Wanderlust

Gina. Bahia de Caraquez, Peru.

We got to Bahia last night and are now settling into life with Planet Drum (the organization Steve´s volunteering with). So far we´ve met the other two people in the apartment and some locals who help out, Steve did a mini day of labor, and we went to the market and had a yummy lunch of homemade (Steve-made) guacamole with chips and half of a cantaloupe. It was yummy, but not as good as our dinner last night at a little oceanside restaurant where we had enough food for 2 more people after eating our fill of seafood rice (Steve´s with shrimpies and mine with tons of squid, shrimp, and baby octopus. I feel a little bad eating baby octopus. I guess I shouldn´t since I don´t feel bad about eating pigs and they´re more human-like in emotions, but I still do. I won´t stop though because they´re really good!). Tomorrow I´m going to try to check out some volunteer opportunities for me and Spanish classes while Steve waters trees.

But this is supposed to be a post about finances. We´ve been really good about keeping track of our spending. I have a little day planner that has really helped. Since I already had our budget broken down by how much lodging, food, and sundries would cost each day (see updated budget post) it´s been easy to keep up with those amounts each day to make sure we stay at or under them. Which doesn´t mean we haven´t splurged from time to time, but my budget has turned out pretty accurate so far so we´ve also ¨banked¨a lot of unused daily budget money that we´ll spend on fun stuff later on. I also took our long-distance travel budget which I had as one big lump sum for the year and broke it down into $500 total for the three months in S. America. And I combined replacement clothes, books and maps, and sourvenirs into one category called Extras and broke it down to $400 total for S. America since they were also lump sums for the whole year.

So, the way we´re organizing things is that on each day block in our organizer we have something that looks like this:

• L (for Lodging)
• F (for Food)
• S (for Sundries)
• T (for long distance travel)
• X (for Extras)

And whenever we buy something we just write down the total and add it up at the end of the day. We then take our daily budget of $32 (for L, F, and S) and figure out if we went over or were under for the day. Then we keep a running tally from day to day of how much we have ¨Banked¨so then we can splurge and not feel guilty. We also transfer the T & X amounts to another page in the organizer to keep a running total of how much we´re spending for those since they´re total S. America amounts not daily amounts.

Here´s how things looked for S. America. Since their currency is nuevo soles we underestimated how many soles were the equivalent of our dollar budget. That way we were being conservative with the exchange rate since it changes. When we arrived it was around 2.6, then it went up to almost 3, then back down to 2.8. We decided to average out that it was about 2.7 soles to the dollar as far as our converting things to dollars in retrospect, but at the time we were working on a low 2.5 exchange rate assumption (we eventually added 6 soles to our daily budget when it got close to 3 soles to the $).

Hopefully for the next month we´ll save a lot of money since Planet Drum is really inexpensive. We´ll need to buy food and anything else we need, but we don´t have to really pay for lodging or any big ¨volunteering¨expenses. So depending on what I end up doing and how much Spanish lessons cost us, we should be able to easily stay way under budget and splurge on some cool jungle time and other touristy things that we´ve done a good deal of but definitely not everything we could have done. I´m looking forward to sleeping in the same bed for more than 1 or 2 nights and just living for a while. Hopefully I won´t get too cranky in the heat! It´s not Alabama quality heat, but it´s still pretty hot and humid especially when you have no AC and no fan! But there are lots of windows in the apartment and it´s on the second floor so it gets a pretty good breeze (or at least it did today). We´re getting closer to the ecuator all of the time and will one day do the obligatory tourist ecuator straddle at the big Ecuador ecuator monument. Steve definitely has a thing for peninsulas since 1) he´s from San Francisco a pretty famous city on a peninsula and 2) he picked Bahia as our place to reside for the next month and it is a much smaller peninsula (we walked around it this afternoon) with the Pacific on one side and a river on the other. He´s just a water guy, I guess. The two other guys in the house are into surfing, so I´m sure there will be lessons or silly attempts in our future. I´ll try to get some good photos of Steve wiping out!

Gina. Puerto Lopez, Ecuador.

Yesterday was a bad day. Things started out nicely on Saturday night. We met a bunch of people at all hostel from all over the world (Spain, Holland, Switzerland, and Australia) and everyone was nice and talkative and we had fun talking about places we´ve been in S. America, future plans, and just chatting. We also learned to play a fun Israeli game called Yaneev (no idea how to spell that) which I was ridiculously bad at. We stayed up late and had plans to get up in the morning and take a boat ride to see blue-footed boobies, whales, and go snorkeling.

But then things went downhill. Neither of us could sleep–it was hot and we had spent a good portion of the evening drinking Argentinian tea with a Dutch guy named Steve who was sort of the center of the gathering. In retrospect I never should have drank any of the tea since I don´t ever really consume caffeine and who knows how much it had in it. And then at some point in the wee hours of the morning I got sick. It turns out that my pharmacy of medication I have to take for the parasite and the bacterial infection all have nausea and vomiting as the first two possible side effects. I spent most of the night feeling nauseous and the rest of the night vomiting. No fun at all. At some point Steve shifted in his sleep and I felt violently ill and I realized there was no way I was going to get on a boat in a couple of hours. I decided that Steve should try to get our money back or reschedule for the next day and if he couldn´t he should go since it´d suck to be out $40.

He ended up getting $15 back for me (which was fine since originally they were going to charge us $25 each but went down to $20) and went on his own. I spent the day sleeping, eating very bland crackers (more bland than Saltines if you can believe it, and they were perfect for my upset stomach), and still taking my stupid medicine every 8 hours. Thankfully I didn´t get sick any more after the night, but I had no energy and felt like crap.

Steve had an adventure of his own. There were supposed to be 4 other people going with Wiston Churchill on his boat. 3 others didn´t show up, so it was just Steve and some other guy. Because they wouldn´t make enough money to cover costs by taking out only two people, they found another tour boat about to leave that would take Steve and the other dude. Why they didn´t just give Steve back his money or try to reschedule us for the next day, I´ll never understand. There were three things that they promised us for the trip: whale watching, snorkeling, and seeing the birds. Their big pitch was that unlike other tour companies that just go out looking for whales and come back as soon as they see them, they liked to tailor to their customers and do more things and have a good time. We were really more interested in the birds and the snorkeling and that´s why we decided to go with them. Steve saw some whales, which was exciting, but that was it. He went out on a boat (where he got seasick, poor thing. We thought he might be susceptible since when we were in Baha, Mexico he got sea sick on a fishing trip but that was after a night of margaritas so we weren´t positive it was the boat that made him sick) and did not get to snorkel which was the only reason he wanted to go, really. The guys just made a really poor business decision. We liked them, we were excited about going with them, and then they pushed Steve off on someone else (who I´m sure they gave his $25 to) and so they made no money and disappointed their customer. How sad.

So, yesterday was a bad day. Steve had no fun. I had no fun. We spent the rest of the day lounging and reading and napping. Today was nicer but still really relaxed. We walked along the beach and then had a late lunch and another nap. I´m still not feeling great, but after tomorrow at lunch I´ll only have the antibiotics left (until Friday). I´m looking forward to no more parasites and no more pills. We´re going to Bahia de Caraquez tomorrow where we´ll hopefully settle down in a nice apartment for a month and start volunteering and unpack our bags for a while.

I think I´m going to come back to Puerto Lopez some weekend over the next month on my own or maybe with a volunteering friend and go to Isla de la Plata. I want to see the boobies, damn it, and take funny pictures of them. Steve isn´t going to risk the 3 hours round trip boat ride, so I´m on my own unless I can find a buddy. But that´s fine since it costs $55 to go ($15 for the island day park pass and $40 for the boat/guide–although I think we get a 10% discount with Machalilla tours with our SAE card) and it´s really for me anyway.

Gina. Puerto Lopez, Ecuador.

We arrived in Ecuador yesterday morning after taking a night bus from Mancora, Peru to Guayaquil, Ecuador. We arrived in Guayaquil at around 5:00 in the morning after getting off the bus 3 times for the border crossing (the bus company was CIFA and for 47 soles each we got bed seats (which were quite comfortable) on the first floor of the bus (which is nicer and less crowded) and they stopped on both sides of the border and waited while everyone got their passports stamped and got their Ecuador travel visa documents. It was a pretty nice bus service and from what I´ve heard about other services where you´re on your own for the crossing (including getting a taxi and possibly getting robbed or worse) worth the money and being woken up in the wee hours to stand in line. My first impressions of Ecuador are all positive. Everyone is very friendly, the bus terminal in Guayaquil was clean, had informative signs telling you where to go for buses to different regions of Ecuador and signs for the bathroom and restaurants (none of the bus terminals in Peru we went to were nearly as clean and well laid out as Guayaquil). It was nicer than a lot of airports I´ve been to in the states. A security guard saw us looking at the poster about buses to different regions and came and asked us where we were trying to go and walked with us to the correct bus company! It was nice and surprising. I´ve gotten so used to being on my guard when anyone approaches me and immediately saying ¨no, gracias¨(sometimes over and over again and having to get rude before the person will leave) while in Peru. I think we were only approached maybe twice in Peru by people who just wanted to practice their English and be friendly, and that was out of probably hundreds of encounters of people trying to sell us something or get us to come to their restaurant.

We took the bus from Guayaquil to JipiJappa (funny name, sad little dusty place) where we changed buses for Puerto Lopez. Both buses cost a total of $3 each! It´s fun being in dollars again, but sort of strange. They use U.S. bills and a mixture of U.S. and Ecuadorian change (the Ecuadorian change is worth the same as the U.S. kind) which is all still silver in col0r and about the same sizes but a lot thinner and lighter. Sacagawea dollar coins are very popular here (which is funny since people don´t seem to like them in the States) as are 50 cent pieces. It´s going to take me a few days, I think, to switch over my head to our daily budget in dollars instead of soles. We´re paying $12/night for our room right now and it seems so very cheap since we were paying about 30 soles/night before. But they end up being about the same amount!

To add to my tummy fun, yesterday I felt just awful. We decided to go to the doctor again, but this time to get a stool test (we read in our Ecuador book that this is the best way to definitely know what bug you have and so you treat it correctly. If only I would´ve known this in Peru!). The doctor and lab technician were very nice but spoke no English, so it was an interesting back and forth with Steve using the phrase book and the doctors speaking slowly and making (sometimes embarassing) hand motions. But we got it all figured out, and after a blood test (we took a lot of time explaining that I was nervous about the needle being new and clean and they went out of their way to prove that it was) and a stool test (which is another whole embarassing tale that I´m just not going to go into here) we found out that I have a not so friendly tropical parasite that burrows into your intestines and sucks your blood, which in turn has caused a massive bacterial infection. So, now I´m on 5 different kinds of medication (on top of the antimalaria pills we have to take once a day since we´re now officially in mosquito land–and I hate the little boogers. Hate, hate, hate them). I take 4 pills in the morning, 1 at lunch, and 5 at dinner. But I´ll be done with all but the antibiotics in 4 days (the antibiotics will take 7). So hopefully this will kill the stupid suckers and I´ll get all better and won´t have any more bad stomach issues for a while. Especially since we´ll be in Bahia where we´ll be staying in a shared apartment and cooking all of our meals (or at least most of them) so will hopefully have less of a chance of me getting reaffected.

Right now we´re trying to plan what we want to do for tomorrow. We got approached on the street by a very nice man who with another man runs a tour company. They´re sort of a small operation but they have lots of books of praise from people who went on boat trips with them and a listing in a French tour book that they had on hand. They seem like a nicer option than the other big companies around which all seem very impersonal and few of them speak English so it´s hard to get an idea of what the trip is like. We´re going to meet back up with them at 7:30 tonight to see if another group of 6 Chilean 20-somethings have decided to book a tour with them tomorrow because if they have a big group they will charge less and have more time to explore around, snorkel, and in general do more. So, we´ll see. They don´t go to Isla de la Plata which we wanted to do, but it´s more like a whale watching trip with snorkeling. They did recommend a company that goes to Isla de la Plata and we went and talked to them, too. So now we have to make a decision. The other company had a man who spoke English and they also do scuba diving lessons and certification. We got to talking to them about that, and now we´re thinking about maybe getting certified. It costs $450 each for 4 days of training and diving (2 days in a pool and 2 days in the ocean). But if we can get 3 other people to do it with us we would get a 20% discount. We´re only a couple of hours from Bahia, so we could try to get a group together there (or through SAE) and then come down some time over the next month for the certification. It would be awesome to be certified because then we could dive in Thailand and all over SE Asia (and Australia if we decide to go there). So, it´d be a big cost but we could potentially get a lot of use out of it. Lots of decisions to be made. I think knowing that we´re going to be living somewhere for a month for really cheap is making us rethink our budget and what we want to do. Potentially we can save a lot of money volunteering for a month in each place we visit and then have that saved money to do something really awesome that we couldn´t do normally on our tight budget.

But Ecuador is really nice. Even though I´m hot (it´s very humid here) and there are lots of bugs and lots of mosquitos, everyone is so friendly and I´m slowly starting to stop my immediate dismissal of people when they approach. I´m still keeping my guard up, but I´m giving people the benefit of the doubt that maybe they´re just trying to be friendly or help. And if it looks fishy or unsafe, we can still walk away. But in general we´re no longer getting beeped at by taxis everywhere we go and no one has tried to show us their menu or try to get us to get a massage. Big pluses.

Gina. Mancora, Peru.

Beach life just isn´t my thing. We left Huanchaco a couple of days ago for another night bus farther up the  coast to Mancora. Mancora is about 1 1/2 hours from the Ecuador border and an 8 hour bus trip from Huanchaco. It seemed like a good place to stop and break up the bus ride. And it´s very nice, but I´m just not into beaches. Well, they´re okay. I don´t particularly like sand (I sort of hate it) and I don´t really like salt water (it irritates my skin. I know, I´m weird). But we´ve had a pretty good time here anyway just relaxing and watching people surf (and a couple of people try to kite surf which looks terrifying). We were going to try to take a surf lesson here, but the water isn´t that warm and while it´s pretty humid it´s also really windy on the beach so chilly. Since we´re heading farther up the coast to Ecuador anyway, we decided just to wait for warmer water and weather to try to get out there.

We had a nice last day in Huanchaco. We tried cebiche at this fancy restaurant that overlooked the ocean. It was pretty tasty–you could really taste the lime. And the raw fish texture was nice. We also got a plate that had a giant piece of lightly breaded fish and a pile of mixed deep fried shellfish. It was damn tasty. We even got to eat some baby octopus which was nothing like I thought it would be. I was expecting it to be chewy, but it really tender. It was a very nice lunch. I like eating seafood while looking at the ocean.

The bus ride was uneventful. I slept, Steve watched a cheesey movie in Spanish. We arrived in Mancora at 6 in the morning. It was dark. I was sleepy and grumpy and we didn´t know where we were going since we´d forgotton to write down possible Mancora hostels. But our taxi driver (Taxi! It was really a motorbike with a little back seat shell thing around it… it´s hard to explain) was very nice and patient and took us to three different places before we picked one. The first place was really cheep but also really grungy. The sink and bathtub were full of giant crickets. The second place was way more than we wanted to spend, but the first place was more our style. It was close enough to walk to the beach and was pretty clean. It´s very humid here so there are a lot of bugs. Our room had ants and our bed was a 24-hour buffet for some termites, there was mouse evidence in our room (and the teenager who ran the place–I guess–had seen a mouse and set traps recently) , and we had a nice lizard friend in our room (who was very welcome since they eat bugs), but whatever. I´m surprised all of our rooms haven´t been crawling in bugs since they´ve been so cheap. We´ve really only seen one or two other insects the whole trip (a spider and a giant, giant bee), but I´m sure the time for bugs has come since we´re planning on staying near the coast and just getting closer and closer to the ecuator all of the time

There were some pretty noisy Brits staying in our hostel as well (I think the walls were literally made of paper) who had some horror stories to tell. Two of them had all of their stuff stolen right in front of them while they were in Bolivia. They had just gotten into the mountains and put down their bags when they were snatched. I guess they made chase but the altitude is so hard on you that they didn´t have a chance. If someone would´ve grabbed our bags when we first got to Cusco they would be long gone–even though Steve ran track in college. Another couple had left Mancora the night before but instead of getting on their bus to Quito (North in Ecuador) they accidentally got on a bus to Lima (South)! They got all the way to Lima, and turned around and bought a ticket back to Mancora! Poor guys. I think the horror stories both made me feel bad for the poor suckers and also relieved that we´ve had very good luck. But really I think we´re just more careful in a lot of ways. These group of kids, specifically, were a bit crazy (a prime example is that we could hear them doing coke last night through the paper walls. Doing cocaine (period) let alone buying it in Peru is, in my opinion, completely nutso). Which doesn´t mean that you can´t be completely diligent and very careful and not get stuff stolen. It happens. I´m just glad we have all of our stuff still, except for a couple of little things that we lost on our own.

So off to Ecuador where we´ll catch another bus to Puerto Lopez which is on the coast and is the launching point for a National Park that has mangrove forests, whale watching, and an island with blue-footed boobies (boobies!). I´m very excited. We´re planning on staying there a few days before going up to Bahia de Caraquez where Steve is going to volunteer with an organization called Planet Drum and where I am going to look for somewhere to volunteer. They´re graciously going to allow me to stay with Steve in their volunteer apartment and help me find something else as they´re doing reforestation of a hillside, which means carrying buckets of water up hills all day, and that´s not really up my alley. I´m glad this is working out as it´s been pretty tough finding places to volunteer that we were both interested in and that didn´t cost a huge amount of money (this one is something like $15 a month a piece for food). So we can save money, do some good work, maybe take Spanish lessons, and still have weekends free to explore.

Gina. Huanchaco, Peru.

Since we´re now on the coast we decided that today would be a good day to try ceviche, a Peruvian dish that´s basically raw fish in lime juice and the lime juice supposedly kills all any bacteria or other bad things and ´cooks´the fish. We walked around this afternoon (after we got to our hostel and slept until one! Bus trips are exhausting) and checked out the prices on a couple of places our guide book recommended. We found one that looked good and decided to go back there for dinner.

After watching some tv and reading and being generally lazy we got hungry and went back out around 6:30 for our much anticipated dinner. But then everything was closed. All three restaurants that were crawling with people at lunch time were dark and locked up with no sign that they´d be opening again any time tonight. Feeling a little bummed and a little confused, we wondered around looking for something that was a) open, b) not too expensive, and c) not divey. I´m weary of raw fish at the best of times, but a divey restaurant at a beach town in Peru on the off season just sounds a little too sketchy for raw fish, no matter how much lime juice it´s soaking in.

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Gina. Huanchaco, Peru.

 We arrived very early this morning in Trujillo (around 5:30) where we discovered that another traveling couple of gringos had their cameras swiped on the bus during the night. Only one passenger had gotten off of the bus at what I think was an unscheduled stop (upsetting). It might have been scheduled, but our tickets only said there was one other stop and that was about an hour after we got on in Lima. We were traveling on Cruz del Sur which is the most expensive and supposedly the safest bus company (they take a video of all of the passengers as they get on). One of their great safety features (I thought) was that they don´t stop in the middle of the night and let people on or off of the bus. The most upsetting (and relieving) thing about the theft was that I woke up at some point during the night (with earplugs in, eye mask, no contacts, and a neck pillow) to what felt like my carry on backpack being slowly tugged from under my seat. I was sitting towards the window and had the bag at my feet (my purse with my camera was safely on my body under my coat and blanket). I immediately woke up and said Steve´s name a couple of times to see if it was him pulling on the bag to try to get some water or something. I obviously woke him up, so I knew it wasn´t him. Now, I was half asleep and blind and completely disoriented, and I halfway thought that maybe I was imagining things. So I just pulled the bag under my feet and wrapped the straps around my legs. I thought about hugging the bag, but there wasn´t anything in there except for a couple of books and our water. It wasn´t until the morning when the couple discovered that their bags had been opened from under the feet and their stuff taken out that I realized that what I felt was real and that I could have possibly done something to prevent their cameras being stollen. I have some guilt about not calling the bus dude over or even turning on the light and looking behind me. There was one guy sleeping behind us when I went to sleep, and he was gone when I woke up in the morning, so he was probably the culprit.

I´m relieved that none of our stuff was stolen but I feel bad about not making a fuss when I felt my bag move. I keep telling myself that I wasn´t sure if what I felt was real at the time, but hindsight is 20/20. Poor nice couple. They searched everyone as they got off the bus, but nothing. They lost all of their Machu Picchu pictures and were pretty upset about it. Which I would be, too. I´ve been keeping the memory card of the photos in my money belt as we´ve been trying to upload all of them. I´d be heartbroken if the photos were stolen.

We´ve been really careful with our stuff on buses in general (keeping all valuables either on our bodies or in our luggage which is checked under the bus and you have to show your ticket to receive your luggage), but this whole under the seat bag grab is going to put me even more on my guard. I´m surprised that I woke up at all since I´m usually a pretty deep sleeper. I think I actually had my leg on the bag and that´s why I felt it being pulled from under me. So just a warning for anyone traveling at night (or during the day, really) in Peru to be extra careful and keep all valuables on your body or stowed away under the bus. You can´t be too careful even on the luxury buses (and really maybe you have to be more careful on those as the only time we´ve seen other gringos has been on the ´safe´buses. The other buses are all local people and they just leave their stuff on the bus when they get off to buy snacks or go to the bathroom. So maybe the lower class buses are the safer bets since it´s be silly for a thief to target them as foreigners´buses).

Gina. Lima, Peru.

We´re already sick of Lima again. It´s just not our town. We´ve been staying in Miraflores this time around (instead of the center) and while it´s nicer and calmer it´s still just not really our kind of place. It´s just so dreary here. We walked around yesterday and visited the SAE clubhouse in Lima, had our 4th of July feast, and went to the ocean. And now we´re done. We´ve got a bus ticket for tonight leaving at 10 pm for Trujillo. It should be about an 8 hour bus ride up the coast, so we´ll get there bright and early. The plan is to find a hostel in Huanchaco which is a short taxi ride away and supposedly a calmer, smaller place to stay. The draw here is that it´s farther north up the coast, so closer to Ecuador, and they have good surfing and some neat sounding archeological sites, including the city of Chan Chan. According to wikipedia:

The largest Pre-Columbian city in South America, Chan Chan is an archaeological site located in the Peruvian region of La Libertad, five km east of Trujillo. Covering an area of approximately 20 km², Chan Chan was constructed by the Chimor (the kingdom of the Chimú), a late intermediate period civilization which grew out of the remnants of the Moche civilization. The vast mud city of Chan Chan was built between c.850 and c.1470 and was the imperial capital until Chimor was conquered by the Inca in the 15th century. It is estimated that 30,000 people lived in the city of Chan Chan.

The city is composed of ten walled citadels which housed ceremonial rooms, burial chambers, temples, reservoirs and some residences. Each of these citadels has a rectangular configuration with a north-facing entrance, high walls, and a labyrinth of passages.

The walls themselves were constructed of adobe brick, and were then covered with a smooth surface into which intricate designs were carved. There are two styles of design present in these carvings: one is a ‘realistic’ representation of subjects such as birds, fish, and small mammals; and the other is a more graphic, stylized representation of the same subjects. While earlier civilizations concentrated on feline and anthropomorphic forms, the Chimú style shows a preference for maritime motifs. The carvings at Chan Chan depict fish, pelicans, and nets for catching various sea creatures. Chan Chan, unlike most other coastal ruins in Peru, is located extremely close to the Pacific Ocean.

Chan Chan was added as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. The city is severely threatened by erosion from El Niño, which causes heavy rains and flooding on the Peruvian coast. Present-day visitors to Chan Chan can enter the Tschudi Complex, believed to be one of the later citadels built in the city. There are also several other Chimú and Moche ruins in the area around Trujillo.

So we´ll see some neat ruins and maybe take a surfing lesson or two, then keep heading north to Ecuador. Hopefully there will be some good photo opportunities in our future as Lima is so dreary it doesn´t lend itself to pictures (although I did talk Steve into going to a Dunkin Donuts today where I took a picture of him eating his first Dunkin Donut ever, and then another picture of him feeling a bit sick afterwards! There are a lot of American stores around Lima, including the first McDonald´s that we´ve seen–we´ve seen tons of KFCs, though. They´re crazy about their chicken in Peru!).

Gina. Lima, Peru.

Something about this trip is inspiring me to do things I wouldn´t normally do. Running down the steps on the Inka trail is a good example. Another excellent example is that Steve and went white water rafting on Tuesday in Arequipa, and it was all my idea. I don´t know what´s come over me. But I´m glad that we went rafting because it was awesome! And cold. Very, very cold. I keep forgetting that it´s winter in Peru. And winter means cold rivers.

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Gina. Arequipa, Peru.

I have a parasite (or hopefully, had). I´m not sure what kind, but the doctor I saw was pretty convinced that since I´d been sick for almost three weeks and didn´t have a fever or any other sign of infection that a creature of some kind was the culprit (I went to Hampi on Choquechaca which is the same street as the yummy Jack´s Cafe and as South American Explorers´Club. It was 60 soles for the exam and the doctor was very nice and spoke perfect English–and supposedly also French).

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Gina. Arequipa, Peru.

The last day of the trek started out very early. 4 a.m. I have a newfound respect for my Uncle Ron for waking up at 4 a.m. every day to go to work. Steve and I were both grumpy when we got up. It was strangely hot in our tent the night before and we weren´t sure what types of bugs/animals were outside, so we didn´t want to open up the flaps. We got little sleep because of the heat and, for me, because my legs hurt so badly that it was impossible to get comfortable (and our tent was on a decline, so I kept slipping to the bottom!).

After a hasty breakfast we got cleaned up and went as a group to wait a half hour for the final checkpoint to open at 5:30. I guess there`s some desire to be the first ones through the checkpoint or the first ones to the Sun Gate, but I would have preferred to sit in the clubhouse for that last half hour rather than standing in the dark with all the other hikers.

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