Europe, pt. 1 (aka Gettin´ Cultured Up)

We have now hit up four different countries in Europe (Spain, Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Austria). We´re just about done with our stint in Vienna and will be moving on to Venice the day after tomorrow. Before I reallz start, forgive me if I switch the "y" and "z" letters in this blog post....thez´re backwards on kezboards here in Europe, zou know? Makes tzping the words yebra, yipper, yig yag, and Yanyabar interesting.

I´d like to start by saying that I have successfully transitioned from dirty backpacking hippy to well-cultured man of the world. Mostly I accomplished this through showering, but also by immersing myself in cultural stuff. Operas, museums, cultural tours, art exhibits, you name it....we´ve now done it all in Europe. Hell, I even shaved and cut my hair (thanks for the clippers, Cousin Marcos!). Of course, this was a near necessity after being pulled out of the crowd in Cusco, Peru and searched thoroughly by the airport police for drugs. I was pretty up in arms about that event until I looked in the bathroom mirror afterwards.....yeah, I probably would have profiled myself as a drug runner, too.

So, zeah, (ok I´ll stop doing that now) here we are sitting in an Internet cafe in beautiful Vienna, Austria. Vienna was actually my home for the best part of a year, but it was WAY back in the day.....17 years ago. When I was last here, the Internet was a brand new thing for most people, no one had ever heard of a digital camera, you still usually got cash by cashing in traveller´s checks instead of going to an ATM, they still hadn´t invented sliced bread, and the "horseless carriage" was just a wistful dream in the mind of some Ford guy. Nah, maybe not that long ago, but holy damn has everything changed around here. I thought I knew where stuff was in this town. Everything is dramatically different. It could have been the copious amounts of booze I consumed when last I was here, but I had a hard time remembering where even the basic stuff downtown was. But here I am, jumping ahead of myself. Let´s just start off with a recap of Spain first, shall we?

We arrived in Madrid after an all-night flight from Peru after the harsh ol´ Inca Trail, the tale of which I´ve already regaled you all with. I´m lucky enough to have family in Spain. We were met at the airport by my cousin Martha who kindly allowed us to stay in her house for the duration of our Spain visit. We were like orphans in from the cold. A couch? More than just a tiny hotel room????? A refrigerator?!?!?!?! It was like a little slice of heaven for us. We spent time catching up with my family. Martha´s son Marcos also lives in Madrid. Rather than the young punk I remember getting in trouble with oh so many years ago when I last visited, Marc is now a successful professional, complete with wonderful wife and the cutest baby that side of the Danube. We did our share of catching up and hanging out but, like I insinuated earlier, we were ridin´ the cultural train big time. Check out some uber-fancy cultural stuff that we did:

- 7 hours (swear to god) in the Prado Museum in Madrid. This is perhaps the second most famous museum in the world behind the Louvre. We saw Goya, Raphael, Titian, Velasquez, you name it. The place is amazing.
- The Reina Sophia museum. This one houses many Dali paintings and is probably most famous for housing Picasso´s famous "Guernica" painting

That sucker is mighty, mighty impressive in person. It´s HUGE...probably 25 feet wide.

- Visited the towns of Avila (we saw a very cultural severed finger of a sainted nun in a glass case) and Toldeo (where they make a lot of swords which, violent things they are, are now far beneath our cultured selves). Awesome churches and really, really old architecture.
- We also did some shopping, ate fantastic food, replaced our camera (damn thing broke on the last day of the Inca Trail), had a meal with a Spanish couple we befriended on the Inca Trail (Lucia and Guillermo, part of our new Inca Trail family), and saw a couple movies. We´ll gloss over that movie part since we are trying to be culturally superior. Still, it´s good to mingle with the unwashed masses every once in a while, is it not?

From left to right:  cousin Martha, cousin Marcos, baby Emma, Marcos´ wife Carmina, Leann, Chris

We then rolled on to Amsterdam. What happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam. Nah, I kid only. Amsterdam, as you may know, is famous for having a TON of one thing. That´s right. Bicycles. What, did you think I was going to say something else? Who´s the hippy now? Seriously, there are eleven gajillion bicycles for every one car there. We rented a couple bicycles but Leann got so freaked out by the massive bike traffic in the city center that we had to park outside of downtown and walk in. Still, we got our culture on once again in Amsterdam. Even though we were there only a couple days, we saw:

- The Van Gogh museum. No severed ears to be found, but an extremely impressive collection of his work as well as cool "behind the scenes" stories about his life.
- The Rijksmuseum. Home to a bunch of Rembrandts, Degases (uh, what´s the possessive of Degas?), and Vermeers, this place was smaller than the Prado but had a similar feel. Instead of Spanish masterpieces, this one had mainly Dutch masterpieces. Very cool.
- Leann wanted to go to Den Haag (The Hague) to see the museum there that has "The Girl With One Pearl Earring" by Vermeer, but I put my foot down for no apparent reason. Gotta love traveling with a pig-headed husband, eh?

We then took a quick flight on over to Prague. I´d also been to Prague before but, again, it was so long ago that I´d forgotten a lot of it. We cultured the hell out of Prague for a couple days and saw:

- The Prague Castle. Oddly, the thing I most remembered about this place was that someone got thrown out of one of the windows back in the day. There is actually a verb for "getting thrown out of a window" - defenestration. Gotta love them middle ages. Well, there´s a lot more to the castle than exit-only windows. Beautiful architecture, to be sure.
- The Prague Astronomical Clock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Astronomical_Clock This clock is in the middle of a square that, when last I visited, had vendors selling bootlegged cassette tapes. I bought the "new" Alice in Chains tape when I was there. Yeah, I´m old. Shut up.
- The Saint Charles bridge. Halfway across the bridge there´s a statue of a martyr named St. John of Nepomunk who refused to tell King Wenceslas what his wife had confessed. Ol´ Wenceslas rewarded his confidentiality by throwing his ass off the bridge. Nowadays you can bring yourself good luck by touching the reproduction of the priest on the plaque underneath the statue. I got lucky that night so it must have worked. (Leann is at my side shaking her head with a disapproving frown on her face.) You can also touch the other side of the plaque to get a little boost in fertility. Leann is now pregnant with twins. (Just jokin´, y´all).

Yeah, we did some other shit in Prague. Can´t remember what. Some guy yelled at me. Pretty sure it was his fault. Maybe. Anyways, we took a 5 hour bus on to the old homeland of Austria.

Quick side note: FINALLY we encounter a country with a foreign language that I can speak passably. Nothing against Spanish, but it really gets old having no goddamn idea what anyone is saying after a while. I´m actually decent with German, even after all these years. "Gezundheit." "Dankeschoen." See what I mean? German IN YO FACE!

We booked an apartment here in Vienna through a very cool website called AirBnB.com (thanks to my super bro Kate Ater for the recommendation). We essentially have our own one bedroom apartment, complete with kitchen and all, for about the same price as a hotel. It kicks ass. We´ve celebrated both my birthday (37 years young!) and our anniversary here. Of course, we have cultured the hell out of Vienna as well:

- Saw a Dali exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien. Actually, it was a surrealist exhibition featuring a filmmaker named Jan Svankmajer as well as other Dali-influenced artists. Dali was pretty full of himself, kind of like Andy Warhol, but a pretty impressive artist nonetheless.
- Saw a Mozart and Strauss orchestral performance, complete with singing and dancing. It was like a Greatest Hits night. The first half was Mozart and the second Strauss. For me, it was like two hours of "hey, I´ve heard that song before!" Like I said, I´m just recently initiated into the whole cultured thing.
- Went to the Vienna State Opera House for our anniversary to see The Barber of Seville. Now, that name sure sounded familiar but damned if I had any idea what the music for the thing was. Well, for those of you as culture-free as me, it can accurately be described as "the Figaro, Figaro, Figaro opera." Many, many more opportunities to say "hey, I´ve heard that before", although most of my Barber of Seville experiences came through Woody the Woodpecker renditions or commercials.

Lucky guy and his beautiful wife on their first anniversary!

- Went to the Belvedere Museum. This one is probably best known for "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt.

Smoochy Poochies

Many other famous artists represented here. There´s even a Van Gogh and some Munch, although not "The Scream".
- Checked out eleventeen churches and cathedrals. Vienna is teeming with gothic and baroque architecture and religious iconography. The place is old and it´s incredible. Even the apartment buildings are hundreds of years old.

Anyhoo, looks like our time in Austria is heading to an end. We visit Venice then Rome then Athens and then we´re Audi 5000 as far as Europe is concerned. After that it´s a brief stay in Egypt. I´ll try and update everyone sometime in the next week or two, but no promises.

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!!!!

Costa Rica (belated)

Sorry to leave everyone hanging!  I know you´ve been waiting with baited breath for the most recent installment (yeah, right) of our adventures, but it´s actually been a little difficult to both get the time to update the blog as well as find an Internet cafe.

So now we´re actually in Bogota, Colombia and about to start the third leg of our trip through this exciting country.  After we purchase a few kilos of cocaine and some automatic weapons, we´ll be all set.  Of course, I´m only joking.  You know, it´s funny, all the dramatic generalizations that people have about countries they´ve never set foot in.  We had innumerable warmings about how dangerous Mexico is and even how the Mexican people don´t like Americans.  Yeah, uh, not so much.  There are definitely very dangerous places in just about any country one would go to and it´s certainly advisable to avoid those places, but our trip has been just about totally devoid of anything dangerous (other than our crappy rental cars) and anyone wishing to do us anything but kindness.

Well, so I don´t have much to report about Colombia yet (and please notice that it´s spelled ColOmbia and not Columbia....we aren´t taking a vacation at the outdoor clothing company) so I´ll let you all know how Costa Rica went.  I´ll break it down into the four parts that we had time to check out - Manuel Antonio on the coast, Monteverde in the cloud forest, La Fortuna near the Arenal volcano, and (briefly) the big city of San Jose.

Manuel Antonio -  Just down the road from the town of Quepos, we stayed near the Manuel Antonio National Park in a pretty blah hotel called Arenas Cabinas or something.  The hotel was mediocre and we should have stayed at the hostel down the road.  C'est la vie.  The cool thing about our hotel was that it was just a couple hundred meters from the entrance to the National Park.  We ended up doing a guided tour of the park, which turned out, despite my skepticism, to be a fantastic choice.  The guide carries along a set of telescopic-ish binoculars and can spot the most well-hidden wildlife that normal human beings would have zero chance of seeing.  We saw both two and three-toed sloths, a raccoon, some frogs, cool spiders, and even a Jesus Lizard (the creature, not the band, you crazy punk rockers, you).  Good times despite the pouring rain.  I also tried my hand at surfing the next day with one of the locals as my instructor.  I suck, even though Leann got some pictures of me standing that make it look like I know what the hell I´m doing.  God bless you, misleading technology.  Other than a pretty brutal walk up a massive hill to get some cash, a quick trip to Quepos to get bus tickets, some grubbing down, and extensive soccer watching, that about covers our time in Manuel Antonio.  We caught the most indirect and winding series of busses of all time and made our way through the mountains to....

Monteverde -  Now this is a pretty cool and unique town.  It was settled by Quakers from the United States back in the 1950s or 60s and has tried to balance its massive tourist appeal with a more ¨green¨, ecologically responsible ideology.  We stayed at a neat little place called Pension Santa Elena, pretty much a cool little backpackers joint.  Anyway, we tried our hand at zip lining (easy and fun), which included a fast ¨Superman¨ ride where you zip along facing down, hands out, a la Superman.  The last leg of the zip lining tour was an attraction called a Tarzan swing.  Now this thing was f´n cool.  You climb across a hanging bridge to a kind of a cage where they strap you in various ways to a long bungee-ish cord.  They open a small metal gate in front of you, instruct you to bend your legs, and you step out into relative nothingness.  The free fall only lasts a second or two, as you plummet 75 feet or so before the cord catches and swings you back and forth a few times.  Now, I´m not normally the type to scream or squawk when I ride rollercoasters or the like, but this thing elicited a primal noise from inside my diaphragm or somewhere that came out sounding like a Neanderthal mating call.  Heart aflutter I waited for Leann to complete her ride, which she admirably did despite a distinct fear of heights.  My woman is pretty much a badass (even though she did do it with her eyes closed and a scary grimace on her face).  In Monteverde we also took a nighttime tour through a portion of the rainforest called the Children´s Eternal Forest.  This area is run and maintained by a non-profit which is funded by schools and children from all over the world.  Only about 5% of the reserve is available to see by the public, as the company decided to maintain virgin wildlife and ecology over touristic income.  Cool stuff.  Anyway, we got another guided tour here and saw the biggest tarantula on the face of the planet.  This thing was way bigger than our guide´s hand.  We also saw a bunch of other neat wildlife (how neat is seeing firefly larvae in the dark all over the ground when you turn your flashlight off?), including a poisonous pit viper, some walking sticks, and the Mot-Mot bird which makes tons of different calls and apparently harbors no fear of human interaction.  Walking around the rainforest while it´s dark is a pretty exceptional experience and definitely unlike anything I´ve ever done.  We spent a couple days in the Monteverde area, getting the lay of the land, cruising around, meeting some backpackers from all over the world, and then booking our next leg of the Costa Rica adventure in...

La Fortuna -  Upon recommendation from an employee at the last hostel, we stayed at a cheapy hotel in La Fortuna.  It was Ghetto, capital G intended.  Oh well, we only stayed a few sleepless hours until a van picked us up to ----- wait for it, wait for it ---- go white water rafting for the entire day!!!!  Wooooo!!!!!!!!!!  This was tons of kickass fun and was a very professionally run adventure.  I´d had some dire warnings from a couple raft guide friends of mine (looking at you, Keenan) to make sure the trips were safe.  This one was safe and just plain awesome.  We left the hotel a little after 5 in the morning and drove a long way and hit the water maybe by 8:30 or so after a quick breakfast.  We were delayed en route by a protest blocking the entire highway.  Kind of annoying for us as we had to walk through the pouring rain, leaving our van behind, but when we hit the actual protest we realized that people were protesting increased taxes on water use.  A little humbing for me, especially since I´d only been thinking about how it inconvenienced my experience.  OK, humble pie sufficiently eaten, we all got some quick lessons about safety, how to raft, etc.  I´ve been rafting a bunch of times but it´s been a while and the refresher was welcome.  The waters ranged from class 1 to class 4 rapids.  Not too intense but just enough to keep the blood flowing.  Every time we´d emerge on the other side of an especially rough patch of rapids, our guide would lead us in a high five with our paddles as we yelled out ¨Pura Vida!!!¨, the national motto of Costa Rica.  At the end of the rafting trip, a van took us down to.....

San Jose -  We only stayed two nights in San Jose at a very nice hostel called Gaudy´s and the first consisted of crushing tiredness and very little else.  We were operating on minimal sleep, exhaustion from the 6 or 7 hour rafting trip, and were just beat.  Leann was a little under the weather so she hit the sack while I did a little exploring, grabbed some grub and a beer, and picked up a few snacks and drinks for our room.  The next day was mostly spent trying to negotiate our way to and through a San Jose hospital.  Never fear, fair friends, all is well with your intrepid travellers.  Leann´s been getting a bit of the stomach bug for a while now and we´d just had enough of dealing with it.  To boot, she had a weird rash on her face.  We went to the hospital, which also had clinics, a pharmacy, and various other medical services.  This place was state of the art and very impressive.  The doctor was great and assured Leann that her weird face rash was probably just from wearing the wet chin straps either on the zip lines or the rafting trip.  She got her blood taken and it was discovered that she had elevated white blood cell counts, indicating a virus.  A few prescriptions and we were on our way.  Way to go, Costa Rican medical care system.  Our last night in San Jose, I went out to meet an old high school friend of mine, Chris Morris, for a couple beers and some dinner.  Leann took it easy in the hotel.  Chris has lived in Costa Rica for 8+ years and is pretty much a Tico (Costa Rican) by now.  It was great to catch up and he even gave me a brief tour of downtown San Jose, which is both picturesque and bustling. 

That takes us to the San Jose - Bogota trip, which went off without a hitch on the airplane side of things.  We got to the Bogota airport, changed out some money, and grabbed a cab to the hotel that we´d booked in advance.  Yes, booked in advance.  We got to the address the hotel had provided and there was no sign indicating that it was a hotel.  We rang the bell.  Nothing.  The cab driver called the hotel´s phone number.  Nothing.  Uh, not good.   This hotel has a branch in New York, which I also had the phone number for, and so I went to an international calling cafe and called them.  Yeah, turns out they just spaced our reservation or something and went out celebrating Colombia´s Independence Day (which was yesterday.....que viva Colombia!) instead of manning the hotel.  Fuckers.  They told us to wait for 40 minutes and there´d be someone back at the hotel.  Moreover, they´d compensate us for our inconvenience by giving us the night for free.  Cool, right?  We sat in a restaurant with all our gear and camped out for a while, splitting a plate of chicken and rice and a couple soft drinks.  After around an hour, we went back to the hotel and rang the bell again.  Nada.  So now we´re on the street with all our bags and the day is turning to night and the people appear to be getting progressively drunker and more sketchy as night approaches.  Screw this.  We jumped a taxi back towards the airport and ended up ¨having¨ to stay the night at a Holliday Inn.  Now, this place is seriously fancy and definitely not the kind of place we can really afford.  Oh well.  It was nice to not have to negotiate weird smells and partial hot water showers for once.  As Leann said, great for morale, not great for the bank account.

We have a couple hours before we catch a shuttle back to the airport and then head to the coastal Colombian city of Cartagena.  Not 100% sure what we´ll be doing there (aside from not staying in a place nearly as nice as this Holliday Inn).  Weather promised to be yet more of the same --- rain, rain, rain.  So we´ll probably be doing less beach stuff and more museum / cultural type of stuff. 

Hope all is well with all of you and yours.  Catch up with you soon with the next installment!  Laters, adios, hasta luego, whatever floats your personal boat.

Tulum and surrounding area

All right, then.  Where were we?

When last I left you, fair reader, we were about to embark on our 11 hour overnighter from Palenque to Tulum.  That really turned out to be a bitch of a bus ride.  The bus we took wasn't quite as nice as the previous one.  Being 6'3", I have the unfortunate problem of being about exactly one inch too tall to fit comfortably into most plane seats (can I get an 'amen', tall people?).  This bus was no different.  My knees were exactly one inch too long to fit well into the space between the seat and the seat in front of me.  No matter how I contorted my body, I simply couldn't get comfortable.  Leann slept like a baby.  I felt like crying like a baby.  Oh, well.  I stayed up most of the night, watching folks periodically get on and off and witnessing a couple Mexican officials check the bus during the night at stops at random, darkened, unknown cities.  Shortly after the sun rose, we rolled into Tulum, a coast town in the Yucutan peninsula in the state of Quintana Roo.

Tulum, Tulum.  Now, I feel like a broken record here, but this town is flat-out amazing.  Well, I guess the town itself is relatively benign, but the people (as per usual.....hell yeah, Mexican folk) and the beaches are incredible.  The beach is comprised of soft sand.  Now, when I say soft sand I don't just mean "yeah, yeah it's pretty soft."  I mean crazy soft.  Soft like bunny fur.  Soft like ground up baby bottoms.  Uh, that's a little disgusting but you get the picture.  The sand is made from mostly limestone and is not only soft but refuses to get hot.  Ever.  It can be a million degrees outside and the sand is completely bearable in bare feet.  The water is the color of the clearest turquoise stone you've ever seen.  One can walk out into the water for a good 50-75 feet, as the slope of the sand is incredibly gradual until the coral reef is reached.

We had a general game plan for the area, thanks in large part to our wonderful friend Kate Ater and her copious notes on the region that she left for us before we all departed Oaxaca.  Ok, so we wanted significant beach time (check), to see Chichen Itza (check), go to Coba (check), swim in a cenote (check), and avoid renting any more cars (negative....we broke down and rented another car that's done us just fine, thank you very much).

I can't remember the order in which we did everything, so I'll just rattle off what I do remember of the spots that we went to.

I'd also like to give a quick and enthusiastic thumbs-up to the hotel we established as our home base:  Posada Luna del Sur.  The owners, Marty and Sara, are a very nice Canadian couple who've run the hotel for about two and a half years.  The place, especially in comparison to our bargain shopper spots so far, is excellent.  It's air conditioned, clean, king-sized bed, and even a fridge.  It's in the town of Tulum, which is not right on the beach.  There are plenty of lodging spots on the beach but the beach stretch in Tulum doesn't have electrical infrastructure.  That means that either the hotel must supply its own power to allow its patrons power 24/7 (which translates to incredibly expensive digs with moderate amenities) or it shuts power down completely for the majority of the day.  On top of that, the showers are saltwater.  Yeah, swimming in the beach and trying to shower the salt off with, uh, more saltwater.  Negatory.

Coba -  So this is a set of ruins just about 45 minutes away from our home spot in Tulum.  Not the most expansive or visually striking of all the ruins but it has its own charm.  The ruins have elements of other civilizations from Guatemala, making them unique in the Yucatan area.  There is a beehive-shaped pyramid totally unlike any other we've seen.  So, yeah.  Cool ruins and a cool site.  But that's not what made this a memorable trip.  It was pouring rain (cats and dogs, yo!) and we sheltered ourselves under a small canopy trying to wait the rain out.  After some time, we figured "screw it" and rented a couple bikes to cruise around the site.  Yes, you can ride bicycles through the whole place.  We threw on our rain gear and started cruising.  It was SO fun.  Splashing through puddles, we made our way from temple to temple, from the juego de pelota court (ancient Mayan 'ball game' court) to the huge pyramid at the end of the trek.  This pyramid was a behemoth....the largest in the Yucatan, if I remember correctly.  We climbed up the 17 bazillion stairs to the top and enjoyed a view that stretched for miles and miles.  I have some pictures that I'll post later.  The trek down was slightly perilous and fairly amusing, as I got to watch Leann scoot down on her butt, holding the rope attached down the middle of the stairs.  The stairs themselves weren't perilous but the mind-fuck of looking down and imagining toppling down to your death was enough to make the majority of visitors take the descent very slowly.  Great, great times.

Chichen Itza -  The self-proclaimed "new 7th wonder of the world" is perhaps the most well-preserved archaeological site in the region.  We had now visited multiple incredible archaeological sites and were a little skeptical about the presumed Disneyland-esque elements sure to be present at the area's most famous site.  Sure enough, there were throngs of vendors selling everything from Hard Rock Cafe Chichen Itza t-shirts to carved wooden masks and small idols.  However, the reputation of Chichen Itza is well earned.  The site is incredibly well-preserved and the engravings on the walls were crystal clear.  The ball court is 100% intact and carries an impressive echo (clapping carries for like 150 meters from one side to the other).  Everything from the Warrior Temple to the Thousand Columns to the other temples there were in fantastic shape.  And Chichen Itza is BIG.  We have some more solid pictures to share, including pretty sharp ones of skull carvings (if I do say so myself) and even those of jaguar and eagle depictions.

Dos Ojos cenote -  A cenote is an underground pool of natural water.  The Dos Ojos cenote is comprised of two pools, connected underground by an underwater channel.  Scuba divers can swim the connecting route but we just did the snorkel tour.  Snorkeling around this cenote is like visiting another planet.  Stalactites and stalagmites abound.  Oh, and there are bats everywhere.  Tons of bats.  At first it just looks like some of the roof of the cave is a little squirmy until you realize that the movement are little fruit bats gathered in clusters.  Cool, cool.

The weather has been a little overly rainy during our stint here.  There was a tropical storm that swept through just prior to our visit (Tropical Storm Arlene or something like that) and the remnants were still slightly present while we were here.  We tried to take advantage of the sunny stretches and immediately hit the beach.  We'd intended to snorkel in a lagoon but were thwarted by a couple stormy days.  C'est la vie.

Yesterday, our last full day in Mexico, we spent the whole day on the beach, soaking in sunshine that lasted about 99% of the day, and wallowing on the Tulum beaches like happy pigs in slop (I'm not calling you a pig, dear, just mentioning that we were incredibly happy and content).  We ate and drank and swam and read and lived like a happy, vacationing couple instead of running around like determined chicken tourists with our heads cut off.  We decided that we'd give one last shot at seeing some sea turtles in Akumal as they make their way up the beach to lay eggs.

Holy f'n crap.  The turtles.  We saw them!  We saw TONS of them!  We watched mama turtles come up the beach and dig huge holes with their massive flippers (these suckers are HUGE...must have been several hundred pounds a piece).  It was amazing, like being in a nature documentary or something.  The turtles and their eggs are protected by Mexican law and there were a few groups, perhaps volunteer, that watched over the egg-laying ritual and marked the spots on the beach where the turtles had decided to do their business.  It was beautiful.  We headed home about 11:00 or so after watching multiple turtles in various stages of their efforts all over the beach.  We went to sleep contentedly, which leads me to.....

Today we leave Mexico.  Noooooooo!!!!!!!!  Well, I guess it's not all that bad, as our next stop is Costa Rica, where we plan to do some combination of beach, cloud forest, and volcanoes.  However, Mexico has treated us so well that it's tough to leave.  I freakin' love this country.  We'll be back!  We're hopping a bus to Cancun in a couple hours to prepare for our 6:00 pm flight to San Jose, Costa Rica where we arrive late, will crash at a budget hotel, and then plod on to the Pacific coast side of the country.  A little excitement combined with a vague sense of loss at leaving Mexico.  But the show must go on!

Check back with you all in a few days, hopefully with more cool adventures under our belt.  This trip kicks ass.

Mazunte (cont'd),, Puerto Escondido, and Palenque

Well, holy crap.

We owe a collective, huge debt to the friendly folk of Mexico for getting us out of yet another car-related mishap.  When last I updated you all, we were stranded in a nice little beach town called Mazunte with a broken car that had leaked all its transmission oil out.  (Now, as for how this happened.....I'm pleading the 5th).  It took about a day and a half, but our nice-ish car was replaced by a sad sack of a beater called a Chevrolet Chevy.  Not kidding.  It is pretty much the equivalent of a modern day Ford Pinto, but it was running and we were stranded so we were in no spot to be both begging and choosing.  Into the Chevy we piled and made our way an hour or so down the windy coastal highway to the surf town of Puerto Escondido.  There we pretty much parked the car and left it and did all our traveling by way of foot and taxi.  ´Twas a good call, as we'd find out soon enough.

Puerto Escondido is a bustling surf town, it would seem, during the winter months for some surf competitions and such.  It was, however, relatively slow and light on tourists during our stay.  Our first night there, we checked out the Zicatela locale, known for gnarly waves and hopping nightlife.  We had some beers at an awesome little joint called The Spot (I mean, how can you not go into THE Spot?).  What started as an innocent venture ended up awash in beer and tequila and conversation with a random Australian surfer we met.  We merrily made our way back to our hotel (Hotel Mayflower, in case you're ever in the region....it's awesome and cheap, about $30 per night for a very nice room) and passed out.

Remember, fair readers, that every single time I mention 'our' adventures with drinking, I mean 'my' (Chris') adventures with drinking.  I think that Leann has imbibed about two drinks the whole trip so far.

The next morning was decidedly rough and a nice trip for some coffee, breakfast, and serious beach time was in order.  We'd already found a cool little restaurant called Danny's, so we grabbed some grub and coffee and then headed off to Carizalillo beach.  This beach is one of the most amazing places I´ve ever been in my life.  It's a little swath of beach surrounded by cliffs on both sides and is only about 200 yards long.  Tiny little open-air restaurant slash bars dot the back end of the beach.  The beach is only accessible via some 170-odd stairs heading down.....a nice haul back up, to be sure.  After a nice stint at the beach, some good sun, and some cool waves we headed back to the main area of Puerto Escondido to grab some pizza (meh) and have an early night (yay!).

The next day was spent nearly entirely on the same Carizalillo beach.  Nikolai and Adrian, our traveling partners, were equally impressed.  We essentially rotated between grabbing sun on the beach, getting overheated, then cooling off in the cool and easy ocean.  What an excellent day of vacation-style relaxation.

 The wonderful, amazing, hidden beach of Carizalillo, one of Puerto Escondido's finest treasures.

The next morning we decided to roll out pretty early, as we had a long day of driving ahead of us.  Our next destination was the town of Tuxtla in the state of Chiapas (probably most famously known by Americans as the home of the Zapatista revolutionaries).  It was to be about a 9 or 10 hour drive and we hoped to get in while we still had light.

So off we went in our little POS car, full of hope and excitement for the day ahead.  I was the first driver and noticed a little jingling noise coming from underneath said POS.  First chance we got, I pulled over and checked it out.  It was an array of wires dangling loose under the car.  Uh, ok.  We kind of stuffed the wires back in the car and headed out again.  I drove for maybe 3 or 4 hours and we decided to grab food and switch drivers.  After some decent roadside tacos, we were back underway.  Another couple hours went by with little fanfare other than  yet another undetermined noise.  Driver switch part deux occurred just a couple hours later and the noise became more prominent.  It sounded like maybe a CV joint issue, as it mostly happened around turns.  We were now in no man's land, figuratively, as the only civilization around were extremely tiny mountain towns (pueblos) with only a hundred townspeople and few, if any, amenities other than food and drink.

The noise got worse.  And worse.  And worse.  We finally pulled over to check the situation out and noticed smoke coming from inside one of the wheels.  Not good at all.  We were decidedly in the middle of BFE at this point and didn't really have any options.  We waited for a while for the wheel to cool off, thinking maybe we had some sort of brake issue or something.  Now, I'm no mechanic but I know pretty damn well that smoke eminating from tires is a very bad sign on sketchy mountain roads.  What else could we do, though?  We rolled on after the cool-down period.

Then things went to total shit.  The noise turned into a shudder.  The shudder turned into a total rear-end of the car shake.  The rear-end of the car shake turned into us stopping the car in the middle of the road.  We got out to inspect the damage.  Lo and behold, the whole fucking wheel had come off.  Not just the tire.  Not the hubcap.  Not a lugnut or two.  THE ENTIRE WHEEL.  We now had a 3 wheeled vehicle.  Uh, yeah.  We were still about 120 miles away from our end destination and about 50 miles from the nearest actual city.  Moreover, our car was sitting dead in the middle of the northbound lane of a two lane highway in the middle of the mountains.  Fubar.

We put on our shoes, gathered our stuff, and prepared for a walk to the nearest village.  A car stopped to talk to us almost immediately after our breakdown and let us know that, no, they didn't have phone reception and, yes, there was a village about 10 km away (Rizza de Oro, or something similar.....middle of nowhere).  Their car was too tiny to accomodate four people and their bags so we continued preparation for the trek.  A big commercial truck also stopped on the side of the road.  Luis, now our amigo and savior, came to take a look at the damage on the car.  He concluded the same as us ---- fubar.  He helped push the car off the road onto a kind of drainage ditch on the side so that it wouldn't get totaled by oncoming traffic and potentially even hurt or kill somebody.  He then offered us a ride all the way to Tuxtla.  Bewildered by our amazing luck, we graciously accepted and piled into his semi truck.  Leann, Nik, and Adrian all fit in the back sleeper area of the cab and I sat shotgun next to Luis (who soon told me that he hadn't slept in two days.....uh oh).  Before departure we were approached with an offer of help by another truck driver.  Apparently Mexican truck drivers are all saints.

We rode with Luis all the way to Tuxtla to the outskirts of town, since huge trucks weren't allowed on the inner roads.  He even helped us hail a taxi to get into town.  The dude is just one awesome amigo.  We gave him some cash, which he tried to refuse but eventually accepted after Nik pointed at a picture of his kids and said 'give it to them'.  He gave us his address in Guadalajara and, in my opinion, we now have a bro for life.

We stayed in an unremarkable, kind of dirty, cheap hotel in Tuxtla after grabbing some grub late at night.  The next day, which was yesterday, Nik and Adrian parted ways with Leann and I.  They headed to the mountain town of San Cristobal while we mosied on to Palenque.  After our six hour bus ride (the bus that we took was better than anything I've ever even seen in the USA.....first class all the way with mega leg room and a bunch of TVs) we landed in Palenque and found a room in an awesome little hotel with air conditioning for only about $20 a night.  We've been exploring the town today and it's very cool.  Tomorrow we head off for a tour of three different spots, including some amazing looking waterfalls and, of course, the famous Palenque ruins hidden in the jungle.  I´ll make sure to post some pictures of this adventure when I can.

We'll be hitting the road in another bus tomorrow night after the long day of adventuring and we'll be going all the way to Tulum, a small beach town in the Yucatan just south of Cancun.  It's an 11 hour bus ride and it's an overnighter so we'll see how that turns out.

That's about it for now.  We will not be renting any cars any time soon.  Oh, and if you ever get the chance, avoid renting from EuropCar at all costs.  Unless, that is, you feel like riding around on three wheels.

Also just thought I'd throw a quick shout out or two to both of our families (love all you guys!), the Bataan Park Guts Brothers (five hole Trammel for me), and the folks at Rotojunkiefix.com.  Keep on keepin' on!

Also added pictures from Monte Alban and Hierva el Agua to the Flickr feed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisandleann/  Check 'em out!