Touring South America with dad

First of all, as I write this post I am deep within the Amazon basin, drinking a cold 1 liter of beer and sitting next to a teenager playing some online Japanese game. The internet connection is slow, but what can you expect when you have to stop the bus to wait for pigs to get off the road.   It has been a fun and productive couple days. We saw the inside on one of the main cathedrals in town. OK, I knew alot of gold came out of here when the Spanish rolled over the Incans, but Holy Cow. The everything inside of this church (actually a bishopric) is coated in gold. The craftmanship of the carvings was remarkable and the gaudiness came close to Rome. There is a cool adapation of the Last Supper, but in this one Jesus and the apostles are about to dig into some guinea pig…more on that subject later. We also got a great last minute deal on an 8 day trip to the Manu biopreserve (Amazon basin).

With only a day left in Cusco before we set off we got up early and headed to a vaguely indicated spot in my Footprints guide to catch a bus to Pisac, a place with amazing Incan ruins. Instead of the bus though we found collectivos; private cars that wait to fill up and go from town to town. It was alot faster than the bus. We walked around the ruins for about 4 hours. They were really well preserved for being hundreds of years old. I guess there wasn´t much gold there. They were by far the best ruins yet…although Machu Picchu is still to come.  

The bus picked us up at 6am this morning and we set out for the Manu preserve. It takes 10 hours by car and another 7 by boat to get there….so this will be my last post for a while. Today we did the 10 hours in the bus and, unlike driving from Texas to my grandparents in Kansas, this was interesting. We saw some pre Incan graves out in the high desert, that was neat. But the most interesting part was watching the geography change. We started on the dry side of the mountain (and drove about 5 hours on that side), but as soon as we crossed the range and headed down everything was green and lush. It is really beautiful here. More to come on my Amazon adventure and some pictures (promise). Cheers.

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