Last Day In Lima
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And then there were two…
We’re the only ones left from our tour group of 12. We spent yesterday morning with Catherine and Brian, visiting the Rafael Larco Herrera private gallery of pre-Inca porn pottery. That’s not really what it’s called, but that’s what the ground floor of the gallery is – pottery figures of every kind of sexual act known between the living and the dead, and animals. Particularly amusing was the pottery depiction of sexually transmitted diseases – there was no beating around the bush (or maybe that’s all there was…) in the blatancy of the imagery. That’s not all there was to the gallery. There was also a very thorough collection of pottery depicting scenes, animals, objects and deities of importance to the every day life of pre-Inca civilization, gold and silver body adornments, woven textiles of incredible intricacy, but they were a little overshadowed by the enormous endowments of the pottery figurines downstairs. We left felling like we were walking underwater – it was all a little overwhelming but well worth the visit.
Back In Lima
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Hey!
We’re back from the Amazon Jungle. We really lucked out with the weather – it was relatively cool and we got to see a decent cross section of wild life – black cayman, toucans, parrots, budgies, monkeys, piranhas, squirrels the size of the foxes in Marathon, industrious leaf cutter ants, and an enormous friendly spider that hung out on our bathroom curtain (our guide thinks it was a wolf spider).
Last Night in Cusco
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We`re back from a four day hike on the Inca Trail, and the smell of us could have killed a pig at 50 meters. This did result in us getting great seats on the bus…
It was a fantastic hike of 45 km over 3 mountain passes (4200 m was the highest pass – the air was very thin, but it smelled thick in our vicinity…), past several impressive Inca ruins, up several less impressive endless sets of uneven stone Inca stairs, through cloud forest capped with glacial peaks, and finishing at Machu Picchu. We camped every night below the snow line and under the stars, and woke every morning to an incredible sun rise on the mountain peaks opposite us while the porters served us hot cocoa in our tents.
Puno and Lake Titicaca and Uros Islands
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We’re back in Puno after an overnight home stay with local families on an island in Lake Titicaca (this is the first time I’ve spelt the name correctly).
We took a dodgy old boat with a finicky diesel motor and no reverse (the captain cut the engine every time we approached shore, let us drift in, then poled us into position at the dock with a long stick). There were no gears – it was a running start every time we left dock – invariably followed by the motor cutting out because the captain forgot to prime it. It was pretty funny. We were all joking that we hoped the captain knew where he was going, and wasn’t going to turn around and ask us the name of the island we wanted to go to, and directions to get there.
Arrived in Puno, Peru
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You know, transit days are usually boring and there´s nothing to really write about, however; not so in Peru…
Yesterday in Quito, we had a free day to just goof off before we caught our flight to Lima. We (our travel friends: Sue, John, Bob, Catherine, & Brian – Holly & Kimberly were to take a later flight) were all flying to Lima, and transferring to the same hotel. This is a simple concept – the reality once we hit the ground in Lima was not so simple… thus begins the comedy of errors that the last two days has been.
