temple of the moon, we did nother cermony tht kimi will not let me put on the blog. we both felt closer to mother erth fterwards.

Kimi again: i´m glad Gary wrote that part becuse expling spiritulity type stuff is pretty hard for me. There are rules about what kinds of ceremonies you can do at MP. Basilio is an extremely genuine person and you can tell that when you first meet him. I tend to trust my instinct when I meet people, and that´s why I was willing to do ceremonies with Basilio even though we just met him on the plaza. our instinct turned out to be right. Shaman do not charge for their services, but you give them a voluntary contribution.

Machu Picchu is in the jungle, much different fry dry Cusco. I went walking with our Argentinin friend Valeri, who is lso from the jungle and who can identify mny of the plants. We saw avocado trees! Tons of avocados were growing up there! But they were wy out of our reach. Banana trees too. Here, avocados are called palta, not aguacate like in Mexico. There is lso a different word for beans but I´m forgetting it. Change is sencillo, not cambio. I´m learning the different vocbulary here, and lso a few Quechua terms from Basilio. Basilio also cut some cane which he will use to make a trditional flute instrument.

Some Quechua words:
apu = mountain spirit
pachimama = mother earth
machu = old
huayna = young
picchu = master ¨maestro¨and is pronounced peek-chew

The train ride to Cusco is very beautiful. Train is the only way to get here, other than by foot. Foreigners have to ride the tourist train, which is very expensive (even the cheaper ¨backpacker¨service which we took). i guess we blew our month´s budget in MP but it ws definitely worth it. In a few hours, we will get bck on the trin to return to Cusco, so until then, thnks for reading!

I hve not forgotten the unidentified photos tht I last posted. I wnt to go back nd add cptions, but the service is too slow to deal with pictures here. I am going to need to experiment with a different photo service like flickr becuse posting them all to the blog takes too long. If I set up a separate photo site, I will let you know via the blog. Thnks for the blog comments we´ve received, as well as the email messages!
Kimi & Gary

First photos from Qosqo

Inca ruins above Cuzco. There are several ruins: fountains that the people used for cleansing before entering the trail to Machu Picchu, administrative center, ceremonial center. The stonework is amzing and hiking through the countryside was also amazing. There are eucalyptus trees everywhere, which are not native here.

Our friend Valeria at one of the ruins

Adobe houses on the road. Many had llamas and alpacas.

and burros. This rooftop thing that looks like a weather vane to me is to bless the house nd keep the fmily together.

Us with Valeria and the student guide who let us accompany his group to see the ruins.

This ws for holding water at the ceremonil center Sacsayhuaman (the joke is that it´s pronounced sexy woman in English). They are still doing excavation here.

The students we hiked down with

This girl is one of the many native people who offer to pose for a picture for a dontion of one sol (bout 30 cents). With a baby lamb, she is extra cute and I couldn´t resist.

Political commentary. Want to add anyone else to the list?

My favorite restroom signs, in a museum

Signs in English everywhere in Cusco. I post these because I have so often heard Americns at home complining about immigrants who don´t speak English, saying that if you go to other countries people won´t speak English. Obviously these people have not traveled.

And so you can see our dietary choices here

Saludos from Qosqo!

We have had a wonderful few days in Qosqo (the Quechua spelling of Cuzco)! It feels like we´ve had the first few days of what will be the best year of our lives! The trip here was good and pretty uneventful except for our mad run through the Lima airport which, coupled with several days without a shower, left us smelling like true backpackers.

We´re at a nice hostel where we met a new friend, Valeria from Argentina. Yesterday, Valeria and Gary and I went to four Incan ruins near Qosqo. We got a ride up to the highest ruin, then walked down stopping at each one. We ran into a group of students having a class at one of the ruins, and after noticing that we were listening they invited us to join their group. They were students at an institute, studying to be guides, and it was nice to hang out with them for a few hours. They took us on a countryside route down the hills, rather than the highway route, which was fun. One of the students had worked in the US for a couple of years. He said that those two years were constant work, nothing else, and he was exhausted all of the time. The students were really nice and fun to get to know.

Qosqo is about 10,000 feet in altitude, if my metric conversion is anywhere close to correct. (I need to download a metric conversion table and get used to this system!) After chewing a few coca leaves, one can hike downhill all day without getting sore knees! The weather here is beautiful, and reminds me of Colorado or Northern New Mexico in that it´s dry and the sky is a beautiful blue. It gets pretty hot for about an hour in the afternoon, and very cold at night. The rest of the time is really comfortable. So every day I find myself in a tanktop in the afternoon and long underwear and a sweater in the morning and evening. Luckily, there are plenty of alpaca wool sweaters, mittens, scarves, etc. for sale here. And I´ve learned that it´s really easy to get a sunburn at this altitude.

A traditional shaman spotted Gary on the plaza and liked his hat, which lead to a conversation in which the shaman offered to accompany us to Machu Picchu and do a ceremony with us. Gary is ecstatic about this! We´re most likely going this weekend, and we are going to do a ceremony at his house tomorrow.

The people here are really nice and helpful with everything. Restaurant staff have been happy to accommodate Gary´s eating restriction of no vegetable oil. We have to ask about the oil everywhere, but people have been willing to cook Gary´s food in olive oil or butter, or to boil it. Speaking of boiling, there are thirty some varieties of potatoes here. I´ve had a few of them already, but I can´t name them. And favorite local dishes around here are alpaca and guinea pig. Valeria, our new friend from Argentina, tried the guinea pig (cuy in Spanish) which comes complete with eyes and teeth on your plate. I´ll upload a picture later, for those who dare to look! Does anyone know, is the guinea pig native to South America? Why is it called guinea?

One negative thing here is that the police really seem to harass the indigenous people. Several times we´ve seen the police chasing indigenous people out of the public streets and plazas. One officer came up behind a woman who was sitting on some steps, and knocked off her hat and told her to get out of there. The other indigenous people nearby went running away. Police also harassed the shaman when we were talking with him on the plaza, twice. They told him to keep moving, not to stay in one place. Qosqo has upped the police presence in the tourist areas because there has been a lot of crime against tourists, but it seems like they harass indigenous people who are doing nothing but talking or offering to be photographed by tourists.

Qosqo is the capital of the gringo trail, with tourists from all over the world. It´s kind of nice that they are not all from the US. We´re having a beautiful time, and will try to keep posting every week or so, depending on internet access. We´d love to hear from you!