This nice condor decided to pose for the tourists 

The group at the start of the trek 

Crossified 

Genie pig in the kitchen of the family we stayed at 

Cooling down by the river

Colca Canyon

I just returned from the three day trek to the Colca Canyon. The first day we started early, as the bus ride to the start of the trek takes five hours, once we got there we got some launch, and starting to descend into the Canyon. The region in general has an arid climate, with desert like landscapes, but what is interesting about this desert is that it lies at an altitude of 3000 meters. The Colca canyon is one of the deepest in the world if not the deepest, 1300 meters deep (If I recall correctly). We walked for 5 hours in the first day and stopped for the night in a small village, were our host was also the mayor of the town! Apparently he runs a kind of a hostel at the same time. The village is not connected to civilization by a road, so everything has to be brought on mules. The mayors family was very friendly, and he had a nice child girl, who was helping here mother with house chores and serving the guests. They had a few genie pigs running around the kitchen, apparently they will be eaten in some coming festival. After dinner we played a card game called Shithead, drank some rum, and went to bed.

We were a group of five plus the guide , Australian girl, an Israeli girl, French guy, a fellow from Hong Kong and me. The guy from Hong Kong was very weird.

The second day we did not do much walking, we had a tour in the family´s farm, to see the plants and fruit they grow. They grow grain, which is used to feed the animals, but as well to make a horrible alcohol called Chicha. We also got a tour into the town, and an explanation about the customs and traditions of the people living there . Then we descended more, until we reached this nice lodge in the middle of the valley, where were going to stay for the night. This was the nicest part of the trip, as the place is quite beautiful, and located in the middle of no where, and although it was created specially for tourists , it was not crowded, which retained the feeling of being in a wild place. They had a nice swimming pool , created from one of the natural streams running close by. After dinner we went straight to bed.

The third day was the toughest, as we needed to wake up at o'clock early morning, to climb up the valley, a 100 meter climb. We started early so that we make it up before the sun rises, as the sun there is very strong. The guide bet that the Chinese guy will be first, and he though I would do it in 2 hours 20 minutes, anyway I was first to the top , and I made in 2 hours and 4 minutes, beating the Chinese guy by 2 minutes. According to the guide the record by a tourist was 1 hour 25 minutes, while local porters can do it in even less time. At the top it was quite cold, so I had a few sips of that bottle of rum I still had with me, which helped me fall a sleep once I got on the bus later.

After we reached the top , we walked to the town, had breakfast and then took the bus to the ¨Cruz del Sur¨, to watch the condors. We saw less condors than I was expecting, but some of them flow relatively close and they were quite beautiful to watch.

Arequipa

I arrived very early in the morning, by the night bus from Cusco, this time I was more prepared for the bus trip, I took my motion sickness tablets, and I did not get sick.

Arequipas architecture is different than that of Cusco, a lot of white stone buildings, personally I liked the Colonial style of Cusco much more. According to guide is a nice place to take it easy for a while, I think that is true only if you do not count the not so courteous cat drivers, crossing the streets here is one of the trickiest activities I had to perform during my trip. Though everything is cheaper here than Cuscspeciallyyy tours.

I am going tomorrow early morning on a 3 day trek to the Colca canyon, after that I am off to Puno.

Cusco

I decided to spend a couple of more days in Cusco before moving on, today I want to watch the football game , and tomorrow I will visit a few sites I have not seen yet. After that I am off to Arequipa, where I will visit the ¨Cola Canyon¨ , the valley of the Condors.

Since loosing my ipod I had to find alternative reading material, first I picked up a book by Cathern George which I found at a hotel, a story called ¨Out of the storm¨, quite enjoyable and not too long. After I was done with that, I wanted to buy a new book, but it was hard to find any booksEnglishlish around here, so I bought the first Harry Potter book in Spanish, I figured it would be a good way to learn Spanish. And it´s working out rather fine, because I watched the movie I know something about the plot and the characters, which helps in understanding the Spanish, but I have not read the booEnglishglish, which means there are a lot details and plot parts that I didn´t know about, which makes it an interesting read as well. I find the book much funnieamusingmuzing than the movie.

Cusco is a lovely city, but way too touristic, peoplepoeple here are only interested in your money, but last week I met quite a few nice travelers , many ofAmericansricans , and I got a few invitations to visit the US.

hotmail has to be one of the slowest and most unreliable sites on the net, especially withinternetternet connections, that you find sometimes in the internet cafes around here, OK maybe I am exaggerating a bit, but you would definitely expect more from the biggest and richest software company in the world, why does reading some simple text emails has to take so long ? What isembarrassingessing for Microsoft is that hotmail seems to work better and faster with firefox than internet explorer. I encountered other sites as well that had more features when accessed using firefox, blogger.com for example.

A one month old baby white caiman 

One of the birds at the lodge 

Caught a cat fish instead 

Fishing for Pirahnas 

The Ayahuasca vine
 

Me feeding Solitario

Solitario the pet caiper 

Sunset in the jungle 

Capuchino moneky 

The Amazon Jungle

This 5 day jungle trip was much more interesting than the one I did in Ecuador in December, the main reason being the number of exotic animals I got to see. While in Ecuador we saw almost none, the list of exotic wild animals that I saw here is amazing : several species of monkeys, white and black Caiman, caiper, Giant tarantulas, Jungle otters, many species of ants and termites, and many many species of large and small birds, which most of their names I already forgot. The most amazing animal citing I had though, was a 2.5 meter black Caiman (A kind of alligator), the guide spotted it while we where navigating a swamp in a boat, the Caiman was resting between the grass, about 1.5 meters from the boat, we could only see the eyes and part of the tail, I was in the front of the boat, and the guide told me to come to the back to get a better look at it, I moved to the back and took a good look at it, then raised my camera to take a picture, but that seemed to alert the Caiman , it twisted its body and disappeared under the water, but when it did that we got to see its whole black body, unfortunately my reactions and my digital camera were not fast enough to capture it on a photo, and all I got with a picture of disturbed water.

Another interesting animal was the caiper it is the biggest hamster in the world , it can weigh 200 kg, and it is the biggest animal in the jungle, they had one as pet in the Lodge. I also saw the dangerous fire ants, and the very dangerous giant ants. The fire ants live inside a small tree in symbiosis, the fire ants protect the tree and the tree provides them with a home, the tree is called by the locals ¨justice tree¨, because they used to punish people for crimes, the tied them to the tree in the night, and in the morning they would come back to find them dead, not a nice way to die. As for birds there are a lot of big colorful macaws, but the most bizarre bird have to be the ¨horned screamer¨, a large black and yellow bird, very loud and honks like a donkey.

It is difficult though to take good pictures of animals in the jungle, for starters it is often cloudy there, and even when it is sunny not much light goes through the thick jungle. Further more, except for the monkeys at monkey island, these are wild animals , and you can only watch them from a distance, you would need a camera with a very high zoom to make decent pictures of them, which I did not´t have.

The guides are were very good, they knew a lot about everything the jungle, and they spoke clear English, and they were great at spotting animals and birds. They explained to us about a lot of plants and trees and their uses, one very interesting plant is the Ayahuasca, anyway this is hallucigenetic plant, which has a vine form (as opposed to a tree or a bush). The indigenous people life style revolved a lot around using this hallucigenetic plant, the shamans prepare a kind of drink by boiling pieces of this plant, then the Shaman would then drink it , other people can drink it as well, but only under supervision of the Shaman. After twenty minutes the people start having hallucinations, which last four hours. According to one of the guides, which already drank it 15 times, it shows him things about his life, he also claims he met the jungle spirits and they thought him things about the jungle. During the hallucinations the Shaman is supposed to watch over the people to protect them from the demon which will try to hurt them. They make many more claims about the spiritual powers of this plant, and I don´t know what to believe or what not. Going to the Shaman to take this hallucigenetic stuff used to be free, but now a days it is becoming a business, people are paying 100$ for a hallucination session with a Shaman, they told me that in June they are having a group of 120 Americans who are coming to the lodge for the sole purpose of participating in a hallucigenetic session, the session will be conducted by four shamans, since according to them each Shaman can control up to 30 people , but no more.

In the night they had caiman watching trips, we would go down the river under moon light, with the engines of the boat turned off , and try to spot caimans, or just listen to the sounds of the jungle. The white caiman eyes would glow in the dark, when they pointed the light at them.

Some of the evenings at the lodge were fun as well. A group of 8 people arrived at the same time as me, all girls except one guy, they were a mix of Canadian, America and Australian. The second night I shared 3 bottles of red wine with one of the girls, and the next morning I had to wake up at five, I managed to wake up and do a seven hour tour, then come back and have launch, after launch I went to take a short nap, the next thing I remember was somebody knocking on my door to wake me up for dinner ! I met a lot of nice people during my four night stay in this lodge. And The lodge it self was quite nice place as well. I just don´t understand why the shower water in the middle of the jungle is so cold.

To the jungle

I am leaving tomorrow morning to the Manu jungle reserve, were I am going to be spending five days. I don´t know if there is any internet there, but I doubt it, so there might not be any updates for a few days.

For those of you interested in visiting Colombia, the Indonesian girl I met in the Salkantay trek was in Colombia before visiting Peru, she did not encounter any violence or crime, I think if a little Indonesian girl can visit Colombia on her own, then you and I can . On the other hand the place with the worst reputation for crime among travelers is Lima in Peru.

The Salkantay Trek And Machu Picchu

The Salkantay trek was a nice one, I went with a group of 10 people aged between 18 and 42, a Swiss couple, a young Swiss guy, 3 Dutch girls, a German women, an Argentinean women, an Australian Indonesian girl (of Chinese origin) and me. The Swiss people seemed to handle it the climbing and the height quite well, me and the Argentinean women generally managed fine, the German and the Australian found it rather hard, but the Dutch girls really struggled to cope with it, two of them get sick during the trek, and they complained all the time about how hard it is, it might have to do with the fact that they come from a very flat country. Though towards the end of the trip they were more happy about, it looked like they adapted, and were enjoying it more.

The first day was a good taste of things to come, it was a lot of walking, in the midst of beautiful mountain scenery. We walked from 8 until about 5:30 in the afternoon, with a couple of breaks on the way. My legs were quite tired when I got to the camp site, and I had a couple of blisters, one in each foot in the back of my heels, but it seems this is part of the experience, since almost everybody else had them as well. The camp spot was quite a wild one, in the middle of one of the valleys, next to a couple of water streams, at an altitude of 3500m, with nothing around except the camp site of the other group that was doing the same trek. At these heights very little trees live, and they are generally around the streams, and the sun is very strong but once it sets down, it starts to get very cold, and we didn´t have a fire to warm us up, I think it would have been difficult anyway, with so little wood around. I slept with four layers of cloth, inside my sleeping bag with an extra sheet, even then the coldness was barely tolerable, I did not sleep well.

The second day was the toughest, but at the same time offered the most spectacular scenery. In the morning we had to climb 1000m in four hours, to get to the highest point in the trek at 4600 m, next to the Salkantay mountain, which could have easily portrayed the mines of Moria mountain in the Lord of the Rings. If at 3500m little trees live, at 4000m and above there are none, the landscape consists of wide spacious valleys, covered by green grass, surrounded by snow covered mountain peaks, with small streams running all over the place, I really loved the feeling of having so much space. Anyway this was the toughest part of the trip, at 4600m there is almost half the oxygen compared to see level, one of the Dutch girls got sick just before the steepest part, there couldn´t have been a worst timing, after realizing that she really could not walk anymore, they put here on one of the horses, that was used to carry some of the gear, and she made it all the way up on the horse. As we were approaching the top I started to get a headache, height sickness, which increased the more we got closer to the top, at the top it was very cold, and you could hear the sound of cracking ice on the close by peaks. We didn´t stay there long, and started heading down for our launch site, once we got there everybody was so tired that they just lied down for nap. I felt a bit sick and still had a headache, but I managed to eat my launch. After launch we did not have much time to rest, as our next camping site was quite a distance away, and we needed to make it there before it gets dark. While walking the group became split into two a fast one and a slow one, since I was not feeling well I ended up in the slow group. But as we went down more and more , I was feeling better and better, at some point my height sickness was gone, and regained all my energies, and I was walking much faster, but since the fast group was out of sight, I had to stick to the slow group. We did not manage to make to the camping site in day light, and we had to walk the last hour in the darkness, we finally made it to the camping site just before 7 pm, considering we started at 8 in the morning, that was a very long day.

The camping site in the second night was not as wild as the first night, there is family living there and maintaining the site, and you could by drinks, it was much warmer as well, as we where at lower altitude and surrounded by rain forest.

The third day was a breathe compared with the second day, the path was mostly flat or going down, and we made it to the camping site at 4pm. But I found the scenery less interesting, as everything was covered with rain forest. Anyway after 3 days of walking and no washing, I was feeling very dirty, and I was determined to bath no mater what, I went down to the river, with a few others from the group and we washed in the freezing cold water of the river, which gets comes from the melting snow, but I felt much better after that. This camp site was run by a family as well, with very friendly children, who were very eager to to meet and talk to the visitors.

Fourth day we did little walking, we traveled mostly but train and bus, but we had to cross a couple of rivers by foot. The first had a wooden bridge, which would swing when you walk on it, definitely not for the faint hearted. The other one did not even have a bridge, just a cable cart, capable of carrying two people at a time. Since we used the bus to travel instead of walking, we got to the train station too early, and we had 4 hours to kill before the train left. Though for a change this time the launch was excellent, unlike during the whole trip the food was no more than adequate. The train took us to Machu Picchu Pueblo, were we were going to stay for the night. We went to from a dip in the thermal baths, before having dinner, and going to bed early.

In the morning we had to wake up at 4:30, have breakfast at 5:00 and head for the Machu Picchu. We had two options to walk up or take the bus which costs 6$, quite a rip off for a 20 minute bus ride. Anyway I was feeling good after a day of rest, and I decided to join the group going up on foot. We made it up there at 7, then we had a guided tour for 2 hours. After that we had only two hours free, because our train was leaving at 1:30 from the town bellow, anyway I decided to climb the Huayna Picchu, a high view point, above the Machu Picchu, some of the other decided to go for the sun gate on the other side which is an easier walk, the others were not in a hurry to go up, since they were not leaving in the 1:30 train, but were going to stay for the night in town, and take the train the next day, anyway I was in a hurry so I went on my own. According to my guide it was an 1 hour climb, but I did it in 38 minutes, though this is still far from the record of 22 minutes. Anyway I got a full view of the Machu Picchu, but rather a far one. Since I made it quite fast up and down the Huayna Picchu, I had time to climb to the there side of the Machu Picchu, and view it from there, which I think is the much more beautiful view point, though I did not make it all the way to the sun gate. Anyway I rested there for half an hour enjoying the amazing view, before heading down to the town by bus, I could have spent a whole afternoon there though, just lying and enjoying the scenery.

Cusco

I just returned from the 5 day trek which ended at the Machu Picchu, I feel quite tired now, I am going to bed early today, so this is going to be a short update, but I will write a more detailed one tomorrow. The trek was very tough aparently much tougher than the Inca trail, but the scenery on the way was spectacular, and the group was very pleasant. As for the Machu Picchu, I have visited many over hyped places before just to be disappointed, but the Machu Picchu is not one of those, in this case all the hype is justified, this place is simply amazing.

Another picture of the Machu Picchu and me 

Yes thats me (and the Machu Picchu) 

Me and the Machu Piccu again 

Machu Piccu from way above 

The group doing the Salkantay trek 

The cable cart midway 

There is not even a bridge on this river, just this cable cart 

A very scary bridge 

One of the mountains on the Salkantay trek 

A girl in a traditional Inca custume with a baby lama. 

Cusco

Cusco is one of the most popular touristic destinations in south America, so it is no surprise that the main streets are full of people trying to sell you their goods or tours, rather aggressively sometimes, the first day here I was constantly harassed while walking in the main square, by the sales people of the tour agencies. The interesting thing is that the next day, when I changed my tourist cloth ; hiking pants, boots, sun glasses , and just put on a jeans and normal shoes, I didn´t get harassed anymore, I could see these sales people giving me a glance and then deciding I am probably a local, and moving their attention to somebody else .

One of the down sides of being in such a touristic place, is that the guides speak English. This may sound strange to you, you would probably think it´s a blessing that that do speak English. But I would really rather they just explained things in Spanish, for starters I am trying to learn Spanish, and would like to use every opportunity to improve my listening and understanding skills, but the worst part is that I have to struggle to understand half of what they are saying in English, as they either do not pronounce the words correctly or don´t pronounce them clearly and completely. But I do understand that the people here are eager to speak English for the same reasons I want to speak Spanish, they want to use every opportunity to practice and improve there language.

Last night I found this nice pub while walking around, its rather small, inside there were a few guys with guitars having a jam session, there was also a women drumming on what I think is some kind of African drum, later a guy came in and joined the with his harmonica. The best performance though was by an Irish guy who sang a lovely Irish folk song without any accompanying music, I think you would really need to have a very nice voice to sing with no accompanying music , and to still sound good. Anyway if you are into music and do visit Cusco check this place out , it is called ´Muse´and it is at the San Blas square.

BTW I read all your comments, but if you don´t leave me an email address I can´t reply to it (fellowship of sagantec)

Cusco

After a 14 hour rough night bus ride I arrived at Cusco, half of the passengers on the bus including me got sick during the trip. I got to the conclusion it is the twisted mountain roads, since the bus rides in the low lands did not make sick. Next time I am going to take the most luxurious bus trip, not that I think it is going to protect me from getting sick, but the extra comfort and luxury might make the sickness more tolerable.

I like Cusco a lot, the city is stylish and beautiful, lively but not too noisy, and I find the people here very nice. After a few days of acclimatization to the 3500m height, I am going do a 5 day hiking track to the Machu Pichu, this is not the traditional Inca trail. Tours to the Inca trail are already booked until the beginning of July. But from what I heard this trek is just as nice as the Inca trail trek, it just does not follow the famous Inca trail path.

I went ahead with my plans to get a web storage, I even uploaded all my pictures there. The nice thing now is that anybody can view my pictures, well most of them, some I am keeping for my self ;-) . The URL for viewing the pictures is : www.streamload.com/whendawi/pictures , it might be more convenient to download all the pictures first and then view them , rather than view them using the browser.

Does anybody actually reads my blog ?

Cusco main square