Seboeis Lake camping trip

July 15-19th was our first big camping trip of the year! My parents are veteran backwoods canoers and campers, and they invited my dear Aunt Barbara and myself (both novice canoers) to join them for an easy four-day trip on Seboeis Lake, way up in Piscatiquis County, in remote Northern Maine. We stopped at the big LL Bean store in Freeport on the way up, to lay in a few extra camping supplies, and then from Freeport we had a four-hour drive to the lake, on I-95 to Newport, Maine and then on country roads through beautiful Penobscot and Piscatiquis counties. We had to stop the car when a gangly young lady moose wandered out of the woods and walked about in the road for a bit, indecisive, into one lane and then into the other and then back into the woods again.
We turned onto dirt roads for the last few miles and then put in the canoes at the landing on the north end of Seboeis Lake. It’s a bit of a process packing four people, four days worth of camping and eating supplies, and two dogs into two canoes and setting off.

canoe atop subaru / paddling out to our campsite

We had a beautiful 25-minute paddle across peaceful waters, through lily pads and rushes, out to our campsite at the end of a long narrow, piney peninsula sticking out into the lake. It was the site of an old loggers’ camp, now converted to two public campsites, accessible only by boat. The soft pine needles were perfect for pitching a tent on, the breeze kept the mosquitoes and deerflies at bay, and we had views out to Mt. Katahdin, and across two pretty little bays, one on each side of our peninsula.

our sweet campsite

We had our first of several spectacularly delicious dinners. My mother does gourmet campfire cooking with gusto, carrying the standard supply of tinfoil and propane camp stove, plus a cast-iron dutch oven for roasting food in the hot coals, and a homemade convection oven for baking cakes and pies on the campfire, as well as a bottle of wine for every night, stores of flour and sugar, butter, eggs, baskets of fresh fruits and veggies, and a snack for every occasion.

blueberry muffins, campfire, reflector oven

first evening on the lake

Our original plan was to camp one night on the peninsula, then paddle out across the widest part of the lake to Hammer Island, a small island with a few campsites and nice views of the mountains, and stay there for the next two nights. But by the morning a real wind had come up, and there were whitecaps on the lake, which we are told makes for unsafe canoeing conditions. So we relaxed under the pines with our novels and our knitting projects, watching the whitecaps churn out on the lake and waves crash on the rocky shore. By and by afternoon we were feeling restless and adventurous so we packed all four humans AND two dogs into the larger canoe and set off across the bay to a tantalizing strip of white sandy beach on the far shore. As soon as we left shore, the winds came up stronger and we realized our weight was poorly balanced in the boat, the dogs were nervous and wouldn’t lie down, they kept jumping and lurching around, everything was tippy and unsteady, the whitecaps were lapping over the gunnels and with too much weight in the front of the canoe, Richard had a challenge trying to steer and keep us on course. It was only a ten-minute paddle but I pretty much spent the whole ten minutes telling myself “we’re going to tip over but it’s OK, I know how to swim, the water’s warm, it’ll be fine.” And it was. We made it across the cove without tipping over, put in at the sandy beach and had a marvelous swim in the lake. The water was unbelievably warm and the sand was improbably white and it made me feel like we’d somehow paddled over to Brazil for a few minutes.

on the beach at sandy cove

For the trip back we were a bit more careful with seating ourselves into the boat and we zipped right back across the cove very neatly and quickly. It was a nice lesson in how important it is to pack the canoe carefully and distribute weight evenly, especially in a stiff wind. After this exciting expedition we were content to just sit back at our campsite and enjoy the view, waiting until the wind died down enough to paddle out onto the lake. As it turned out, it never really did. There were stiff winds and whitecaps all day every day, from dawn til dusk, so we stayed put in our lovely campsite with our vacation books and our knitting and our tasty cooking.

choppy waters / canoe and roots

blueberry picking, sunset swimming

sunset over Seboeis Lake and Mt. Katahdin

Paprika / fern

chilaquiles for breakfast / canoe lessons

We did lots of blueberry picking, and tons of swimming, as the lake was very warm, and took a few short outings into the quieter, shallower, smaller cove on the lee side of our peninsula. Judy gave me some canoeing lessons in the shallow water, trying to teach me how to man the stern and steer. It’s hard! On the last morning the lake was finally calm enough for us to go out and paddle about. We had a lovely turn around the lake and enjoyed the quiet early morning, still water, dragonflies and nice views of katahdin before heading back to break camp.

early morning paddle

first weekend at Intervale

Mike, Paprika

pacific coast

sunset & pelicans in Paracas, Peru

Sunday afternoon we caught a bus to Camana, Peru. We picked our destination kind of at random; I was distracted with work and just wanted to get to the beach, anywhere on the beach! So we heard that Camana was by the beach, we bought a bus ticket, and three hours later we were in Camana. The drive was just a winding two-lane road through a weird alien landscape of sandy, gravelly mountains and dunes. Really quintessential desert. As we went further, the dunes got less rocky and more sandy. And then, over a giant dune, appeared the ocean! There was nothing in-between, just desert merging seamlessly into sand dunes and beach and then ocean, I’ve never seen a place like this before. Camaná turned out to be a small city or a big town, a little bit away from the beach, but it still had a kinda beach-town vibe, lots of ice cream parlors and game arcades and seafood places. In the daytime the town felt really quiet but in the evening, the main plaza filled up completely with families and kids, running and shouting and enjoying the fresh evening air. Two french clowns set up a show in the main square and did a great show for kids; we got ourselves ice-cream cones and enjoyed the show too. They were really talented!

seafood shack on the beach. Camana, Peru

The next day we spent at the beach, doing beachy things like eating ceviche and fried shrimp, wading in the chilly water (I always think of the Pacific ocean as warm, but it wasn’t!) and reading paperback novels while drinking beer under beach umbrellas. That night, after enjoying another performance by the french clowns, we caught an overnight bus to Paracas, six hours up the coast. We were told that only the budget buses stop in Camaná, so we’d have to take a gritty budget service. Our bus turned out to be over an hour late, and then when it arrived, the guy at the bus station would not let us get on our bus! He kept saying “oh, no, there’s another bus coming really soon. You can take the next bus. It’s much better, it’s a very fancy bus, you’ll like that one much better.” We watched twenty other people get on that bus but he wouldn’t let us on! I did not believe him and I tried to argue to no avail and then just sat there, despondent, imagining us stuck in the bus station with all our bags, all night long. But lo, twenty minutes later, another bus appeared! And it was a luxury bus! It stopped just for the two of us, and we climbed aboard, very surprised but thankful… it was air-conditioned, it had huge bathrooms and plush leather seats that convert into actual beds, they gave us blankets and pillows, the whole thing was really surreal. We have no idea why this happened to us! But we slept well and in the morning they woke us up to get off the bus in Pisco.
Pisco is a port city a few hours south of Lima that was pretty thoroughly destroyed in an earthquake in 2007. We thought we’d just check into a hostel there, sleep for a while longer, then head over to explore Paracas, which is a beautiful beach town nearby, and a starting-point for boat trips to the Islas Ballestas. But I ended up feeling very sick all day and we never managed to leave our hostel until late afternoon. The hostel was kind of weird so we thought it would be nice to get out and walk around – but our walk around Pisco was seriously depressing. It was the scariest, saddest place I have ever been in my entire life. It was mostly comprised of piles of rubble, stripped hulls of cars, mud streets filled with sickly, limping dogs and gangs of teenage boys. And we were staying in the “nice” neighborhood. The four blocks’ walk to the main square were really unpleasant (maybe made worse by a bad stomach ache and dark, overcast sky above). The main square did not really lift our spirits at all, and we hastily retreated back to our hostel, deciding that we did not want to explore Pisco any further. In the morning I was feeling better and we were only too happy to move on to Paracas.
All of the places we visited on the south coast in Peru felt pretty quiet, pretty far off the gringo trail, which was a welcome contrast from Cuzco (except for Pisco, which was TOO FAR off the trail). Paracas is a tourist town but seems like mostly domestic Peruvian tourists, it’s a pretty small and quiet place.

beautiful beach day in Paracas, Peru

sunset on the beach in Paracas

The town has only a few streets, no street numbers. It’s built along a pleasant stretch of beach, polka-dotted with bright umbrellas on sunny days, and there’s a promenade along the beach, lined with seafood restaurants and souvenir vendors selling the usual seashell necklaces and stuff. We got a quiet, breezy room on the roof of a pretty whitewashed hotel. Ate ceviche by the beach and listened to a really great old man who played afro-peruvian songs and some latin favorites (Besame Mucho, Quizas, Quizas) on guitar while we lunched. Waded in the water – Paracas is on a bay, so the water is calmer and warmer! Got caught up on work. Paracas doesn’t seem to have a real internet connection at all, I think the only connection is via wireless phone networks? There was one “internet cafe” which was tortuously slow but allowed me to get enough work done so I could get back to relaxing. In the hammock on the hotel roof, I finished the book that I’d started in the hospital in La Paz. Finished writing postcards. Felt like we were really on vacation. Enjoyed a few last days of calm and peace and quiet.
The major attraction near Paracas is the Islas Ballestas, a sanctuary for millions of birds and sea lions and other sea fauna. The Islas Ballestas are a group of rocky islands, home to Humboldt penguins, pelicans, boobies, sea lions and seals, among many other species!

pelican with penguin friends

pelicans kind of look like dinosaurs.

mama sea lion and baby sea lion

thousands of baby sea lions and parents! the sound here was incredible, they all bark and cry at once and make a giant crazy animal roar!

Peruvian Tern? and Candelabra geoglyphs

Humboldt penguins. Every year, around the time we visited, they molt and lose all their feathers, and can’t go swimming (and can’t catch fish to eat) for a few weeks. So they have to go a week or two without food while they wait for their new feathers grow back!

We caught a boat early in the morning from the beach in Paracas out to the Islas Ballestas; it was a two or three-hour trip in all. We passed The Candelabra, a mysterious geoglyph on the sand dunes (maybe created around the same time as the Nazca Lines?). It’s been there for thousands and thousands of years, nobody knows how they got there or who made them! And then we cruised around the islands admiring the zillions of birds and sea lions. It’s a sanctuary and breeding ground for many species, so visitors aren’t allowed to go on the island, just ride around in a boat. Every three years there is a legal guano harvest, hundreds of workers descend on the island to harvest the nutrient-rich bird poop that covers all the islands. The whole island has a pretty intense animal-poop smell, even from the boat. And the sounds are amazing – tons of sea lions breed on these islands, and we arrived in early summer, so there were thousands of babies and parents covering the beaches with shiny brown, flopping bodies, crying and calling and shouting – an unbelievable mass of animal noise. On our way back to town, a flock of pelicans flew overhead in V formation, then swooped down to playfully chase our speedboat – they caught up with us and swooped down beside us, cruising past the boat just inches above the water, one by one, and then flashing back up into the sky.

pelicans dive-bombing our speed boat

hiking in the Colca Canyon

There are about a zillion tour companies in Arequipa that offer hiking trips to the Colca Canyon. We tried to pick one that claimed to be eco-conscious and socially responsible, etc, and cost a bit more (hopefully to good end). We had to leave Arequipa at 3:00 in the morning! to reach the Colca Canyon by 8:30-ish. First stop, the high lookout point at Cruz del Condor, where we were rewarded with a spectacular view down into the canyon below, and saw a few enormous condors gliding casually overhead.

condor sighting at Cruz del Condor. I initially assumed that the giant birds come here because they nest nearby or something like that; actually, our tour guide later told us that the town puts out carrion around this area to attract the condors here and give us tourists our photo ops!

Then we headed on to the town of Cabanaconde for lunch, and met with our group of fellow hikers, seven in total. We were lucky to be there for the start of a big four-day holiday, and we caught a really bright parade marching through town with a brass band and a big float covered with millions of fresh flowers and fruits. Mischief and throwing water on people are part of the holiday too – we saw at least a dozen little kids armed with water guns and water balloons (luckily we missed getting soaked) and saw a shop-keeper lady run out of her store and empty a whole bucket of water over some guy’s head and run away, laughing crazily.

celebration of the Dia de La Virgen de Candelaria in Cabanaconde

Like all the small towns around Bolivia and Peru, there were lots of ladies wearing beautiful and bright traditional outfits. Even more so here because of the holiday, I think. In this area, skirts, blouses and especially hats are covered in finely detailed bright embroidery. Our guide, Pepe, explained that since pre-Inca times, the Colca Canyon has been occupied by two distinct indigenous groups, the Kollawa and the Cabanas, and they are still easily distinguished by different styles of hats – the ladies of one group all wear rounded, brightly embroidered hats; on the other side, they wear white hats, with a more squared-off shape. In pre-Incan times, each group deformed the skulls of their infants to create a distinct cranium shape – the hats they wear now still reflect the different skull shapes traditional in each group.
After lunch we headed out of town and Pepe got us a quick ride to the canyon’s edge with some dumptruck drivers who were headed our way.

hitching a ride in a dumptruck

From the edge of the canyon, we peered down, down, down to the river far below… and we could see a few towns perched on the steep canyon sides opposite us.

looking down

The path down started out gentle, and then got steeper and rockier as we went down. I think it took about three hours of steady, often pretty steep descent to get down to the bottom. It was a narrow path, covered in loose gravel, and next to the path, just… straight down… so it was a bit scary, and tiring on the knees!

steep descent

My legs were all shaky by the time we finally made it down to the river at the bottom. We crossed a hanging bridge, and then had to scramble up a really steep bit before we got to sit and rest under some trees.

hanging bridge

It had started to sprinkle rain on the way down and by the time we stopped to rest it was really raining. The opposite side of the canyon was kind of a whole different world. We’d been descending through dust and gravel, surrounded by rocks and cacti and brush… the other side of the canyon was green and lush, with peach trees and avocado trees, terraced farmland and rushing irrigation brooks. We had a nice hour of gentle climbing through thick green forest, past waterfalls and terraced farms. Then crossed another hanging bridge, and then straight up up up up, and the rain turned to a downpour, and it was all a little intense.

climbing up into the clouds

We were very relieved (and wet) when we finally got to our destination, a little farm in the tiny town of Cosñirhua. We all stayed in a few adobe rooms owned by an older couple, Mauricio and his wife, who helped Pepe cook up a delicious dinner for us. Hearty sopa de sustancia, delicious fresh avocado salad, and sweet potato fritters! They had a tiny little store with some packaged snacks and beer, we asked for a bottle of wine and they didn’t have any… but Mauricio said “wait, I think I might have something in my house for you.” He came back with a giant jar filled with brown stuff, the label said Strawberry Marmalade, but Mauricio said it was homemade peach Pisco! Inside there were a half-dozen small brown pickled-looking peaches floating around… At first I thought “Is that safe to drink?!” but Mauricio offered us a free sample and we thought it tasted just right, so we bought the whole jar and shared it round with all the tired hikers. Perfect.

this is where we stayed in Cosñirhua. All the towns around the canyon were decorated brightly for the Dia de La Virgen de Candelaria.

In the morning, the sun was out again. We breakfasted, did the ritual sunscreen-slathering, and headed back out on the trail. Pepe stopped along the way for a few show-and-tell stops, explaining the different cacti and their uses (the Tuna cactus has delicious fruit and the plants host Cochineal bugs which are widely used for natural dyes; the San Pedro cactus is used to create a hallucinogenic drug used in shamanic rituals) and pointing out different crops, picking strange fruits from the trees and sharing them with us. He seemed to know everyone in all the towns, and stopped to chat or hollered greetings as we walked past. In the next town over, the plaza was littered with charred firecracker papers and remains of the previous night’s Virgen de Candelaria festivities. We stopped to visit the health center and a small museum, and Pepe explained lots of details about local life in the small canyon towns.

a baby fox at the museum in Malata. (Atoc is the quechua name, i think)

mules on the path ahead

Then down, down, down again, back down to the river bottom and across another hanging bridge. During the descent we could see the crazy path zig-zagging up the opposite side of the canyon, where we’d have to climb up after lunch. It looked intimidating.

below, the oasis… and above, the path we will climb up!

On the other side of the canyon we stopped at a touristy little oasis and had a glorious splash in a swimming pool and sunned ourselves on a huge rock while Pepe cooked up our lunch. He’d warned us that the ascent would be really intense and tried to talk all of us into renting mules to ride up the canyon! He said “I don’t know why you pay money to hike and suffer! Peruvians never walk up the canyon, they ride mules. Only foreigners come here and pay to suffer, climbing up in the hot sun!” Eventually Mike and Marthe were convinced, and agreed to rent mules at the oasis to carry them up. The rest of us were either gluttons for punishment, or too scared to imagine riding up that steep path on the back of a mule. Maybe both.

Mike and his sweet ride!

After all that, it wasn’t so bad. Just a long, slow, steady, hot climb. Luckily the sky was cloudy so the sun wasn’t burning. The second half was pretty spectacular, with the sun sinking, Andes all around, and the canyon below. Pepe somehow got the idea that we were crazy daredevils, and asked “Do you want to take a detour to do some rock-climbing?” Our first response was “nononoNO!” but somehow we agreed to it. We took a 20-minute “shortcut” that was super intense, we were just scrambling straight up these rock faces, hand to rock and foot to rock and it took complete focus to just pay attention to where to find the next hold. I looked down and there was nothing there! and I got all dizzy and had to just think about going up. When we finally got back on the path, we were all pumped with adrenaline and realized that for 20 minutes we had totally forgotten we were tired and hot and had heavy packs and all that. So it was kind of an awesome detour.

alpine glow

At the very end of the trail, the sky turned crazy orange and red and we got a spectacular sunset show as we came over the top of the canyon.

crazy sunset

It felt like a celebration of our arrival! I was seriously SO tired by the time we got there but SO excited and exhilarated about having made it. A high point of the whole trip, in every sense! Walked back to town in the pitch dark and enjoyed some excellent hot showers, roasted fish, and soft beds.

patagonia!

April 2009: 6 days in the deep south of Argentina. Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, El Calafate, Glaciar Perito Moreno, El Chalten, Cerro Fitz Roy…

Day 1: it took us most of the day to get from Buenos Aires to El Calafate; we finally arrived at our hostel around 4:00 and then explored El Calafate. It’s a lot like Bariloche or any other Argentine touristy town; lots of fake-alpine architecture and chocolate shops and souvenirs. The view from our hostel was awesome, out over Lago Argentino to the mountains beyond.

Day 2: a visit to Perito Moreno Glacier and Parque Nacional Los Glaciares. We woke up bright & early and had a scenic two-hour bus ride through foothills and pastures and lakes, out from El Calafate to get to the park.

There’s an impressive series of boardwalks and platforms from which to admire the front edge of the glacier, watch little icebergs calving off from the icy mass and crashing into the lake below.

this ice is 400 years old! These spires of ice began as humid air moving east over the Pacific ocean and over Chile they condensed to clouds and then over the Andes they became snowflakes which fell on the Patagonian continental ice field and slowly made their way down to Argentina a few hundred years later. This is one of the only glaciers in the world that’s not receding. Between the melting and the giant icebergs constantly crumbling off the front end, it’s not really advancing either, but it’s more or less holding its own and neither advancing nor retreating.

After an hour or two of admiring the glacial action, we went to the tourist center and had a hot chocolate, then headed out for our hike across the glacier! We took a boat across the lake, then hiked along the lakeshore and up alongside the edge of the glacier.

Our herd of tourists split into smaller groups and we all strapped on crampons over our boots and gingerly marched, single-file, up onto the side of the glacier. From across the lake you see how massively wide it is, but from this vantage you realize how tall it is, like a giant ice mountain and all of the climbers are little tiny ants on its side.

The ice was all pebbly, just like crushed ice. Every now and then we came across crevasses where you could see deep into the ice, and it glows bright blue inside. The sun was surprisingly warm and there were rivers and lakes of melted glacier-water running all over the place.

Our guide told us to fill up our water bottles and drink from the puddles, it’s the purest water in the world! With the crampons it was really easy to climb up and down the ice. We had sweet views of the lake and mountains from atop the glacier. After clambering around for a while, we arrived at a little wooden chest nestled inbetween two great ice-drifts. Inside: a pile of hand-made chocolates, a bottle of whiskey and a dozen glasses; the guide scooped up glasses full of glacier ice and we each had a whiskey on the rocks and a tasty chocolate.

We were sleepy on the bus ride back to El Calafate but I was glad I stayed awake because it was the best colored sunset I have ever seen.

Day 3: bus ride to El Chalten and an afternoon hike to Laguna Capri brings us face-to-face with the mighty Cerro Fitz Roy.

Day 4: Blustery buckets of rain. Stayed inside the hostel knitting a scarf and cooked a pot of pea soup.

Day 5: hiked the Laguna Torre trail, a long but easy trail through amazingly bright fall foliage, and at the end a spectacular view of the laguna, Glaciar Torre, and the cloud-covered Cerro Torre. Snow flurry at the summit.

Day 6: bus back to El Calafate, had a few hours to relax in Calafate and then flew back home to Buenos Aires.

here are more pictures!!!

farm

mike was just showing me all these pictures. his friends work here, at this farm in Germantown, NY. it looks so nice it just about made me want to cry from missing farm life and vegetables and gardens and green. and they really make it look like fun.