Happy Freakin´ New Year!!!

Happy New Year to all, and a belated Merry Christmas as well.
We're whooooping it up in Valparaiso, Chile for the Año Nuevo. This is the second largest city in Chile, and only 1.5 hours from Santiago. It's a port city and is very famous here for the New Year's fireworks and festivities. This means that there are a couple of hundred thousand people here from Santiago for the night, effectively doubling the population and tripling the price of everything. Whoopee!
We went for a walk in the city today, and were invited in for a drink by two different families, one of whom fed me as well. (They were having a massive BBQ, so no food for Vero)
I hope everyone had a good year, and if not, better luck next time!
Feliz Año Nuevo!!!!!

Buses, busses, bussses.

Holy crap, hooray!! We´re in Chile!
Last night we wheeled in to Arica, the northern most town in Chile, right next to the border. Only about 350 hours by bus to Santiago!! Okay, maybe I exaggerate a little, but boyoboy, is this country ever long and skinny. We aim to be in La Serena for La Navidad. It´s about 600 km north of Santiago, so it´s pretty close. This place (Arica) is a lot like Banff (except that its a beach town in the middle of an enormous desert). It´s choked with tourists (mostly wealthy Bolivians) spending loads of plata (precious metals, slang for cash) on Christmas crap. We had to take a day off from the buses, though. Tomorrow we head off down the antipodean string bean that is Chile.

Lake Titicaca (hee hee hee, ha ha)

Boy, I bet this lake gets a lot of teasing from the other lakes. What were it´s parents thinking?
We came here without planning to, sent by the vagaries of the bus companies. When we got here, we discovered that out on the lake, there is a community of people living literally, on the lake. Over some span of time unknown (but probably easy to find out) to me, the residents have built islands to live on, with nothing but some grass and string. McGyver eat your heart out. It´s quite amazing to go out and walk around on what is essentially a giant, old school mattress. It´s spongy to walk on, and if you go too close to the edge, you fall through, or feel like you´re about to. Most islands have 5 or 6 houses on them, with a family in each. Many have a hole in the middle, like a small duck pond, or fishing hole. Once every couple of weeks, they throw down a new layer of reeds. Apparently each island is about 2.5 m thick, with only the top half meter above water. Unbeleivable.
The giant flamingo shown here is a super example of the gimmicks each island builds to distinguish itself and thus draw more tourists to their souvenir tables.

Floating education

Here´s where the kids go to school. Somwhat limited options for recess.
The school buildings are on pontoons, and the yard is built of reeds. You take attendance with a snorkle in hand.

Bird´s eye view...

Actually, it´s more of a crazy-Inca´s eye view. This is a shot from the top of Huayna Picchu, beside Machu Picchu. It´s pretty strenuous getting up here, and they not only climbed it, but built a couple of houses, lookout towers, and terraced the sides to grow food as well. Your average Inca must have been lungs with legs. The zigzag on the left is the road to the ruins, where the buses bring loads of lazy bastards up to the site. There is a flight of stone stairs that goes straight up, cutting across the switch-backs, for those who want to earn their views. Needless to say, we walked up, and back down.

Clock or chopping block...

The stone in the foreground is called the Intihuatana (inti-wa-tana, one word). Some think it´s a sundial, others think it was used for sacrificial or astronomical purposes. Apparently, a few years ago, a Peruvian company was filming a beer commercial (yes, that´s right) and one of their cranes tipped over and chipped a corner off this thousand year old edifice. Nice, hey? Let´s hope they sold a lot of beer.

Early Morning View

We woke up at 4, and walked up to the ruins before the shuttle buses started running. It´s pretty much the only way to get a picture without one or two hundred people wandering around. One traveler we met likened the multicolored poncho-wearing tourists to bits of plastic garbage in any landscape photo. Later in the day, we saw what he meant. The high peak in the near background is called Huayna Picchu, which we climbed. There are more ruins on top.

Can you see the lines?

This odd little (giant) fellow is one of the mysterious Nasca line drawings. Rendered on the side of a small mountain in the desert, he is hundreds of meters high, and can only be seen from the air, for example from a little 6 seater single-engine light airplane such as the one we were in. Nobody really knows what these freaky Nascans were up to when they drew these (there are many more) several hundred years ago, but some nutty fruitcakes think that it proves the existence of extra-terrestrials. I think it proves that life back then wasn´t nearly as tough as we think it was. These people obviously had a lot of time on their hands.

Stranded in Cusco

In an unfortunate turn of events, I have contracted a mild case of food poisoning. By mild I mean that Vero kept threatening to take me to the hospital if I didn't get better soon. I'm mobile again, and thanks to lots of drugs, I can move farther than 4 m from a toilet. Coincidentally, today we found out the the train to Machu Picchu (the only way to get there) will be closed for two days because of some folks protesting their poor quality of life, or human rights violations or some such things. I don't mean to be cold-hearted, but it's kind of freaking inconvenient, people!!

First day of summer...

Yes, that's right, summer!
We are now in Lima, Peru, and last night we kind of stumbled on a parade of 300-400 D'Onofrio bicycle-ice-cream-vendors. Kind of like the Dickie Dee guys in Ontario (or all of Canada?) They had a small marching band, and clowns and jugglers and stunt riders. You should see the stunts they can do on one of those three wheel freezer bicycles. Pretty crappy, actually.
We followed the parade down to a blocked street overlooking the ocean where they were having a small festival with live music and food and stuff, finishing up with 12 minutes of fireworks. All to celebrate the beginning of summer.
In December.
Kooky Southern Hemispherians.

Damn!

I took this while we were waiting for CAA. Vero got all ready, packed her parachute, checked the weather forcast, and filed her flight plan before she realized that she had locked her keys in the plane the day before. Ha ha, you should have heard her swearing like a trucker! On a serious note, we couldn't find a coat hanger to jimmy the door, and while we were waiting on the tow truck, we missed our window of opportunity to bomb that idiot Bush off the face of the planet. Needless to say, we keep a spare set of keys in one of those magnetic dealy-boos stuck to the landing gear.

Squirrel Monkeys

These little critters are endangered, because stupid humanity is wrecking their habitat. Of course. We saw a whole pack (gang, troupe, mess o') of them on the side of the road where, of course, some stupid tourist was feeding them cookies. We yelled at him until he left. The tourist, I mean. The monkeys are quite tiny, about the size of a small cat, and make a kind of whistling screech like some kind of bird. It's definitely the kind of noise that, if you heard it outside your window at around 5 AM, you'd run outside with a machete and destroy some frigging habitat. Hmmm, food for thought.

Pisote

This is a medium sized (about 1m, nose to tail) raccoon-type animal called a pisote. We saw this one on a beach in Manuel Antonio, eating the inside out of a coconut the hard way. An Argentinian guy we met told us that in Rio, they call the homeless kids pisotes because both are commonly seen rooting through the garbage. He thought that was pretty damn funny.

Goodbye CR, Hello Panama!!

Wow, big day. 5 AM start, muddy roads, broken down busses, little kids screaming, peeing and throwing up on said busses, but we made it. We got all the way to the border, and then ended up having to bribe our way into the country. Can you believe they didn't want us?!?!?
Big excitement for today, other than illegal border crossings, is that we're going to a movie for the first time in over a year and a half!
What with movies in Japan costing so damn much ($20/person) and all the traveling, this is big time excitement. Movie admission for 2 here, $3.85, tax included.
New long term plans for us, instead of Colombia, we're going to go to Chile to teach. We will be flying into Colombia in a few days, but we'll be getting right on a bus to Peru.
Off to the movies to see Harry Potter get his ass kicked. Whoop-dee-doo!