Arequipa to Sacred Valley

We woke up at 4:30 to be ready for our taxi at 5:30.  We had a smooth flight to Cusco, and out pick-up was waiting there with a "Sra. Williams" sign.  We were starving and thirsty by the time we got to The Sacred Valley Retreat and B&B.  The owner would be another hour before he arrived (It was about 11:30).  One of the staff showed us to our room and where the filtered water was.  In an hour the owner was here and we inquired about lunch.  A few cups of tea, biscotti, and a grand tour of the small retreat later, and he told us one of the staff would make lunch for us.

At 2:30 we sat down for a lunch of fresh salad from the garden, bread, giant corn, olives, cheese, and a purple corn lemonade-style drink.  It was all very good.  Nearly all of the ingredients are from the garden on the property, and we were in the mood for some fresh veggies.  We sat with Fernando, the staff member that prepared it, and Martina, the one who showed us to our room.

Fernando is learning English, so we talked a little bit back and forth about this and that, trying to understand eachother.  For the most part it was a quiet lunch.

Afterwards Ryan and I hiked up the mountain behind the retreat for an hour or so before coming back down and stopping in the tiny town for 2 cokes and a muffin.  I made Ryan hide the empty coke bottles in his backpack because I didn't want the all-organic natural staff to see them.

On our way in we saw a family of pigs (A mom and at least 7 piglets) being ushered along the road by a local woman.

We talked on the balcony with the owners friend who has been staying here 3 weeks.  He is some sort of therapeutic pain-eraser.  He demonstrated by trying to lengthen Ryan's spine by adjusting his posture.  The jury is still out.

Time for pity-corner.  I have a huge bug bite on my right ankle, actually about 3 or 4 bites but only one is huge and swollen.  Why?!  Every where we go they find me.  I have been spraying every bed we've slept in with a preventative bed-bug deterrent so I don't think its bed bugs.  It's from Arequipa, but how or why I don't know.  Oh well... could be much worse.  Pity-party is over.

Here are a few more pics from the last several days:

Suriplaza, Putre

It was windy and cold

Awesome colors with the blue sky

The tire shaped grave it dug

filled in with rocks - again!

hopin' and a prayin' that it works!

It worked!  Ryan lays in the ditch that tried to eat our front tire

The back yard of out retreat in Sacred Valley, Peru

Burro's coming up the trail this afternoon

Sun starts to set

sunset over the mountains

Arica to Arequipa

From the international bus terminal in Arica, we got into a "colectivo".  Colectivos are txis that fill up with people to go across the border into Peru.  Enough of them were around with people saying "Tacna?  Tacna?" so we were able to get in the taxi of a woman in her 50s right away.

She took us with 3 Chileans over to another area of the parking lot and disappeared with our passports.  We would have been alarmed, but we read about how this all works and we knew she'd be back.  Sure enough 10 minutes later she was back with our passports and a printed immigration form.

We made the drive through the Chilean border, and then onto the Peruvian one.  It went pretty smoothly and she dropped us and the other 3 at the Tacna bus station.

From there we got a cab to the airport and waited for our flight to Arequipa.  We split a mediocre empanada from the airport cafe while we waited.

Around 4pm we arrived in Arequipa and taxi'd to our hostel "Amazing Home."  Our original hostel had emailed us a day before cancelling, so we hurried up and booked this one.  Its in a n old building, but the room is spacious and the shower hot, so we were satisfied.

We were starving since we'd barely eaten all day.  We stopped in the first juice shop we saw and ordered 2 mango juices.  The guy had us take a seat and ran out the door.  He returned a few minutes later with a bag of mangoes, and shortly after that we enjoyed some of the best juice ever.

The juice gave us enough energy to wander a while and find somewhere to eat for dinner.  We ended up eating at "Istanbul." We ordered pita sandwiches, kafta for me and falafel for Ryan.  We walked a little more after that, got some ice cream, can back and hit the sheets.

This morning we woke up early and Ryan did some exercises in the room.  We had banana pancakes in the breakfast area, which we were pretty good.  We walked to Starbucks for coffee afterwards.  I didn't even feel guilty for getting Starbucks in South America...I needed coffee that wasn't instant.

We sat on a bench in the Plaza de Armas for a while and watched the pigeons fly around the fountain.  We stopped back at the hostel to drop off our coats because it was getting warm, and then headed to tour a 16th century monastery.

The Santa Catalina Monastery was really pretty and really large.  The walls were painted bright blues and oranges, and it was interesting to see the old cells and chapels throughout the property.  We walked around for about an hour before heading off to find some lunch.

We got to the restaurant just as they were opening and the owner asked us to give him 15 minutes.  What else to do but get more juice from our favorite spot?  We sucked down 2 mango juices and headed back to the restaurant for lunch.

Lunch was a bed of sliced potatoes with vegetable and beef topping.  It was delicious and really hit the spot.  It was a mix of sweet potatoes and regular, but each had purple skin.

We wandered a bit more before heading back to the Plaza to meet Joe.  Joe (remember Joe, Ryan's dental school buddy, with us for a while in Panama?) is also in Arequipa for a but before heading to Cuzco to do some volunteer dentistry for a few weeks.

We met with him and went to see a museum about a frozen 500 year old body of a child that was sacrificed to the god's by the Incan people.  The tour consisted of an introductory movie about the archeological expedition to the top of various mountains to uncover these bodies.

A guide took us around to see all the artifacts and at the end we saw the frozen body through a glass freezer.  Pretty weird stuff.

Afterwards we went to a cafe and had some tea and churros until it was time for dinner.

We ate at Mixtos, a restaurant not far from our hostel.  I had a stuffed pepper with potato, and Ryan had a mashed potato tower with shrimp (similar to a dish in our south american cookbook!) Lots of potato today!  Joe had a burger that looked really good.

We said goodbye and he headed off to the bus station for his bus to Cuzco, and we headed in to get ready for tomorrow mornings journey to Sacred Valley.  Goodnight!

(Pictures still to come...)

Putre, Chile

When our bus dropped us off in Arica we got a taxi to the airport to pick up our rental truck.  We reserved it through Hertz a few days before.  The Hertz website said the office was open from 7am on.  We got there at 8am.  Do you think there was a representative smiling and ready to give us our truck?  You're catching on.  Hertz will be hearing from me.

I asked another staff member at the airport what time they open. "Nine or nine-thirty".  Hmm.  Ok.  Ryan and I went upstairs and overpaid for an instant coffee while we waited.  We came back down around 9.

The lady from the parking voucher stand was kind enough to call the number posted at the desk for us since we had no phone.  "They're coming" was all I gathered.  We got a map from the Europcar rental lady, and waited around.  Three guys came up to get their car, and called that number again.  20 minutes.  It was after 10.

Finally the guy shows up and we get the truck.  We forgo the damage insurance, since our credit card covers it.  He gives us a better map and shows us to our Toyota Helix (or is it Helux...Hilux?) It's stick shift.  Since Ryan hadn't driven stick since he was a teen in his grandparent's VW, we took a few laps around the parking lot.  He took to it quickly and we were off, headed to Putre, about 2.5 hours northwest.

The road was long and took us through huge sand dunes and mountains.  When we arrived we checked in to Terracelodge, and I was happy to see a clean, attractive room with a hot shower.  We got some lunch (soup and chicken and rice) and walked a small trail a few kilometers from town.

We weren't very hungry at dinner since we'd had a late lunch.  We went to a restaurant on the square and ordered too much food than we wanted.  It was good though, a veggie pizza for me and fish for Ryan.

The next morning we had breakfast at the lodge and headed out to see Chungara Lake, a high altitude lake overlooked by a huge volcano.  We stopped at the rangers station and they gave us a neat sticker of the park.  I used their bathroom, that they had just finished hosing out.  I had to use 2 of my rationed napkins just to dry off the seat!

We walked a short trail near the water, and drove out to some other lakes around the volcano while we waited for the clouds to clear (Ryan was dying to get a shot of the whole thing uncovered).  We ate our lunch of empanadas and chocolate in the back of the truck just over the hill from a heard of llamas.

When we finished eating the clouds had moved and we went back to get more pictures of the Volcano.  Success!

With the rest of the afternoon we explored the dirt roads in Lauca National Park and a Vicuna Reserve (Vicna look like short haired llamas mixed with baby giraffes).  I even tried my hand at starting the truck, with Ryan coaching me.  it worked, and I drove a good 30 feet!

We took a long road to an old decrepit town with a crumbling church,  Ryan said he was waiting for zombies to come walking out of the old buildings.  It was creepy.  An old broken down swing set, with chains dangling, a see-saw with the wood broken in half.  And not a soul in sight.  We didn't see one other human the entire afternoon driving around the park.

The best part of that town is that it is right next to an active Volcano - you can see sulfuric steam and gas  rising out of a vent on top.  It was really neat.  We worked our way back to Putre and saw a beautiful rainbow shooting straight out of a snow covered mountain.

Guest blogger: Ryan

After following a seemingly endless number of trucks we arrived back in town.  We went to a local hole in the wall for dinner and got two "menu completos".  First came a huge bowl of quinoa soup with veggies and chicken.  The soup was so big that we thought the whole meal was the soup (and would have been satisfied)...wrong.  We quickly got a plate of noodles and another huge piece of chicken covered in some kind of delicious sauce.  For dessert we received a small bowl filled with a pink jello like substance.  It was pretty good.  We walked back home and went to bed.

Steph Blogging:

We enjoyed our breakfast again the next morning before heading off to explore the other side of mountains.  We first grabbed some empanadas, peanuts, and bananas to bring with us.  Suriplaza was our first stop.  It is a beautiful group of bright orange mountains, dusted with snow, and that day set perfectly against a royal blue sky.  We ate our lunch in the truck facing the mountains.

We decided to take a few more dirt roads over to another "must see" star on our map.  A few wrong turns had us dead end into more ghost towns.  Finally we found the road (either the map is labeled and the actual raod isn't, or the road has a sign but there is nothing on the map) and headed over.

About half way there we came up fast on a spot of the dirt road in which an old dried up stream had washed away a small ditch into the road.  Ryan hit the brakes so that the front of the truck didn't get damaged, but in doing so effectively wedged us in.  Impulsively he floored it to try to get us out of the spot, and by the time we got out to assess the situation, the rear driver's tire was in a 12 inch hole it had dug itself.

So now we have the front passenger tire wedged into the ditch/stream bed, and the back driver's side tire in its own neat little tire shaped hole.  I immediately regretted eating my entire empanada at lunch.  The hairy part was that we hadn't seen a soul since about 9 am on any of these roads, and now it was 1pm.

We ended up getting the jack out, jacking up the back tire as far as it would go, and filling the hole with small and medium stones, rocks, and gravel we could gather.  Ryan started her up again and I stood back and watched.

When he turned off the car, there was a clear black stripe of baldness forming on the tire, and all of the rocks we had gathered had been flung all over the road behind us.  And still, there the truck sat.

We would go through this a few more times.  Kissing the tread on the tire goodbye, filling and refilling the hole, trying to dig away the ditch that was holding the front tire, and so on.

I'm reading The Neverending Story, and there is a character in it called a "Luck Dragon."  Maybe I was getting delirious, but I was hoping that a luck dragon would come help us.

Finally we dug and dug at the back tire, wedged some large rocks in as far as possible and as flat as possible, trying to give the tire an unobstructed way out.  We dug and dug with our hands and parts of the jack to clear the front tire as much as possible.

I stood back and Ryan started her up again.  And moved!  Forward!  A lot!  I was jumping up and down yelling and Ryan had a huge smile on his face.  We made it!

The whole ordeal probably lasted an hour and a half.  We still didn't see a soul until we got back in to Putre, at least a 35 to 40 minute drive away.  Ryan of course was still up for seeing that other landmark, but I had had enough and just wanted to get back to civilization and out of that damn truck.  I had actually thought the axle was broken for a while when it was sitting there, it looked weird to me and the other rear tire didnt spin at all for the longest time.

I'm proud of us.  We didn't panic (outwardly) or loose our heads.  We didn't get short with each other even though we were both frustrated and getting nervous the longer it was stuck. We pulled it off together and got ourselves the heck out of there.

We went back to the same restaurant for dinner.  Again we ordered the menu completo and got too much food.  A huge bowl of cazuela de vicuno followed by a plate of beef with a fried egg on it and a large portion of rice.  Dessert was a banana drizzled in honey - very good!

We showered and got to bed when we got back to our room.  Ryan mildly skinned up a finger from all the digging and filling, and we were both tired.

The next morning we left before breakfast, taking very bland cheese sandwiches prepared by the owner with us, and returned the car.  We tried to fill the car at the gas station at the ariport, only to find out it was a jet fuel station and not for cars.  We had to drive 20 minutes out of our way into town to find a gas station.  Thats one thing America's got going...you never have to search too long for a gas station.

We dropped the car, got a cab to the bus station, hopped into a taxi bound for the Peruvian border.

to be continued...

The Volcano neat Lake Chungara

Is this a toyota ad or what?

Learning to drive stick

The old church belltower

more pictures to come soon!