Kate's Pura Vida

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Wrapping up Peru, Photos

Colca Canyon

Rocks :)

Arequipa, the white city

Great Peruvian friends

How I felt when I walked through the door of my house.

The day we climbed down from Machu Picchu, we headed out to make our way back to Cusco one last time. It was another round of harrowing vans and buses, and the way back was way worse for some reason. We made it back to Cusco, and stayed for a day before heading to Arequipa.

Arequipa is known as the white city because its buildings are made from white volcanic stone. We decided to do a two day hike of Colca Canyon which was a couple of hours away from Arequipa. We took at 3 am bus from Arequipa to the Canyon, and started out hike.

“Slicing through the High Andes like a giant fissure for more than 100km, Colca is the world's second deepest canyon, approximately 3,400m at its deepest point -- a shade shallower that the nearby Cotahuasi Canyon and nearly twice as deep as the US' Grand Canyon”

-taken from internet.

The first day of the hike consisted of going down one side of the canyon all the way the floor to where there was an oasis that most people stayed at over night. We wanted to do out trip in less days, so after getting more water at the oasis, we hiked all the way back up the other side, missed the turn-off to the trail we were supposed to take, and ended up hitching a ride back down part of the mountain in a truck. It turned out the trail had been taken out by a landslide.

We finally made it back down the canyon to a small hostel where we stayed in a room for 3 dollars, and then started back up the other side of the canyon the next morning. Three hours later we made it back into town where we took a bus back to Arequipa.

For the rest of our time in Arequipa we toured a monastery, ate traditional food (Christina ate alpaca steak), and wandered the city. We took another night bus back to Lima, where we would have three days before heading back to Costa Rica. We spent our time in Lima with friends that we had met around Peru, and it was a really wonderful time…the calm before the storm.

We got to the airport in Lima three hours early, only to find out that they were not going to let us onto the plane to go to Panama because we didn’t have bus tickets to leave Panama. The reason we didn’t have tickets was because the bus company told us we couldn’t buy tickets a month and half in advance and that we could just buy them when we got back to Panama. Lies.

They didn’t have a phone number, we couldn’t buy them online, and the other bus company’s website wasn’t working. We could be more tickets from the airline and the cancel them, but that was going to include $100 of fees, and we would have had to wander downtown Panama City at night looking for their “cancelation office” which wasn’t in the airport.

Instead, I found Christina working furiously on her phone, and I found out that she was making fake bus confirmation tickets that said we were leaving Panama for Costa Rica. By that time, our plane was almost leaving, so we sprinted to check-in, out fake tickets passed inspection, and then we sprinted from one end of the airport all the way to the other to find out gate.

No one else even looked at our tickets, and we made it out of the Panama Airport, and back to the bus station to buy our tickets to get back into Costa Rica. Naturally, there were no tickets back to Costa Rica until the next week. Same with the other company, but before we had a heart attack, we found a bus that would drop us off at the border, and then we would have to find another bus to San Jose.

Bus to Panama/Costa Rica Border (7 hours)> wait at border (7 hours)>bus back to San Jose, Costa Rica (8 hours)> Bus to San Ramon (1.5 hours)> HOME!!!

We made it, and then the next day had three hour advanced Spanish class.

There is the conclusion of our Peru trip.

Machu Picchu Photos

Gate in front of Hauyna Picchu. No. I didn't spell it wrong, there are multiple ways of spelling it.

Cloudy view from Huayna Picchu

Machu Picchu!

Mountains of the Sacred Valley.

Machu Picchu

We left Puno on a night bus, and headed back to Cusco for the beginning of our journey to Machu Picchu. We arrived in Cusco at 5:00 am, bought bread, banana, avocados, and smoothies. Our main staple. Earlier we had decided that we didn’t want to pay the huge amount of money to take a train from Cusco to Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu town), and instead we were going to take various forms public transportation to get there.

First we got on a combie (minivan filled with seats) towards the town of Urubamba, and then got onto another combie toward Santa Maria. This was the part of the journey that all the books said was suicide during the rainy season and had 100 dangerous curves. It was not that bad.

We made it to Santa Maria, just as a van was leaving for Hydroelectrico. This van was filled; there were people sitting on each other’s laps, kids standing, and a man in the truck of the van. Also the driver was insane and we had to take a back mountain road because a landslide had closed the main road.

We were dropped off in the pouring rain at the hydroelectric station, where we started our two hour walk along the train tracks to Aguas Calientes. This walk was actually really nice, flat, and later I found out that we were walking right under Machu Picchu and other Incan ruins the whole time.

We stayed in a hostel, and then got up at 4:30 to start hiking to Machu Picchu. We should have gotten up earlier when we realized how many people had started before us. We hiked pretty hard to try and pass as many people as we could, but when we got to Machu Picchu, we still had been beaten in line by many of the people who took busses to the entrance instead of walking.

Our goal was to make it first to the entrance of Hauyna Picchu (Hauyna Picchu is a mountain above Machu Picchu that is very small and fills up with up with people really fast) We made it to the top first and were able to enjoy a slightly cloudy view of the mountains, river, and jungle surrounding Machu Picchu. It was a short lived victory as we were soon being asked to take other hiker’s photos, and it got really loud very quickly.

We made our way down, and spent the day wandering around the wonderful rocks of Machu Picchu.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Puno photos

Christmas, new years, lots of buses

After Huaraz, we took another night bus to Trujillo, where we stayed with another couch surfing host. He had a huge house, and Christina and I got a little cabin-like room on the roof that overlooked the neighborhood. It was beautiful, and I know I felt sort of royal.

On the first day we visited Chan Chan, the desert ruins that were all made out of adobe bricks. For that reason, they haven’t held up anything like Machu Picchu, but one of the areas had been restored and was very impressive. The next day we visited Huaca de la luna, a temple that was built by the moche people, a race of peoples older than the Incas. What impressed me most about those ruins was the presence of the original paint and color that had been painted hundreds of years ago.

Christmas eve day we went to a beautiful and remote beach. The water was cold, so Christina and I opted for digging for sand crabs (muymuy), and walking along the beach. That night we found out that our host had no plan of celebrating Christmas, so we decided we might as well move on. The next morning, we shared a piece of chocolate, bought our overpriced holiday bus tickets, and headed back to Lima. Our treat was that we were on the ritzy bus (Cruz del Sur), got decent bus food, got to chose our own movies, and had wifi on the bus.

We planned to stay with a couch surfing host that we had already stayed with, and he came and picked us up from the bus stop. Like normal, his amazing family was cooking up a storm to make us some Peruvian cuisine that we didn’t eat until 12:00 at night. The next day was Christina’s birthday, and we met up with one of our friends from Tingo Maria and his sister. We all went to the quaint beach town of Barranco, which I could spend a decent amount of time in if need be. After a few shared drinks of Pisco (the national Peruvian alcohol) sours, we made our happy way to a beer tasting restaurant, and had ourselves some Sierra Andino, pale, amber, and dark ale. Then we made our way back to our host’s house, were his mother was cooking another HUGE meal for Christina’s birthday. The specialty: Cuy (Guinea Pig). Yes I ate it, it was actually pretty good.

The next day was our killer 24 bus ride from Lima to Cusco. It was not as bad as I thought it would be, but the bus also played movies (not good ones) nonstop, so that helped with distracting from the really long journey. In Cusco we stayed with another couch surfing host for a few days, and spend new years with them as well. We all went to a many of the free ruins, and paid about 7 dollars to trot around on some horses through a rain, hail, thunder, and lightning storm, que divertido.

Because we couldn’t get tickets to Huayna Pichhu, a little mountain that overlooks Machu Picchu, for another couple of days, we decided to head to Puno and Lake Titicaca. Puno was really cold, and because we didn’t figure out the island visiting schedule until too late, we spend two days in Puno trying to fill time without much to do. The main attraction in Lake Titicaca is to visit some of the various islands sprinkled throughout the enormous lake. We visited the Islands of Uros, which are the floating islands that are made from reeds.

By now, the entire culture of the people of Uros is dependent on tourism, and they receive boats and boats of people every single day. We all crowd off, get an explanation of how the islands word, go into one of the houses where we can try on their clothes if you want, and then they lead you to their craft table where you are supposed to buy something. It was very interesting, and I am not sure how I felt about being a boated-in tourist. Never the less, it was certainly a unique experience to meet people living the way they have lived for a long time.

The next day we boated 3 hours to spend a bit of time on the beautiful island of Taquile that looked like it was in the middle of the Mediterranean. The best part was when the rest of our tour group ate at the super expensive restaurant (we brought food…you taught me well parents), we asked the kitchen if we could help them with anything. We ending up clearing tables, scraping plates, and the serving our tour group their lunches! It was the best, and then at the end we got free food.

Our last day in Puno, we went to the reserve headquarters to see if we would visit their lands, and do a bit of bird watching. The government organization was SERNAMP, the same people we stayed with while in Tingo Maria. Unfortunately, they happened to have a mandatory meeting, and could not take us out to the reserve which was only accessible by car and then by motorcycle. We were so bummed, but when we told the Puno SERNAMP that we were two American girls that were studying Biology and Spanish in Costa Rica, had a special interest in birds, and had already stayed at another park, I thought they were going to cry with sadness they could not take us out to show off their wonderful reserve.

Instead, they gave us lots of bird pamphlets, and requests for us to come back another time. When we were halfway down the road, one of the men came running after us, and he ended up giving us a copy of his book in the birds of Lake Titicaca for free! We bought another one from a book store so we could both have one, and then spent the day walking the shore of Lake Titicaca doing some identifyin. Here is our list.

1. Andean goose (seen in Huaraz)

2. Yellow-billed pintail

3. Puna Teal

4. Speckled Teal

5. Ruddy Duck

6. Chilean Flamingo (seen in Huaraz)

7. Little blue heron (seen Tortuguero, Costa Rica)

8. Puna Ibis

9. Plumbeaus rail

10. Common moorhen

11. Andean coot

12. Black-necked stilt