Goodbye Mums and hello Colombia!

After one of the tastiest meals I had eating in South America, my mum was on a plane back to the USA to continue her retirement on American soil. I jumped on a plane the next morning to get the stamps for my fifth country, Colombia. I chose to fly up to Medellin instead of busing so that I could have a travel buddy reunion. Also, at this point I was pretty tired of super long bus rides. Sitting still is hard.

MINE

Oh buoy! Time to head back to the mainland.

Six days sounds like a decent amount of time, but when you spend all of that time staring at cool animals or snorkeling, the time goes way too fast. Hard to believe that we only had two more days left. On Friday morning we woke up on Fernandina Island. Here on Punta Espinosa we got to see a ton of marine iguanas. We had hoped to see some sharks in a deep little cove they like to frequent, but instead we saw a sea turtle and more iguanas. This is the youngest island and has some of the coolest black lava rock ever. 

=D

I'm on a boat!

The next morning, we were on our boat in the Baltra harbor by 1130. After a tasty lunch, we headed over to the North side of Santa Cruz island to Dragon Hill for our first bit of exploration and snorkeling. I was super excited when our guide pointed out our first marine iguana. Over the next hourish walk, we say a ridiculous number of birds, land iguanas, and marine iguanas. The land iguanas are the largest, and they eat low hanging succulents and plants as well as fruit that has fallen from trees. They do not swim like their smaller marine counterpart who eats algae and seaweed from the rocks. They both lay eggs in nests dug into the ground, and they both share a common ancestor, the green land iguana. It is thought that this iguana drifted to the Galapagos on vegetation several million years ago.

Boobies everywhere.

Lovely, now that I have your attention I'd like to talk to you about the Galapagos. More like show you. Because I took 1000000 pictures. So feel free to close this (and my subsequent posts about the Galapagos) if you're not interested in a million AWESOME animal photos. I understand not everyone thinks they're as cool as I do.

Sunset from our boat, the Encantada

La madre viene!!!!!

I made it up to Quito a day before my mom arrived so that I could scope it out for her. The plan was for her to arrive on Thursday evening so that we could get up and see the Good Friday parade. Because of a lovely snow storm, her flights got cancelled, and she arrived bright and early Friday am. After breakfast and some coffee, my trooper of a mother headed out with me to check out this procession. And lets just say it was not like the fun-filled cheerful parades I've seen. 

Ecuador first impressions

I've felt for a while like I've been having a harder time connecting with people and their cultures here in various countries than I did when I was in SE Asia. Maybe its because people here are a little bit more reserved? Maybe its because there are more similarities between N America and S America. There are more things here that feel 'normal' than in SE Asia, so I don't notice them? Who knows. Either way, I decided that one of the things I wanted to do on my way up to Quito was to do a homestay in Saraguro, Ecuador. 

The most perfect mountains I've ever seen

I'd had multiple people tell me that if I only had one hike to do in Peru, I had to do it out of Huaraz. And I only had time to do a couple of days of hiking. So I booked it up to Huaraz. I arrived on a night bus, so I figured I'd spend a day sorting out my plans and leave the next morning. Laguna 69 (yes, thats what it's called pervs) is the classic day hike that everyone does, so I figured I would do that and find another day hike to do.

The view from the van on the way up

Capital city with a cat park!

For most of my life I've always said that I wanted to live in a city. That I can't imagine living in a smaller town, and I'm pretty sure I would go crazy. But traveling I consistently find that I am unimpressed with big cities, and I find myself falling in love with smaller towns. It's a variety of reasons. Safety. Walking (I prefer this SO much more to buses or taxis). Charm. Warmth of people. It seems to be a unanimous trait that people in big cities are in more of a rush. Practicality. Cities are big dirty and busy. Apparently I like that more for living than for visiting. Anyways, it's been rare that I visit a capital city of any country and fall particularly in love with it. Still, I always feel like the capitol city deserves a day or two. And after a day or two, I am usually ready to go.

Checkin' out the Incas

I left Arequipa so that I could meet up with a friend in Cuzco. I sent him a message that I was taking a bus that would take nine hours and arrive by 5pm. When it was 8pm, and I hadn't arrived at our hostel yet, I was starting to make people nervous. This, friends, is why you think twice before buying one of the cheapest tickets you could find. Even though they promised the trip would only take nine hours, the bus stopped to let on/off anyone. At anytime. So I watched people get on and off my bus while I sat in one place and practiced patience. So when I finally arrived I was starving and cranky (hangryyyyyyy). Nothing that a little food and friends can't fix.

Sexiest dogs in the world

Arequipa and Colca Canyon

After leaving Sucre, it took a full twenty four hours of traveling to get to Arequipa, the White City of Peru. At this point I'm getting a little tired of busses. I don't understand how South American's aren't bothered by how warm they are. No ventilation and they can fall asleep under a heavy blanket with a jacket on.

 I learned from the father of the woman running my hostel that it is called the White City not just because of it's Spanish colonial architecture, but because a couple generations ago it used to be an incredibly white city full of Europeans. It has since become a much more mixed city.

Colca Canyon: All the details--without a guide

I don't normally do this because the nitty gritty details aren't super exciting. They're not the most fun for me to write, and since most people reading this aren't using it to plan trips it just hasn't seemed helpful. There are tons of other blogs that do a much better job, usually. But for Colca Canyon there is very little information on hiking in this canyon by yourself. And it's an incredibly easy thing to do. The planning part. The hiking's awesome but got some hills. (Duh Laurel, its a huge canyon.)

Carnaval in Oruro

Although Carnaval is one weekend, its celebrated the end of January and you could still see kids throwing water balloons at the end of February. Carnaval is the main celebration right before the beginning of Lent. It's generally celebrated with costumes, masks and parades. Of course this is accompanied with tons of alcohol and other things that are generally given up during Lent. Two Thursdays before the official guys night out, and the Thursday before is the ladies night out. Men weren't allowed into several of the bigger bars until after midnight, and several of the bars had sexy male dancers.

Sucre: The White City, The Silver City

After saying goodbye to the Websters, I hopped on a bus to La Paz (again). It was a quick bus ride back and I found a bus leaving for Sucre that gave me just enough time to dash down and pick up some nachos and a margarita from an awesome Mexican place Ellen and I found on our first visit to the city.

All the colonial architecture

The highest navigable lake in the world

The center of La Paz is situated in a valley, and the top of the valley is called El Alto, it's the part that has been expanding quickly in the last few years and in general is much lower income. As we were leaving La Paz, our driving spent a ton of time telling us about a famous architect who built lots of buildings in El Alto. We were on our way to a small town on Lake Titicaca. Bolivia and Peru share Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake.

Crashing the Webster's Bolivian Adventure

After a quite stuffy, hot, sweaty night bus we arrived in La Paz. At about 4am. Without a hostel reservation or any interest in walking around in the cold with our packs. Solution? Carefully select a bench in the bus station, put on all your clothes and fall asleep. Surprisingly, we slept until around 730am, when the bus terminal was finally buzzing with people. Trying to make our appearance as normal as possible (not much you can do when you haven't showered in 4 days, then took a bus and slept on a bench), we grabbed our stuff and walked down to the hotel we were meeting Ellen's dad at. He was arriving super early the next morning, but he decided to include the night before in the reservation. And thankfully they allowed us to check in several hours early. I thought they might turn away these two scraggly smelly backpackers that turned up, but they were super nice!

The biggest salt flats in the world!

The south of Bolivia is most known for the salt flats near Uyuni. They get less than 300mm of water per year now, but over a milennia ago, the depression between mountain ranges was Lake Tunupa. After a long series of drying and flooding, alternate layers of clay and salt have been deposited in an area up to 12,500 sq km. The salt flats are slowly expanding as more salt and clay are deposited by the rivers coming down from the mountan ranges around it. Drilling reveals at least 120m of salt and clay, with suggestions that there were 11 major flood/drying cycles, and its thought that the salt could go down as far as 500m.

Even more flamingos!

At this point, our exact itinerary for the four days blends together in my mind, so I can't guarantee that these pictures are in the proper order. Looking back, I still can't believe that places like this exist. Such amazing mixes of colors and patterns.

We saw a few groups of bikers biking on incredibly tough 'roads' in the middle of the day at altitude. Wow.

Volcanoes, salt and flamingos Bolivian style

Instead of starting our tour in Uyuni and ending in Uyuni, we started our tour in Tupiza with La Torre Tours. Our group consisted of our guide, Vicente, cook, Augustina, and a lovely couple, Alex and Sas, from Switzerland/Austria. They were multi-lingual and would rotate the language they were talking in every couple sentences. So cool. So jealous. We loaded up our land cruiser around 8am, and we were off!

One of our first views climbing away from Tupiza

Movin' on to a place a bit less Chile.

After we got back, we spent a few days hanging out in Puerto Natales again. We may have eaten pizza two nights in a row. How Chilean. I know. There was also a lot of sleeping involved and NOT wearing my hiking boots.

Hanging out

Hello friends,

This will be my life for the next couple weeks. I decided it's finally time to refresh on the proper way to speak a language, so I'm taking some classes and also volunteering at a hospital here. With babies. 

Sucre is a really gorgeous city that's a lot warmer than La Paz. And lower altitude. We have had awesome thunder storms both nights I have been here so far. It's a chill city that apparently has some dinosaur footprints I can go visit in my time off! 

I'd love to take this time to catch you all up on my blog, but I've yet to find a internet connection that can handle loading pictures. So you're out of luck. Instead I'll be doing homework and practicing verb conjugations. Sorry guys. 

The Q - Part 2

Day 6: Seron to Dickson
We thought we had a super long day ahead of us (which my feet were not looking forward to), but it turns out there's a typo on the map they give out at the park entrance. A typo that means we had about two hours less walking to do. Hooray!!

Gotta love those reflection pics.

Torres del Paine - The Q

The bus to take us into the park left at 730am on the 26th. We were still packing at 1am the night before. As I looked around at all the food and clothes we were going to be carrying around with us, I wasn't even sure it would all fit in our bags. What the crap did we just decide to do. But by 2am it was all packed and neither of our bags weighed much more that 35lbs. So that wasn't so bad.

730am at the bus stop and feeling great

The bottom of the world

Before heading to the south of Chile, I was meeting up with Ellen in Santiago to play tourist for a couple of days. She came in on a night bus, and instead of wanting to sleep all morning she came out with me and we checked out the seafood and produce markets in Santiago. While the seafood market didn't smell all that great, it had tons of things I didn't recognize. Massive fish and eels, weird stuff in shells, big squids, you name it. I stopped at a restaurant on the second floor of the produce market and got ceviche. It was more fish than I could have eaten in two meals. Phew. For those of you that don't know what ceviche is, its chunks of raw fish that are covered in lemon juice. The acidity essentially cooks the fish and its served tossed with slices of onion. 

Van para el paradiso!

I knew that my bus ride back down to central Chile would be long, but I didn't anticipate the two hours we would spend sitting because the highway was closed for a massive accident. Or for the fact that I was next to a heater that blasted all night. I seem to always get these seats. It happened on the busses in Vietnam a few times too. Ahhh. Always better to show up roasted, sweaty, tired and hungry in your destination city. Especially when one of the kids working on the bus (taking tickets and luggage etc) chooses to sit down next to you at 1am to ask why youre traveling alone and where your boyfriend is in the quietest, fastest mumbled spanish ever. Even better when you write down the address of your hostel wrong but know its only a couple blocks from the bus stop. And in the middle of a market. No worries, you can just wander down each street that's both a couple blocks from the bus station and in the middle of the market. That doesn't get weird looks from people with you're two backpacks. 

Flamingos volcanos and salt

After I left Arica, I took a night bus to Calama. It's the larger city where you transfer buses and take a quick one over the San Pedro de Atacama. This is the small town that provides access to the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert is 49,000 sq mi of salt flats, lakes, sand and lava. Its just to the west of the Andes and still has a couple active volcanos. The average rainfall in this area is about a half an inch per year aka not very much at all, making it the driest non-polar desert in the world. And one of the oldest!