due south

So. Um. I know this is gonna come as a little bit of a shock to some of you, but… we’re in Tulsa, Oklahoma. How and why we got here is a long and complicated story, but I’d like to start it by saying that it looks as though everything is okay now. We’re both doing well and are, at the moment, wearing the new pajamas that Megan’s mom had lying out on our bed for us upon our return and sipping the Nicaraguan coffee that we hauled through four countries and two hemispheres on our backs. Things are looking up.

A few days ago, Megan started losing strength in her feet and legs. She couldn’t jump or run and was having a lot of trouble walking and couldn’t move some of her toes. Then it moved to her hands and she lost a lot of grip strength. We were afraid that if it kept getting worse that she wouldn’t be able to walk and then we’d be in the middle of Bolivia (we actually never made it there), days away from an airport or hospital screaming to the heavens for a little guidance. So, after talking with Megan’s mom (who is a nurse at a hospital and talked to several doctors about the situation) we bought tickets home. It took us three days of plane travel, six flights, and seven airports to get here. But last night we did. In the meantime, Megan improved enormously. She is not 100%, but she’s on her way. Thank the lord above.

Megan has had to endure alternating taunting and weeping about her condition at the hands of moi. So… she gets a gold star for that. Well, that and keeping her cool in a situation that looked scarily dire for a couple of days. She was super cool through it all, while I was the one freaking out (I mean, who couldn’t have guessed that one). So… add a cookie to that gold star of hers.

For those family members that were following the situation, thank you for all your good wishes, prayers, and thoughts. We felt them. And we’ll keep you all updated about what we’re up to in the days to come.

Much love,

Sarah (with help from Megan who got all crazy, scary sick and then got better)

Machu Picchu through a door

Originally uploaded by skavanagh.

So, a few days ago we took the long train ride from Cuzco to Machu Picchu. Because of our digestive problems and generalized laziness, we opted out of the Inca Trail, which, during February, is a day longer and apparently much more difficult. When we arrived in a horde of tourists, it became apparent why the trail is so popular — you arrive at Machu Picchu before dawn, watch the sunrise, and have the place to yourself for a good 5 hours before the first tourist train arrives. This is the way to feel wonder at Machu Picchu, not fighting through tour groups and walking very slowly up hills like you’re an ant in a line.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Machu Picchu isn’t a magnificent site. We just weren’t able to do it justice the way we planned our trip. We found ourselves a guide for just the two of us, who introduced himself as “Johnny” and told us we could call him “Johnny Walker,” which we didn’t. Without him, we would probably have missed all the coolest stuff — the Temple of the Mother Earth, the fountains, the way the Incas not only used the rock of the mountain to carve their temples but also carved the rock of the mountain into sculptures of the mountains that surrounded the city. Truly an impressive, awe-inspiring location. The Incas used it well.

Click on the photo for more shots — mostly Megan and Sarah in various “money-shot” poses around one of the most photographed sites in the world. Also, some cool shots experimenting with our new camera. Look out for Sarah in yellow.

-Megan (with help from Sarah)

We’ve been indulging ourselves lately: eating fancy foods, drinking non-swill beer, and watching rugby games on ESPN at the highest Irish Pub in the world. On one such, non-swill-beer-drinking, rugby-watching occasion a rather drunk young man from London decided to join our table, which would usually be fine, except that he didn`t seem to realize that we actually wanted to finish watching the game.

He started the conversation by asking us where we were from, to which we responded with our usual short-hand of “California” even though that is by no means true. Lucky for us, he hated Californians. “Every Californian I`ve met has been terrible. I thought you guys were supposed to be laid-back! You’re all aggressive and obnoxious. I like Texans. I met one guy from Texas and he was really laid back.” Ummmm… okay. Maybe you should go back to the bar away from the scary aggressive Californians and let us watch the game. But we had no such luck. Maybe he stayed because Megan`s actually from Seattle and is therefore too polite for her own damn good.

Luckily he pushed away from the Californians-are-terrible conversation and, without hesitation, jumped into the Americans-are-even-worse conversation (our favorite). “How many Americans does it take to ruin the world?” He asked. Gee, guy, I don`t know, how many? Around the same number of Brits it takes to colonize the entire planet? “No… 51%! Ha ha!” You know, it’s actually a pretty funny joke, and we both let out a little chuckle. Usually in these types of conversations (they pop up pretty frequently) our anti-Bush credentials save us from long winded diatribes. Not the case with our British friend, who seemed to have had his face in his cups for a while. He started off strong: “After September 11th the world was with you, I mean, everyone was behind you. It took a spectacular fuck-wit to mess that up.” We nodded, because, yes, it was, sadly, true. It did take a “spectacular fuck-wit” and we just happened to have one at the ready. If the conversation had ended there it would have been just another time Europeans had tried to bond with us by telling us how stupid our president and, by extension, our countrymen are.

But, it didn’t end there. Two minutes later after we explained that, yes, we did, in fact, understand the rules of rugby (to his utter shock), he decided that he hadn`t made it quite clear how much Europeans hate us. “I mean, I don`t know if you know, but after September 11th the world was with you, I mean, everyone was behind you. It took a spectacular fuck-wit to mess that up.” Um… okay… got it the first time. We explained to him that we had spent months travelling around the country going door to door to try to convince people that a “spectacular fuck-wit” was running the country. He responded by saying “You’ve got to go home and tell everybody that after September 11th the world was with you, I mean, everyone was behind you. It took a spectacular fuck-wit to mess that up.” Um… yeah… guy… we tried that. “No, but I don`t think you understand! After September 11th the world was with you, I mean, everyone was behind you. It took a spectacular fuck-wit to mess that up. Europeans don`t elect stupid leaders.” At this point we had both hit our limit. Not because he was dissing America, but because he was an idiot.

“Gee, guy… last I checked you guys were in the war, too.”

“Yeah, but more Brits were killed by Americans than by Iraqis, in BOTH gulf wars!” He retorted.

“Well then, you guys should wake up and stop tromping off into wars behind us. That seems like a pretty spectacularly fuck-witted move, blindly following a bunch of soldiers who keep turning around and shooting you.”

“Yeah, but, you don`t understand… after September 11th the world was with you, I mean, everyone was behind you. It took a spectacular fuck-wit to mess that up.”

Ummmmm…. wow. I mean… wow. We would have been long gone by that point had two other fellas, both quite amiable, not joined our table. One other Brit whom we’d actually run-into twice in Ecuador and an Irishman who was awesome even though we couldn`t understand a word that came out of his mouth. Our original Londoner had informed them when they joined our table that we were from California and that he hated Californians. They were polite enough not to laugh. He also made sure to tell them, at least three times each, that “after September 11th the world was with America, I mean, everyone was behind them. It took a spectacular fuck-wit to mess that up.”

Strangely enough, when we packed up our bags to go, after an evening of insulting each one of our identities in turn, he leaned over to Sarah and whispered “I’m really very attracted to you. If you leave now I’ll cry.” Wow, the guy had some moves. It’s a wonder the women weren’t knocking down his door.

We left and Megan patted him a little too hard on his shoulder. “See ya, buddy.”

In other news, we went to Machu Picchu yesterday. Pictures to come.

-Las Dos

Okay, so the time has finally come for the post you’ve all been dreading… the poo post. You know it had to arrive at some point. I mean, we’re travelling through South America, how could we get away without writing about poo? You must all have suspected that we’ve been talking to each other about poo much more often than we do in our lives back in the States, and now, like it or not, we’re going to share that poo with you.

Our bowel maladies began… well… as soon as we entered Guatemala four months ago… but, they’ve come and gone and come and gone and come and gone again. However, if there was a prize for the day of most poo, or day of most stomach pain, or day of most whining, today would take home the big brown trophy. Today sucked. Today was a steaming pile of poo. We both hate today. But luckily, it’s over.

Besides poo, other things that have recently sucked about our digestive systems are their proclivity to vomit. Not too much, but once or twice is enough — especially when one of those times occurs when you’re up in a small biplane with three Germans and Peruvian pilot looking out over ancient, mysterious, and unexplainable desert designs in Nazca. Luckily Sarah had only drank water that morning and hadn’t eaten anything and there was a barf bag tucked into the seat in front of her. She came walking out of the biplane after the half hour tour holding what looked like one of the plastic baggies that hold goldfish — only without the goldfish.

As if to punish us for Sarah’s public puking (which, truth be told, was quite discreet and dainty), we shared our night bus with a puking woman in the seat in front of us. This woman made such sounds as would wake the dead, coughing and spluttering all through the night. It made us both quite nauseous, perhaps even bringing on our latest bout of intestinal trouble. But judge not lest thee be judged, right? I wouldn’t be surprised if the sounds our stomachs have been making all day have been a source of complaint for the folks in the room next to ours.

Unfortunately, our first real ‘out of commission’ day happened in Cuzco, a quite beautiful city. We’re taking the traveller’s diarrhea pills that were prescribed before our trip, eating saltines, and drinking lots of water and sprite. We both managed to force down a rather bland dinner tonight, which bodes well.

Everybody poops. It’s true. It’s just when your poo is really pee that it starts to become a problem.

-Las Dos

If there’s one thing Megan hates more than anything else, it’s being asked to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and do something… you know, like call a bingo game. Because of this hatred, today was quite an adventure.

We had organized a tour of Las Islas Ballestras, often referred to as “the poor man’s Galapagos” because a tour costs $10 instead of $1500 and you still get to see boobies and penguins and sea lions. So, a guy picks us up at our hotel this morning and brings us to the tour bus where we join loads of other tourists. Weirdly, after we’ve been driving for maybe fifteen minutes, the guy that picked us up says: “Sarah? Sarah? You guys get off here.” We look around. No one else moves. We follow the guide to a pier, where the early morning anchovy catch is being packaged, and sit down on guano-strewn docks to watch the dolphins and wait for the rest of our group. Half an hour later, we’re sitting in the boat, the captain is spilling his guts about his ill-advised marriage at age 16, and the rest of the group still hasn’t shown. And then they do. Turns out our tour consists of the two of us, the captain, and about fifty seven-year-olds dressed in school uniforms which announce that they belong to the “Escuela de los Bomberitos” (School of Little Firemen). Cute, until you’re sitting in their vomit three hours later.

At one point on the journey the aforementioned captain explained to the two of us and the fifty bomberitos that the seas were going to get rough. “Don’t worry” he said, “if the weather turns I’ll sacrifice the two North American tourists to the gods. You know, fresh, white meat.” The bomberitos thought that was very funny. Other than the spectre of our impending doom, the boat was pleasant, the kids well behaved (even while vomiting) and besides a little nausea, both of us were safe to watch the sea lions and penguins.

Later in the day, on a bus from Pisco to Nazca (where we are now) there was another incident. Now, in South America, guys often times get on buses and give 10 to 30 minute speeches, often comical, which segue into the selling of caramels or just asking for money. One such gentleman entered our bus today and started his spiel. Everything was fine (usually, these folks assume we don’t speak Spanish and so basically ignore us) until he brought down a sports bag and insinuated that there was a cobra inside. The bus became, quite understandably, nervous. Since Megan was sitting on the aisle, right next to him, she craned her neck to see whether there was, in fact, a mortally dangerous snake less than a foot away. He capitalized on this move, grabbing her hand and sticking it in the bag, to a soundtrack of gasps and shrieks, and proved, thank the Lord, that there were only candy bars inside.

So began Megan’s second career as a “helper to the guy who does strange comedy routines to sell candy bars on Peruvian buses.” He asked her the usual questions, where are you from, what’s your name, do you want to take the guy sitting behind you home to the States with you, would you like to touch the killer snake I’ve got here in my bag… and so on. Then he decided, for some unfathomable reason, to involve Megan in a marriage proposal skit. He would declare his love, teaching the men on the bus the proper way to woo a lady, and Megan would respond in some way that would probably involve nervous laughter. She was unsure what this would entail, and hoped it would involve the least amount of Spanish speaking possible. He complimented her eyes, her hat, said their love was hopeless but he wanted to try anyway, and generally employed every love cliche in the book before requesting a hug. Megan complied, abashedly. The bus loved it, and everybody bought a candy bar. Even us. We’re such suckers.

At least Megan’s fever had subsided by this point.

-Las Dos

So, I got a fever and then, good person that I am, decided to share. Megan is just getting over it now. Unfortunately, her’s decided to set in about an hour into a night bus ride from Huarez to Lima. Needless to say, she didn`t get much sleep.

We boarded another bus in the morning to get us to Pisco, where we knew we could find a fancy hotel with cable and a tub. Such luxury! On this bus, the stewardess (fancy buses have stewardesses round these parts) made friends with us, which would have been nice except that we were both exhausted and Megan was doing the “I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m hot, I’m cold, I’ve got a fever” thing. This wasn’t our stewardess’s usual route and she didn’t really speak English, which she was very concerned about because the bus company usually had people who spoke English work this very touristy route. So… when Bingo time came around (yes they played Bingo on the bus… if you won, you got a free return trip), she tried to enlist my help for the English translation of the number calling. Sure, I said, no problem. I know my numbers! (Megan was completely passed out at this point, finally able to sleep). So, the stewardess starts her number calling over a microphone so that everyone on both decks of the bus could hear her. But the first number wasn`t just a number… there was something else… I couldn’t tell what it was… what was going on… this was supposed to be easy. Megan, who at this point had woken up from the sound of the bellowing microphone looked at my panic stricken face and then up at the stewardess who jammed the microphone in her obviously much more knowledgeable (and color-drained) face. And that, my friends, is the story of how Megan came to call a Bingo game on a Peruvian bus while spiking a 101 degree fever. (By the way, the reason I was so confused was that apparently there are letters in Bingo too… who knew? Obviously not I.)

-Sarah (with help from Megan)

Hairless dog

Originally uploaded by mebrown06.

1. There is a breed of hairless dog that lives in Peru. It’s kind of blue and its body temperature is hotter than other dogs. It has historically been used as a heating pad for those with pains. Also apparently, its urine cures freckles. When I got a fever, Megan looked on the bright side and said “well, maybe now we can use you like a hairless dog… wanna pee on my freckles? Ha ha ha.” Very funny.

2. Megan ate beer flavored ice cream for breakfast yesterday. She said it tasted like coconut. Go figure.

3. There was a Peruvian teenage girl on our tour of the Cordillera Blanca yesterday. She was wearing a pink sweater that said, simply: “Jeans!” (exclamation point included).

4. One thing that will be a relief about being back in the States is that men will not constantly say (in English) “Hello… hello… good morning” to me on the street, or, if it’s night time “hello… good night… I love you,” or in Nicaragua “Goodbye, goodbye, you’re beautiful.” (Weirdly in Nicaragua people say “adios” instead of “hola” when they greet each other on the street.)

5. When they say that altitude sickness feels like a hangover (and “they” are the people that wrote our little first aid book), they’re not lying. Here at 3100 meters above sea level, we’ve been in a constant state of hung-over-ness for the past few days without the aid of any fun times the night before.

-Sarah (with help from Megan)

Sarah and horse

Originally uploaded by mebrown06.

After several weeks of worry and unproductive Spanish conversations with photo shop workers, we have discovered the root of our camera problem: the USB thingy that we put the memory card in to transfer the pictures onto the computer. It’s not the camera (though it’s like 5 years old and has only 2 mega pixles) and it’s not the memory chip. Which means you can now enjoy all the pictures we’ve been enjoying on our camera’s tiny little screen. Click on the picture for an obscene number of new pics. Enjoy.

Exhausted from dragging ourselves from colectivo to bus to museum, only to struggle to translate archaeological terms from Spanish to English, we splurged on a guided tour of several Moche Pyramids and Chan Chan (once the largest mud-brick city in the world). Our tour guide, Michael, arrived in Trujillo 18 years ago from England and never went back. He was full of fun facts like asparagus is the number one cash crop in Peru and lots more that have slipped away because, well, most of them were about as memorable as the asparagus one. But he did have a lot to say about sites that otherwise would have looked like piles of sand in the middle of the desert (except, of course, for the truly unbelievable art carved into the walls of the Moche Temple of the Moon).

It was nice being ferried from site to site not having to worry about how to get there, and how to get there cheap, and what to look at when we got there. We’re realizing just how much of our time is spent navigating public transportation systems… needless to say… it’s a lot. If we hadn’t gone on the tour, we probably wouldn’t have made it to the Moche temples, which turned out to be a favorite, covered in stylized geometric and pictorial friezes to which the original color still clung after something like 1500 years in the middle of a windswept desert prone (weirdly) to floods and (not weirdly) to earthquakes. Mind blowing. Replete with obligatory stories of human sacrifice that everyone seems so obsessed with — the National Geographic article on the sites wouldn’t shut up about the “gory, blood splattered warrior culture of the Moche” and managed to forget about the impressive art they created. The pyramids were strangely modern, like they’d been designed by one of the clean-cut, suit-wearing Trading Spaces designers. AND, everything was handicap accessible as the Moche preferred ramps to stairs. So… there you go… Wesleyan University could learn some important lessons from them.

Chan Chan, on the other hand, was far more extensive and much less well preserved. The town of Trujillo had expanded to engulf the ruins after the 1970 earthquake, and so wandering through the crumbling mud brick walls while glimpsing much flimsier modern concrete buildings was trippy. We’re not exaggerating when we say that Chan Chan was extensive, I mean, the place was freakin’ huge. It was a vast expanse of walls spreading out over the desert covered with the remains of fish, bird, and fishing net designs. It must have been a truly inspiring place in its heyday. Now, however, it reminded us both of some kind of man-made Badlands resembling those in South Dakota. Weird, but true. Luckily our guide brought the place to life a bit. I’m sure we wouldn’t have gotten much out of it if we were just wandering around by ourselves in the desert. Archaeologists are currently working hard to preserve the site from El Niño phenomena and desert winds, which often means covering up the most interesting, best preserved carvings in order to save them for an unknown time in the future. The perfect illustration of “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Both the saying and the archaeologists actions make little sense to either of us.

Anyway, we left the desert and are now staying in the Cordillera Blanca at the foot of snow-capped peaks that reach 6000 meters above sea level. Peru is trippy man. Send some extra oxygen our way.

-Las Dos

We promised to let you know how the movie (La Oscuridad or The Dark) was and so, good to our word, we will. It was creepy. It was weird. It involved welsh folklore, blonde look-alike children, and a lot of sheep. The sheep were especially creepy because we’ve seen so many of them around these parts and, inevitably, we`ll be running into some soon. Baaaaaaa.

So, after a movie like that, operating on about an hour of sleep in the last 48 hours, and trying to navigate a city that we`d arrived in that morning, we left the theater very disoriented. Creepy horror film movie music still played in our heads. It didn’t help that Chiclayo is a chaotic coastal town where the taxis honk constantly just to announce that their intention is to keep moving through intersections without stopping.

We had walked about two blocks when a woman stopped us in a crowd and asked us if we were American. As it turns out, we’re conspicuous. But then she threw us for a loop: “Are you with the A*r F*rce?” Maybe we`re not so conspicuous. “Um… no,” we answered. “Oh, well are you with the Military”… “Um… no… still no.” Megan at this point was afraid that she was Peruvian searching the streets for American military personnel to ream out for Human Rights Abuses. But it turned out to be nothing that sinister. The next words out of her mouth were: “Oh, well, you`re American. And YOU’RE GIRLS! What are you up to? Do you mind if I tag along?”

It turns out she is a Texan, currently a secretary with computer skills in the A*r F*rce, stationed in Lima and working for the week in Chiclayo. (What, might we ask, is the United States A*r F*rce doing in Peru?) She is the only woman in over a hundred A*r F*rce personnel here for some kind of training, which explains her delight at our femaleness. Over the next half hour she took advantage of our feminine listening skills and told us about her life.

She grew up in El Paso, the oldest of five in a Mexican immigrant family. Her mother was over-protective. Her father was machisto. She joined the JROTC in high school but didn’t meet the GPA requirements to join up after graduation. Instead, she “wasted” (her word) a year in community college, living at home, with a 10 pm curfew at age 19. On the advice of an already-enlisted friend, she joined the A*r F*rce, thinking “if I don`t get out of El Paso, I’ll die here.” Since then, the A*r F*rce had taken her to Hawai’i, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Peru. It had seen her through one marriage and two children. As a single mother, she was given the choice of heading off to Iraq or putting her Spanish language skills to work in Peru — logically, to our minds, she had chosen Peru. It was not that obvious a choice to our new friend — “my friend in Iraq told me that even the ugly girls get lucky in Iraq — there are 35,000 lonely men out there now, and the ones who are married are cheating. I should’ve thought harder about my decision. Men here just come up to my boobs and only want me for a green card.” Suffice it to say, neither of us had considered the advantages of being a single woman in the A*r F*rce before. The evening ended with a plea to join her in a night of Karaoke with her all-male comrades, which we politely declined. Neither of us were up for a night on the town with American A*r F*rce soldiers, especially after our harrowing bus journey and creepy movie experience.

However, the next day, after a trip to the best archeology museum either of us had ever visited, we started seeing white Americans with buzz cuts everywhere. They were eating pizza, they were ordering ice cream, they were drinking Cristal (the national beer of Peru). Quickly realizing that we would not be free of our countryman for the rest of the weekend we retreated to our hotel where we commandeered the public television and watched “What Not To Wear” (“No Te Lo Pongas!”). Tomorrow, to Huarez!

— Las Dos

*Names altered to protect the innocent, namely Megan and Sarah.