Yesterday Holly Mike Elaina and I headed out to Ollantaytambo, we met Kareema and some other English teachers out there. We had some hot chocolate and decided to climb the free ruins to have a fabulous view of the pay-for-entry ruins. It was great. We were basically the only ones up there, and someone even had an iPod with speakers and EVERYTHING it was sweet we just hung out up there for a while. It is a super cute town with really nice places to eat and little cobblestone streets. We had a good view of the town from up there too and got to explore the ruins on our own. We headed down after the sun set due to the fact it was getting dark and we did not want to be stranded up there in the dark. We caught a bus back to Cusco that ended up going to Cusco via Pisac (which is not on the way) so it took a little longer than expected, but we made it!! Plans for Lake Titicaca next weekend and Nasca the week after that! ALSO the Village People are coming to Cusco... might have to go to that for s/20 tickets?!?!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
the past few weeks
I don't even know where to start. Since I got home from the Inca Trail the time has gone by soooo fast!! We got back on a Sunday night, I had a shower and was in bed SO fast, probably the best sleep I've had since I've been here! That week was a pretty standard week with the project and Spanish lessons. The 21st of March all the volunteers from my project (3 of us in the morning and 2 in the afternoon) went on a day hike with some of the older boys from the community. We started at 4:30 IN THE MORNING yeah I am serious. Well we probably started walking at about 5 because then there was a little bit of light to see by.. We hiked from about 3600 m above sea (where Cusco is ) to about 4800 m. We took a back way where there wasn't really a trail... so also that meant no tourists! It was free too which was sweet. We hiked for about 8 hours and ended up at Huchuy Qosqo which is Quechua for 'little Cusco', some ruins that are about 5 kilometres above a little town called Lamay in the Urubamba valley. It was a very long hike down to the town, we got to Lamay at about 3 o'clock and caught an hour long bus back to Cusco. As soon as I got home I CRASHED and tried to get in as much sleep as possible because alas it obviously was the same night as the TEFL graduation party at Maximo. Holy I don't know if I've ever been so tired in my life. A few hours before we left I honestly just laid on the floor with my leg up on the wall HAHA it was great. We headed out to Maximo to see Kareema, Sonja and Jay (from the house) graduate! (Also there was free drinks...) It was a very fun night as EVERYONE went. The next Sunday we headed to Jack's for some western food lunch where I ate the best BLT ever. Too bad it wasn't a BLCheese that would have been so perfect. Last week at the project was a busy one as 9 of the kids, one other volunteer, and the director of the project were heading to Lima on Wednesday for first international Futbol Calle Festivale, basically a conference for organizations similar to the one I am working with from all over Peru. They are there from Wednesday the 25 until this evening. So for the past three days Phil and I have been holding down the fort at the project, Friday was crazy, like every single kid came, it was really good though. They had so much energy at the end of the day still we honestly had them running races back and forth.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Inca Trail!!
Thursday March 12 2009
SO the story begins on a rainy thursday morning last week. (March 12) We were picked up at 6:30 at the house by this bus that was like an airplane it was sweet, it had pneumatic doors and this cool stair and everything... Anyway I realized 4 seconds after we got on the bus that I had filled up my water bottles and definitely left them sitting on the counter. Of course I would do that right. At least it wasn't anything important. So we drove around Cusco for a bit picking up people from different places (we were picked up first). We then drove about an hour to Ollantaytambo which is near Km 82, the start of the Inca Trail. We stopped here to pick up last minute things such as water for me, walking sticks for some, snacks, ponchos etc. We continued to drive to the trail head where we checked in with our tickets to the trail and our passports (yes i got a stamp!!) and then began our walk. The first day was leisurely compared to the rest, it was just nice scenery and such, on dirt paths not quite the stone paths like the rest of the trail. We stopped after a couple of hours for a lunch of soup and tea and a rice dish with chicken or some sort of meat I can't quite remember. We had soup every lunch and dinner which was actually quite nice, it was great to have something warm to start off. We continued to walk after lunch, and now started to ascend a little bit. It was a beautiful day, we stopped at our first ruins, Llactapata, just after lunch and it was a perfect day. Before the end of our day we definitely passed a little shop that clearly specified its acceptance of Visa and Mastercard. I thought it was hilarious. We reached camp at about 5 or 6 I would say, it was just getting dark. We then had 'happy time' hahaahahah which basically was appetizers of tea and popcorn. It was so great after a day of hiking. A few hours later after we had settled into our tents and such we had our dinner which consisted of soup and another rice slash some sort of protein and veggies dish. That night we all were partiers and headed to bed about 8:30 or 9:00, I mean man what can you do when it gets dark? It just hits you. Plus we were getting up at 6 the next morning.
Friday March 13 2009
Believe me I had no trouble waking up, with about 5 roosters wandering around the campsite and loudly announcing sunrise. So funny. We had a breakfast of some pancakes with this like maple spread stuff on it and some tea, and set off for a grueling 3.5-4 hour hike. And by hike I mean it was all climbing. All an ascent. It started off pretty gradual, meaning they didn't find the necessity for stairs yet. We took 2 different breaks and two campsites along the way. Our campsite that we started at was at an elevation of 3000m above sea level and our highest elevation, at the top of Dead Women's Pass or Warmiwanusca, was 4215m. So a lot of vertical that day. I think it was over 6 or 7 km that we climbed 1215m. It was a very interesting process, we went relatively slow but you just had to keep going. Stopping was like not a good idea you don't want your heart rate to go down. It was a strange feeling I never knew I could go that long while breathing that hard. But it was different from like cardiovascular exertion where you can feel it in your lungs you know, it was just like.... taking more breaths. It was strange. Anyways we started our hike at about 7:30 and got to the top shortly after 11. After resting for a bit and talking some pictures for proof, we started down toward our campsite for the day. This was in terms of hours the shortest day, we got to the camp at about 1pm and had lunch at 2. Between lunch and dinner we basically got our tents ready and rested some, we couldn't do that much exploring because it was raining. After happy time and dinner, we walked out of the dining tent to see a completely clear sky above us, and clouds in the valley below. It was very cool to be above the clouds. The stars where incredible but I was so disoriented because everything is flipped around down here!!
Saturday March 14 2009
Day three was the longest day. We started hiking at about 7:30 or 8, and got to camp about 4:30. We saw a bunch of ruins that day too. Shortly after leaving camp, we reached the second big ruin of the trip, Runkuracay. Here we were instructed to pick up a small pebble to carry to the top of the second highest pass, Runkuracay Pass. It took us probably about 45 minutes to get to the tope of this second one, it was teensy compared to day two. We had quite a lengthy break up top and then continued down toward our lunch spot after briefly visiting another ruin, Sayaqmarca, which was basically a resting place for people traveling on the Inca Trail back in the day. We got to our lunch place at about two and had some fantastic noodle soup and CHOCOLATE PUDDING which I was extremely stoked about. The rest of our walk that day was basically all going downstairs which was actually pretty tough!! My calves were definitely feeling it. The scenery was beautiful, day 3 was definitely the nicest scenery. We passed some more ruins on our way to the last campsite, Winaywayna. At this campsite there is a building with a restaurant type thing and bathrooms with hot showers. I did not shower because I didn't feel like hauling my towel and shower stuff around the entire trip. We had our happy time and dinner as per usual and tucked in at an appalling 10:30 pm as we were getting up at 3:45 the next morning! We also spread Audrey's space blanket over our mattresses because they were damp from the rain that day. It was the greatest thing ever but very crinkly. (I need to get myself one of them!)
Sunday 15 March 2009
It was definitely an early morning and the night's sleep felt more like a nap than a real sleep. We woke up to a semi cloudy sky but the sunrise was s pretty!! We headed down to the building to use the bathrooms and fill up on water and such and then waited in line for the actual gate to the Machu Picchu part of the trail to open, which opens at 5:30 am. After the gate opened we literally power walked for about an hour and scrambled up staircases to make it to Intipunku, the Sun Gate, for when the sun was rising. I am pretty sure that's impossible unless you actually run. So we got to the sun gate at about 7 am, saw Machu Picchu from a distance, which was amazing, and then continued our descent from the Sun Gate to the actual ruins. Intipunku is actually about a 45 minute walk from actual Machu Picchu. We raced down to the gate and checked our bags (no bags allowed in the ruins) to run to get a ticket to climb Huaynapicchu. Only 400 people are allowed per day to climb it, and you have to check in and check out so they can make sure you make it out alive. We got our tickets (YAY MORE CLIMBING) and then got a couple hour tour of the ruins. It was incredible! I just can't even believe how long it would take. And it's not like it's built near ressources such as a river, where normal people build establishments. It is because they worshipped the mountains and the sun and wanted to be as close as possible. After our tour we decided to climb huaynapicchu... man that was so steep it was insane. You had to like cling on to cables attached to the mountain side and crab walk down the stairs as to not fall off the mountain. I understand why they have people sign in and out! The view was amazing from up there though, a great view of Machu Picchu and then also a 360 view of the mountains and countryside surrounding. After taking some pics and hanging out up there for a bit we climbed down and headed down to Aguas Calientes, the town just below Machu Picchu. We met our guides there around 2 where we were given our train tickets to return to Cusco: 6 pm. With some time to kill, we checked out the actual 'aguas calientes' or hot springs after which the town is named. I didn't bring my bathing suit because once again I did not feel like trekking with it, so I just went and stuck my legs in. It was heaven after hiking for four days. We caught our train back to Ollantaytambo, on which everyone pretty much passed out, it being 6 pm but we had already been up for 14 hours! At Ollantaytambo we transfered to a bus to Cusco, which is apparently faster than just staying on the train. We finally got home at about 10 on Sunday night, absolutely exhausted, but I managed to fit a shower in before crashing :) Overall a fantastic weekend and I am so glad I had the opportunity to do it!!
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Daylight savings has brought us closer
Wow what a great blog entry title. I'm so glad I chose that. Anyway, it has been almost a week since March 4th and apparently I have been keeping busy. The end of last week was pretty standard, played some soccer in the morning, did some drawing (now in colouring books because two of the other volunteer's parents sent them colourig books not suitable for their project so they gave them to us!) and some english. It's really good, the english. They are so keen and really want to learn. Yesterday Fiona and I had a verb race against our studnets Yaneth, Evelin and Jhon (yes its spelt like that with the j and h together...) we had to translate english verbs to spanish as they had to transfer spanish verbs to english. It was hilarious. We tied.
This weekend was pretty intense, did A LOT of walking around ruins and such. Saturday Fiona, Allie and I went to Tambomachay, Puka Pukara, Q'enqo and Sacsayhuaman, the four ruins super within 8 km of Cusco. We took the bus to Tambomachay, the furthest one out there, and made our way back along the highway. It was THE perfect weekend for doing stuff like that it was so so so nice out. Tambomachay was not as big as I thought it would be, but was still very cool, featuring water drainage and irrigation systems that were used, and had fantastic views!!! Puka Pukara was super cool, it was easy to see how it was used as a place of residence. There were different rooms visible and places that they used to store food during times of drought (hard to believe there was drought...) Plus a little cave we found where they stored food throughout the year. We then walked about 8 km to the next site; Sacsayhuaman was HUGE well like relatively huge compared to the other ones we saw that day. There were three parts: the labyrinth, the cemetery and the temples. The labyrinth was sweet we actually walked through pitch black tunnels that people used to believe led all over the world. AKA you would enter one and end up like China. We didn't end up anywhere cool, just the cemetery part which was this open space surrounded by circular wall and structure where all of the tombs faced the middle. We then got to slide down the rainbow rocks, ridiculous, we actually climbed to the top and slid down like on those crazy carpet things at the stampede. So funny. The landing wasn't all that soft though. After the slides we walked over to the big rock step things that are probably associated with sacsayhuaman by most. The rocks were gigantic! We walked to the top and had a fantastic view of Cusco and saw the three sites of the former temples: Temple of the Sun, Temple of the Moon and Temple of the Stars. We had a short visit to Q'enqo because by this time it was like 5:30. Basically Q'enqo was a mummy-making site. We saw the tables on which the procedures were carried out, knida creepy. We definitely went home and devoured dinner, then attempted to watch 'The Kingdom' during which I fell asleep. THAT NEVER HAPPENS. And there was like bombs going off in the movie and everything!!! I can't believe I slept through it. Jees.
Sunday I woke up at about 8 because I had a nice long sleep including my doze during the movie. At about 10 seven of us headed out to Moray, another pretty well known ruin about an hour from Cusco by bus. It's the one that kinda looks like crop circles. We caught the bus no problem and got seats thank goodness. After an hour of bussing we got off at a stop that had an arrow and 'Visit Moray! 14km this way' WOOOOOOO 14km. We began walking along the road and cut off a few hundred metre by clmbing pretty much vertically between the switchbacks the highway made. Very efficient! We arrived at Maras, the town close to Moray, after about 3 km of walking. We stopped here to have lunch and as soon as we took our brown paper bags out (yes grade 2) there was like 4 dogs at our feet, begging. I felt so bad. One was so so skinny you could see every rib and it was just awful. We planned to catch a taxi the rest of the 9 km (I know distances change apparently) to Moray, but found out the walking path was onlt 6 km so we decided to tackle that. That was quite the ordeal. We went through I think three valleys where the path led down down down and then had to climb up up up again. Training for the Inca Trail! We got to Moray at about 3pm after almost 2 hours of hiking, so not that bad. It was super cool. Apparently it was used for agricultral experiments, to see at which altitude crops would grow best at. Very interesting. And also it was just like this giant hole in the ground where all of the water would've ended up if it rained. Those stairs were killer cause they were made for like 7 foot tall people. We the took a 25 minute cab from Moray to Salineras, the salt plains. Those were super cool!! The water that flowed through was very warm and extremely salty. We took a cab back to Cusco after busses just kept driving past us and honking like HEY GUYS WHAT'S UP SEE YA! Got home just in time for dinner and then we watched HOME ALONE hhahahaha it was great.
Today at the project not many kids were there cause of the start of school. For real this time. We went around the community and took pictures to promote their problems and needs; there is some sort of conference in Lima at the end of March so we're making a presentation for it. I am meeting tonight with my guides for the Inca Trail which I start on Thursday so that is very exciting!!! Hopefully I have everything I need...
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
"I'm writing you to catch you up on places I've been"
Sooooo this weekend was a success I would say, after rafting on Saturday, we tucked in relatively early and woke up with one side of our bodies being sore. Hahah very interesting that is. On Sunday I went to a 'gringo' (their word for white people basically) cafe and got French toast with strawberries and bananas for breakfast and it was just so good I can't even tell you (however the maple syrup they have there is not REAL maple syrup, to be expected) After which we proceeded to walk pretty much across the city back to the house (all the while getting bombarded with water balloons because it was the last day of carnival which conveniently lasted all of February). We took a little pit stop at the house while I changed into shorts because I was roasting, had some water, and then set out again. We made it to the Plaza de Tupac (it is actually tupac-something or other but I can't remember the rest of it HAHA) where the majority of the celebrations were being held. This also meant the majority of the water fight. We watched some of a mini parade type thing that went around the outside of the square where I saw a legit Peruvian flute band! My picture of it is not that good because I was trying to not get sprayed in the face while I was taking it. Just to clear things up, the most popular weapons used in this giant water fight are water balloons and cans of spray foam.. kinda looks like shaving cream slash sill string... if that makes any sense at all. Taking refuge from the attackers (especially since we were not armed with any water balloons or anything) we checked out the Mega, basically their version of Safeway, just a giant supermarket. I walked with Fiona a little towards her house as she was going home and I was meeting people at the square. I decided to go with her for a bit to take a break from getting attacked. However when we were walking we saw a bunch of boys across the road with a stash of water balloons, so we jeered at them when their shots missed us. Unfortunately for us there was a break in traffic and they took advantage, running across the road to get us from about a meter away. Luckily it was a gorgeous sunny day so it took no time to dry off.
THE FOOTBALL GAME. WAS INSANE. Well not entirely the game itself but more that there was about twice as many people as there were seats. Everyone was extremely friendly with each other to avoid tumbling down the bleachers. I once tried to sit in the middle of one of the stairwells leading up to the seats but got YELLED at by these 3 ladies I was like AH SORRY I GUESS THATS NOT A GOOD IDEA. People got to the stadium and began to enter the stadium about 3 hours ahead of time. Now know that this is not usual. This game was especially intense because it was Cusco vs. Lima. They sure do not get along. There was singing on both ends the ENTIRE game, shirts waving, firework things that did end up on the field sometimes and no one put them out.. I was a little worried about a fire but hahaha did not happen. It was a good epxerience all in all everyone was so into it. This woman behind me yelled the entire game at the ref, who clearly could hear her, like YELLED. It was great. After the game we just headed back to the house and watched... I don't even remember what movie. Wow. It was possibly Donnie Darko.
Monday was a pretty standard day, went to the project and whoops I forgot no it was not standard, NO ONE CAME because it was the first day of school, or so we thought, for the schools. (Remember they just finished their summer break) However the next day we found out that the state schools were not so into it and decided that next week would be a better time to start. I wish that happened at home!!! Man!!! Monday night we went to Trivia at the Real McCoy, a british pub here that hosts the trivia nights. The trivia nights are basically fundraisers (its s/5 to play) for different organizations, and mondays are Maximo Nivel, who I am here with. It is basically trivial pursuit team style, its very entertaining. We did not win this time unfortunately. Tuesday was same as usual, project in the morning, come home for lunch, Spanish in the aft (I forgot my homework sheet at home so I had to sing for the class... couldn't think of anything so I sang oh canada. shoot me) And then yesterday went out for a coffee with this girl from Edmonton who was in my Spanish class. It was her last day in Cusco, she left for Machu Picchu this morning and is going to the jungle and then Bolivia following. Last night we went out for a tiny bit with some guys from Oklahoma we met rafting, as it was also their last day. We decided that coming home and watching Eagle vs. Shark was a great idea, it was the randomest movie ever ever, Jemaine (no there is no 'r' i guess they don't need it with their accent) from Flight of the Conchords is in it... SO random and so ridiculous. I also have not mentioned that I have the best sleeps ever here because I am in the room aptly named 'The Cave' because it is tucked in a corner with no windows. I love it. It is so dark and glorious. Anyways this morning headed up to the project and played football with the older boys, probably about 15-19, and they totally ganged up on me, we were playing everyone for himself, everyone protecting their own goal. I am apparently not good at that game hahahaha. Also was sweaaating by the end. We did a great activity in drawing where they had to draw a picture containing a certain 7 things and incorporate them somehow into the picture, and then explain it to us. We also help them with their English at that time if they wish, helping them translate their description and English words for certain things in their picture. Spanish today was good, I graduate from Basico 1 this week!!! WOOOOO! Next week I tackle Basico 2 hahaha YES. I also booked my Machu Picchu trek!! I am doing the traditional Inka Trail beginning March 12 and ending March 15. Thats so soon I am so excited however I might be out of commission for a while after. I hope you enjoy this entry it is a marathon entry I will hopefully post soon again!
p.s. I have a list of items I will send out that my project is looking for!! Thanks everyone for the offers to help out :)
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