March 18-29

We are back, as far as blog posting goes! Sorry to keep you all in the dark, I know everyone has been dying to read our next adventure… It’s been a busy month and a half traveling through Peru and Bolivia and back to Peru now! We aim to finish what we started which is regaling all of our travels so that not only our parents, grandparents, or friends back home can catch up on us, but for Rach and I to remember what we’ve done and reminisce once we return back to the States. This first post starts in Lima, Peru after a quick two day layover in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Lima

Lima is the capital city of Peru and sits on some high cliffs overlooking the ocean. We stayed in the Miraflores district at a nice hostel after arriving early in the morning. This part of the city is very vibrant and green. We walked through some flower gardens, watched some surfers, visited a cat park (yes over 100 stray cats), and took a tour of some local archaeological sites nearby. First impression of Peru was very good but quite a bit different than our travels prior. It is a much poorer country but where it lacks in nice facilities and infrastructure it makes up for in its culture. We would later learn, in many of tours, about the thriving indigenous populations of past and present.

Huacachina & Ica

There is a pretty typical “gringo path” of travel through Peru that tourists follow, and we were no exception. Our first stop after Lima was the Oasis town of Huacachina. We usually take buses but found a tour agency that said they would drop us off in the small town for the same price as a public bus. We didn’t want the tour so we were just bystanders in a day group headed the same way. We got to stop at one of the side attractions, which was a boat ride through old guano islands (bird poop for fertilizer) and a marine sanctuary full of sealions and penguins.

Huacachina is located in the desert a quick drive from the main city of Ica, and is an oasis town situated around a small lake surrounded by sand dunes. The main attraction here was to head out into dunes on a dune buggy and either ski/snowboard or sandboard down them! We chose to sandboard since the skiing looked kind of dingy and had no regrets. Our guide whipped us around the dunes in his buggy and brought us to some very steep and intimidating slopes (for Rach, at least). The sandboarding was thrilling! A little like sledding on snow but not as forgiving.

After one night in the oasis we were heading to Arequipa on a night bus. The bus left from the terminal in Ica and we got there to find out our bus was delayed two hours. We posted up along a brick wall and Rach noticed something off pretty quickly. After about an hour waiting, a woman on our left and a man on our right, who was making calls to another man across the way, attempted the bird poop scam on us. The man on my side asked me an innocent question and then we were squirted with a mustard/vinegar mix (“bird poop”) all over our clothes and backpacks. The man tried to offer some napkins but I knew it was a scam to “help clean us up” and then steal our belongings. I told him to scram and we found refuge with a couple other backpackers across the station. Phew…

Arequipa & Cañon de Colca

After a restful sleep in our moving hostel we arrived to the city of Arequipa. Arequipa is nicknamed the “white city” jokingly for the amount of “white” tourists that visit but really for the white, unpainted walls and bricks made from the volcanic limestone in the area that form the foundations of all the buildings in town. We took part in a free walking tour of the city and learned more about the history of Peru.

Our next morning we left very early to take a bus to the town of Cabanaconde where we would do our first high altitude trek in one of the deepest canyons in the world, Cañon de Colca. The start of the trek is on the rim of the canyon and then descends 4,000 feet to the bottom. The canyon hosts numerous small towns from the edge of the rim to the very bottom near the river. We would trek through a few of these towns and stay two nights in them. We brought our tent and our own food, mistakenly, because there was plenty of options for dining once in the towns. It was nice that we brought our tent however, since the hospedajes had some incredible campsites for us to perch up on. Our first night we were situated on a terraced ledge overlooking the river and the hostel included a hot spring! The next day our hike was hot and strenuous, but we reached a jungle paradise with swimming pools and another nice place to camp. A British lad (Toby) we met in Arequipa accompanied us both nights and we played some intense games of Cambio (the card game) into the night. The last day we climbed our way out of the canyon and hopped on a bus back to Arequipa and then a quick turn around on a night bus to Cusco…

Next stop: Capital city of the Incas, Cusco.