2 worlds, side by side
April 15th, 2006
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Posted in Travel | No Comments »
Tags: argentina, TravelHere is a brief description of months 1 and 2 in South America:
*Getting sunburnt and watching surfers in hippieville, northern peru
*Realizing that I actually DO speak spanish and who needs to spend money on school when you get free lessons just by living here
*Hitching a ride in a ford explorer with a few locos (aka crazy psychos) who drove all the way from Pennsylvania
*Driving through the spectacular Andes and feeling the altitude squish my tongue (hard to explain)
*Carnaval in Cuzco, Peru which consists of at first, water balloons and then an upgrade to buckets of water and everyone spraying foam out of cans in the streets (REALLY good day)
*The 4 day hike up and down the inca trail with my guitar, singing songs with kazoo solos i might add, at 4000m being dubbed as the “Four Thousand Meter Band”
*Drinking and dancing at the bars til 7am and not paying a cent (love the free drinks, even guys get them!!)
*Organizing a game of twister in our room, which got icks-nayed for a “football” game
*Chillin in the COPA COPACABANA and watching the sun set over Lake Titicaca (hehe)
*Being in the cheapest and best country in South America, BOLIVIAAAAA (I LOVE Bolivia)
*Waking up and walking down the road for a glass of fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and an empanada (pastry stuffed with chicken and veggies) for a grand total of 35 cents
*Hanging out with monkeys, aligators, caymens, tucans, vultures, pirañas, pink dolphins, turtles and MOSQUITOS for 3 days in the jungle
*Going anaconda hunting in the pampas (an extensive, treeless grassland area, as found in South America, which, by the way, is thigh deep in water) and not finding one (this could be good or bad, depends on your love for big snakes who like to cuddle)
*Arriving in the highest city in the world, eating a “hamburguesa con huevo” (hamburger with egg) from a street vendor in order to cure late night munchies and ending up hurling into a flower pot for the next 6 hours
*Curing my food poisoning hangover by going swimming in a 30 degree lake on top of the Andes
*Spending 3 days in a Toyota Land Cruiser, cruising through the world´s largest Salt Flats, visiting an island which would be best described as a giant cactus forest on a hill, climbing to altitudes of over 4000m, where there are green lakes, blue lakes, red lakes, and flamingos everywhere (no drugs i swear)
*Horseback riding through the same ravines and canyons that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rode through back in the day (yeeeee haaawwwww)
*Spending 2 hours on the internet trying to remember everything I´ve done over the past couple months in order to tell all of you what a terrible time i´m having and how much i want to come home
Posted in Travel | No Comments »
Tags: bolivia, inca trail, peru, salar de uyuni, The Week Before The Flight, TravelSo, they have tuk tuks here, only they aren’t called tuk tuks. They’re called MOTOTAXIS. For those of you who aren’t tuk tuk savvy,”The tuk-tuk (ตุ๊กตุ๊ก or ตุ๊กๆ in Thai) is the Thai version of a vehicle known elsewhere as an auto rickshaw or cabin cycle, (or, in Peru, a mototaxi) and is a widely used form of urban transport in Bangkok and other Thai cities, where traffic congestion is a major problem. The tuk-tuk has a tin or iron body resting on three small wheels (one in front, two on the rear), a small cabin for the driver in the front and seating for three in the rear.
Tuk-tuks are generally fitted with a motorcycle version of a two-stroke engine with a handlebar for control instead of a steering wheel, effectively making them a three-wheeler motorcycle carrying passengers on the rear seat. The tuk-tuk is named after the sound its two-stroke engine makes. It may have been derived from a similar Japanese non-motorised automobile in the 1950s. Tuk-tuks are quite powerful, and can go faster than taxis, particularly in heavy traffic.”
Anyhow, I think I should definitely make a Today’s Lunch Tuk Tuk out of my scooter. It’s no 2 stroke engine but it would do the job!!
Posted in Travel | 6 Comments »
Tags: Travel, Travel, tuk tukHey everybody!!
I finally left Lima with my newly purchased classical guitar. Headed north on a 16.5 hour bus journey to the surfer town of Mancora. I spent 2 days with these 2 locals from Lima. A lady named Amparo, who is a travel agent and wanted to come check the place out so she would have some information for people who were going there, and her friend Henri. It was pretty cool, I got to speak all sorts of spanish and the guy wouldn’t let me pay for anything although I sure tried. He’s says I’m not in Canada anymore and here, the man pays. Whatever you say!! After they left, I got to make some english speaking friends and I never thought it would be so relieving. It gets exhausting trying to always remember words for things but my spanish is getting pretty darn good.
Mancora, in a nutshell, is a cross between Tofino Canada, Byron Bay Australia, and Jaco Beach Costa Rica. Bunch o’ hippies and surfers and artisan markets with hostel after hostel after hostel. Nice place but a bit of a fashion show of an interesting type. Everyone surfs!! I almost felt “uncool” because I hadn’t shredded any ‘mar’ lately. Haha, nahh, I never feel uncool.
So… my plan, which changes every 12 hours or so, was to go up to Ecuador and take spanish school. Well, I met a couple girls who took spanish school in Peru and it was even cheaper. And the place they took it was in the town of Cuzco, which is where the journey to Machu Pichu begins. Which is also in the exact opposite direction to where I was heading. So I kept that in mind as I waited patiently in a hammock for something to tell me where to go.
That something came in the form of 3 dudes who had driven a Ford Explorer all the way from Pennsylvania and are on their way to Buenos Aires in Argentina. Not even joking! It was late Sunday night that I met them, and by Monday morning I was the fourth passenger and we were heading south. So apparently I have a new plan now. And travelling in a vehicle is SO unbelievably WAY easier and more exciting than any bus where the seat fully reclines. We drove right up to the hostel once we got where we were going and had to carry our bags for about 30 seconds until we got to put them down. A whole new aspect to backpacking I tell ya. So we made a 9 or so hour journey down the coast, through the desert, listening to Journey and White Snake and Boston (power ballads), got pulled over once for going the wrong way around a meridian and paid the cop off once again. It’s the “no system system.” Yes they have it here too.
Now we’re in a new beach town called Huanchaco, still north of Lima and plan on staying here for a few days. Haven’t done much yet other than walking to this internet place but so far so good, and the sun is shining.
Miss you and Love you all!!
Sue
Posted in In Peru, Travel | No Comments »
Tags: Beaches, In Peru, TravelWell, here I am after spending a week in Lima, Peru. It’s so good to be here! Once I got off the plane and into a taxi to my hostel at 12:30am, huge waves of nostalgia set in. Like I had been here before. The heat, the sounds of the honking cars, the crazy drivers, the smell of a third world capital city, the adrenaline of getting off the plane, all too familiar. I was quite happy to be here. Still am.
I’ve had an excellent week here, done a bit of everything really, beach, museums, discos, nothing in particular, it’s great. The hostel manager, Frances, is great! He likes to drive us around, tells us all the good places to go for whatever we want to do. The other day he crammed 5 of us in the back and 3 into the front of his 4 door BMW and drove us around town. We got pulled over… for speeding no less!! $55 ticket for him but they didn’t say anything about the amount of passengers he was carrying. Until we got pulled over again 20 mins later after we dropped 2 guys off at the airport. This time we had 3 in the front and 3 in the back. Apparently 4 in the back is more legal than 3 in the front. Anyways, I got to witness my first bit of latino corruption. 10 soles to the cop got us free, which is about $3.50.
February is Carnaval month and they celebrate it here with water balloons and squirt guns. Mostly the kids get you while you’re walking down the street or if you have your car window open. Not really a huge bummer if you get hit cause usually you’re sweating anyhow so a bit of a shower is a good thing. As long as the camera is safe. Another interesting thing I learned here is that they steal the powerlines in the night and sell the copper to different companies. I imagine companies who make power lines??? Crazy.
Thursday I’m heading to a little surf town on the north coast near Ecuador called Mancora for a week or so in a hammock. Only 14 hours on a bus!
Love you and Miss you!!
Posted in In Peru, Travel | 1 Comment »
Tags: In Peru, Lima, TravelHere’s a glance of my mom and I BEFORE the shots of tequila that Bill bought for us… OK OK mom didn’t actually drink it with me but it was a good try!
Posted in The Week Before The Flight | 1 Comment »
Tags: The Week Before The FlightHere is part of the happy crowd at my going away party at the Sticky Wicket Pub. A “private function” don’t forget!! Everyone seems as happy as I am that I’m leaving…… (joke) Good times, good times.
Posted in The Week Before The Flight | No Comments »
Tags: The Week Before The FlightMy first blah-g… seems like a good idea. Nothing to say yet, other than I’m almost there!!! I just got entered in a contest on the Q radio station to win a trip to anywhere in the world, whenever I want to go. Wish me luck! Can you imagine??
Love Me
Posted in The Week Before The Flight | 1 Comment »
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