U-S-A!! U-S-A!! U-S-A!!

Well, after many months of travelling around the world, we have finally arrived back in one of our home countries, the US of A. It was a bit treacherous landing at JFK in New York last night as there was a major lightning storm causing trouble. After many delays we finally got into the city at 11 p.m. after a long day of travelling.

We spent almost exactly 6 months in the southern hemisphere, but it's good to time our arrival in the northern hemisphere with summertime! Although it's a bit too hot right now in New York.

So, after four and a half months in South America, it's a bit difficult to adjust back to first world living. For example, now I can:

- take a taxi cab with a meter, rather than agreeing a price beforehand
- receive change in a store and not have to inspect every bill looking for fakes
- not worry so much about catching rare and exotic diseases
- flush my used toilet paper down the toilet rather than throw it in a trash can next to the toilet
- walk down the street after 10 p.m.
- not have to speak Spanish at least once a day (although during our layover in Miami airport, I thought I was still in South America)
- drink the tap water! This is very helpful and also saves us money when we eat out

And speaking of the USA and South America, the USA men's soccer team kicks off their Copa America tournament in Venezuela today against Argentina. The Copa America is like the European Championships. It features all of the South American countries except the Guyanas and first Mexico muscled their way in and the US joined them in the 1990s. My money is on Argentina to win it this year. By the way, Mexico beat Brazil 2-0 last night. More information here (although the site is in Spanish): http://www.copaamerica.com/

And also speaking of the USA, it might be time for the oldest country in the Americas (apparently Haiti is the second oldest) to get a name change. In Latin America they didn't like it when we called ourselves "americanos", insisting that South Americans were also "americanos". So, instead to refer to Americans as "norteamericanos", although I'm not sure how the Canadians (or Mexicans) feel about that. The other option is to say "estadounidense", but that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But then again, Mexico is officially known as "Los Estados Unidos de Mexico" so technically they could also be "estadounidense". Any suggestions for a new name for the USA?

The Galapa-WOW! Islands

Karen and I have just returned from the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador and they are just simply amazing! Definitely one of the highlights of our 8 month trip. There's only one word to describe the Galapagos: amazing, fantastic, incredible, awesome, stunning, beautiful, surprising, unique, breathtaking, inspiring ... Oh wait, is that more than one? OK, just choose any of the above words to describe them.

We won't post any pictures just yet, as we're in New York City right now and it's difficult to find internet cafes here (everyone has their own computers) and the connection fee is expensive. So we might just wait until next week when we're in Chicago crashing with my brother and I can take over his computer for hours at a time. Although we got some great pictures, it is really difficult to truly capture the essence of the Galapagos. Plus, a lot of the cool stuff we saw was under the water and we don't have a waterproof camera.

The weather for the week was fantastic (although the water temp was slightly chilly at times). The boat and crew and our fellow passengers (only 13 on the boat) were all great and our guide, Juan, was extremely enthusiastic, knowledgeable and excited for everything, despite guiding almost every week.

The amount of animals we saw and got close to was impressive. Plus many of them are found nowhere else on the planet. Gigantic land tortoises, sea turtles, land and marine iguanas (iguanas that swim with their tails - unique to the Galapagos), dolphins, reef sharks, tons of birds (blue-footed and Nazca boobies, albatross, cormorants, finches, etc.), lava lizards, sea lions, etc. etc. etc.

Overall, Galapagos and Antarctica were equally amazing experiences, but in Galapagos we could do what we could never do in Antarctica - swim with the penguins!!! Yes, those birds can't fly - in the air, but underwater, there's no other word for what they do but to use the word "fly". And we were swimming right next to them, along with sea lions, sea turtles, flightless cormorants, sharks! and tons of fish. As the Australians on our boat said, usually when someone yells "shark!" when swimming, everybody panics and swims the other way. But in the Galapagos, that was a call for everyone to come to you to check out the harmless sharks.

Although we saw them just a few kilometers south of the equator, the Galapagos penguin is the only northern hemisphere penguin, as they can be found just slightly north of the equator as well.

We also got quite an education about the basics of life. That is, we saw sea lions, boobies, iguanas, tortoises, hawks and a couple of other animals in the act of, um, copulation. I think it's the heat that makes them all so frisky!

On board the ship we watched a great BBC documentary on the Galapagos. You can purchase it here:

http://www.bbcamericashop.com/default.asp?cpa=product&id=4080&ctl=81&cc=21249&tt=

They have some absolutely fantastic footage.

We'll try to upload some pictures from the Galapagos next week when we have better access to the internet.

We would highly recommend a trip to the Galapagos, but go sooner rather than later, as the UN and the Ecuadorian government are getting worried about the massive influx of tourists and permanent new locals moving to the islands to support them, so they might eventually have to start putting tighter restrictions on the islands. The easy money to be had now is very tempting for poor countries like Ecuador, but they also don't want to kill their golden goose either.

Lonesome George

I have fallen in love with a tortoise called Lonesome George here in the Galapagos (Kevin's just a ta bit jealous). George is the last remaining tortoise of Pinta island (but has been brought to the Darwin Center here on Santa Cruz island). Problem is, he just refuses to breed with any tortoise (even though he has 2 cute looking female tortoises in his pen who closely match his genetic makeup). So, when George dies (who is in his 80s), his species will end as well. It's so sad! That said, he's a minor celebrity around the world and a major one here on the islands.



So we are now on Santa Cruz island, where we have been for the last 2 days. It's a great island with some good beaches and most importantly the Charles Darwin center, where it's possible to see rare breeds of tortoises and iguanas. Kevin and I agree that it's as if we walked right into Jurassic Park here. The birds, especially the giant ones, look as if they existed during the time of dinosaurs. But amidst this paradise, we got a shock of reality. We were swimming in this gorgeous gorge yesterday when we noticed a couple of the local boys spray painting graffiti on the rock face! That was pretty depressing. But in a country like Ecuador, where the poverty level is depressingly high, it's not surprising that young boys get bored and do this kind of thing. Otherwise, though, this place is like a wildlife paradise. Since the animals aren't scared of humans, you can get so close and take great pictures without a powerful zoom lens. Pictures to follow a week or so!

Never take rides from strangers!

Karen has already posted an entry on Chan Chan, one of the many archaeological sites near Trujillo, in northern Peru.

We visited some other sights like Huaca de la Luna, which was quite impressive. Some of the color that remains on the walls is really striking. Here are some various views around Huaca de la Luna.











And across the way you can see Huaca del Sol, which was the largest structure in all of the Americas before the Spanish arrived. One third of it has washed away, but you can still see its impressive size. It is currently off limits to visitors. You can also see how excavation work continues around both huacas.





Another sight in the Trujillo area is El Brujo, a sight similar to Huaca de la Luna. El Brujo was only discovered in the past 20 years and is still undergoing excavation. As of now it is fairly difficult to reach and attracts very few visitors (very few visitors make it to all the amazing sights in northern Peru, instead concentrating their efforts in southern Peru). In the visitor logbook at El Brujo, it looked like they went days without receiving a single visitor! When we were there, we had the place to ourselves, along with our local guide (our hotel owner) and two German ladies from our hotel.

It was quite interesting to visit the site, as with the local guide you could go almost anywhere you wanted, as long as you paid the armed guards a bit at the end. At first they seemed concerned with you taking photos etc., but once they knew there was money in it for them, they were less concerned and opened locked parts of the site for us. Their main concern was for the other workers down below not to see us and know that they were taking bribes and letting in tourists to restricted areas. Interestingly, the restricted areas were the best parts of the site, so if you didn´t get to go in there, you´d be disappointed. The restricted parts had walls with amazing colors on them remaining after centuries. Another cool aspect of visiting the site was the fact that textiles and broken ceramics absolutely littered the site and were everywhere you walked. If you were so inclined, you could take home lots of thousand year old souvenirs and no one would be the wiser.

I won´t try to explain all the imagery (because frankly I´ve forgotten most of the explanations), but I think most of them are amazing enough without any descriptions.





























Getting to El Brujo is quite an ordeal and originally we weren´t going to go because it´s very expensive to arrange a tour. But two German ladies staying at our hotel had shipped their car from Germany and are spending two years driving around South and North America. They mentioned they were going to El Brujo and then driving north to our next stop, Chiclayo, so we asked them for a ride, as it would allow us to visit the site and also get to Chiclayo without taking another bus.

Well, just leaving Trujillo was an ordeal as the car was making noises so we stopped by a mechanic, jumped the queue, had the wheels re-aligned and air pumped in the tires. The cost? Absolutely free! The lady tipped the guys 10 soles (3 dollars) and they were more than pleased. Amazing.

Anyway, we did manage to see the amazing El Brujo site 60 kms north of Trujillo and then dropped off our guide to take the bus back to town. Five minutes after dropping off the guide, the German ladies turn to us and say "so, where you guys headed?". Huh? "Um, we´re headed to Chiclayo with you". "Oh, we´re not going to Chiclayo, we´re heading inland a bit". Hmmm... they never mentioned any of this in the preceding 24 hours. Well, in the end after lots of asking around with various locals we managed to find a small town before the turn off inland where the ladies could drop us off and we took a bus to Chiclayo. A bit of unnecessary drama, but we made it where we wanted to go in the end. But it turns out that your mother was right as usual: you should never take rides from strangers! We weren´t worried about two 60-something year old ladies causing problems, but they did provide us with unnecessary headache. It would have been simpler just for us to take the bus from Trujillo to Chiclayo and skip El Brujo.

Finally, here´s a picture of the famous hairless Peruvian dog. Man, are these things ugly! But apparently they have a higher body temp than most other dogs, so apparently they are good to sleep with on cold Andean nights. No thanks!!

Down Time at the Beach!

So after lots of bus trips and sightseeing in Norther Peru, we thought we needed a little break. Our friends Ali and David (who we first met in Chile and went to the Uyuni Salt Flats with) have been meeting up with us from time to time for the last 6 weeks. They were also with us to celebrate my birthday. So it was great to meet up with them in Mancora, a beautiful beach near the Ecuador / Peru border. We also happen to have a date to meet with them at the Gramercy Tavern (David booked us in for a super lunch deal) in New York City on the 28th of June when they stopover for 3 days on their way to the UK.



Kevin has some great pictures of the beach. This was the view from our room.



Kevin chilled out in the hammock, though I think it was slightly too small for him. Love the haircut Kev!



The waves were pretty good at the beach so people were windsurfing...something I've never done but would love to do.



And this is sort of unrelated...but this is the view of a cloud forest from our our bus window, while we were on our way to Quito, Ecuador. I've decided I really love cloud forests.

Chan Chan

Chan Chan is a massive adobe structure near the town of Trujillo in northern Peru. It's the largest adobe city in the world, but because of exposure to rain some parts of it are rapidly deteriorating. Basically, the city consists of 9 palaces where each successive ruler built his own private quarters. But each one of these 9 quarters is huge and takes a lot of time to walk around, so only one is open to the public in order to preserve the other 8. It's been estimated that more than 30,000 people lived in this city made of clay that sits right next to the Pacific Ocean. The beauty of Chan Chan lies in its delicate and very sophisticated carvings. Unlike its ancestors, the Chimu people used very uniform, highly organised carvings as a source of artistic expression. Kevin writes about the Huacas (pyramids) we visited and if you compare the images, the Moche people's art work is much more "modern" looking and very sophisticated.



The Chimu people mostly used forms from marine life, which is quite different to earlier civilizations which preferred to use feline or more ambigious forms. The carvings at Chan Chan depict fish, pelicans, and nets for catching various sea creatures.



Some pelicans created with a graphic, stylised formation.



This image is not from Chan Chan but rather from Huaca Arco Iris which was also built by the Chimu people. In English, Arco Iris means rainbow and from the carving you can see why it's called that. On each side of the rainbow are 2 dragons that are supposed to represent duality, male and female. However, to me lots of the dragons looked quite similar and not actually different genders!



The thing about all these sites in Peru is that much of what the guides tell you is guess work and conjecture. The truth is, there is no written language to fall back on which retells the history of the early Peruvians. However, through the remaining imagery, archeologists have tried to piece together a story of the past that, though not necessarily all factual, tell a compelling story of the ancients in Peru. So in a way, Peru is like the Egypt of the Americas, but at the same time it's a much younger culture and doesn't have the benefit of having a written language like the Egyptians did with their hieroglyphs.

Máncora: just what the doctor ordered

Before we left Perú, we spent the last two nights there lounging on the beach in Máncora. Our hotel was quite nice, although slightly overpriced. But 2 days of R&R was just what the doctor ordered for both of us. The water of the Pacific Ocean crashes pretty consistently along the shore, but it´s still great for swimming, with decently warm water temps. The hotel pool was also nice after bundling up for weeks in the chilly Andean weather in the mountains.

The Gringo Trail in South America is narrow indeed. Two months ago we piled into a 4x4 in northern Chile with two other British couples on our way into southwest Bolivia. One couple, Ali and David, we have been travelling on and off with ever since and made plans to meet up again in Máncora, so we stayed at the same hotel as them. They got there a few hours ahead of us and as they walked down the beach in the morning, who should they run into than the other couple from our 4x4, Laura and Alistair, who we hadn´t seen for the past 2 months. The 6 of us had a nice dinner that night. Always nice to run into people hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from where you last saw them. Here´s the 6 of us from 2 months ago, at much higher altitude.



You can ride horses on the beach if you want, but we decided to give it a pass. Here´s Karen posing with them in the background all the same.



And a sign that you don´t normally see outside most hotels: It is prohibited to stop with horses in front of the hotel.



Another nice bit was that we essentially had the great beach to ourselves.



Although ... on closer inspection, we realized we were not alone!

Some vultures:



The beach was crowded with small crabs that would dart in their holes when you approached and then pop back out after you had walked past them. Real tough. But this poor fellow had a defective leg or something and was a bit slow. We could have caught him with our hands if we wanted. Instead we just opted for some great close up photos.



And you thought you were feeling bloated??? How about this poor fellow?



A great setting on the Pacific Ocean provided spectacular sunsets both nights we were there. Karen says I always include too many pictures of the same thing, but I just couldn´t help myself. So here are a decent collection of sunset pictures. The first night was slightly cloudier than the second night, so the sunlight had more clouds to dance on.

From the first night:









And from the second night:

Off to the Galapagos with Sadly Only 2 weeks to Go!

Well, our trip isn't ending yet. We still have 2 months in the US, but somehow, as our time in South America comes to a close, it does feel like our trip is ending. We're ending it with a bang. On Sunday, we head to the Galapagos for 10 days...2 days on the main island of Santa Cruz and 8 days on a cruise on a small yacht (14 passengers). The day after we return from the Galapagos, we're going to New York. We are now in Quito, Ecuador and we have travelled on buses for a lot of the last 2 weeks covering about 1200 miles but on windy, bumpy roads (about 40 hrs on buses total). 20 hrs were done in the last 30 hrs so Kevin and I are slightly dilapidated. We'll write more about what we saw in Northern Peru soon.

Choquequirao

A few of our loyal readers in the New York area have tipped us off about a recent article in the New York Times about Choquequirao, the "alternative Machu Picchu". You can read the article here:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/travel/03inca.html?pagewanted=all

We hadn´t heard much about Choquequirao before getting to Cusco. While there, we looked into going there but were quickly convinced against it. The main reason is that it is currently a two day hike to get there and once you´re there you either have to hike the same trail back the same way for 2 days or take 3 days to hike out the other side. At the time, we weren´t really in the mood for such a hike. Plus, after seeing so many Inca sites in the area, you get a bit overloaded after a while.

Having said all of that, as the article makes clear, it is indeed quite cool to see such an archaeological wonder and basically have the place to yourself. Only 6800 people visited it in 2006, which works out to less than 20 people per day. I heard that Machu Picchu gets about 1000 a day, but this article makes it out to be more like 2000 a day. When we were at Machu Picchu, we felt it actually wasn´t overly crowded and you could still enjoy it and find hidden parts that you had all to yourself.

The Peruvian government is supposedly ramping up the infrastructure around Choquequirao so that it will be easier for tourists to get to. But as with most things in Peru and South America in general, I´ll believe it when I see it. Maybe 20 years from now you´ll be able to visit it without doing major trekking.

Here are a few pictures of Choquequirao I´ve nicked off the internet. Copyright: other people. The NYT article also has a decent slideshow of pictures.