Merry Christmas from Sucre, Bolivia!

We´re not yet sure how we will be spending our Christmas here in Sucre but we are safe and happy though missing and thinking of you all!  Merry Christmas!  (Roxanne, please give Brody a Christmas hug for us. We miss our little Reindeer. Thanks!)

Sucre, The White City



Nick climbing





Rachel repelling.  Very serious.



Sorry for such a delay from the last blog post, and we wish we could say it has been because we´ve been so overwhelmingly busy, but alas that is not the case.  To be fair we have been fairly busy the last two weeks with our volunteer work with the Sucre based trekking agency Condor Trekkers.  Condor Trekkers is a non-profit trekking agency that works in and around the communities of Sucre, it is completely volunteer run, minus Lidia, the local woman who runs the office for us most of the week (and her adorable daughter Agelen, of 6 years) and local guides.  It´s a really great concept, and not like other charity and tourist groups that just more or less head out, but we actually meet with the communities that we hike through and meet with their leaders to decide how best to practically collaborate with the needs that they´re presented with in their respective communities.  Also the volunteers are great themselves, and we´ve had the pleasure to meet many people, from various backgrounds and walks of life (though mostly from other western nations and most predominately English speaking, and an especially high percentage of Kiwi´s). So for the last month we have been getting accustomed to life here in the city of Sucre, as well as spending much of our time with Condor Trekkers.



Leading up to Sucre presented us with many first time experiences as well, including rock-climbing!  After we checked out Paracas and Las Islas Ballestas we hopped on a semi-cama bus to Cusco, which can´t be stated enough how pretty it is.  The foundations of many of the buildings are built upon the same foundations that the Incas had first constructed hundreds of years earlier.  In fact years ago, around 1950, there was a earthquake that damaged a great deal of the structures of the city, but the Inca foundations where undisturbed by the event.  It is mind-boggling  to look at the craftsmanship that such an ancient civilization possessed in terms of stone manipulation, seamless transition from on stone to the next, and so exact and precise in their angles and cuts into the stone, and to top it off they used nothing between the stones themselves.  It was literally stone next to stone, and so smooth and seamless, that its impossible to imagine how someone today could even achieve such precision, let alone a civilization hundreds of years removed from the earth. We spent time checking out a few museums in Cusco, and despite how beautiful it is, it is also predominately economically centered around tourism, and just when that was getting to us and we were camped out in a cafe with not much to do, we were approached randomly by a young peruvian, Alexander; who invited us to go rock climbing with him and a few of his friends.  This being both Rachel and I´s first experience rock climbing, but there was no way we could turn down the offer. So after running back to the hostal for a quick change of clothes we headed out of Cusco and spent a few hours repelling and rock climbing, and ended up walking a couple hours through the countryside till we arrived back at Cusco well after dark.  All in all it was an experience we likely wont forget anytime soon, if ever, not just in the physically experience of climbing, but the beauty of the land and ancient Inca ruins (such as the temple of the moon) on our walk back into the city.



Walking back to Cuzco at night