Machu Pichu, Peru

Machu Pichu (Big Mountain in the Inca language).

Where to begin...? Magical, mysterious, immense... far more incredible than I had ever dreamed of!
At 6am after three days of trekking (the first of which was on bicycles) we arrived at the lost city of the Incas. It took us almost and hour, running in the dark up the steep trail from the town of Aguas Calientes. We practically killed ourselves trying to beat the sunrise. We didn´t quite make it, but were nonetheless rewarded with a breath taking view full of misty clouds weaving their way through the ancient ruins.
Wandering through the city one could feel the presence of an impressive civilization. Even though the Incas reined for only a short time, they left behind a facsinating spiritual energy that we were so lucky to experience.


After wandering for several hours we climbed for 45 minutes up the almost vertical trail to the top of Waynapichu (small mountain). Here we were rewarded with a breath taking view of the entire city of Machu Pichu. Up here in the cliffs were built more Inca structures, passage ways and tunnels.

I stayed in the city for almost nine hours, long after most of our group of 11 had returned to Aguas Calientes. As time ran out, myself and my Irish compainon Kevin, ran down the steep stepped trail back to town to catch the train back to Cusco leaving behind us an amazing magical day.

Lake Titicaca, Peru

Nick, Amelie and I made our way to country number four on our trip, Peru. For Amelie and I, the three hour bus ride was made extra uncomfortable when we were singled out to leave our seats and sit on little wooden benches on the floor. The bus was over booked and it was a mystery to us why we were chosen to sit in the isle... But anyway... we made it safely to Puno, Peru. The following day we began a two day tour of the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca.
Our first stop was the floating Uros Islands. People actually live on floating island made of reed roots covered with dried reeds.

We then spent the night with a Quechua family on the island of Amantani. We ended up venturing a little farther into the world of Gringo Tourism than we would have liked...

Copacobana & Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

An easy bus and boat ride took us from La Paz to the tiny town of Copacobana on the banks of Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world. This is the view from the roof of our hostal just after dawn as we prepared for our trip to Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), the capital of the Incas. In Copacobana we ran into Australian Nick who we had volunteered with at the animal park. Nick and his guitar came along with us to the island.
We spent one night and two days wandering along the Inca made paths on Isla del Sol. Here we saw our first Inca ruin, el templo del sol (the Temple of the Sun), orriginally built by the Incas predecors.

The trail passes over the summit of the island, showing incredible views of boths sides at the same time. Our second day was rainy and foggy. This is my favourite photo taking weather. The whole island had a cool, mysterious energy.
There are tons of quinoa fields here, so dark and colourful.

La Paz, Bolivia

La Paz is yet another large capital city that I found wonderful and beautiful. This picturesque city is built at around 4000 m above sea level, surrounded by immense mountains with nowhere to grow but up. The night view of the city is the best, when you can see the lights climbing up the mountain ridges like tiny arms. Unfortunately I have yet to master the art of taking night photos :(
We were lucky enough to have our own private tour guide, Djanira, a contact through a friend of Amelie´s in Canada. Djanira was born and raised in La Paz and showed the sites during all four days of our visit! Above is the incredible view from her house.

Parque Machía, Villa Tunari, Boliva

Meet Leoncio, one of the 8 pumas who walk through the jungle everyday, led on a rope by a volunteer in Parque Machía. There are hundreds of animals living in the park who were born in captivity and are either here for life being treated much better than in their former home, or being prepared to live in the wild. We volunteered here for two weeks.

I worked with what were called the ¨Small Animals¨ which included Tayras, Tehons, Cuchi Cuchis, Night Monkeys and Turtles. With the exception of the turtles I had never heard of any of these animals before.
Here I am with Petronia, likely the most spoiled animal in the Park. She loves to be held and if you get close enough, will crawl up your leg into your arms. Even though she looks lovely and harmless she bit me several times as I tried to end cuddle time.
Baby Cuchi Cuchi at dinner time! There are four nice cute ones and unfortunately one temporamental one named Frank who makes the whole job very difficult. Poor Frank is suffering from an inferiority complex because he is missing half his tail.
Amélie worked in the monkey Quarantine. This is where new arrivals to the park stay until it is confirmed that they don´t have any sort of parasite to spread to rest of the park. Sick monkeys also live here until they are well enough to be in the monkey park.
Claudio... the most adorable little baby capuchin monkey in the Quarantine.

Sucre, Bolivia

Sucre is a town out of a fairy tale book, with its orange coloured rooves clustered amongst the rolling green hills.

Although the government and activity of the capital city is in La Paz, from the beginning, the Bolivian constitution holds Sucre as the Capital City. In August 2007 there will be a revision of the constitution to try and either make La Paz the official capital or move the government to Sucre. Obviously there is much conflict throughout the country over this. I´m glad to be in Bolivia now and not in four months...




There were great views of the city from the roof of this church.
Diego!!! Here he is in the Casa de la Libertad where the first constitution was signed and Simon Bolivar lead the country into independence.









In Sucre we sadly said good bye to our German buddies Jonas and Philip AND our Chilean buddy Diego, leaving us Canadian chicas once again on our own.

Potosi, Bolivia

The four of us arrived in Potosi at 4:30am after a horrific 8 hour bus ride that covered about 300 km before which we almost lost all of our bags on top of the wrong bus. After some solid sleep we explored the gorgeous city seemingly from another era. Potosi was at one point the most important city in the world with an intense wealth from the silver mines that the Spaniards profited on.





Potosi´s silver mine is to this day a very important part of the region employing thousands of miners who work in the most terrible conditions. We went on a tour of the mines and for about two hours got to see first hand what these miners live through everyday. We felt the intense heat, crawled and climbed through frighteningly tight passage ways and enhaled the toxic gases that everyday are killing the workers as young as 10 years old. It was mind blowing to see that in this day and age there are people making a living like this.


Every group of miners (Quecha aboriginials) has there own Tio (god of the earth or the devil according to the Catholic Spaniards). Before starting the day of work they must give offerings to el Tio such as alcohol, coca leaves or cigarettes. It is custom to give el Tio a lit cigarette to smoke. If he smokes it, then a good day of mining is sure to come.




Here in Potosi we met up with our friend Diego who we met way back in Val Paraiso, Chile. Our nice little gang of five then headed off together to Sucre, the official capital of Bolivia.

The tour continues...

Here are Phillip and Jonas in the Valley of Rocks. The vally is full of these giant rock formations formed by volcanic eruptions.










Salvador Dalirocks Desert. Salvador Dali painted this desert without ever having been there.
















Here are Amélie and I with la Laguna Verde behind. All the lakes in the region have crazy bright colours - brown, blue, white, green.


Sol De Mañana Geysers. There are a countless number of geysers here in the ground emitting an intense amount of Sulphur and other gases with a eerily loud hissing noises. Each hole is fully of bubbling hot grey liquid. Each one is like a mini volcano. We were warned not to get too close.

Throughout the tour we were all slowly getting acustomed to the hight altitude of around 4600 m. We were all extra short of breath and had minor head aches most of the time. Our guide introduced us to Coca leaves which miraculously got rid of our head aches.

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Salt Flats of Uyuni, Bolivia

Bolivia.

For thousands of years most of Southern Bolivia was covered by the sea. Now all that is left are two enormous salt flats, the most famous of which are the Salt flats of Uyuni.
We crossed the border into Bolivia in Villazon where we took the train to Uyuni. On the train we met Phillip and Jonas our new travel companions. Of course they happened to be German...!
In Uyuni the four of us began a private three day guided tour of the incredible region south of Uyuni.

Because of this years El Niño the normally dry cracked flats are covered with a sleak layer of water. Crazy how there is practically now depth perception with the awsome lighting we had. We went a little crazy with the photos...











On the road south of Uyuni.

Mendoza

Due to frustrating technical problems I´ve had yet another stand still in my blog entries. I am now going back about 3 weeks to Mendoza Argentina. In Buenos Aires we said good bye to Johannes and headed west to Cordoba, then Alta Gracia where we saw the disapointing Che museum in his families old house, and then to Mendoza where we stayed for a week in awsome Winca´s Hostal! The hostal had great people and even a swimming pool which was key with the 40 degrees weather without a cloud in sight. We had an awsome week in the capital of Argentinas famous wine producing province. We went of a few winery tours, learnt how to taste wine like the pros, ate too much steak, and more. I went white water rafting too with our new friend Daniela from Buenos Aires who was in our dorm room at Winca´s.
It just so happened that we were in Mendoza for the annual grape harvest festival (Festival de la Vindemia). There were two strange parades, one on the friday night and another Saturday morning. The town centre was closed off for the stream of 18 giant floats displaying each of the 18 region´s Wine Queen and their respective Wine Princesses. The Queens and Princesses threw fruit, vegetables, cookies.... even water melons into the crowd. One of the 18 Queens was then elected as the official Wine Queen of the province....

After the wine the second highlight of our week in Mendoza was Paragliding!! Here I am all geared up with my guide Pacho ready to run down the slope and then jump off a cliff 700 m off the ground! What an amazing experience!











Amélie brought her camera along for the ride so here is a little taste of the view from around 800 m above ground!


After Mendoza we headed far north to Salta where we stayed for 3 incredibly lazy days. The hostal staff were so much fun. Here we had our last evening of Argentine steak and wine before leaving country number 2 on our journey.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Beautiful Buenos Aires... so much to do in so little time. Normally Johannes, Amelie and I are not fans of the big cities and the orginal plan was to stay for only two days. After 5 we had trouble tearing ourselves away. What an incredible place with great food, music, dancing, markets, architecture, neighbourhoods, anything and everything you dream of in a city.


We were immediately captured by the place. We saw an incredible tango musical, ate the most amazing meal at an ´all you can eat´parrilla (grill) restaurant, wandered around countless beautifully different neighbourhoods, had foam fights in the street for Carnaval... and the list goes on.


Tango in the sunday market palce in San Telmo.
Colourful buildings in La Boca
Giant old museum in Tigre.

I will definitely be coming back to this city. Wow!

ARGENTINA: Sarmiento, Camarones, Penisula Valdez

We have now been in Argentina for almost three weeks. We left Punta Arena, Chile on February 8 with our new friend Johannes from Germany. We ended up taking the non touristy route up the Argentine coast and made our first stop in the town of Sarmiento, famous for it´s petrofied forest. Here are Johannes and Amelie in the desertlike landscape. Practically the entire southern third of Argentina is pampa, pampa and more pampa.


We happened to find ourselves in the small town of Sarmiento of the weekend of the yearly Rodeo festival! What luck! The town was doubled in size for the festival and full of Argentine tourists. As far as we saw we were the only foreigners. Above are the three of us at the rodeo... a pretty strange sport if you ask me... but interesting to see at least once.

From Sarmiento we made our way to another even smaller, non touristy town called Camarones where there is a major penguin colony. We walked around among hundreds and hundreds of them. Close by there was also a sea lion colony, but they were too far away for photos.

They made me feel extra tall!

We then went farther north up to Puerto Madryn where we chilled out for a few days after the week of intense travelling. We took a day trip to the Peninsula Valdez where we saw tons of seals, and elephant seals. This photo was taken through Johannes´binoculors. The black ones are the puppies. They were all so cute playing together in the waves.

This is a Pichi... Amelie´s new favourite animal. It was scurrying around the parking lot at one of the look out points on the peninsula.

Argentina has turned out to be so incredibly different from Chile, far more than I had expected. The culture, language, traditions, daily routines, etc. are all so different. We are now used to the fact that businesses are all closed between 1pm and 5pm and practically every town has a plaza in its centre that comes to life at night full of free show, artesans and music. As we´ve been moving farther and farther north the climate has been getting hotter and hotter, a major change from the chilly south of Chile. It´s been difficult getting used to the heat.

Patagonia - Parque Torres Del Paine, Chile

Our seven days in the park began with gorgeous weather. We were not so lucky after that with rain at some point every other day and having to pack up wet tents three out of six mornings. The water here in Pehoé lake was crystal blue!
The enormous Grey Glacier, one of the largest ice caps in the world! This field of ice goes on as far as the eye can see. We camped close by for two nights...chilly.

An evening tea beside the glacier - an absolutely essential part of the day! The sun sets super late. It is almost 10pm in this photo! I am getting really good at the self portraits! Here we are the whole treking team - René, Mandy, Amélie and me - and what a great team we were too!

I took this photo during a short break in the rain. We made good use of our rain gear and water proof pack covers.
You can see the trail off to the left. It was soooooo windy in this valley and at times the trail was extremely narrow with a steep drop off to the right.... scary!

Amélie and me with the famous Torres del Paine (blue towers), the mascots of the park.

What a trip! Walking through cities with our heavy packs is now super easy after hiking with them through frigid, windy, rainy mountains