Machu Picchu, the Inca Trail, and some pain

A couple things right off the bat. I´ve been misspelling Machu (one c) Picchu (two) for quite some time now. I blame society for that one. Thanks a lot, all my teachers ever. My wifey, aka BWE (Best Wife Ever), filled me in on my egregious error. Another thing, I am about to do some seriously whiny bitch writing. I apologize in advance for that. My wuss muscle is about to flex mightily. Oh, and one final thing: I was told that my last post was a weighty 10 pages long. I´ll put out my best attempt at brevity this time around, though it´s not my strong suit.

OK, when last we visited in Blogsville we were about to embark on a 4 day hike through the Andes mountains, ending up in MaChu Picchu on the last day. Obviously we survived the journey (or perhaps this is a ghost writer), but holy goddamn crapfest it was a tough hike. Let the wussery commence...

As a possible foreshadowing of things to come, we had a couple dubious encounters with our travel agency (Andina Travel, for anyone who´s thinking of heading to Peru...). We met the staff once to pay the balance of our trip and, suffice to say, they knew pretty close to jack shit about what was going to happen on our hike. Us: ¨How many people are going?¨ Them: ¨Uh...err....umm....duh....let me....err....well....¨ Us: ¨Yeah, ok, forget about that. What, specifically, do we need to bring in terms of cold weather gear?¨ Them: ¨Well, some clothes.¨ Us: ¨...uh, WTF?¨ Them: ¨Yeah, here´s a list of stuff to bring.¨ (They rummage through their office to find us a pamphlet that repeats the same extremely vague information on their website.) Us: ¨Well, we were hoping for something a little more specific and maybe you could just......ah, screw it, we´ll just talk to some other folks who´ve done the trek.¨

So after arranging for them to come to our hostel the night before the trek, we are on our kinda-sorta-a-little-less-than-merry way. A guy comes to ¨brief¨ us nearly an hour late and less than 10 hours before we´re to leave the next morning. The briefing consisted of two (2) maps of the hike and one (1) tersely voiced ¨Any questions?¨ Well, yes, we still had the same questions as before, namely what the hell we needed to bring. We end up having to purchase a couple last items at the last minute that we had no idea we needed, which was fine but left us a little low on the sleep-o-meter.

Day one of the Inca Trail - We were picked up at 5 in the morning and boarded a bus that picked up the rest of our group. We drove a total of about 2.5 hours and grabbed a quick breakfast at the coldest open-air restaurant in the world. Judging by the way my boogers were freezing under my nose, it was going to be witch-titty cold in the Andes. We met our guide on the bus, a nice fella named Rolando, and a couple other of the crew members and porters. We ended up at our starting point, the beautifully named ¨Kilometer 82¨. It has some other name that is something like Ollyantambo, but that´s its scientific name or something. After queueing up and giving the folks at the checkpoint our passes, we collectively roll on and up through the Andes. The first day starts off pretty easily but also has some pretty hard uphill climbs that take their toll.

Let me pause briefly to explain what an ¨Inca Trail¨ really is. It´s not your normal, average, run-of-the-mill dirt path that winds through stuff on its way to other stuff. It´s mainly big ol´ cobblestones. There is no such thing as flat ground for the Inca people. ¨Flat¨ means ¨not as soul-crushingly steep as some other parts.¨ Also, the Inca people averaged about 3.2 feet tall. This fact belies the other fact that most of the uphill climbs were actually stairs that, coincidentally, averaged about 3.2 feet high each. Seriously, the stairs are big ol´ m´fers. I have no idea how these people climbed these things. (Told you the wuss factor would be turned up to 11. You were warned!)

So, yeah, we´re climbing the equivalent of cobblestone ladders built for 8 foot people. The first day was hard. It was hella hard. (¨How hard was it?¨) So hard that....nah, I´m exaggerating. It was difficult because it was strenuous and it was difficult because the day was very long, but it was doable. I mean, we did it, right? We ended the day at our first campsite after 10-ish miles and around 8 hours of hiking. Food was delicious (really fresh and delicious stuff the whole trip long, honestly) and our tents were solid. Slept on some mattress pads and inside some North Face sleeping bags we´d rented. Oh, another thing that ramped up my wussification was the fact that I had to carry my stuff with me and it was heavy. It was heavy for me despite the fact that we had porters, the oldest of whom was an impressive 59 years, who carried more weight than any of us and literally RAN up and down the trek in order to set up camp before us. These dudes, Quechua locals all, are crazy freaks of nature with apparently no need to consume oxygen or anything. They were carrying bags bigger than their bodies and they do this run every single week. I bow in wonderous admiration to you, Inca Trail porters of the world.

Day two of the Inca Trail - We´d been warned repeatedly, both by trek-finishers that we´d met and by Internet postings, that Day 2 was the ¨hard¨ day. Saying day two is kind of hard is like saying that Rick James kind of liked cocaine. It was really long and had two serious uphill treks, the first of which started right at the beginning of the day and lasted for 4 straight hours. The initial ascent up to ¨Dead Woman´s Pass¨, so named because of a rock formation that looks a little like a female body, was rigorous to the max. At the top our group celebrated a bit and took some pictures together, which was pretty cool and allowed for an awesome, awesome view, and then began the descent (La Bajada, for you New Mexicans out there). The descents are like rock meat grinders for human knees. They´re steep and they´re incessant. Making me feel like an even bigger tool was the fact that hordes of tiny little porters were RUNNING down the descents at near full speed with their body-sized packs on their backs. One more tip of the cap to these amazing guys (and, impressively, one girl porter who is also a cook). Toward the middle of the second big ascent, we got hit with some serious rain for a while, increasing my personal wuss factor tenfold and making the path a little more slippery and treacherous than it already was. However, eventually we all made it and bunked up for the night.

Day three of the Inca Trail - This day was the ¨easy¨ day, something I could not take issue with even though my calves were essentially useless lumps of painful meat hanging off the backs of my legs. The day wasn´t very long and had some really spectacular views of the Andean mountains, some great ruins, and generally breathtaking nature everywehere. Leann and I both had pretty beat up legs at this point which made, strangely I guess, it even tougher to descend than ascend. Jeebus as my witness, I actually preferred trekking uphill. Day three was only a few hours (like five instead of the usual 8-9) and we covered a lot of ground. We hit the sack early so that we could wake up at the ungodly hour of 3:00 AM the next morning to prepare for the final jaunt into Machu Picchu.

Day four of the Inca Trail - We started our hike in the absolute dark, using head lamps to guide our way. The sun rose in the mountains and gave off a very neat mist on the forest for a little while. We had to wait in a queue for the final checkpoint, still in the dark, but once we got moving it was only about a two hour hike to the deservedly famous Sun Gate. At this point, you´ve pretty much sealed the deal and completed the Inca Trail. The Sun Gate´s vantage point looks right down on the big city of Machu Picchu, which has around 140 stone buildings, along with expansive rock terracing for farming, and the coolest big ol´ prayer rock you´ll ever see (if you look at our pictures, look for the picture of the hands nearly touching a big ass rock). A small 40 minute hike down to the city itself and WE´D DONE IT! WE FINISHED! WOOO!!!!!

Some hippy and his woman standing at the Sun Gate with Machu Picchu in the background.

Here´s our whole group just about to walk into Machu Picchu.

A couple notes that I thought I´d pass along. First, if you really want to enjoy Machu Picchu without the bother of corpse-like exhaustion, I´d suggest arriving via train instead of via 4 day hike. Once we got there, we were collectively almost too tired to take the whole huge place in. Second, and this one is crucial, make sure you acclimate yourself to the high altitude first. It´s really high up there. How well you deal with the altitude has very little to do with fitness level (case in point was a barfalicious French Canadian kid who looked to be in pretty good shape....he, sadly for him, had to turn all the way back an hour or two into the second day....bummer) and very much to do with how much you´re used to it. Also, you can chew on coca leaves and drink coca tea to help deal with the altitude. It does help. Chocolate also helps, to the delight of chocolate lovers like my sweet wife.

Our joy at finishing was slightly tempered by the insistent fuck-uppery of our travel agency, who didn´t make changes to our train departure as promised, leaving us to stay the night in Aguas Calientes (small tourist town next to Machu Picchu accessible ONLY by train). We had to haul ass in order to make our overnight flight to Madrid, Spain but we made it. We even got a little laundry done the night before so we didn´t have to smell like the walking dead on the long, long flight.

We´re now happily hanging out with my wonderful cousins in Madrid, Spain. We´ve seen a cool flamenco show starring Joaquin Cortes, the mega superstar of the flamenco world. We even saw the Pope. Yes, THE Pope, not one of those lesser popes or demi-popes or whatever. He was in Madrid for World Youth Day. (Insert joke about Youth and Catholic here.) There were seriously two million people in town. I´ve never seen anything like it. The believers weren´t as stoic as one might expect. I even saw a spontaneous conga line looking thing that had multiple nuns in full habit get-up conga-ing the afternoon away.

We also went to The Prado Museum the other day and spent something like 7 hours there. It wasn´t even enough to see all the stuff. That place is awe inspiring. From Raphael to Velasquez to Goya, The Prado has it all.

We´ve had some great food and drink here so far and look forward to grubbing on some paella tomorrow (finally!).

I have also now shaved off my beard and no longer look like a serial killer / hobo.

Like I said, some more pictures are posted, so please go to and check out what we´ve got!

Hope this entry hasn´t been too long and tedious. Feel free to berate me with your con(de)structive criticisms and let me know what you think!

Til then, hasta luego! Good luck to all of you that are about to deal with Hurricane Irene. Stay safe and check you soon.

Peru, part I

We´re now in Peru and have been here for a little over a week.  We still have the Inca Trail hike coming up (oh crap, oh crap, oh crap) but have done some pretty unique stuff in our time so far here.  I think when last we spoke, so to say, we were just about to leave beautiful Colombia.  Getting from Bogota, Colombia to Lima, Peru turned out to be quite the unexpected (and uninvited) adventure.  Yeah, we were in the airport in Colombia, muddling through million-mile-an-hour Spanish as usual and trying to figure out just what the hell the lady at the ticket desk just told us.  Well, at least it was clear where our gate was, so we proceeded down and got in line to be checked into the waiting area by one of the Avianca Airlines employees.  Whilst waiting, I couldn´t help but wonder just which seats were ours, since under the ¨seats¨ portion of the ticket it simply read ¨SBY¨ both of our tickets.  Not being the sharpest tool in the shed, I kind of just shrugged it off and continued to wait.  It was only when we were about 4 people from the front of the line that I realized that ¨SBY¨ probably meant ¨Standby¨.  Shit.


Sure enough, the flight was overbooked by at least 10 people.  Time to hurry up and wait.  We snagged a friendly Colombian fellow who´d spent 11 years living in New York and enlisted him as our unofficial translator.  He was in the same boat as we but also had to catch a connecting flight to Chile.  We told him we´d give him a seat before we took them, if it came to that.  Hey, small price to pay for a translator, right?  So, long story short, we ended up taking the offer that Avianca gave us --- two free flights anywhere Avianca flies plus a free meal in the airport.  Sweet deal, no?  Yeah, well, Avianca doesn´t really fly anywhere near where we live at all and there are, to use the clinical term, a shitload of restrictions on where we can fly and when.  Ugh.  We´ll see if we can even use those things at all.  On a side note, anyone living in the San Francisco, Washington DC, Miami, or New York areas interested in some SUPER sweet tickets at a SUPER sweet price should drop me a line.  :)


We arrived in Lima at somewhere around 2 in the morning, having already canceled our one night hotel stay in favor of staying in the airport all night.  At around 3 in the morning the StarPeru ticket office opened and we switched our 9 AM flight to a 7 AM flight and got into Cusco, Peru early that morning.  (Note:  StarPeru is to Avianca as filet mignon is to a burning paper bag of feces.  Yes, I took the SATs and can do analogies quite well, thank you very much.)  We had to wait a little bit for our hostel room to be ready but once it was we took a 5 hour nap, got up and grabbed dinner, then went right back to bed for another 9 hours or something. We were beat.


For those of you who don´t know, Cusco is the jumping off city for most Macchu Picchu travelers.  It´s a city  of about 350,000 people that´s situated at an elevation of over 11,000 feet (that´s 3,400 meters to you wacky metric types).  Now, we thought that since we come from majestic, aerial Albuquerque and all of its 5,000-ish feet of elevation that we´d be fine and dandy here up in the Andes mountains.  Well, hot damn, it´s a hell of a lot different.  Drinking a couple beers here is like beer bonging straight tequila back home.  Walking up a flight of stairs here is like running a half marathon back home.  Carrying a 50 pound backpack here is like.....yeah, yeah, you get the picture.  Analogies for the win, I suppose.

Downtown Cusco.  Viva el Peru, indeed.  Am I right?

One thing we´ve quickly found out is that, similarly to other Central and South American countries, the Peruvians like to party.  A LOT.  There have been multiple fiestas that we´ve stumbled across.  Fiestas in parks.  Fiestas downtown.  Fiestas on islands (I´ll get to that in a bit).  So, yeah, here´s a quick video of the celebration of the Virgin of Copacabana (in Bolivia) that I shot with my cell phone in downtown Cusco.  The dudes with the long nose masks all had beers in their pockets.  I almost get run over by a motorcycle cop at the end of the video (damn gawking gringos!).  Apologies in advance for the quality of the video.  




Anyhoo, we spent a couple days just cruising around Cusco, getting some business taken care of (up until a couple days ago we really had no idea where we were going in Europe and certainly didn´t have any tickets to anywhere), and generally just taking it easy.  We decided that, in no small part based on my mom´s advice, we should take a trip down to Lake Titicaca (yes, Beavis....Titicaca....calm down) and spend a couple days.  We sought out a reputable tour agency, no small feat in these parts, and booked a bus tour down to Puno, a city near the lake, as well as a couple days exploring the islands on the lake.  Little did we know the trip we were getting ourselves into....


The bus trip down made several stops at museums, ruins, and an extremely picturesque spot en route at the highest point on the road from Cusco to Puno (over 4,300 meters, which is something like 367,000 feet if my calculations are correct).  I´ll give you a quick rundown (and a friendly reminder that pictures of all these things and oh so much more are available on an ongoing basis at flickr.com/photos/chrisandleann ).




- Andahuaylillas - Cool little chapel and museum combo. Only checked the church out from the outside, but the museum had some neat stuff including modified Inca skulls. The elite classes of Inca culture stretched the back of their skulls out from very young ages and ended up resembling something similar to a conehead. If you´ve seen the newest and lamest edition of the Indiana Jones movies, Crystal Skull something or other, these skulls will look really familiar, if only a bit less crystally and annoying.




- Raqchi - Although not really proniounced ¨Rocky¨, I couldn´t help but sing the triumphant soundtrack from Sylvester Stallone climbing those stairs in Philadelphia in the movie. I did it so much that Leann looked like she was going to explode. Sometimes I just think that I´m lucky not to get Lorena Bobbit´ed in the middle of the night. Anyways, this place is an old Inca site consisting of the massive (and mainly intact) walls of a temple as well as multiple stone storehouses. The site was used, in part, as a waypoint for the Inca to deliver foods from Cusco to Puno.




- Raya Pass - The aforementioned spot in the Cusco-Puno pass that´s located several million feet above sea level. Those of us who didn´t have oxygen masks suffered immediate high altitude pulmonary edema and swelling of the brain. Nah, not really, but it was pretty damn high up there. The views of the Andes were spectacular (also on Flickr) plus there were some cute kids there chilling out with alpacas (the Peruvian little brother of the llama).




- Pucara - Another museum site with interesting skeletons. Maybe it´s the former archaeologist in me or maybe I´m just a sick bastard, but I am endlessly fascinated by skeletons. These ones also had the misshapen skulls. Small but good collection of lithic and ceramic materials there as well. Oh, and of course there was the obligatory dude walking around with alpacas on leashes, much to the extreme delight of the one child in our group.

We arrived in Puno after a 9 or 10 our ride slash tour and checked into our hotel for the night.  Early the next morning we were picked up to go on the next leg of this particular adventure --- Lake Titicaca.  We bussed out to a boat and boated out to a series of islands.  The islands were:


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Uros - These are actually a series of floating islands. Seriously. The islands are man made. Don´t believe me? Wikipedia says so, and Wikipedia NEVER lies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uros. It´s true. Students, make sure to only use Wikipedia for citations on your next term paper. Anyway, this was an odd stop. We witnessed some islanders reproducing the making of the islands by way of small replica islands. Super cool. We met some of the inhabitants. Also cool. We were introduced in pairs to one specific island woman who showed us into her grass hut. Sort of cool but kind of awkward. We got the hard sell on the crafts the islanders had made. Not that cool, but okay. We were then bid adieu by the island folk who sang us native songs (kinda cool), then moved on to ¨My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean¨ (more creepy than cool), and finished by saying, in unison, ¨hasta la vista, baby.¨ I could have done without that last part, for sure. Unique stop, in more ways than one. We jumped back in our tour boat and headed on to...




- Amantani island - We docked here and got out to a waiting throng of native folks. This island is home to about 4,000 folks and their native language is Quechua. We were to stay in the home of some islanders. It was kind of exciting, pretty strange, and entirely awkward (that word again). We met out host mama and she led us to the house where we´d be staying. Here´s some evidence about how enormously huge I am compared to the locals:

Pretty Alice in Wonderland-esque, eh?  Well, so we had lunch with our new mama, who didn´t really speak much Spanish at all, so we spent it in relative quiet.  Good stuff, all vegetarian.  We ended up meeting our new papa as well, who was fluent in Spanish and chatted with us about everything from Barack Obama (he was pretty excited that los Estados Unidos had elected a black man) to the Spanish (whom he associated with violence and blood....an attitude that´s actually pretty common in Peru, moreso than other Latin American countries we´ve visited) to the power system of the island (combination solar power and generators).  The island has two very high peaks, Pachamama (Mother Earth) and Pachatata (Father Earth).  Father Earth is represented by the sun and Mother Earth by the moon, by the way, for those that are interested.  The peaks were waaaaaaaaaaay up there but provided for awesome views and pictures (Flickr, people, seriously).  We saw another fiesta that had significant amounts of raging fires associated with it, which was cool, and then got dressed up in native clothes and had a small fiesta of our own, which was kind of weird and contrived but still pretty fun.  Good stuff, right?  Well, one communication breakdown between the wifey and I led to some serious consternation.  Turns out that Leann had read ahead of time that we were expected to bring gifts to our host folks.  I had no idea and the tour agency didn´t mention this.  Leann was confused about when and where this was supposed to take place so she didn´t relate the info to me and we just went on our merry way.    We had zilch to give these folks.  Well, we had a small backpack with stuff in it, but I was doubting whether they had strong interest in my underwear or our toothbrushes.  Shit.  Well, at least we can give them some cash, right?  Yeah, well turns out that no one in the entire country of Peru can ever make change for a 100 Soles bill.  I might be exaggerating on that point, but oh just barely.  I´d resigned myself to giving them the whole 100 when a kind lady from the Netherlands, Simone, lent me a 50 spot.  I gave the 50 to our mama at the end of the stay with warm and honest thanks for sharing her home and delicious food with us.  The experience was, again, both unique and exciting combined with awkward and potentially exploitative.  I´ve read that some agencies try to rip the locals off on this deal.  I hope that wasn´t the case with ours.  The next day we boated off to...


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Taquile Island - Pretty tame after our Amantani experience. We checked out some woven goods, grabbed some coffee, and got a lesson about the region from our guide. We also learned about the neat ways that men declare their intentions by way of what type of cap they wear and which way they let the top of the cap fall on their head. Essentially, married men wear red caps and single wear red and white caps. There are some other variations that I can´t recall. The funny thing about the ¨single¨ caps is that those fellows who let the top of their cap fall to the right of their head are looking for a good time (rather than for a wife). I guess there are quarterly fiestas and a lot of the local dudes try looking for love on these occasions. However, when we had lunch the kid who served us also had his cap tilted to the right, a fact that I noted to the young British girls in our group. Maybe he got some phone numbers out of the deal, I don´t know. Lunch was grilled trout and was delicious. We hopped back on the boat and took the 3-4 hour ride back to Puno. A few of us met up for dinner and beers and then called it a night.




We hopped a much shorter bus back to Cusco, since we didn´t do the tourist stops on the way. The bus was actually a double decker bus and we sat up top, which was awesome. Also awesomely inappropriate was the fact that they showed the movie ¨Splice¨ with Adrien Brody on the bus despite the fact that he makes sweet love to a weird mutant creature in graphic detail and that there were kids on the bus. Whatcha gonna do?

So now here we are, back in Cusco.  We´ll spend the next couple days getting regaled by stories reviling the Spanish, possibly checking out some local ruins in the Sacred Valley, and getting ready for our big trek for 4 days up to Macchu Picchu.  Honestly, I am really looking forward to having the chance to stay with my family in Spain and just not stay in another damn hotel for a little while.  I haven´t seen my Spain cousins in something like 17 years, since I went to Europe as an exchange student.  See you soon, Marta and Marcos!


Oh, and check out our Flickr site at flickr.com/photos/chrisandleann if you´re so inclined.  :)

Colombia!!!

Sittin´ here in an internet cafe in our last night in Colombia.  We´re heading out to Peru tomorrow for a little over two weeks.  Colombia has been pretty sweet in just about every respect, from nice weather (finally), to pleasant people, to new friends met, to a good combo of beach and city time.

We´ve spent a good deal of time in the Carribean city of Cartagena, which was amazing.  We also traveled slightly to the north to the small town of Taganga for a couple days where we took a boat to the Tayrona National Park.  The last leg of our Colombian stint has been spent in Bogota, where we just finished up a nice trip to Monteserrate this afternoon.  In typical fashion, I´ll update you point by point on what we did.

Cartagena -  This town is pretty unbelievable.  The "old" city is surrounded by walls dating back hundreds of years that were aimed at discouraging unwanted visitors (read: attackers).  We stayed our first night near the Centro, which is the historical district and is quite a bit more expensive than other areas.  We then moved on to more reasonable hotel accomodations at the Hostal Casa Baluarte in the Getsemani district.  Getsemani is pretty seedy, but not dangerous.  If you´re looking for trouble (drugs, hookers, whatever) you can probably find it in Getsemani.  So after getting some drugs and hookers we checked out the rest of the city.  Just joking, Grandpa!

Cartagena is really unique in terms of our Latin American travels, in that it really resembles a European city in many respects, especially architecturally.  The streets are really narrow and almost entirely one-ways and the buildings are colorful and complete with balconies galore.  Very easy on the eyes.  We did a bunch of wandering around the city but also did a couple things worth mentioning here in blogville (and, hence, for posterity).

-  We hit up the beach at Bocagrande, the fancy shmanciest part of Cartagena.  This is where the gazillionaires go to be doted upon at fancy resorts in big hotels.  Luckily for us peons, the beach is wholly public.  Of course, along with public beaches in Colombia comes the inevitable tidal wave, so to speak, of vendors.  Vendors patrol the beaches touting their wares in hordes and the beach-going public comes to Bocagrande in, well, hordes.  However, we really lucked out.  The beaches were packed but our taxi driver had called ahead to a friend of his (something we were immediately suspicious of, to be honest) and said friend met us at the beach entrance and walked us to a restaurant / sunbathing area combo.  This worked out extremely well for us as we got to relax on some huge beach bed things at no charge other than the purchase of the occasional cocktail and snack.  No one bothered us and it was as if we were on our own private little stretch of beach amongst the masses.  Very nice.

-  We took a boat tour slash cruise to the Islas del Rosario.  Our boat was a fairly big one, accomodating about 80-100 people, and it took a good two plus hours to get to our first island.  This island essentially consisted of an aquarium, which we didn´t visit, and crystal clear water where you could see sea urchins by your feet as you walked in.  It wasn´t much of a beach but we only spent an hour there until we rolled on to our next stop at Baru.  Baru was very nice.  We had lunch that was provided for us by the tour and then moved on to the beach itself.  The beach was fantastic.  We´d met a nice Canadian couple that we ended up grabbing a beach umbrella / lean-to with and some chairs.  We had to fight off a couple semi-aggressive masseurs (seriously, these ladies start by grabbing your extremities and going from there) and a vendor or two, but the beach time was relatively quiet and relaxing.  The water was so incredibly warm it was difficult to differentiate any difference in temperature between the water and the beach.  Leann said it reminded her of the beaches in Jamaica.  We´d also met another bloke in Cartagena, Brett, who ended up staying in a hammock on Baru for 6,000 Colombia Pesos per night.  Sounds like a lot, huh?  That´s a little over 3 dollars US.

-  Later that evening we joined Joel and Katie, our Canadian friends, for a night tour of the city of Cartagena by horse and carriage.  Beers in hand, we cruised around the town, trying to understand just what the hell our driver was telling us, in Spanish of course, we were seeing.  It was great fun despite the communication barrier.  Watching our driver negotiate the tight turns was worth the price of admission.

So after doing this, and oh so much more, in Cartagena, we took a 5-6 hour bus ride up to the town of Santa Marta, also on the Carribean coast.  From there we cabbed it to the small town of Taganga.  Supposedly Taganga has just recently gotten on the tourist map and it´s grown some from even the recent guide that we´d read.  By the way, Lonely Planet Colombia is not super helpful.  Tons of inaccuracies and well out of date.  We ended up finding a really cool hostel up the hill away from the beach called Divanga.  Run by a really nice French lady, this hostel has its own tour booking branch (good), its own pool (better), and its own rooftop bar, complete with pool table and reggae music (best).  Perhaps even better than best was the amazing food.  Shrimp pasta, chicken curry, and delicious baguettes to die for.  From this hostel we booked a trip to Tayrona National Park which, among other things, boasts an area that was once a cocaine plantation that´s now been converted into a series of eco-hotels.  Of course, these ecotels ran $200 and up per night, so we didn´t stay there.  We decided to take a boat to the park and a van back.  The boat.  Holy freakin´ crap, the boat.  This boat ride was about 1000x more exhilerating than we´d imagined it would be.  There were about 8 of us tourist types on board and the boat just plain hauled ass.  I think we went totally airborne for about half the ride.  There was a French lady, we´ll call her Pukey McGee, sitting across from us that looked like she was on the verge of blowing chunks from about minute one on.  This boat trip was almost an hour.  Fortunately, Mrs. LePuke didn´t actually toss any cookies so we all emerged unblemished.  On the way, we encountered multiple flying fish, one of which actually flew into our boat.  Six foot waves, airborne boat, green-faced French ladies, and flying fish behind us we spent our time on a nice little stretch of beach where swimming wasn´t as dangerous as some other areas where the currents are too strong.  When it came time to trek out to the spot where our van was going to pick us up, we had to pack up and walk through jungle paths for close to two hours.  All along the jungle paths are gazillions of crabs that hole up as soon as someone approaches.  We walked past other tourists, locals with horses carting goods, and through muddy canyon-ish stretches until we found our van.  Pretty well beat, we headed back ¨home¨ to take a dip in the pool and grab some beers and grub.  We only spent a couple days in the Taganga / Tayrona area, but wish we´d spent more.  This place is pretty outstanding and unique.  Apparently there are even waterfalls you can dive off of into pools, as well as well-hidden jungle artesan villages.  Gotta go back and adventure there some more, for sure.

We bussed it back to Cartagena for one last night and then took the flight back to Bogota.  We´d had our fair share of hustling and bustling and decided to say ¨F it¨ and hit up a movie theater.  After checking some local theaters on my phone, we found that Harry Potter was playing at an upscale mall theater in 3D.  Decidedly not Colombian, I realize.  Screw you, we were tired.  We watched the movie (which was really good but probably not worth the 3D experience) and came out only to find a couple from Washington DC that we´d met our last night in Taganga.  Small world, eh?  We went to an outdoor arts market, stumbled on some sort of circus-esque festival in a park with folks juggling on unicycles and playing music, and then grabbed some beers and nachos, oddly enough, in an Irish pub.

That brings us up to today, where we´ve now finished exploring Monserrate.  Monserrate is the name of the mountain high above the city of Bogota at over 10,000 feet.  Up there you´ll find a neat little church and pleasant gardens where they have statues depicting the stations of the cross (all the cross-related stuff that happened to Jesus up to and including the crucifiction).  Sorry, Grandma!  Anyways, the peak is best reached via a short tram ride, which our Albuquerque brethren will certainly appreciate.  While not nearly as long as the Albuquerque tram, the ride was cool and the views impressive. 

We took a taxi back to the central historical district and took some looks and pictures in the Plaza Simon Bolivar.  We got to see some cool, palatial government buildings and took a stroll through the financial district.  We walked around for a while, grabbed a snack, and headed back to.....well, to do this here update, y´all!

The under-20 soccer World Cup is being hosted by Colombia in a variety of Colombian cities, including Cartagena, Bogota, Baranquilla, and Medellin, and the excitement level is very high. 

Sad to be leaving Colombia, but am starting to get excited for the next leg of the trip in Peru.  One of the most daunting tasks we decided to undertake prior to leaving the States was the Inca Trail hike to Macchu Picchu near Cuzco.  This hike is 4 days and 3 nights and is rumored to be slightly on the brutal side.  Hopefully my old ass can make it through (or, more accurately, hopefully my old lungs can make it through).  On night two, if I remember correctly, we´ll be sleeping somewhere well above 13,000 feet above sea level.  Wish us good weather and good luck!

Oh, and if you know people who, like those who think Mexico is a cesspool of violence, still think that Colombia is infested with the Pablo Escobars of the world and nothing else, tell them to suck it.  We were here and this place is fantastic.

Pictures coming, hopefully, within a few days.  Ciao!!!!