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













What did we do two weeks ago?

La Candelabra



Can someone identify this bird for me please?





Drowsy sea lion



This took half an hour to load...The Peruvian Cormorant?

 Geez, updating a blog is difficult when constantly on the move.  The whole purpose of it is to document our travels and it has already been two weeks since the last post.  Let me see, let me see, what did we do two weeks ago?  Well, after Lima, we took a four hour bus ride south to the town of Pisco, also on the coast.  Here again, we realized  that an up to date guide book would be handy.  The town was completely ravaged by the earthquake three years ago and looked like cleanup was still in the beginning stages.  Businesses were physically no longer there and there were rubble piles along all the streets.  It was a sad site.  Perhaps sounding insensitive, we were fortunate that Pisco was just a jumping off point for a tour of Islas Bellestas, islands that contained numerous seabird and sea lion colonies.  Guess who was really excited for that?! Well, we had arrived too late in the day to do the tour and so booked for the next morning.  We found a hostel run by a nice family, him Brazilian and her Peruvian, and spent the evening drinking beers and playing cards in the room.  The next morning we were picked up and taken to a town twenty minutes down the coast.  There we squeezed onto a boat, along with thirty other people, and taken out to these islands  (This is where pictures would really be nice, I´ll add them as soon as we can have the camera chord sent!).  The first stop was to view the the Candelabra (see above), a giant figure etched into the hillside by an unknown indigenous group, perhaps the Nazca, famous for the Nazca lines that are in the shapes of monkey, lizards, etc.  The guide gave a very brief summary of what is known and then we moved onto the islands.  You could tell he gives the same schpeal every day and was not super animated.  Note, we were not alone out there, there were at least 5 other boats around us as well.  The islands were pretty amazing, there were thousands of pelicans, gulls, cormorants and more lining the rocks.  There were also thousands of sea lions, which we got way too close to.  I felt bad that the seals were getting exhaust from the boats blown in their faces and sadly, they seemed to be used to it.  They hardly opened their eyes to look at us whilst 5 ft away, though that could have been due to drowsiness from the fumes, I don´t know.  After a brief description by the guide, we were already on our way back.  The day was young and we decided to walk out to the national reserve.  After an hour walking in the desert, those carrying the heavy packs had had enough.  We paid our entrance fees and hopped a ride the rest of the way in a local fisherman´s van.  He dropped us off at fishing village that had a couple restaurants, a dock, and little else.  I couldn´t help thinking to myself "This is it?"  The guide book made it sound like a breathtaking experience, but perhaps that too had somehow changed since the four years of publication.  I put on a happy face and joined the others in our search to find a place to set up camp for the night.  Only a half hour later, we found it, on a beach called Las Minas.  To access it, it was necessary to traverse a loose, rocky and steep hillside.  By this time it was only 330 and I´m pretty sure everyone was thinking to themselves "now what?"  With little to do and already having spent five days the three of us together, 24/7, we all needed a little space and we were stuck together on a secluded beach.  Rather comical, looking back on it now, but it wasnt at the time!  Jess set up the tent, Nick took a walk, and I did some bird watching.  We had an early dinner of bread, avocado, tomatoe and cheese and got into our sleeping bags around 6pm.  Just half an hour later we realized the tide was rising and that at some point during the night, we would certainly have waves coming into the tent.  With little light left, we quickly moved the tent to higher ground.  I must add that I have realized on this trip that somehow I have become more paranoid since last traveling three and a half years ago.  I couldn´t help but noticing the large rocks that had fallen from the cliffs above all around us and imagine a rock slide crushing us during the night.  But, at that point we had little choice.  It was too dark to find another place to camp and that was the only higher ground on the beach.  Needless to say, little sleep was to be had.  There were three of us in a two person tent and if it wasn´t the crashing waves on the shore, it was the pebbles that would fall and hit the tent, startling me awake and signaling to me I likely had seconds to live.   We packed up early the next morning and as we got up the hill from the beach, I noticed some local fisherman smirking at us.  I´m sure they thought we were crazy and I had to agree.  We overpaid the first fisherman we could find to take us back to town.
What´s great about traveling though, is the rose colored glasses effect.  I look back on that experience now, even just two weeks later, and think "wow, that was awesome!"



This is it? half mile from the beach we camped on



Walking tours of Lima AND... errotic pottery

Happiest dead guy you´ll ever see.  Fortunately proportions of certain body parts seemed to have changed in the last 500 years.

Who hasn´t pictured this before?

I´ll start off this post with a warning: There will be no pictures for a while.  Sorry, I know that´s the most exciting part, expecially when errotic pottery is involved, but through all of our meticulous hours of packing, we managed to forget the chord to connect the camera to the computer. So, no new pictures until we get settled in Sucre and have an address at which to send.
At the moment, we´re in Ica and are on our way to Cuzco via an 18 hour bus!  Not looking forward to that but we have had our fair share of adventures so far.
I had a completely different view of Lima than I had the previous time I was here.   No sweet family to stay with, no fancy restaurants, no being driven around to all the ¨nice¨ parts of town.  We pretty much struck out on everything we attempted to do.  We were told museums were closed Sunday so we thought we would spend the day exploring neighborhoods and plan our Monday activities.  Turns out it is important to have an up to date guidebook as nothing is in the same place it was three years ago.  We spent the day walking around a large part of the city, likely 15 miles in total.  By end of day we were exhausted and found none of the places we were looking for.  Plus we found out that museums are closed Mondays, NOT Sundays and the ruins we were planning on biking to were also closed.  Darn.   But Lima is a much prettier city than I had thought and I think we got a pretty good sample of it.  By now, you are probably wondering when the errotic pottery comes into the picture.  The one museum we were able to go to was the museo Rafael Larco.  Unfortunately Jessica did not make it as she had had enough after 15 miles of walking without finding anything we were looking for.  Who could blame her but she missed out!
Rafael Larco was an archaeologist who studied a number of the pre incan cultures during the 20th century.  He collected some 45,000 artificacts, including a number of pots displaying pre incan sexual practices of men, women, skeletons and animals in all combinations of the above.  I believe the imagination will suffice here but Ill make sure to throw in a picture for illustration at a later date.  Three days in Lima and we were off to Pisco for a tour of Islas Ballestas and Paracas National Park...more on that later!
By the way, if you´re reading this, and there are details and descriptions I leave out, let me know!  Lack of sleep does not necessarily make for good blog writing.

Anticipation

Moving Out

Wyoming big sky

Iowa morning

3 or perhaps 4 rascals

Happy dog

girl and dog

Anxious...we've been unemployed and in Iowa for almost 3 weeks! (not including the short trip to Madeline Island). A long drive on I80, dogs and more dogs, trip planning and some relaxation sums up our time here. We miss San Francisco, fresh(er) produce and are sad we missed out on the Giants mayhem.  Oh well, there's always another World Series, right?! Will be in Lima in less than 48 hours...

Oh yeah, we miss Brody too (Understatement of the century according to Nick)