Jungle Book

I was told to write less and put up more pictures. So that´s what I´m going to try and do.

Last week I skipped out on volunteering for 3 days to go into the Jungle with my friend Jane and her parents. There is a park nearby called Manu National Park and it´s in the Amazon Basin. It was so different from anything I have done since I have been traveling. We first went into the cloud forrest where the fauna is less green, the weather is chilly and there are no views... because of the clouds.

Then we got into the heart of the Jungle where it´s hot and muggy with lush green plants and trapical flowers and animals. We were so lucky because we got to see three different types of monkeys and tons of different types of birds. We hiked, boated, and looked for animals. We also got to go to a sustanable farm owned by a nearby lodge and I got to try a handful of new fruits. We went to bed when the sun went down and got up before the sunrise.

You´d think that the scariest part about the jungle would be encountering a snake or a puma, but in reality it´s the road into that is the scariest. It drops off into a cliff on one side and is never smooth. It is also only one lane and when you encounter a truck headed in the opposite direction you have to sometimes back around blind corners to make space to pass. But, I made it home safe and sound without any major accidents and only 2 bug bites! The biggest highlight for me was meeting Paulo- a red howler monkey that had been rescued from a house in Cusco and was now living as a pet in the Jungle. He was only 9 months old and very cuddly. I got to cuddle a monkey in the Jungle! I had a hard time leaving him behind and not sneaking him back to cusco with me.

Semana Santa

Easter is supposed to be the most holy Catholic holiday. In the US we celebrate Easter with chocolate eggs and stories of a fake bunny that visits your house to leave you candy. It is a very different holiday in South America. First of all, it is a week long celebration- not just one Sunday in April. Most people go to Mass at least once a day during the week and the holiest days are Thursday and Friday. It is also a week full of repentance and asking for forgiveness instead of gorging yourself on cadbury eggs.


My semana santa started out with the idea that I would start volunteering and start Spanish classes. I had no idea what I was in for. The day before I had met my new Peruvian Family and spent the night there watching movies with the 3 brothers Carlos, Fernando, and Fabrecio along with the 4 other foreigners staying in the house. It's a big house full of people. So Monday I was excited to start doing something productive. I went to the office of my organization totally clueless on what I was going to be doing, where I was going to be working, and when I was going to have spanish classes. Turns out they were totally clueless too. This was my first lesson in the latin american timeline. Things that should take a couple hours to work out in the US take a week to happen here. I feel like I should have been ready for it since I have been traveling in Chile and Argentina, but it seems that Peruvian time is a week behind everyone else.


I didn't get to start volunteering Monday, or on Wednesday when they told me to come back, or even for the rest of the week since Thursday and Friday were national holidays. Anyway, I had an entire idle week of waiting for my program to start to explore the Semana Santa festivities.


Monday of the Holy Week in Cusco is a important day. It is the day that Cusenos celebrate the procession of the man of earthquakes. Sounds weird huh? It is. But it has reason. I guess every 300 years Cusco is destroyed by a massive earthquake. The last time there was a massive earthquake in the 1930s the people ran into the streets praying for it to stop, and it did! So now they celebrate it by carrying a statue of Jesus through the streets. He processes through the streets all day, but when he gets close to the main cathedral at night over 50,00 thousand people come to watch and shower him in red flowers. All morning I saw women selling small red flowers and I could not figure out why until then.



For the rest of the week there were all sorts of processions and masses. But Thursday and Friday were the most interesting for me. My Peruvian parents are very Catholic and observe all the rules of holy week. There is a special dinner/lunch where you are supposed to eat twelve plates "doce platos." Most of the plates are breads and cookies, but it's still a filling meal. Traditionally, after a family eats the 12 plates the father is supposed to take each child into a separate room and beat his child 3 times with his belt! Then the kid is supposed to beg the mother for forgiveness for their sins. Luckily, my family does not observe this this particular ritual!

Since I had some extra time on my hands I decided to get out of the city and head to a town north of Cusco with hot springs called Lares. I went with some housemates. We stopped for the night in Calca where we observed another amazing ritual. It reminded me of the Mandalas of Tibetan monks. The city spent the entire day making beautiful and intricate sand pictures or "rugs" in the street, then once night fell, there was another precession of a statue of Christ in a coffin and Mother Mary over the sand rugs destroying them. It was amazing to watch, and I guess it represents the fleeting beauty of life. But wow, all that work....


Lares is a town almost untouched by tourism. The people all dress in the colorful traditional quechua dress, and very few of them speak much Spanish. Most people just stared at us Gringos, probably wondering what planet we came from. The hot springs were nice and nestled in the mountains. A great way to pass some time!

Peru

Ok, I have been really really bad and I have not told you guys anything about the last month of my trip. To summarize since I last blogged, I went to the self proclaimed ¨end of the world¨ in Ushuaia, Argentina in Tierra del Fuego for a few days, then I headed back to Puerto Natales, Chile to catch a flight up to Lima.

In Lima I met up with Chris and we traveled around in Lima, Huaraz (the center of Peruvian Andies) and in Cusco. We both had bad altitude sickness in Huaraz because it is at about 4,000 meters and we were overly ambitious trying to hike up to almost 4,800 meters the second day we were there. Just as future reference, that´s not a good idea. Spend a couple days laying low, then attempt a hike. Otherwise it´s not pretty.

We then traveled to Cusco and did most of the touristy things in the city, like hiking up to the nearby ruins saqusiwahman (sounds like sexy-woman), visiting the plaza de armas, seeing the 12 sided stone and pretty much all the major sites in Cusco. We were planning on doing an alternative to the Inca Trail - a 4 day hike to Machu Picchu- but it turned out to be very expensive and not very direct. So, we decided to make our own way there through the mountains of the Sacred Valley. Chris and I packed up our backpacks for an overnight adventure and walked from the city into the mountains. This was the first mountaineering experience I have ever had. It was full on map and compass reading. But, it was probably one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences I have had in nature. First of all, you are never sure where you are going so all the time you are slightly scared you´re headed the wrong way, but when you end up where you are supposed to be it´s like a miracle! One of the coolest things for me was interacting the the campesinos (the mountain farmers) who are some of the most friendly people I have met here. They were always willing to point us in the right direction and share what little they had with us.



We arrived in a small mountain town North of Cusco called Calca and took a couple crowed minibuses (colectivos) to the jump off town for Machu Picchu called Ollantaytambo. Ollantaytambo is a neat little city. The entire city is built on Incan foundations and the layout of the town is exactly as it was 500 years ago. Many of the Incan walls still support the city. We spent the night there, then headed to Aguas Calientes- the town outside of Machu Picchu. Aguas Calientes is the ugliest town I have been to during my entire time traveling. It has grown uncontrollably in the last 10 years because of tourism to the ruins with no city planning and everything is geared towards tourists. There are very few real inhabitants of the town and they are the ones who own the cheap souvenir shops.

Anyway, we woke up at 5am to catch the 5:30 bus up to Machu Picchu to see the sunrise. I was astounded by the line of people waiting for the 5:30am bus. I have very rarely seen so many people awake before 6. There was no sunrise over the mountain because it was too foggy, but when the sun did come up it burned holes in the fog and started to reveal the beauty of the ruins to us one part at a time. Wow, this is an amazing place. It is in such great shape. I can´t use enough words to explane how amazing this place is... you will just have to visit it for yourselves. You can get lost here exploring for days. We spent the whole day there and headed back to Cusco that night.

A few days later Chris left to go back to the real world and I was getting ready to start my volunteering. This entry is getting pretty long so I will put the volunteering entry separately. But those weeks were amazing with all sorts of new experiences and adventures.

The ¨ W ¨

It´s been a while since I last posted. I´ve been busy. I have been traveling around Southern Patagonia for the last two weeks. It is an amazing place. And now I am back where I started, in a town called Punta Arenas waiting to catch my flight up to Lima.

About two weeks ago I was in this same Internet cafe waiting for my friend from Spanish school, Christina to meet up with me in my hostel so we could do a 5 day hike in the Torres del Paine National Park together. She never turned up. I waited and waited and finally I got an email from her sister saying she was in the hospital in Santiago because she fell off a horse and slipped a disk in her back. And obviously she wasn´t coming down to meet me. That was the last and only thing I heard about her before I left for hiking. I was really worried about her because I didn´t know anything about her condition or if she was ok, but it turns out she is fine and back to traveling. This meant I had to find a new hiking partner and FAST or hike alone (which I didn´t have a problem doing but it´s cheaper and lighter to split the equipment.) So I went to the jump off town for hiking - Puerto Natales to rent gear, buy last minute supplies and find someone to hike with. Luckily I ran into this woman named Susie from San Fan that was also looking for a partner. We decided to hike together and got all of our things ready to head out the next day.

After all the gear was rented and the bags were packed we got up at 6:30am to catch the bus to the park. We had amazing weather that first day. It was 25 degrees C and Sunny. This is a park notorious for bad weather and instant weather changes. But the whole day was warm and sunny. It was hard hiking- harder than I expected, and it was the first real exercise I have had since I´ve been in South America. But luckily I got into the swing of things quickly. Also on the first day we picked up a lone hiker named Emma from Ireland. She wanted some company since she wasn´t comfortable hiking alone. I soon learned that Susie loved to talk A LOT but was a really nice person. So she kept us entertained with stories about her life in San Fran for the rest of the week. The first couple days were hiking to and around the Glacier Grey. An impressively blue and low hanging glacier that reached out into a lake and occasionally spit out icebergs.

The next day we hiked to a valley called the French Valley (valle de fraces) which was a bowl in the mountains surrounded by beautiful peaks. This day we added on four more people to our rag-tag gang of hikers. Susie knew a couple from the States that ended up hiking the ¨w¨at the same time as us, and they knew a couple hiking at the same time too. They were all very sweet people and my solo hike was turning into a group adventure.

The second to last day was the longest where we hiked to the actual torres de paine (the blue towers). They are an interesting rock formation caused by glacial activity. We spent the night at a camp about an hour hike away from the base of the torres. It poured rain all night and we woke up in a big puddle. But the rain stopped around 5am- in time to get up, hike to the torres in the dark and see the sunrise from the top. Wow, it was amazing, but VERY cold. It had rained at our camp, but it had snowed everywhere higher up. So it was snow dusted and the torres were obscured by snow clouds. But we were prepared and brought up sleeping bags and hot chocolate.

Finally after seeing the sunrise, we returned to camp and packed away the wet tent, but by this time it was snowing at lower elevation. So we quickly scurried out of the camp and hiked out of the park. The end of the hike is pretty awkward because you have been in the woods for 5 days without showering and the hike ends up at luxury hotel. So around 2pm (in time to catch the shuttle back to town) about 30 smelly dirty hikers end up at this fancy smancy hotel. Lucky they are used to it there and no one made any bad comments, but I felt very out of place and had no idea what to do with myself. I think most of the hikers felt this way because very few ventured inside for a drink or to use the bathroom. Mostly everyone hung out outside even though it was cold.

This was probablyone of the most beautiful places I have ever been in my life. Every turn seemed to unveil something new. I saw wild alpacas, emus, horses and lots of birds. I even saw my first iceberg. And what I thought would have been a solo trip into the woods turned out to be a very social trip. It´s amazing how things can change so quickly but something amazing comes out of it.

After the hike, I came back to town and took a long hot shower. Then I headed down to the self proclaimed ¨end of the world¨ Ushuaia, Argentina. But I´ll get into that later... Now I´m off to catch my plane.

Buenos Aires y Pingüinos

Buenos Aires is an amazing city. I read in my guide book that I would fall in love with BA and I would not be the first or last to do so. I was a little skeptical before going since I was told that I would fall in love with it, but it has a certain charm and it is such a beautiful city that it´s hard not to fall in love. There are some amazing parks in the city. A whole chunk of the city is devoted to parks. They have several different kinds of parks like a Japanese garden, a botanical garden, a dutch garden and a zoo. I had time to stroll through many of these places on sticky summer days.

I was staying with my friend Zack from Spanish school. He and his girlfriend Cat just moved to BA for the next 6 months. I was so jealous. I guess that a lot of foreigners do the same thing, because there is a huge market for weekly and monthly apartment rental. But be warned-- it is VERY expensive. It costs the same as it would to rent a place in Boston. Even though Argentina is a much cheaper country, they know their own allure and know how to milk foreigners.

I also went to this amazing cemetery called the Ricoleta Cemetery. It holds the bodies of Argentina´s most wealthy families. It was amazing, there are streets and streets full of mausoleums. You can wander this place for hours. The weirdest part is that your family has to pay $18,000 each year for the upkeep of your mausoleum. If they run out of money for your mausoleum they pull out your coffin, cremate you and sell off your mausoleum! That´s tough. I guess there´s no forever even after you´re dead. Here´s a picture of an example of one. It has a stature of the angle of death on the top.

I left Buenos Aires and now I am in Southern Chile in a town called Punta Arenas. It is a jump off town for a lot of tourist activities like going to the near by National Park Torres del Paine or going to Antarctica. I am not going to Antarctica, but I am going to Torres del Paine. It seems like an amazingly beautiful place. But I´m sure I´ll report on that later on.

I went to the Isla Magdelina today. This island is about 2 hours off shore in the straight of Magellan in Southern Patagonia (in between main-land Chile and Tierra del Fuego). I took a ferry to the isla and on that island there are 75,000 pairs of nesting Penguins!! It was so amazing. Everywhere you looked there were penguins! (oh yeah, the word for penguin in Spanish is Pingüino). They were so cute. There were no babies because they left their nests last month to be off on their own. Anyway, you could get so close to them. One actually bit me! I was letting it cross the path to get to the water, and it walked up to me, looked me in the face, then bit me in the leg! But, I couldn´t stay mad at it for too long since it was so cute. Here´s a picture of me and my new ornery penguin friend.

I´m getting ready for a 5 day backpacking trip in the National Park. I hear it is one of the most beautiful places in South America. I bet you´ve seen pictures of it on any South American or Chilean advertisement. Anyway, I have a lot to do before then, rent gear, buy food, meet up with my hiking buddy Christina... I´m really looking forward to it. Hopefully the weather will hold out. Send me sunny thoughts!

Ciao!

Bariloche

I just arrived in Buenos Aires from Bariloche, Argentina. I´m going to summerize my week in Bariloche because it doesn´t really deserve more than one blog entry.

Bariloche is the Aspen, Colorado of Argentina. It is a rich tourist ski town that does not represent the country. I had an interesting conversation with my cab driver on the way to the airport about how bariloche is the opposite of what represents the country. It attracts tourists from all over the world and is an even more expensive place to stay than Buenos Aires. When Argentina´s economy is doing badly, more tourists flock to Bariloche because is it cheaper and the town does well. But when the country is doing well, the number of tourists drops and the small tour companies go out of business and the town doesn´t prosper. So, this is a town that thrives off of a bad economy. The cab driver told me that this has been a great year for Bariloche because Brazilians flock to the city to vacation since Brazil has not been hit nearly as hard other countries with the economic crisis. To sum it up, Bariloche was not one of my favorite towns in the world, but it serves its purpose.

I was there to finish up my final week of Spanish school. The ECELA school in Bariloche is tiny, it only had 18 students (where Santiago had about 60 when I was there). There is a much smaller community and you´d think that it would be more tight knit right? Well, maybe since I was only there for a week or I came from Chile instead of BA, but I wasn´t welcomed into the community in nearly the same way as in Santiago. The people were kind of cold. I hate to feel like I´m complaining, but it´s hard not to compare my experience to my time in Chile which was very warm and friendly. I was in the minority there. Most everyone spoke German, and maybe that had something to do with it? Or maybe it was just a different atmosphere.

Anyway, my experience wasn´t all bad. Not even close. I made friends with the other girl in my class (there were only 2 of us in my level) and we ended up exploring the area together. It is a beautiful area in Patagonia with lakes and mountains in every direction you look. I got to explore some caverns inside an inactive volcano at Cerro Leon. People lived inside these caves over 500 years ago. I didn´t catch all of the history because it was all in Spanish, but I think I got most of it.

I also learned how to make empanadas- the local ¨fast food¨ of Argentina. They are a lot like calzones, and they are delicious!

The other really good thing about Bariloche was my class. I really liked the girl from Brazil- her name is Bruna- and my teacher. I was alone and had private lessons for half of the week because Bruna skipped out on class to explore around the city. I think that I learned a lot of grammar and got some great lessons. This us from left to right Gustavo- the activities director, Me, My teacher Graciela, and Bruna.

All in all, Bariloche is a beautiful area, but not a great town, so if you are heading to Southern Argentina anytime soon, skip the town and head straight for the mountains...

Passed The Test

I had my second test this week to graduate Intermediate Level 1-B. There is a test every two weeks. I was worried about this one because there is a lot of grammar in the subjunctive tense which is very complicated. It´s a tense that we don´t have in English and it´s hard to understand when to use it. But I received an 84%-(75% is a passing grade). I was thrilled just to pass! The rest of the class was just as confused as I was and everyone received around the same grade- I think that the highest grade was an 87. Anyway, after the test we went to the liquor store and bought a couple of bottles of Chilean wine to celebrate my last day in Santiago and passing the exam. Then we had an Almuerzo de Despedidas (a goodbye lunch) where everyone leaving had to give a speech. I don´t like talking in public, but the post-test wine definitely helped. I got a certificate and everything! Here´s a picture of me looking awkward again. Enjoy.

A girl named Sarah moved into my family´s house at the beginning of the week. It turns out that she is also from Seattle! We lived a block apart from each other in the University district, she went to the UW. We are even the same age. We have so much in common it´s crazy. It makes me realize what a small world it is. It has been nice to have her in the house for a change of pace.

Tomorrow I´m off to Bariloche, Argentina in central Patagonia to finish up school. I will be staying with another home stay family. I hope they are equally as nice as my family here. I´ll be taking a 20 hour bus ride to get down there. Ugh. I splurged for the ¨semi-cama¨bus that has more comfortable seats and more leg room. I think it will be worth it... I can´t wait to get into the mountains. I´m definitely a mountain girl.