Our trip to Peru was awesome, I'd love to spend several thousand words describing it, but I know how hard long posts are to read and how boring I can get. Plus I'm not really sure how to describe two such diverse weeks, so I'll just post some entertaining bits:
- Iquitos, where Melissa's grandparents live and where we spent week #1, is the world's largest city which is inaccessible by road.
- The moto-rickshaws that serve as taxi's in Iquitos consistently charged Melissa, myself, and her cousin Janette 25% more than normal fare for a ride. Supposedly it's because they thought I was down there stealing their women and they were exacting their revenge.
- We had no running water the whole week we were in Iquitos, which is in the middle of the Amazon rain-forest. Hello bucket showers.
- In Iquitos there are no readily available sources of dairy.
- Lima, the capital of Peru, reminds me of a giant, dirty version of Oakland. It wasn't pretty.
- I am too big for Peru, I couldn't stand up on buses, I made motocarros list to whatever side I was on, and if I didn't duck I'd hit my head on almost every door frame in the country.
- Cusco is a really cool city. We stayed here. In the highest room, at the highest hotel, in the highest city in Peru. We got winded every time we walked back to our room.
- On the second day of our trek to Machu Picchu we crossed the Incachiriaska Pass, which is over 16,000ft. It was hard, I'd walk twenty feet, catch my breath, then repeat. The people who crossed the pass that afternoon and the next day had to do it in a foot of snow.
- If you walk for most of a day in a nice thick jacket and get a little wet and sweaty you'll smell bad later. Really bad.
- I'm no boy scout. I set my tent up poorly on the second night, when it rained pretty hard and Melissa and I spent the night on a small lake.
- Our tent and sleeping bags were great, despite the rain and the poor set up we were warm and dry every night, we were the only warm ones the first night.
- Machu Picchu is well deserving of every good thing you can say about it, it's awesome. Not only is the site cool enough alone, but it's sitting up at the top of incredibly steep and sheer mountains which are covered in thick, jungle vegetation. It's just amazing.
- The United States of America is the best country ever.
