After 22 hours we made it home with New York welcoming us with a giant hug. We landed a few minutes early, waited in practically no line to get through immigration and customs, our bags were riding around on the carousel waiting for us, and we got from home from JFK in about 35 minutes… at 6pm. Seeing the skyline again made me misty and clap my hands in glee like a 3 year old. I never realized just how much I love my bed. I feel good. I tore apart the kitchen today in an attempt at reorganization and simplification. I am starting a new life, it’s purging time.
Things I will miss:
Carlitos - a Rosario specialty. white, crustless bread with ham, cheese and ketchup…grilled.
Brazilian beer - the only beer I have ever successfully drank a lot of and enjoyed.
ice cream delivery
the ice cream
1.5 Liters of beer for $2
3 to 1 US dollar.
personal trainer for $10 an hour
traveling
tanks
Marcelo and Jorgelina - they kept us busy and well fed. Marcelo rolled up his pants and waded into the dirty flooded street to load our 65 lb bags into a taxi our last few minutes in Rosario. Jorgelina was incredibly patient with me and my broken Spanish… she made me want to keep trying instead of curling up into a ball in the corner.
David - put us up for 10 days and gave us his bedroom, kept me wanting to curl up into a ball in the corner. Introduced us to Argentinian choripan, fideos de David, the public bus system, and Laura our personal trainer.
Eduardo - took us out on the river for some of the best days we had in Rosario and kept us full of great Malbec.
Laura - trainer and friend. spent 3 hours a week with her in the park busting my ass. Got me motivated to get back in shape, kept me in caramelos, good spirits, and better health.
Leo and Ileana - brought Blas into the world, kept us swimming, and grilled the best fish I have had in Argentina. (yes, I can eat fish with a head on it now)
Pancho and Laura - brought Francesca (the happiest kid I have ever met) into the world, kept us laughing and full of flan casero.
Everyone we know in Argentina and Brazil took amazing care of us.
My sincerest thanks you all. I will miss you.
I am getting impatient. We are leaving tonight for our 4 hour by van, 2-4 hours in the Buenos Aires airport, 2 hour flight to Sao Paolo, 1 hour in the airport, and 10 hour flight to JFK where we will sit at customs and then in rush hour traffic to finally get home by around 7:30pm Wednesday. But we will be home. All the traveling is worth that.
I have had an amazing time here but am ready to get back. I have seen some of the most amazing places in the world in just 4 months and I feel incredibly lucky to have been ready and able to make this trip. I have never felt so unhindered and relaxed in my adult life. I realize that by coming home, I will lose much of that, but I will keep the feeling with me for as long as I can, and try hard to recall it when the stress inevitably returns.
My advice to anyone thinking of a trip like this… do it. It is hard to leave a job, trust me, I know that well, but there is so much more to get out of life than a decent paying job that takes up most of your waking hours. I may have to get back to that eventually, but the time away from it was invaluable.
I am headed home to an entirely new chapter of my life…and I couldn’t be happier.
Just returned from 3 days at las Cataratas del Iguazú . I have been to Niagara, which is beautiful, but this place was magical. Niagara is one big fall in the middle of a city… The Iguazú system consists of 275 falls over a span of about 1.5 miles in the middle of the jungle.
They can be seen from both the Brazilian side and the Argentinian side, each giving a different vantage point and experience. The Brazilian side is an overall view of the falls. The Argentinian side takes you up close and personal. The largest of the falls is La Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat) and Ivan and I left it drenched and hoping our cameras would survive to see the rest of the day. We took a boat ride directly under one of the lower Falls and down some pretty serious rapids… I am not sure I have been that drenched before.
We were almost about to give up on being able to fit this trip in to our limited time, but I am so glad we did. This was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. It was awe inspiring.
It is almost time to pack our bags and head back to NYC. My Spanish is improving by leaps and bounds…just in time to go back home. The mind has started moving at lightspeed going over all the things that I need to do once I get back home. I hope that I can just make a list, and leave it at that so I can enjoy my last few weeks here.
I have gotten a lot out of this trip so far, one of which is my desire to de-clutter my life back home. Living in an apartment with hardly anything has really made me enjoy the “spaciousness” of it all. I will most likely be purging a lot of knick-knacks, etc when I get back. I am starting to realize the proximity of having to find steady work, be it freelance or otherwise. The prices here are similar to home numerically, but three times less money gets removed from my bank account. I am hoping to knock on a few doors and be able to freelance for as long as I can before my need for security forces me into another full-time job. I do love the freedom that freelancing allows me, and I hope to take advantage for as long as possible.
We are planning two last trips for the next few weeks. One is a day trip to go and drive/shoot a tank… I will explain later, with a lot of pictures. The other is to the Cataratas (Iguassu Falls) which are supposedly one of the most amazing locations in the world, they put Niagara to shame. I feel like I have now procrastinated sufficiently and am going to have to squeeze a lot into a small amount of time. We have decided that another long trip to Rosario is not in our future. As much as we have really enjoyed every minute here, there are hundreds more places to visit, and several others with friends living there, other possible 4-6 month trips. We need to take advantage of our last weeks here, and realize that we may not see many of our friends for years to come. So, we shall be busy.
So far we have been lucky. I was very afraid that it would rain for the entire 2 weeks we were in Peru since it is the rainy season, and let’s be serious, I am a bit of a pessimist. All in all, we got a couple of showers while at Machu Picchu and a bit of rain here and there, but it had rained for a full week before we got to Peru and it seemed to be taking a break just for us. We had sunshine and the after effects of a week of rain. This did not effect us much until we arrived at our last stop, Puerto Maldonado and the Peruvian Amazon.
We stayed only about an hour in Puerto Maldonado, to meet our guides and buy some supplies for the jungle. Puerto Maldonado is a city on two wheels. Cars are reserved for tourists. I have never seen so many people on one motorcycle before, or really, so many motorcycles. I felt like I was at Sturgis. I thought of my many bike ridin’ friends and how much they would have enjoyed the scene. Oh and I think I forgot to mention but seeing 3 kids and their parents on one bike is one thing, but in Puno, I saw a man and his sheep riding down the road… they were going too fast to get a picture.
And I digress, after shopping for flashlights and raingear, we climbed into our long boat and headed upstream for a 3.5 hour trip to our jungle lodge. This is where Peru became not so much “amazing” but certainly more “interesting” than it had been previously. Gone were the ruins of past civilizations, we were in someplace in constant flux, someplace “alive.” Our jungle lodge was, well, rustic. There was no electricity except in the main lodge where we ate our meals. The rooms were cabin-like with only mosquito net over the windows and ceiling. We shared one panel wood walls with the room next door and got to know a lot about the habits of our tour companions. This was the first place we had been where there were no other American tourists. Our little group was composed of a couple from Barcelona and another couple, one from Belgium and the other a native Peruvian. The owner of the lodge was from France, living in Peru and in the process of learning Spanish and English. We were quite the international crowd.
We did a short night walk the first night and were able to catch glimpses of monkeys, birds and a multitude of insects all that only come out once the sun goes down and the predators go to bed. We stopped at one point and all turned off our flashlights. Take away your sense of sight and the sounds of the jungle became so much stronger.
I unfortunately got pretty sick after that and had to sit out the activities of day two. You can read Ivan’s blog if you are interested in what happened that day. I spent the day in a hammock… which was pretty amazing in itself. I just sat there all day listening to the sounds of the jungle. At night, the jungle sounds change as a new batch of creatures wake up and start their day. I was feeling a bit better at night and joined the group for a night boat ride to look for Cayman. We were not having any luck spotting the red eyes of the Cayman on the river banks because due to the season, many of them were resting out of the reach of our spotlight. Finally they spotted a red flash and we made our way over to the river bank where Henry (the boat’s Captain) reached out into the grasses of the river bank and somehow managed to grab a baby Cayman and bring him into the boat for us to see and touch. The Cayman seemed less than happy about the process but it may teach him a valuable lesson in survival. If we had been a predator, he would no longer be around. We put him back on the river bank and headed back to the lodge.
On day three I was still feeling a bit under the weather but I could not miss another day. They told us that we were going on a hike to the lake which would be about 13 kilometers there and back. How bad could an 8 mile hike through the jungle be? The way there was difficult for me. I was still not feeling 100% and the heat was oppressive. We finally arrived at the lake about 3.5-4 hours later. We went on a canoe ride around the lake and fished for Piranhas… no one but the guides caught anything (which they threw back), but we did a great job of feeding the piranhas a lot of raw beef. We would feel a nibble and try to pull the rod (a stick with fishing line and a hook) out as quickly as possible but those little guys managed to clean the meat off the hook every time.
Now was the time for the guides to come clean with us. We had two options for the return hike. We could hike back 4 hours, the way we came, or we could cut an hour and a half off the hike and go through some flooded terrain. They assured us that only about half hour of the hike would be in water, some up to our chests but mostly thigh level. At first I thought they were kidding… they were not. The rain from the week before had flooded a lot of the jungle and we were lucky that we had 2 dry days because they had to swim back the same route a few days earlier. We all decided to risk the water thinking that maybe they were exaggerating. No luck there. The first water we hit was a small river and it was clean and fast moving. We all made it across, wet up to our waists. This was going to be fun!! Unfortunately, the rest of the water was more “jungle floor tea” and did not offer the same refreshment as the cool, fast moving river. This was stagnant and well… ever see “Anaconda”? It was all I could do to just hope that the thing at my feet was just a tree root. It was slow going, but in all honesty, the water did help to cool things down. We had to step gingerly since we were walking on jungle floor and could not see our feet. There were many obstacles we had to feel out. I started to get a cramp in my foot so as I was walking along trying to work it out, I hit a root and SPLOOSH! I slipped and reflexively grabbed for the nearest tree. I only halfway submerged and my pack stayed semi-dry, but really, the last thing you wanted was jungle tea in your face. We hit a patch of dry land and heard grunting sounds off to the right of the trail. Our guide hushed us and had us get down to the ground. We began seeing black flashes off to our right and the grunting sounds got louder. Seconds later a pack (herd?) of wild boar began streaming across the path just ahead of us. Luckily most of them had no interest in us except for the leader who stayed off to our right watching the rest of his group pass us by unharmed before he moved on himself.
We finally emerged from the jungle back at the lodge looking like we had come from war. We were filthy, soaked to the bone and really have no idea what we smelled like. We came face to face with a new tour group that had just arrived to the lodge that afternoon. They had a look of horror on their faces and asked us where we had come from. We were honest and told them about our experience… I have to say it was a little fun seeing the shadow of impending doom come over their faces.
I have said this several times… but more than anything this was an experience that I will NEVER forget!
more pictures HERE
As our time in Peru passed, each new city brought with it different perspectives and culture. I think we did the trip in the right order as each new city was better than the one before. On our third morning in Cusco we finally were ready to see what we had heard so many wonderful stories about. We caught the 6am train and after 4 long, curvy hours (they seemed MUCH longer on the return trip) we arrived in Aguas Calientes, the jump off point for the Lost City. Another very curvy 25 minutes by bus and we started to see the first ruins at the top of the mountain.
It is not any one thing that makes Machu Picchu so majestic. Looking out over the “main vista” (this is the picture you see in postcards) you can lose your breath, and this time, it is most likely not the altitude. There are clouds…at eye-level and many more below, there are 125 ton stones cut with 33 corners that were somehow laid in place without “modern” technology, it truly is a magical place… you can feel it.
We were on a tour and honestly, a bit tired of hearing about how the Incas made their buildings earthquake-proof. It was quite interesting the first time, but by the 10th time, I was ready to get on to seeing more of the sites. Ivan and I decided to skip lunch and keep on climbing. We followed a muddy trail, in the pouring rain and oppressive heat, on the sheer cliff of Machu Picchu mountain to the Inca bridge. It was quite a trek and an experience I won’t soon forget.
more pictures HERE
It took 9 hours by bus to get from Puno to Cusco. We stopped along the way at numerous ruins and scenic vistas, we hit 4+ thousand meters above sea level.
Cusco is for tourists, but this is no New York. The history here speaks through the cobblestones and the Incan temples mostly destroyed when the Spanish arrived. Through everything the Incan’s were subject to, they endured, the culture is still alive today. They may be 93% Catholic on paper but the Incan religion has survived and is mixed in with their new faith.
Cusco is also the kick off point for one of the most visited sites in the world, Machu Picchu. We spent two days in Cusco getting acclimated and visiting ruins.
We took a tour through the Sacred Valley during Carnivale. There were kids everywhere with water guns, cans of foam and buckets of water. If you weren’t paying attention enough to shut your window on the bus when you glimpsed one, it would be a wet ride. We got a full bucket through the tour guide’s front window and it made it back to the opposite front seat to soak my unsuspecting mother. (she was not happy, but she sure was wet)
a LOT more pictures HERE
We start out our day quite early and head out onto Lake Titicaca. Our first stop is the Uros Islands. Now I realize that I have said a few times that “I have never seen anything like this place” but really… I should have reserved that phrase for here.
The Uros people have built their homes on islands… that they have also built by hand. The cut down the tall reeds that grow in the lake and layer them meters thick to form an island. They build their houses/kitchens/beds, etc all out of these same reeds. Several families live together on an island and if there is conflict, they simply cut off their piece of the island and paddle it over to another one and bind themselves together. It is a way of life that is difficult to comprehend, but it works for them and has worked for thousands of years. We were able to visit with a family and when we left, they sang us songs in Ketchua, Aymara, Spanish and even English… an experience I will never forget.
The little girl in the last picture jumped into the reed boat at the last minute and said nothing more than CALLATE PATO to a passing duck.
more pictures HERE
I have been back from Peru for a week but have yet to find the time to write. In Peru we had very little downtime/internet access, so here we go…
After a very rainy/early start to the Puno leg of the trip, we wound up with a beautiful sunny day. As we flew over Juliaca/Puno we realized why our flight had been canceled, there was water everywhere, and had we gotten there on time, we would have missed a whole day due to rain. Our first stop on the way to Puno was at Sillustani where ancient burial columns were scattered over the mountain tops. The view of the lake was breathtaking…and so was the altitude.
Puno itself is a very rural city on the edge of Lake Titicaca. But what it lacks in modernity it makes up for tenfold in culture and hospitality.
We were picked up from our early morning flight and swept off on an 8 hour tour of the city and the countryside. THIS is what I was looking for. Beautiful mountains, Inca irrigation fields, colonial city built from compacted volcanic ash so the buildings are all naturally white, alpacas and other assorted animals everywhere. The air is clear and the people are lovely. This is like nowhere else I have seen. I can´t compare it to other cities I have been to, it is a different world.
We woke up this morning for a 4am pickup to the airport, where the fog cancelled our flight, we are off to try it again and are heading to Juliaca and Puno which is the home of Lake Titicaca. We have started chewing our coca leaves to help stave off altitude sickness. More when I can…
