I know it´s been awhile, but there have been some serever problems with blogger. Also although we have done a lot since the Inca Trail, many of which have been cool, none alone have seemed to deserve a blog entry to themselves. I guess after you´ve been travelling for awhile you become harder to impress.
Anyway after the Inca trail we got on a plane to Arequìpa. It is a city much a kin to most others you will find in South America, however, this one is in a desert near a bunch of volcanoes. Due to this many of the buildings have been built out of white volcanic rock, making the city look suitably arid and kinda cool. A part from that it´s just your average run of the mill city. From there we visited Colca canyon, the world´s deepest canyon. It was alright, but not terribly impressive, probably because we didn´t visit it´s deepest part. We went there mainly to check out the condors, one of the world´s biggest birds, but we only saw 4 in the distance and they weren´t very impressive either. After that we visited a hot spring, and that was about as nice as taking a communal bath can be. Which is in fact relatively nice.
From there we headed back to Arequipa for a day, and then set off to Nazca. I saw the Nazca lines from a small plane, they were pretty cool, seeing as they are thousands of years old. I found the monkey especially impressive, as the Nazcans were located in the middle of the desert, and conversley monkeys are generally situated about as far away as you can get from the desert. So it was most puzzling indeed. After this we checked out some ancient Nazcan cemetries and saw some mummies, it was cool if a little morbid. Sarah wasn´t terribly impressed by the constancy of Ness´and my jokes that were admittedly in pretty bad taste.
That night we drank out of pineapples next to the swimming pool at our hotel and had a generally pleasant evening. From Nazca we headed to the coast to Pisco, the inventors of the Pisco sour, a tasty drink indeed. On the way though we sopped at the worlds biggest sand dunes and went dune buggying and sand boarding. This was incredibly cool. The dune buggies were crazy. Better than any roller coaster I have been on, climbing up and down the steepest dunes at the most incredibly speeds. The boarding was cool as well, we all ended up with sand in every crevice imaginable, but incredibly exhilarated... In retrospect I am sure the sandy cracks were at least partly responsible for said exhilaration.
Upon reaching Pisco we found it was a dank hole. Also quite dangerous. So we mainly kept to our Hotel. One of the very friendly but incredibly clueless and painfully annoying members of our group got his camera bag stolen at the bus station, in total losing his camera, three credit cards, ipod, passport, 1000 soles cash, and his entire trip´s worth of photos. It was heart breaking but dumb. Some guy came over to him and started joking around with him. And as he sees himself as a bit of a joker he joked around back and whilst he thought he had this guy as his audience, someone else took his camera bag... So that´s where attentin seeking behaviour can get you. It was a massive hassle for him though, but our tour guide helped him out and got just about everything sorted so the only real loss would be his photos. You may recall a similar scam was played on us, but we were far too savvy to be fooled by such trickery... Some would say lucky, but I think savvy is a much more apt term.
In Pisco we headed to the Bastille Islands to see the penguin, sealion, and other bird colonies. It was pretty incredible, we got much closer to the wildlife than we did in Argentina, and there was lots of it. We also saw the mysterious ancient candleabrah (clearly that´s not how you spell it but I don´t even know where to begin to fix it up, and I´m way too lazy for spell checker, as you may have picked up with previous spellings of Machu Picchu...) inscribed in the side of a sand dune. Noone really knows what it is, why it´s there, or how it got there, so that´s pretty cool.
From Pisco we headed to Lima for the conclusion of the tour. It was a relief, although we had come to like many of the tour members, many had thoroughly shit us. The eldest member of the group was easily the most childish and selfish. It was no wonder she was alone. Another member of the group did nothing to break down the stereotypes that Germans are austere, easily dissatisfied, and generally unpleasant. Although it must be said that many other Germans we´ve met have. Mainly though, it´s just good to be doing are own thing again.
In Lima I was met by a man´s worst nightmare. Walking with the girls, slightly ahead as I sometimes do, I spotted to my dismay a huge clothes shop that was advertising tshirts for 5 soles... so very cheap. This was made worse by the fact that the clothes were displayed in 12 massive piles 1and a half metres inheight, 2 in lenght and 1 and a half in width. I knew this spelt trouble. No one can navigate through that amount of clothing in a relatively short period of time. especially when displayed in such a ridiculous manor. I tried not to notice and continue walking, but the girls surely saw it and freaked out. We were there for an incredibly painful hour and a half. I couldn´t really do my own thing either as we had just arrived in Lima, and it is a notoriously dodgy city. I tried waiting outside for a moment but was offered drugs twice in a two minute period, with one man urging me to come with him. So with little other option I sat through the horrifying ordeal.
Currently we are at Trujillo, a beach town that is very nice. We certainly have seen some diverse terrain on this trip, and we still have jungle and the Galapagos to go.
Anyway best be off.
Regards,
Chuckles
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