Lima, Peru

Last stop! Lima, Peru. We just had two-and-a-half days to see the capital city of Peru. Caught a morning bus from Paracas to Lima, arrived mid-day. Our hostel turned out to be incredibly beautiful, a huge old colonial house in the fancy Miraflores neighborhood. We were so lucky to find such a cheap, beautiful old place!!

our beautiful hostel in Lima

hostel in Miraflores

The neighborhood of Miraflores is pretty fancy and international, a world away from Camana or Cabanaconde. We were near a beautiful park, lots of fancy looking private schools and homes in old colonial buildings, some big stores like Falabela and Plaza Vea, some interesting art galleries and cultural centers.

paper sculptures. centro cultural, Miraflores

nice garden. American high school, Miraflores

I think at this point in our journey we were simultaneously trying to enjoy our last days of traveling and freedom, and also looking forward to our imminent move with tons of excitement and anxiety and muchas ganas de hacerlo, YA! (that is, a great desire to get this thing done already!) We had some beautiful walks around the neighborhood and passed some nice afternoons writing postcards over coffee, reading and working quietly in cafes, shopping in artesan markets and eating DELICIOUS foods. Miraflores has lots of good food to offer! We had sushi, yakitori, snails, green tea ice cream and other delights at a Japanese place near our hostel one night. Saturday we ventured into downtown Lima, which was a kind of long cab ride, we had to take the highway. It’s a whole different onda in the center, more old and colonial, much more gritty and crowded and busy. We visited the famous Chinatown, got some delicious street food (sticky buns with pork & cabbage inside, fried rolls and crunchy things) and tasty cans of lychee juice. Visited the huge Mercado Municipal nearby. Had to wait for the restaurants to open for lunch so we wasted twenty minutes and a few quarters on the slot machines at the casino on the main peatonal in Chinatown. It was the day before Chinese New Year, so the barrio was really busy and festive and we got to see a parade with lots of loud drums and dragons passing by.

The butcher section of the mercado municipal. Lima, Peru

lunch counter. Mercado Municipal, Lima

parade in Chinatown

A few weeks have passed now that I’m writing this… my favorite memories of Lima are that beautiful hostel, walks around Miraflores on sidewalks shaded by huge trees, admiring the colonial mansions… eating a donut and drinking lots of iced teas (both are rare delicacies for an Estadounidense in South America!)… generally trying to take it easy for a few short days after a long series of adventures! … and lots of conversations with Mike about the end of our South American exploits and how soon we’d be moving back to Maine, what we expected and hoped for in our new lives, nervousness about the big move, hopes and dreams! Big stuff.

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.

Cuzco part 2

Mercado Municipal in Cuzco, Peru. Every town and city we’ve visited has its own version of the public market, which is like a farmer’s market, the supermarket, the butcher, and the dollar store, all rolled into one, plus they have rows of lunch counters that serve hot and tasty homemade soups and cheap meals. The variety of merchandise is amazing and overwhelming! This place also had tailors, stalls that sell fabrics and notions, and lots of fancy traditional costumes for sale.

On our last day in town, we happened to wander off into the “other” Cuzco, that is, the less touristy side of town where the locals hang out. It was a totally different story! We poked around the Mercado Municipal, a big colorful public market just like the ones we’ve visited in almost every town along our trip – but this one was the biggest, and filled with tantalizing arroz chaufa and other favorite peruvian dishes on offer at the lunch counters.

a plethora of juice vendors!

pig head for sale

Beyond the market, we found a maze of smaller markets and shops, streets filled with vendors, etc… It was great to see a livelier and more genuine side to the city.

busy streets behind the Mercado Municipal in Cuzco

baby chickens for sale

Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

Isla del Sol panorama. Seen from the Puerta del Sol, Yumani, towards the southern end of the island. Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

Arrived in Copacabana, Bolivia, on the shore of Lake Titicaca on Monday, I think? We accidentally got ourselves booked into a really fancy hotel, which was nice because (like everywhere we’ve visited in Bolivia) Copacabana is freezing cold and we had the luxury of an electric heater AND hot shower in our room. You can’t even imagine what a welcome treat that was.
Copacabana is a little tourist town on the shore of Lake Titicaca, with lots of tourist boats in the harbor and beautiful views along the lake and the green hilly shores.

brightly colored boats. At the beach in Copacabana, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.

I’m about to start working(!), the semester will begin on Monday Feb. 1st, so I took half a day to start preparing my online curriculum, and the other half of the day to relax a bit and wander around town. Bought more warm clothes at some of the many touristy shops.
The next day, we had considered doing a 17-km hike along the lakeshore, but upon further research, the “hiking trail” is actually just walking along an auto road, so we decided to skip it and head straight out to Isla del Sol instead. We took an hour-and-a-half ferry ride on a big motorboat, arriving at the town of Yumani, on the southern end of the island. From the ferry docks we had to climb up the astoundingly huge “Inca Staircase” to get up to the town.

had to climb up a zillion stairs to get from the ferry dock up to the town. At 3800 meters elevation, it was pretty hard to breathe, let alone climb up this many stairs!

Isla del Sol, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

Isla del Sol is a beautiful, green, rocky island in Lake Titicaca, covered with Incan ruins. Supposedly the Incan sun god was born here. There are no cars or roads, the population is about 800 families spread amongst several towns. The land all around the towns is covered in beautifully terraced farmland, and the streets and front yards of the towns are filled with donkeys, pigs, sheep, and llamas.

busy streets on Isla del Sol

We identified lots of quinoa and potato plants, and many fields planted with some other crop that I couldn’t identify. I expected the island to be more touristy; the towns were certainly busy with backpackers, but the island itself is so beautiful that it wasn’t overwhelming, and it seems like the people in the towns also do lots of farming and fishing, in addition to hosting travellers from around the world.

town and terraced farmland. Isla del Sol, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

We stayed the night in an icky hospedaje (our room was unfortunately flooded and moldy and of course freezing cold!) with a beautiful front terrace overlooking the town of Yumani and the lake below. Took an afternoon hike down to the southernmost tip of the island where we visited some Incan ruins, El Templo del Sol.
Hiked back in time for a heartbreakingly beautiful sunset, with the orange light reflecting off the sides of Mt. Illimani in the distance. Ate roasted lake trout for dinner! Mike read somewhere that trout and kingfish were introduced to Lake Titicaca in the 1930′s, to bring more protein into the local diet.

alpine light on Mt. Illimani, with the Isla de la Luna in middle ground. Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

In the morning we were very excited to get out of our icky room bright and early, even though it was pouring rain. We loaded up our backpack and pulled on plastic ponchos over our warmest clothing. Hiked out of town on the trail that leads to the northern end of the island.

hiking trail, Isla del Sol, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

Despite the rain it was a really fantastically beautiful hike, along the tops of all the highest peaks on the island. From such a height, we could see the island spread out below us to either side, the lake and through occasional breaks in the clouds, the surrounding mountains in the distance.

rainy view along the coastline of the Isla del Sol. Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.

By the time we made it to the northern end of the Island, the rain let up a little bit. We wanted to catch the last boat back to Copacabana, so we didn’t have time to visit the island’s biggest Incan ruins, but we felt like the hike up there had been reward enough in itself.
We were exhausted and fell asleep on the ferry ride back to Copacabana.

puma-headed reed boat carrying tourists around Lake Titicaca. Copacabana, Bolivia

Had a fancy dinner overlooking the lake, and enjoyed a good night’s sleep in a dry hostel. In the morning we caught a bus (again, in the pouring rain!) to Cuzco, Peru.

Southwest Bolivia jeep tour

We left Tupiza early, in a Land rover with our driver Santos and his wife Silvia(?) and a young Argentine couple from Buenos Aires (Laura and Fernando; we were randomly put together but they turned out to be really nice). Drove out of town up a dry riverbed, and passed workers repairing a damaged section of the train line (the one that we’d hoped to take to Tupiza). We passed red cliffs and bounced up a steep, rock and gravel switchback road before stopping to look out at the Sillar de San Pablo de Lípez, where the earth drops away steeply on either side of the road, and there are crazy red rock formations carved by rainfall, I guess. The land is so steep and dry, I think whenever it rains everything just floods and crumbles away.

Sillar San Pablo de Lípez

Then onwards in a bumpy, hairpin ascent. As we all gasped and tittered about the scary road, Santos turned back and said “Don´t worry about it, I’m a great driver, you’re going to be completely safe!” with a huge grin. We bounced and jostled up and up and up, passed grazing llamas and rock corrals on the hillsides, went through one tiny town with adobe houses and terraced gardens and a single baby llama wandering in the street. We had a delicious picnic lunch (tamales and sandwiches) and climbed about on the hills a bit (slowly, in the thin high air), then jostled onwards.

grazing llamas with curious babies

high up, walking

our trusty jeep and Silvia preparing lunch

We stopped in a bigger town, San Vicente, which had a military base, a town hall, a church, and maybe 20 or 30 adobe houses. This is the capital of the Lípez province! (Population of Lípez is maybe 50,000 people and many many llamas.) Bumping onwards, the sky got darker and we could see rain in the distance, then spectacular lightning in the mountains ahead.

thunderstorm ahead

We pulled into San Antonio de Lípez (altitude 4,200 meters, population 430 people) around 5:00 and dragged our packs down from the roof of the jeep just as it started to hail. We’d left Tupiza amongst a caravan of other tour jeeps, but hadn’t seen much of the other jeeps all day; now they all turned up in the same town but stayed in different houses scattered around the village. We had a cozy tea time, then when the hail stopped we climbed up the nearby hill to see the town, watched a raucous, impromptu basketball game (tourists vs. local kids and dogs) and then Silvia served us a tasty dinner in one of the adobe rooms. Fell asleep under thick heavy piles of alpaca wool blankets, in very uncomfortable beds that were beautifully stenciled with bright flower patterns.

sunset in San Antonio de Lípez

Woke up at 5:30 am and had a breakfast of crackers and tea. Everyone was looking pretty wilted from altitude and restless sleep. We bounced off as the sun rose, and stopped at the ruins of the old San Antonio, an impressive town of many roofless, crumbling stone buildings, dark in the valley with the early sunlight burning orange on the mountain peaks above. Santos told us some old tale about two devils that lived in the town, and something about decadence and divorces and immoral living and some kind of curse – in explanation for why the town was abandoned. There were two different church buildings, one older and one newer, and it seemed like various parts of the town had been used and abandoned at different times since the 16th century. The newest buildings were from a fruitless mining exploration in the 1960′s. The town’s cemetery still had newish plastic flowers and Santos said that the farm families in the surrounding hillsides still bury their dead in that cemetery.

the old church, ruins of San Antonio de Lípez

ruins of San Antonio de Lípez with morning sun on the mountains beyond

Then onwards, up and down hills over dirt and mud roads, jiggling and bouncing mercilessly in the back of the jeep. Mike was feeling really sick and miserable and slept on my lap a lot. We stopped at a few different weirdly-colored lagoons, encrusted with natural borax or salt deposits around the edges and filled with flamingos. I had no idea that borax existed in nature like this, nor that flamingos were such fans of fetid-looking, crusty salty lagoons in the desert.

Laguna Verde. The green color comes from copper, chloride and some other minerals in the soil. In the wilderness of Lípez, southwest Bolivia

orange desert

Everything about the lagoons was beautiful but weird and sort of poisonous-looking. The strange colors of the various lagoons come from different minerals present in the soil. At mid-day we stopped at a natural hot spring to go swimming! It was my first time in a hot spring and I was super excited about it. It was hot and felt SO GOOD but then I got dizzy after a while and had to stagger out.

swimming in the hot springs

pastel paisaje. view from the hot springs.

Then onwards to more weird colored lagoons, then some stinky, sulfury geysers. We felt really fatigued from all the bouncy driving and were very happy to get to our night’s lodging, a spartan hospedaje in the middle of nowhere. We had a fantastic dinner from Silvia, and met some other nice backpackers from various parts of the world. By bed-time Mike felt much better but I felt bad and I had a horrible, sickly, sleepless night.
Next morning we got to sleep in until 6:00, then headed off to see the Laguna Colorada, the biggest and most spectacular of all the salt lakes. It is bright red because of algae that thrives in the warm, mineral-rich, salty water. There are three dormant volcanoes reflected in the red lagoon.

Laguna Colorada & volcano

a bubbling hot spring. Laguna Colorada, Southwest Bolivia

we saw a thousand flamingos at their breeding ground. Laguna Colorada in the wilderness of Lípez, southwest Bolivia

It’s also home to gazillions of flamingos, all three of the South American flamingo species go there to breed every year. Then onwards through smooth, sandy desert. Stopped to see a grouping of weirdly-shaped volcanic rocks, including the Arbol de Piedra (Rock Tree).

El Arbol de Piedra

Then we drove on and on and on, descending in elevation, and even Santos complained that the roads were horrible. We stopped for lunch in a lava field, an undulating sea of strange red forms, tons of rock formations to climb, nooks and crannies and archways and in the distance, an active volcano trailing a wisp of smoke from the cone.

mike. lava fields

We stopped in a little town of San Juan and saw a museum about the indigenous history of the area, quinoa farming, and the local historic practices of mummification. On the road out of town we were hailed down by a group of confused Czech guys driving their own jeep (on all of these roads, the only vehicles we pass are farmers or other jeep tours) who asked which way to Chile. Santos said “See that mountain over yonder? Go there, and then Chile is to the left.” I translated this into English for them and then they headed off into the dust, apparently satisfied with the directions. We crossed a small salt flat and then the road hugged a wall of elaborately-shaped cliffs. Long long long ago, when the salt flat used to be an inland sea, these cliffs were the rocky shores and they were completely covered by coral; the elaborately shaped rocks are coral skeletons, and if you look way up above, you can see the line where they stop was once the water level. Our night’s lodging was a “hotel” built entirely from salt, perched up among the cliffs. It was super basic but really cozy and comfortable and we were both immensely thankful for and improved by a good night’s sleep.
On the last day, we had to get up at 4:30 am in time to load up the jeep and get out into the grand Uyuni Salt Flats in time for the sunrise. The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world; it’s just white and white and white and white and flat in every direction as far as the eye can see. As the sun started to creep above the horizon, tiny blue lines of mountains appeared in the distance, one by one. We spent the day putzing around the salt flats, running and taking silly photos on the blank background. We stopped at a coral-and-cactus-covered island, Isla de Pescado (because when seen from the air it looks like a fish shape). There’s a pretty fancy visitor setup there, a beautiful hiking trail that goes up to the top of the island. Looking down from above, it really looks like the island is surrounded by ocean. When we climbed back down, a dozen or more jeeps had arrived and the picnic area was swarming with backpackers. (a lot of shorter tours leave from Uyuni so as we got close to Uyuni we started seeing a lot more jeeps). Silvia served us a last delicious picnic breakfast feast, and we got acquainted with a very friendly ostrich who was apparently brought out to the island as a wee chick and left there (poor thing), and now he makes his living begging and stealing snacks from tourists. As we cooed and snapped photos of him, the guides shooed him away and said “watch out! he’ll steal anything he can get his hands on.” After breakfast, we went on through the salt flats, and again we could see nothing but white in every direction. The driving was mercifully smooth over the flat, hard salt. We made it all the way to the opposite end of the flats, stopped at a little salt-processing town for lunch, and then were dropped off in Uyuni, saying fond goodbyes to our guides and fellow travelers. Very very very excited to take a warm shower (first in five days!) and filled with an inexplicably intense urge to eat some pizza.

Tupiza, Bolivia

Arrived in Tupiza, Bolivia (elevation 3,160 meters) on Jan. 9th, late at night, after a long, bumpy bus ride out of Villazon. The only road isn’t much of a road, it’s just a collection of tire tracks across dried mud flats. Sometimes the double-decker bus pitched down into a ravine, and then the driver would stop and get out to check the depth of the river before driving through the water and up out the other side. After dark fell, I was constantly imagining the road to be even scarier than it probably was. We stopped halfway through for dinner; beside the road there was a shelter and a line of ladies with steaming pots of stew and rice. Hungry passengers piled out and, after choosing a tasty stew, were handed an enameled metal bowl and spoon to slurp their dinner standing up, then hand the bowl back to the proprietor. It looked pretty good but we’d already eaten (another) roast chicken before boarding so we weren’t hungry. We got in to Tupiza exhausted from the scary bus ride and the elevation and crawled straight into bed at a hostel.
When we woke up in the morning we saw that the hills and cliffs around Tupiza (which had looked gray in the night-time) were bright red and orange and stripey. We felt pretty feeble and spent most of the day in Tupiza resting and drinking lots of water. I think the altitude has really made both of us sickly and easily tired; it´s hard to say because traveling is exhausting anyway, but I think the altitude makes us feel breathless and sort of dazed and slow-moving all the time. We try to deal with it by relaxing a lot and not demanding much of ourselves (which is how vacation should be anyway). We started taking altitude-sickness pills in Tupiza (they call it MAL DE ALTURA) which made our hands and feet tingle oddly. And we try to drink coca-leaf tea, which is supposed to help too.
When we ventured out in the late afternoon to explore Tupiza, we found a small and pretty city, the fancier buildings with smooth painted facades and plainer buildings with exposed adobe brick walls. The adobe bricks kind of look like they’re melting in the rain, but since it doesn’t rain much here I guess they’re pretty durable. Like most of the towns we’ve visited in Bolivia and Northern Argentina, there’s a glorious church and municipal building facing the main plaza (Tupiza’s plaza is big and lush with trees and grass), a touristy part and a locals part to the city.

the main municipal building in Tupiza, Bolivia

Tupiza street, mountains in the distance. The streets were all pretty deserted because it was a Sunday afternoon.

Hairdresser shop, Tupiza, Bolivia

The tourist district has hotels and hostels, gift shops selling hand crafts, and at least 8 pizza restaurants boasting American/European style meals (Pizza! Breakfast! Porridge! Pancakes! Burgers!). Then the rest of the town is devoted to local commerce and houses. The restaurants outside of the tourist area seem to all serve stews and soups, and roasted chicken. Probably other stuff too, but we haven’t figured it out yet. The town markets are always fantastic, with tons of stalls selling fruits and veggies, dried corn and grains and pastas, packaged snacks and colorful plastic goods of all kinds, all manned by sleepy-looking ladies or kids.

market in Tupiza. Evo Morales (Bolivia’s first indigenous president) was recently re-elected so there are Evo campaign materials everywhere.

Most of the ladies in Bolivia wear the most amazing styles, a bowler hat or straw hat, long braid or braids, sweater or pinafore/apron thing, and a knee-length gathered skirt with a sort of built-in bustle thing that makes the hips look wide, and orangey-colored thick tights with sandals. I am a big fan of this style but I feel odd about photographing people I don’t know, especially in a weird objectifying touristy way, so I haven’t taken pictures. I wish I could wear the same outfit but I think I would look totally ridiculous in it, so I just admire!

crossing the border to Bolivia

We turned up in La Quiaca yesterday evening and stayed in a weird but clean and cheap hotel for the night. Woke up early to make the border crossing, in hopes of getting to the train station in time to get tickets for this afternoon’s train. The border crossing was OK, waited in line with a bunch of other backpackers to exit Argentina, then walked across a high bridge and waited in another line to enter Bolivia. Wish we’d known in advance that we were supposed to have brought extra passport photos for our Bolivia tourist visa, but we got it worked out without too much trouble.

crossing the bridge that separates La Quiaca, Argentina from Villazon, Bolivia

Immediately across the border into Bolivia, the city got kind of crazy and intense! The street is super crowded, there are tons of money-changing places and little shops offering every possible kind of bright colored plastic stuff, giant sacks of coca leaves, old ladies dressed in skirts and bowler hats, squatting beside the street selling steaming pots of stew and rice that looks delicious. Intense smells of stewing meat, sweet kool-aid smells, and toxic solvent smells all mixed together. We tripped over a furry little severed-goat-foreleg which was lying in the middle of the street. We made our way up from the border into Villazon, and took a long sweaty walk with our stupid heavy packs all the way to the train station, to find that it’s closed – train service is suspended because of heavy rains. Backtracked to the bus station and bought tickets for the next train to Tupiza, checked our packs in the very dodgy looking bus station (As of press date I am not sure whether or not we will ever see our packs again. I will admit that I would be a bit relieved to find them gone). Then we had 9 hours to kill in Villazon. Wandered into the public market which was honestly really awesome and fun. Another crazy jumble of people and things and foods and smells and sounds. People speak spanish here, but we also heard indigenous dialects (probably Quechua?) that we couldn’t understand. There are tons of used clothes for sale here, stuff that comes from the United States with aid organizations, a lot of the items still have Salvation Army pricetags on them. We bought watermelon slices, roasted chicken, and since I’m almost done with my knitting project I got supplies for my next project- an embroidery hoop and floss, and a few used t-shirts to practice embroidery on. They sell everything in the market, it’s great. Then we hunkered down on a park bench to read and embroider for a while. Good, relaxing Saturday afternoon!

our first (and second) meal in Bolivia: roasted chicken. Pretty tasty. Note the Bolivian version of coca-cola which came with our meal.

we waited for a bus in the attic above the bus station. There was a pay bathroom (two Bolivianos = US$0.28) where you have to scoop water out of a giant bucket and dump it in the toilet bowl to flush. The waiting room doubled as the youth boxing club; they were setting up for a boxing match but unfortunately we had to catch our bus before the match started.

Quebrada de Humuhuaca

The Quebrada de Humuhuaca is the name of the valley that stretches from the town of Yala, north of the city of San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina, up to the city of Humuhuaca, Argentina. AR Route 9 follows the Rio Grande up through the valley, and around the river is green and lush, while the mountains above are dry and dusty, with lots of cacti and brush and not much other vegetation. The valley is oriented more or less north-south, and as you drive north the elevation increases steadily. Purmamarca is near the southern end, Tilcara is around the middle, and the city of Humuhuaca is near the northern end. In between there are a few smaller towns, and a few groups of adobe houses, with farmers herding goats and llamas and growing corn and potatoes in terraced gardens.

Waking up in Purmamarca, we had a nice breakfast of bollo (homemade bread) and cafe con leche, then hiked up a big cliff to look out across the town of Purmamarca to the famous Cerro de Siete Colores, a stripey colored mountain behind the village.

climbing up

Purmamarca and the Cerro de Siete Colores

Driving around the Cerro de Siete Colores

Purmamarca Cemetery

Before leaving town, we took a drive around a kind of sketchy dirt road that goes around the Cerro de Siete Colors and stopped at the amazing and beautiful town cemetery. We decided to take a side-trip to visit the Salinas Grandes salt flats a few hours west of Purmamarca, along the road towards Chile. To get to the salt flats we had to basically drive up out of the river valley and across the mountain range, onto the high altiplano. It’s a crazy switchback stretch of road called the Cuesta de Lipan, it’s a really dramatic ascent (the high point of the pass is 4,170 meters) but the road is two lanes and it’s in good condition.

Cuesta de Lipan

above the clouds

Salinas Grandes salt flats

We saw lots of llamas and vicuña and goats grazing happily among the cacti on the steep dry hills, and looking back over the road we could see clouds far below us. The Cuesta de Lipan ascends about 1,978 meters in elevation, then descends another 800 meters to the salt flats, over 17 kilometers of driving, which our tiny little rental car managed happily with Mike at the wheel. The salt flats are weird and unwelcoming, as soon as we arrived I felt blasted by heat and light and had to fight the urge to retreat as fast as possible. I remember feeling the same way when I drove through the salt flats in Utah long ago, it just feels intensely alien and unfriendly. We wrapped scarves and towels around our heads to fight the sun and glare, and wandered around a bit. There are square pools of salt water where salt has been harvested and water has seeped into the square hole. The salt underfoot is crunchy and crackly. There were some cool crystallized chunks of salt lying around. Unbelievably, there were some guys there selling handcrafts carved from salt blocks. They all had t-shirts wrapped around their heads too. I can’t imagine spending the whole day working there, yikes.
After the salt flats we had to descend by the same road again, and then headed further along the valley to Tilcara, another town along the Quebrada de Humuhuaca. It’s a slightly bigger tourist town, cute but a bit overstuffed with other backpackers. We found a place to stay at the local cooperative schoolhouse! The kids are on summer vacation, so they put beds in the classrooms and rent the little schoolhouse to travelers! It was a perfect place for us, with a kitchen and a barbecue in the back yard and beautiful fruit trees and gardens that the kids had planted. We felt super comfy and ended up staying a few nights in Tilcara.

our schoolhouse home in Tilcara

our schoolhouse home in Tilcara

There was lots of music and festivities for Three Kings Day, which I believe is a big holiday in all of Latin America. There were tons of kids in costumes marching around to drum and flute music all day, and there was a stage with performances in the town square, and there was a maypole dance which kind of blew my mind because I thought that maypoles were just a european folk tradition, I had no idea there were maypole dances in the Andes!

Three Kings Day in Tilcara

One day we did a great hike to a canyon with a waterfall called El Garganta del Diablo, it’s a 12km hike there and back, and there are really amazing views of the valley and striped mountains, there were only a few steep parts but it felt like we were so incredibly high up, we could look waaaayyy down into canyons below us and across to the pastel rows of mountains beyond.

Andrew and Vickie hike home from La Garganta del Diablo

Garganta del Diablo waterfall

Another day we climbed up to the Pukara, which is the site of a pre-incan walled city that’s been excavated and partially reconstructed by archaeologists from the University of Buenos Aires. The site is covered in cacti, with a maze of low stone houses that look very tidy and new. It was incredibly windy and surprisingly cold up there so I spent a lot of our visit hiding in the little stone huts trying to stay warm.

Salta, Jujuy

Friday afternoon (New Years day), we left Buenos Aires by sleeper bus. Traveling with Andrew and Vickie for this week, two of our friends who are visiting from New York. Our bus arrived in Salta on Saturday afternoon and we checked into Grandma’s hostel. Wandered around town in the rain, ate empanadas, tamales and humita (all regional specialties. Humita is cheesy creamy sweet corn mixture, wrapped in a corn husk and steamed). Went to visit two insanely ornate churches and spent some moments contemplating the intensity and strangeness of these looming, over-wrought and slightly creepy places.

the spectacularly fancy Convento de San Francisco, Salta

another grand and elaborate church in Salta

The sky cleared a bit and we went for a hike up the Cerro San Bernardo. The path is a steep, twisting stone stairway punctuated by prayer shrines every few hundred meters, each one representing one of the 14 stations of the cross. I think Salta seems very religious compared to Buenos Aires. It was a long, sweaty climb (1,070 stairs! winding through lush jungly forest) with beautiful views out across the city. At the top there’s a park with spectacular panoramic views and more Jesus stuff. We rode the gondola car back down and then wandered off to dinner.

We walked up the 1,070 steps to the top of the hill! And then rode the gondola cars back down.

Roasted goat for dinner in Salta

Ate roasted goat and locro (more Salteño specialties – locro is a tasty stew) and then went to listen to some folklorico music at a place recommended by our taxi driver called La Casona del Molino, it was a beautiful and crowded place with casual, spontaneous music performances, I wish we’d stayed longer. Had to wake up early for the bus to Jujuy. Two hour bus ride, then rented a car and headed out of town. Tried to visit the hot springs at Termas de Reyes but it was mysteriously closed.

Hot springs closed, waded in the icy river instead.

river valley near Yala

Waded in the river, drove onwards towards Purmamarca. Spectacular scenery as we passed Yala, as green lush river gorge turned to dramatic gravel and rock canyon, carved by water.

Quebrada de Humuhuaca

Turned up in Purmamarca and explored town, checked out the touristy handcrafts at the market and found a cheap hospedaje to sleep for the night. Purmamarca is a little tourist town with brightly colored, striated reddish mountains for a backdrop, situated in this lovely gorge, very photogenic. We discovered that we were sunburned and exhausted and hungry, went out to get dinner at a peña around the corner (peña is a place to listen to folklorico music). Had goat stew (thinking of the many cute little flocks of goats and sheep we’d encountered in the middle of the road during our days’ drive) and more locro and tamales. The peña started out a bit somber but got louder and more fun as the hour got later, with dancing and clapping and singing along. Sleepy and ready for bed now. I think we’ll go for a hike tomorrow morning, then we might head further up the gorge towards Tilcara, we’ll see.