Friday 16 October 2009

Day 27: Traveling home

The thing about Peruvian airports is: there's always someone trying to take your money. First, they want an airport tax. I guess when you buy your tickets through Orbitz to fly around the U.S. these taxes are included in the prices. Not so when you're flying around Peru. In Peru, you have to stand in long lines to pay your tax before entering the airport.


That's mildly inconvenient. What's worse, though, is that they make you pay $4.28, but refuse to accept US quarters. They give you the change in sols. So if you're headed out of the country, you're stuck with a few worthless sols in your pocket unless you can find something to spend it on at the airport (which I'm sure is their plan).


Then, of course, there's the plastic bag scam. Ming was incredibly careful to ensure that all her liquids and gels were the proper size. Apparently, though, you need to have them in a zip-lock bag. A fancy cloth bag won't do. If you don't comply, you have to ditch your toothpaste. Fortunately for the unsuspecting passenger (who, by the way, can make it all the way to Cusco without complaints), milling around the Cusco security checkpoint are ladies selling individual zip-lock bags... for 2$ each!

Sorry the picture's so blurry, I had to shoot from the hip. Every time I started raising my camera someone came by and said "no pictures, no pictures". Guess they know it's a scam.


But no worries, we made it out of Peru without too much of a hassle. Then back to the states. First New York and on to Tennessee, where we wrap up our Honeymoon with a visit to the Littles.

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Day 26: Rafting down the Urumbamba

Today was our last in Peru, and the last abroad, so we had to fill it up with excitement: rafting. Originally, we were hoping to go in the morning, but times got shifted around, so we ended up scheduling the trip for 1:00pm through another guest lodge. Thus, we had a few hours to kill before the trip. Ming's mission: find some corn on the cob. So we set out from our guesthouse in search of the snack.

We roamed the square, asking the locals where we could buy corn. The square is in disarray at the moment, as it's being spruced up.

After bouncing from shop to shop in search of corn, we finally ended up at a local vegetable market. At least, I thought it was a vegetable market, until I walked around a corner and found myself staring directly into the eyes of a severed cow head. I'll spare you the picture. In any case, no corn here. We were having a particularly hard time expressing what we wanted to buy, because the term "maize" actually means the dried corn, not the boiled corn on the cob. We finally figured out that "choco", was the term we were looking for. We originally thought it meant chocolate, so we refused a few friendly locals who offered to take us to the nearest choco seller. We finally found some ourselves at the train station. Ming was happy.

On our way back, we walked by some local taxi/van drivers gambling on the sidewalk.


As we were walking around town, Ming decided to head into another shop that was advertising rafting on the Urumbamba, just to compare prices. We payed $30 each for our guided tour down the river. Turns out, the little shop was only charging $25 for what looked like the same trip! Ming seized the opportunity to nab the cheaper deal using her broken (but still fairly impressive) Spanish. Through the conversation, we learned that we could leave at the exact same time as we were originally going to, and that we would be rafting with two other tourists. It wasn't until a few minutes later that we figured out that the other tourists were actually us! It turns out that the lodge we had booked the trip through, had just used these guys. I guess you pay a $10 premium for dealing in English. Ming wasn't having any of that, so we canceled the trip through the lodge, and booked directly through these guys. My only regret is that we didn't get to go rafting with ourselves.

In any case, we zoomed off promptly at 1:00 and drove a few miles outside of town to the launch point. Ming and I watched as our guide and his friend did all the hard work of blowing up the raft:

Job well done.
The raft-guide's son wasn't helping either, so we didn't feel bad.


Soon, we were off, our guide in the back and the two of us perched up front.

The guide narrated through the calm waters, telling us about Incan ruins that lined the river banks. The bridge in the background of the next shot was fortified with a large bolder that the Incan's had rolled into the middle of the river to divert the powerful water around the sides of its base.

The rapids around this time of year were not particularly high. There were two class 3 rapids, and a couple of class two rapids, but nothing too scary. Still, this was Ming's first time rafting, so she kept an eye out:

Since it was just the two of us and the guide, we had quite a bit of maneuverability. There was a nice eddy next to one of the class 3 rapids, so we snapped a picture.
Little did we know, the guide had plans for that rapid. Since there were just two of us, he found it easy to maneuver the raft facing upstream and into the rapid. He told us to paddle as hard as possible, until the front of the raft was submerged into the oncoming river, and the back end popped up. We surfed the rapid for a full minute, as he expertly kept us from flipping. The guide told us to scoot forward as much as possible, and we literally had the river flowing into our laps, as the back-end popped up even more. When we popped out of the rapid, we paddled over to the eddy to rest. Then, after about a minute, we repeated the whole thing again; it was a blast. I'd say we surfed that rapid five or six times before finally moving on. Another 10 minutes of light paddling, and we reached our destination, a little river-side pull-out... which also happened to be a farmer's back yard.


With the excitement of the day out of the way, we chose to relax as the evening came around. For dinner, we went back to our a restaurant we'd found the first night, just across the river from Hostel Sauce. And so ended our last full day in Peru.

Monday 14 September 2009

Day 25: Day of Rest

Ouch. Today, I woke up and I could barely move. The combined strain of hiking Machu Picchu mountain followed by Pisac the next day is finally coming back to bite me. My calves are so sore that I shuffle across the floor rather than walk. Good thing this coincides with our already planned: day of rest. Ming's not feeling to bad. Something about step class and exercise... I dunno, I wasn't fully listening... too much pain.

By lunch time, I was able to hobble over to the Blue Puppy restaurant.


Ming got a Machu Picchu. Pretty cool drink. You're supposed to sip it with a straw as you draw the glass away from you, so that you get all three flavors.


I was happy with my coke.

As we finished up a late lunch, we saw that the US Open's mens finals was about to start. Thus, I decided to hobble back over to the guest house and watch the Del Potro / Federer match. Turns out when you watch it in Spanish, they don't cut away when the players start cursing. I was surprised to hear Federer cursing up a storm when arguing with the judge about Del Potro's tendency to take to long when challenging the calls. His expression was deadpan though.


With a long day of rest, I'm hoping to feel better by tomorrow, when we're scheduled to go rafting!

Sunday 13 September 2009

Day 24: Peru - Sacred Valley sightseeing

Today, we had arranged to do a day tour with a local driver to see all of the sights of the Sacred Valley (well, many of them anyway). It was going to be a looong but sight-packed day. We started off towards Pisac, a Peruvian village known for its Sunday Market... well that and the Incan ruins.

The agricultural terraces are situated up on a hillside, overlooking the valley.

We hiked around for about an hour. After the Machu Picchu hike, this Pisac didn't seem like it would be much trouble at all. We still wore ourselves out pretty quickly.

Since I'm writing this post, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that I'm the one carrying all our stuff (see pictoral proof below).
Turns out we both had gotten pretty chewed up the day before by the Machu Picchu mosquitoes. The bites started turning red and itching today.


After wrapping up Pisac, we met our driver in the lower parking lot, grabbed some fresh squeezed orange juice, and drove down towards the modern town to see the market. The Sunday market was enormous. Ming could have spent hours in this place.


I think I was a pretty good sport about the whole thing. I even tried on a few things so that she could "see how they'd look."

Eventaully, we started getting hungry though, so once we made a few purchases, we wound our way back to the car. Next stop: Chinchero.

Fortunately for our weary bodies, this stop was just a quick viewpoint, where we were able to snap a photo of us with the snow capped Andean peaks behind us.


Finally, we made it to a restaurant. Some ominous looking clouds were chasing us as we drove. When we stopped to eat, it actually began to hail!

We left the restaurant once the hail died out, and wound our way across dusty dirt roads to Moray, a set of circular terraces that sink 150 meters deep into the valley.

It's possible to hike down into Moray (as the tiny circle of people at the bottom attest), but we chose to stick with the view from the top. After a 5 minute pit-stop, we moved on to the last leg of our journey: Maras.

The salt mines in this area have been used since pre-Inca times. The salty water of a nearby stream is evaporated, leaving the salt behind in thousands of pools perched on the side of a hill.

After a full day of sightseeing, we were both pretty tired. We slept on the ride back as soon as the sun had set.

Saturday 12 September 2009

Day 23: Machu Picchu

We heard that today was going to be a sunny day, so we had tickets for the 5:37am train to Machu Picchu in hand. Many thanks to Jenny for making our Machu Picchu excursion possible. We boarded the earliest “backpacker” train and fell asleep for most of our 1.5 hour ride to the ruins.



The train actually dropped us off at a town just outside of Machu Picchu called Aguas Calientes. It's definitely an up and coming tourist town. A lot of new lodges were on the verge of being finished, but we decided not to stay in town because we heard that it sometimes loses power, and as a result the refrigeration (and thus the food) was a little suspect. From Aguas Calientes, it's a windy 20 minute bus ride up the mountain to the ruins.



Just entering the park is spectacular. We set out with the mission of getting tickets to the Waynapicchu trail, which leads to the peak in the back of this shot:



It's the most popular hike in Machu Picchu, because the climb is relatively short and the peak overlooking the ruins. We were somehow under the impression Waynapicchu tickets were sold in the park, just outside of the trail entrance. We jetted across the park, barely even stopping to take pictures...



Ok, I was lagging behind a little bit, because I couldn't resist.



When we got there, though, someone informed us that the Wanyapicchu tickets were actually sold at the entrance. Whoops.



We high-tailed it back to the entrance, but the tickets were sold out. We later found out that the tickets were sold out long before we even got to the ruins. You actually HAVE to stay the night in Aguas Calientes be at the park gates around 4:30am to get tickets.

I have to admit. I was a little downhearted after that. I was a little mopey as we headed up towards the sun-gate, another spot with a supposedly decent view of the ruins. We never made it though, since we got distracted by a little detour marked by this sign:



Maybe we could get a better view if we hiked up a little ways along this trail. After about 15 minutes, we finally caught a glimpse of the ruins over the foliage.



The trail kept going, so I figured, there'd probably be a better view even farther up. I saw some lizards along the way, so I was entertained despite the hard work of hiking at high altitudes.



We saw an inch-worm that was making the climb with us. We figured, if he could do it, so could we.



After a while, we decided the inch-worm was just holding us back, so we hiked on. Finally, we got a clear short of the ruins from afar.



But alas, there was nobody else on the trail, and no good spot for the camera's self-timer feature, so we couldn't get a shot of us together. We were forced to hike on. A little while later we caught up with an American tour group that was slowly trudging up the same trail. As we passed them, we asked how far they were going along the trail. They said “You see that flag up there? That's where.” You can't really see the flag in this shot... we could barely see it standing there:



It was then we realized that we were on the trail to the highest of the three peaks surrounding Machu Picchu, the namesake of the area in fact. We should have realized at the base, when the sign said English equivalent of Machu Picchu mountain. We just couldn't believe that a trail went up that far. Not without a cable car anyway. We moved on and finally found a spot with a view to set the camera down.



By that point, though, we were already half way up the mountain. Oh well, there was no turning back at this point. We were starting to wrap around the mountain so we saw a different valley.



The views of the ruins kept getting better, so we kept climbing.



The flag was slowly getting closer. Boy, I was really starting to feel it though. Each step seemed to take twice the effort it should have. Finally, after about 2 hours of hiking, we made it to the top.



From there we got a full 360 view of the surrounding valleys.



We figure we were the second and third people on the peak that day, since we met only one other person on the way up (aside from the tour group we left in the dust). We stayed up there for quite a while,and eventually some fellow hikers joined us.





When noon rolled around we realized we were getting hungry, so we started the decent.



Ming would like fans of Chinese historical soap operas to note the skillfully tied pack she's wearing on her back in that last shot (she learned it from Huanzhugege).

It took about an hour to make the decent, but as I would find out in a few days, that was the portion that really killed my calves. I finally see the up-side of Ming's step class addiction: Machu Picchu hike training. Once we got to the bottom, we stepped out of the park to enjoy an expensive, but tasty buffet at the Machu Picchu sanctuary lodge.



We took over an hour for lunch, mainly because we were so beat from our hike. Since we still hadn't really seen the ruins up close, we hired a guide outside the gate to take us around the ruins.



It's pretty amazing what the Incan's were able to accomplish with rudimentary tools. They split enormous stones by pounding holes in hairline fissures, inserting wood, and using water to expand the wood until the stone broke apart. Pretty clever. Then, just imagine all the chipping and polishing that would have to go into making these seamless walls of stone.


They even went so far as to carve miniature versions of the surrounding mountains out of stone.

It's mind-boggling when you stop and realize that Machu Picchu survived relatively intact from the Spanish conquests because of its relative unimportance and lack of grandeur/treasure. If this tiny, young, "unimportant" town was this glorious, just imagine what the real cities and throne-rooms and palaces of the Incas would have been like if they weren't destroyed by the Spanish!

We decided to splurge and get a guided tour for the rest of the day.



We had to take rest stops every now and then, these "thrones" worked well for us.


Of course, what's a day without more animal shots -- here's Ian's shot of the Machu Picchu bunnies.


After the sun starts to set, it's time to head back to the train station to catch our ride home. We had taken the "backpacker" train out in the morning since it was the first to leave, but we were on the "vistadome" train for the ride back. Apparently the extra $15 buys you a sandwich and a visit from the Peruvian ghost dancer.


The train stopped and they played music while this guy ran up and down the airs spinning in circles and waving his stuffed lamb. It was definitely interesting.