A little bit of this a little bit of that

Rolling rolling rolling, diving diving diving

2007-04-09T22:21:00.000-04:00

The trip from Copan Ruinas to La Ceiba SUCKS. majorly and seriously. I mean when they sell you a ticket telling you that it's a direct nonstop bus, then pick up and drop off every person in view and not in view and have tiny children literally almost sitting on your shoulder because it's so packed, when all you want to do is a)sleep and b)scream at the person that sold you the tickets, it's just plain uncool. 4 hours later and it's layover time. Fortunately for me, it happens to be SATURDAY of Semana Santa--i.e. everything is closed. what isn't closed, doesnt make coffee. Now at this point i'm REAAAAALLY cranky AND decaffeinated. And when i finally find a bucket of brew i have to dump it because it's too hot to drink and the bus is already trying to leave for Ceiba. GRRRRRR.

On to better things. 2 hour ferry to Roatan-kinda nice. pretty views, sunset all that. Oh, wait. sunset. Shit. That means (duh!) everything is closed and dark and i'm just hoping i find a place to stay and hopefully all the Semana Santanians have left on Sunday and uhm MAYBE i can even find a dive shop that's still open to book some diving (nope). No prob with the housing though, it even has a kitchen. But no hot water. And as of today the dorm is FULL. oh well, at least i'm diving.
Not super spectacular diving but at least i'm in the water and at $20/dive you really kind of have to take it as it comes, huh?

Vacation Round 2

2007-04-07T19:59:00.000-04:00

El Salvador-Day 1.
s/p arriving at 8 pm and being threatened of bus robbings, not that buses were running at that hour, i finally make it to the hostel. And so what if nobody there wants to go out explore the town, and so what if the bed is reminiscent of a hammock in shape if not in purpose one beer in, one person out.

Day 2.
buses buses and more buses as I try to make it to the volcano climbing trip on time. i don{t, courtesy of an outdated travel book which steered me wong. no matter, i still get to see fun things like the lake by Santa Ana, little-tiny-whithered-away-must-be-90-yo ladies carrying wood stacks heavier than yours truly, pretty mountains etc. etc. I also get to be the only person at the lake hostel where I crashed. Spent most of the day hanging in the hammock, reading, napping, staring at the water and swimming every now and again. Have i mentioned it's hotter than haides? At night it's a fricken DELUGE. it's raining so hard, the place where i'm staying is leaking through every imaginable and unimaginable hole so i boot it to another housing option. thankfully there was one. Granted i was already asleep when i started getting rained on inside-it might have been all of 7pm or some such thing.

Day 3.
I finally make it to the volcano. The one I was planning on climbing is closed, courtesy of some seismic activity which was apparently picked up several days ago. Not that anyone saw/felt/smelled anything, but now nobody is allowed to climb it. We can climb it's sister volcano, a mostly dead place with only steam coming out of it. Which is cool too. It's a STEEP bunch of steps running down, then a climb pretty much straight up (what happened to switchbacks? don't ask, they won't tell anyway). You get to putz around the crater for quite a bit, while trying to figure out where oh were the massive quantities of flies are coming from. I didn't discover it. Then a lovely SLIDE down the lava sand back to the bottom of the volcano (goodbye my lovely shoes, i will miss you i'm sure!) and then a torture climb up the million stairs in million degree heat while i curse myrself for not bringing enough water (having finished my supplies at the top of the volcano). Fun times were had by all. Pictures to follow eventually.

Day 4.
I chicken bus it over to the beach. This chicken busing i have not seen before- we're talking people shoved in until you can't fit in anymore, then shoving some more people on top of those anyway. Then following them with some luggage. Damn semana santa. Damn all those local people getting vacation at the same time as i get mine. Damn everybody deciding to go to the beach at the same time. Definitely damn everybody coming to the same beach and taking up all the rooms, beds etc, before i even FINALLY make it there. At least somebody took pity on me and let me stay in a hammock. hurray for nice people everywhere.
First ever surfing lesson-I can stand mostly on all fours for about a second or slightly less. woof. tail wag.
it's really really hot. the ocean is really really hot. you'd think it would be refreshing? it's almost as warm as the air. pfft.
i sleep most of the day in the hammock. in the intervals between sleep i get to read a little bit and then doze off again.
at night i get woken up by a loving mosquito kiss smack on my lower lip--those suckers HUUUURT!! the whole next morning i felt like i had a lip the size of texas. it didn't look as bad as it felt though. itchy itchy scratchy scratchy by this point everywhere. arms legs, neck face, fricken LIP???
turns out palm friday the buses are on a loose schedule of running whenever whereever (a la Shakira) as a li'l o'le lady in the road store tells me. good thing i couldn't get my onward tickets till next day anyway. between a random pickup truck (please don't kill me or kidnap me) and some random colectivo van going smack to where i needed to go i finally make it to my favorite hammock-bedded hostel (what, you think there would be others in a big city like San Salvador, wouldn't you? you'd be wrong). Not that there's much to do around town from what i can tell- folks have been around the hostel for the past several days, nobody came up with a better option than going to see ninja turtles. (really?? really!!! no way. no how)

Day 5. Still going strong but i'll write about it anyway. 4am pick up and until 6am putzing around to get to leave San Salv. for Copan Ruinas in Honduras (via Guatemala) you can always look at the map to figure that one out. At least we're THERE by around 10 am. A small scare of ATMs not working is easily and quickly resolved by apparently turning the card upside down. AAAAH??? OOOOH!!! yeah, i'm smart like that. Copan ruinas.... kinda interesting in that amidst all the destruction they still have these super detailed elements. very weird. pictures to follow once the kids i'd met up with forward me their pictures from today (i brilliantly left film with the pack in the hostel) have i mentioned i'm smart like that?

2006-12-04T20:41:00.000-05:00

China Trip

And here are some pictures I couldn't quite get my camera to take, so check out the Terracotta Warriors @ Xi'an, and cave buddhas at Luoyang. Both were quite spectacular and I'm rather bumming I didn't get the pictures I wanted.

The nightmare purple

2006-09-24T13:40:00.000-04:00

My hospital just switched to purple scrubs. Aside from the hideousness of the color which looks godawful on everybody and makes my eyes hurt, it apparently had a purpose other than employee disgruntlement. Apparently, this is how we try to decrease infection rate: we'll force everyone to wear the purple scrubs but only inside the hospital. No one will be able to walk in from home (for some people literally from across the street) or go out to get lunch (we have no cafeteria) or run out for a soda while wearing purple--they force to you to change. Which would all be good and dandy IF we could actually change near the OR for example. Instead, we have to change in the bathroom and either lug our crap to the building furthest away where the lockers are, or stash it in the conference room and hope nobody swipes it. Stealing is usually a major issue. My fricken WATER BOTTLE got stolen the other day. I mean COME ON. I think it might've cost a whole $3, who'd want that?? In addition, there usually isn't all that much time between cases (assuming one is actually in the OR as opposed to doing scut on the floor) so it's not like people can get out of a case, run back to their locker, change, go get food outside, then come back, change again, go to the OR. As for the rest of us, the floor scut-monkeys, we can't even get the greens anymore, since the scrub machines only give out purple. We're stuck with what we had time to cheat the machines out of over the past few months.
And as for the theory about decreasing infection rate--are you KIDDING ME??? where did they come up with that? the hospital has more bugs and worse bugs than if i went rolling around new york sidewalk. And there are sterile GOWNS for the sterile field. I want to see the research that shows that forcing people to change clothes outside the hospital decreases infection, before they force us into something this ridiculously inconvenient and ugly to boot. And that's my two cents on the subject.

Wandering about

2006-09-17T22:59:00.000-04:00

I got back from call yesterday mostly spaced out and mostly confused. Luckily I still made my eye appointment (which had been postponed and re-postponed courtesy of late evening rounds killing any sort of commitment I might have made) and decided to wander about town, since the day was so nice (and i could always sleep it off in the bad weather). So this way I got to:
1. get a manicure,
2. stroll through random stuff stores and get new sunglasses--must look cool while falling asleep!,
3. finally get a haircut, albeit at a random chain place (at least it had girls inside, most of the weird places i've been passing before had been barber-shops) and hey, at least i dont look like a a dust broom anymore!!,
4. drool at the puppies in a dog show across the street,
5. buy a shirt at a really 3rd world looking store, just because i got cold,
6. yummm, candied almonds from the street vendor,
7. get tossed and shoved around at Daffy's, H+M and Forever 21 without buying a thing
8. buy a cool humongous purse from a fake bag store
9. actually get back home around 7 just in time to play stupid computer games online.
Ah, the weekend off. How sweet it is.

Did you know?

2006-09-04T17:57:00.000-04:00

This was an interesting story I heard yesterday, though not in quite as vivid a detail.
A 25 yo girl comes into ER with abdominal pain and vomiting though vomiting started after the pain. KUB shows free air. The girl is stable but she is tender. Attending is called in to take the girl to the OR to see if she perfed an ulcer or what. Right before going to the OR, the attending asks her if she had rough sex the night before (earning himself the looks of "say wha?") and anyway, any such activity is denied. The lap doesnt show any perforation, but there is some fluid in cul-de-sac which ob/gyn evaluates intra-op and says it looks physiological. Next day and (with her father this time in the room), the girl mentions that she may have had enough to drink the night before to not remember anything and or pass out and oh by the way she has a new partner. Apparently during rough sex, air can get pushed up into the uterus and out the fallopian tubes, causing intraperitoneal air with more or less irritating symptoms. Moral of the story: if you think the family is dysfunctional, get the family in the room to get the best sexual history ever.

Just a quickie

2006-07-24T22:05:00.000-04:00

a quiet night on call with yet another object vacuumed out of a butt--a big red ball. i mean COME ON people, that one is OBVIOUSLY going to be hard to get out yourself, what were you thinking?? apparently no thinking involved though since my million-to-one-chance, doc! guy has extensive history of falling on objects (like potatoes). If at first you don't succeed keep trying. If it ends you up in a hospital, keep trying again.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

2006-07-22T20:39:00.000-04:00

Things of the butt...

I am trying to find a picture of the biggest thing I have never would have imagined one would shove up their own rear. The chief that operated has pictures on her phone but that's about it. I have yet to make it down to pathology to take my own pictures, until then I'll just have to describe:
1. You could see this thing on the KUB. The tip was just below the lower ribs
2. It was about 4 inches in diameter. I just looked at a ruler to make sure I was siting a similar number.
3. It looked like a fricken rocket coming out during surgery
4. The guy ended up with a colostomy

There is a lady we're consulting on with what looks like distal obstruction. One of the other interns on my team was "blessed" with having to disimpact this lady on call. The found what looked like plum pits. The nurses washed the plum pits and kept them by the bedside. The next day gave rise to many a speculation for how the plum pits found their way where they did, as the woman's son was found dropping food into her salad-shooter style and indiscriminately. This after having been instructed several times in several languages and with several translators including his own wife that the lady has to be on clears. I'm starting to wonder if he was trying to kill her on the sly and we caught him in the act.

And more on that oedipal subject: a patient's daughter keeps calling and threatening that she's "watching everything and writing everything down" as if just looking for something to sue over. The problem with this is that if there's something to sue over, something bad needs to happen to her mom. You mean you're actually looking for something bad to happen to your mom in the hospital so that you can sue???? I should've been a vet.

Intern impressions 1st two weeks

2006-07-14T22:35:00.000-04:00

Being an intern sucks. Being a prelim--an intern who's only there for one year just might suck even more if that's even possible.

An intern: You're at the bottom of the feeding chain--you get shit from attendings, chiefs, seniors, nurses and anybody else who happens to be in the way.

Your patients keep thinking you're a nurse.
Your attendings think you're a medical student.
Your nurses think you're a torture device specifically designed to personally harass each and every one of them.
Your seniors think you're their secretary. In fact, you pretty much are a secretary but with much worse hours and probably less pay.
Your chiefs think you're someone on whom they can practice being a boss. As indeed you are. If you take much seriously this can seriously mess you up.

You freak out when anybody refers to you as Dr.

You crack up when other interns answer the page as "this is Dr.So-and-so"

You work long hours pushing papers designed to make the work as inefficient as possible. In fact, you don't even know how the hospital is still standing from the way most things are managed. The whole bureaucracy is designed with the efficiency of a treadmill: you have all the appearance of activity without moving an inch towards the end point. Then you find out that the hospital IS in fact out of money (duh!) and is selling housestaff housing as a short-term solution.

You keep trying to remember why you signed up for this, and keep trying to get to do the stuff you're interested in (say, getting into the OR and doing stuff) only to get foiled in your attempts: anybody who's more senior, or who's staying next year, gets first dibs. If there's anything left over you might or might not be able to get the case.

You keep reminding yourself that jail is not worth strangling anybody, no matter how incredibly annoyed at them you are.

You learn the extentions that page you most frequently and you know when in the day they will start paging you. You return their calls at your convenience, since several will definitely pile up over half an hour to an hour from one extension.

You can write "A+Ox3,NAD,CTAB,RRR,soft NT/ND,dressings c/d/i,nonedematous" in your sleep.

Everyone who's admitted deserves to have a stick for labs at 3am STAT (the labs won't come back till 12pm, but at least you'll see them during day shift. AM labs means results coming out around 9pm or labs not being drawn).

Your service's patients blend in into one morbidly obese patient who has a little bit of everything or at least of the top 2-3 things people are coming in with (John Doe with diverticulitis, acute cholecystitis and Crohns, all at the same time. Oh, and maybe throw in some SBO on top like a cherry)

You run the list 20 times a day.

After evening rounds you try to run away as past as possible to savor the last hour or two before you crash, and start having murderous tendencies toward your fellow-intern on call, who is holding you up.

You start thinking warm food at night is over-rated.

You can't get through a whole movie in one night.

You fall asleep before the seniors in the nursing home do.

You wake up as if you've only had 3 hours of sleep, even if you did crash earlier than your childhood bedtime.

IV coffee stops working.

You realize it's only been 2 weeks.

A mad rant

2006-06-24T22:31:00.000-04:00

I understand why incoming residents are required to take the ACLS course before starting work. What I don't understand is how the folks that run these courses still get paid money for what they teach. Call me cranky, but the guy I've had both for basic life support/cpr yesterday and for advanced today flew through his presentation slides either rattling off things or skipping entire slides altogether, saying "this is in your book". And repeating things like "I just want to get us out of here" Which begs the question--what's the point of my sitting through the class if all it's going to do is tell me to read the book? I can read the book in the the comfort of my own apartment (granted, there the A/C won't be set to sub-zero levels). Oh and I won't have to do that after walking through a torrential rainstorm and therefore wearting soaked jeans throughout the freezing class.

My apartment's so swank!!

2006-06-22T16:31:00.000-04:00

Moving into this place, I knew that I'll have to look for another apartment and move someplace else for the next three years, since I'll no longer be working for the well-moneyed institution of Beth Israel, and therefore will not have the uber-spiffy subsidized housing in the village. Figuring that, I got minimal and cheapo furniture, since who knows what'll fit into next years' apartment, right?
I finally moved in yesterday, and aside from this place being definitely dark even on the brightest day, I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. This thing is close to everything, it's quiet, it's even bigger than I expected AND has an A/C!! I know, I'm easily pleased, but to top this off I have a decent-size balcony coming out on a courtyard, where I plan to plant my ass every chance I get while it's still summer. I haven't checked out the roof yet, but there is also sunning that must be done out there--I might as well be brown since I've finally moved from the land of the palish green.
That said, the antenna for my tv is not picking up as well as one would've hoped. I guess it's back to ripping episodes of 24 off the net for me! I'll definitely take living in this location over access to even the best series ever (sorry, Alias *was* good for the first few seasons too!)

Graduated thoughts from the peanut gallery

2006-05-23T13:19:00.000-04:00

Well, I guess I've finally done it. After 7 years, a little blood, some amount of sweat and excessive tears, not counting the grey hairs or the character flaws acquired, I'm finally getting out of Case and Cleveland. Graduation was on Sunday, nothing holding me back but the packing and the furniture. It's strange, I must have been here for so long, I feel like I've grown into the place. Don't get me wrong, I by no means want to stay here, but at the same time this is the familiar ground now; this is where I'd spent most of my 20s, met most of my friends and went through everything that had been important to me in the past 10 years. There's something like nostalgia already trying to bite me and I haven't even left yet! It's even more ironic now, since such a large number of my friends from here have moved on and moved out over the past few years, so it's not like I can say that I have so many friends out here anymore. Which only makes my friends here that much more precious. I know I am horrible at keeping in touch, and who knows if we'll even talk once I move, and I have no friends in the place to which I'm moving, so I'm scared. It becomes so much harder to meet people when you're not in school anymore: when you're not all the same age and in the same place and more or less same situation. At work it becomes more about the age difference, and the family or single, and whether you've had enough time to brush your teeth let alone hang out and whether you even want to see the people you work with outside of work. I know it all manages to work itself out in the end, somehow, but it doesn't really help knowing this right now.

And the Mammoth Cave pics

2006-05-22T23:41:00.000-04:00

If you ever wondered whether to take 400 film or a digital camera into the cave.... take a look at this comparison, see if you can tell which pictures were taken with what camera! Just click here

Goin' down to Kentucky

2006-05-16T16:26:00.000-04:00

I packed all my camping shit into the car Friday morning in the rain and headed down to Kentucky to check out Mammoth Cave. Along the way I realized that 1)i'd of course managed to forget a bunch of stuff at home (typical!) 2)if it kept raining like this much longer I'd need to start collecting pairs of animals into my car and 3)it's a hella religious bible belt out there. I seriously wished I'd had a camera phone to take pictures of some road signs. My favorites were: "HELL IS REAL" in the middle of a corn field along I-71 and one with 5 out of 10 commandments chosen apparently at random on a sign surrounded by others advertising "ADULT books and video", "Gentlemen's club" and "XXX Dance parlor". Gotta love bible belt.
But it's all fun and games until somebody's eye gets poked out, or until my right to drink gets taken away. Now I'm by no means a big drinker, but I like to be able to enjoy a nice beer after I've driven for 7+ hours straight and especially after I hung out in the parking lot of the Mammoth Cave park visitors' center waiting for my friend Ben to get his ass to the park from Chicago (there was no cell phone reception and apparently the boy got lost. Anyway, picture this, two tired and hungry kids make it to a Walmart/supermarket with full intention of buying some alcohol to soothe the aching butts and are told that "this is a dry county". ARRRRRGH. At this point it's a matter of principle and we drive down to the next county (about 30 miles away) just to load up on the alcohol for the next couple of days. We were so pissed and hungry we almost got a speeding ticket (but thankfully got off with a "courtesy warning"... this would normally be accompanied by a comment about how i feel about cops. but in view of this unexpected lucky occurrence this shall be skipped.
The country around the park is a trip in itself: there are more "rock shops" than one would ever think would be necessary on the planet (who buys ROCKS??). Fortunately there was other stuff we could play with: (I got a block to sharpen my machete--yeah! i'm dangerous now!!! and a little folding knife for all those occasions when i just really want to have a knife. Just in case i turn into Doug and want to go around "killing shit", or just for making holes). There were a couple of fainting goats I got to chase around and try to startle, but they were not impressed with how scary I was. Come to think of it, neither was I. As it was, I did not manage to make them faint. They just laughed at me in their goat-fashion. I also got to go horseback riding for the first time EVER in my life! Which was fun even though I could feel my sitting bones for the next couple of days. Unfortunately we only got to walk the horses, none of the trotting or galloping or any of that crazy wild stuff.
As it happens, we got through three bottles of wine the night before doing the wild cave tour at Mammoth cave, which basically comes down to waking up with a hangover and feeling like hell, taking down camp and praying we didnt forget anything (oh yeah, i couldnt find my keys so i got the honors of waking up the whole camp-site just because the siren went off for a while. This is then followed by much undercaffeinated spelunking (gotta love that word!!!!) for 6 hours and a drive back in the ridiculous rain for another 7 hours. In fact, I didnt make it. Around 50 miles from home i just had to stop and take a nap, because I was falling asleep on top of hydroplaning and that just seemed like badness waiting to happen. It was still raining when I got to Cleveland and apparently had been raining non-stop since Friday when I left. It's still raining as I'm writing this and the evil weathermen promise rain for the next several days. How can there be so much water up there??

Finally Belize pictures!

2006-05-10T01:37:00.000-04:00

What I've been able to recover from my laundered camera (thankfully the memory card was still good!) is now up in the Belize folder on my yahoo picture dump

Belize trip-Part II

2006-04-28T08:45:00.000-04:00

Although I had tried to lose the roommate by the end of my stay on the island--since I didn't want to commit either homicide or suicide (oh, i was told that muder is only worth 7 years in Belize, so it might have been worth it after all...)--that was pretty much unsuccessful, and he managed to tag along on my trip inland. Thankfully, he was planning on changing his flight to an earlier date, so I kept hoping for earlier rather than later. Anyway, three hours on a re-painted school-bus (i dont know why they bothered with the paint) and we rolled into San Ignacio, from where i planned to go check out some waterfalls, caves and whatever other hikes.
Wandering around town, it was about a half an hour walk to a Cahal Pech (aka the place of ticks)--the pictures from which will be forthcoming, once i figure out how to knock some life into my camera. While climbing up some steps of leftover mayan temples/royal living quarters or whatnot to take in the pretty views (ok, so i'm not an archaeology buff, sue me), a couple of tourists and I were approached by this local-looking older guy who just started telling us about the ruin (who knew that this was the new way of doing the guided tours?) which weirded the daylights out of the couple who proceeded to retreat faster than you can remember what the name of the ruin was.
The next day I signed up for a tour of the Actun Tunichil Muknal (everyone just says ATM) tour. This was supposed to be one of the more newly discovered caves in the region, full of mayan artifacts that were left untouched, including all sorts of pottery and human sacrificial remains. Contrary to what I normally do, I decided to go with a larger group just to dilute the anger that had been building up towards my roommate (I was seriously considering how much harm I could do with a bottle opener at this point). That actually ended up being a pretty good idea--the group had a great dynamic and by the time we made it to the entrance of the cave through the three river crossings, everyone was almost as chatty as me. or maybe i just couldnt shut up for the 17 of us and so it seemed that way. or it could've been all the termites we ate on the way (eeeew, no YOU try it!! tastes like carrots... doesn't really smell like chicken) . So next time a place I live in gets assaulted by the buggers, I won't need no stinkin' Orkin man! I'll just make a meal of the suckers!!
What can I say, the cave was absolutely amazing. You swim in before you can start wading (rock... ow, ROCK!!!) past all sorts of spectacular stalactites, stalagmites, sparkly curtainy formations (don't touch the sparkly--according to the guides, the skin oils interfere with growing formations: they were explaining it by the hydrophilic/hydrophobic theory) and generally spectacular rock arrangements. Again, the pictures are coming, I hope. The second part of the trip is on dry surface and that is where all the artifacts are--tons of pots (broken, to release the spirit of the pot), strangely arranged skeletons (apparently Maya used to cut up their captives and leave them for sacrifice, and in the furthest part of the tour a normally arranged girl skeleton. The guide was saying that the number of artifacts and human remains increased towards the decline of the civilization--kind of appeasement for the gods. You come out of the cave 5-6 hours later and discover that the sun is setting, and I just wanted to go stay in the cave for longer. No worries, I figured there'll be some caving involved during my wilderness med class, that was coming up.
I wanted to go around the area exploring the next day, but found out that the taxis were charging exorbitant fees, and I was too much of a scaredy cat to race the belizean drivers, so renting was out. I was left with what seemed like a good idea at the time--a tour that would go around to most of the areas that seemed like fun--some waterfalls some pretty woods etc. Turned out instead that it was a "van-tour"... there was at most 10-15 minutes of walking involved at a time. The guide was pretty un-sociable (he even ate by himself, even though the group was only 5 people) and would just kind of drop us at a place, and tell us we need to go when it was time to go to the next place. Maybe if I brought a big batch of sangria with me this would've gone over better. Otherwise, it felt quite a bit like being dropped at overlooks on the highway: here, scenic overlook... I guess, a good resting up though, since the day after I ended up going over to Tikal, in Guatemala. Oh and this was the day I finally said see ya never to the roommate, as my tourmates from ATM looked on and laughed (apparently I was not the only one with the impression that he was completely whack!)
There are day trips that go from San Ignacio to Tikal which, considering the trip there is at least 3 hours, seems like a sin. I decided to hop the tour there, then stay the night and come back the next day, then head down to Belmopan for the class. I was actually very happy I did that. Although the guide did not contribute much, other than the chronology of the site, I would've wondered if I'd missed out on something had I just gone in by myself, plus the ride there was SO much shorter as I was going to find out on the way back! Anyway, Tikal is this amazingly huge city mostly covered over by the jungle and only partially excavated, something resulting in a very surreal experience. During the day it tends to be more crowded and is HOT HOT HOT while you climb up all the temples you're allowed to (the closed off one of the temples after two people fell from it-eeeeek). The tour group left after lunch (don't get the ham sandwiches!! no i'm serious! everybody chowed down tons of food which was much needed after all that climbing, and then the ham sandwiches came out: people got two slices of white bread with a slice of ham in the middle. on a little desert plate), and I went over to the place where you can rent-a-hammock with a mosquito net for the night, plopped down my stuff and took a nap. I woke up to sudden commotion in at least three languages going on all around me (I was the only one in the hammocks when I landed there)--apparently the bus from Flores, Guatemala (nearest big city) just got in.
I ended up hooking up with two Netherlanders (hee hee) and an American who were all traveling together for a while, to go and see the sunset. Since they got into the site after 3pm, they could also go in in the am and see the sunrise the next day. When we got to the top of the pyramid (which is supposedly the best site to see the sunset from since you can see all the other ruins around and the jungle and tons of birds and monkeys etc, there was a filming crew there, filming an interview with this little old guy dressed up in traditional indian garb. I don't know who that guy thought he was talking to, but he talked on FOR-EVER and EVER for every single question. And we all had to sit there quietly and not move anywhere in view of the camera-which was of course everywhere the best views were. So aside from getting more murderous thoughts into my head about tossing people and equipment off the top of the temple (after all, I wasn't in Belize anymore, and it was no longer 7 years, who knows what it is in Guatemala) I had a great time. The views were spectacular; parrots were flying everywhere; pictures are still stuck in my camera. We considered going over to the next temple to hang out without the camera crew, but we would've missed the sunset.
So the moment the sun set, we hiked over to the taller temple to try and catch the sunset again. Nevermind that on the way there we got yelled at by the guard that it was 6pm and everyone should be leaving the park. Nevermind that it was seriously getting darker and there's no lighting in the park. Anyway, we get to this temple and go to check out the side under construction (which, I'm cringing at even now--this is Guatemala we're talking about. If anything happens we're screwed) on the other side than the one I saw during the day, and lo and behold there's a great little platform to watch the sky there. And then the darkness starts setting over the jungle and I start thinking that I probably should head out since my vision kind of sucks in the dark, and I don't really want to have a twisted ankle for the class; plus there's not that much else to see. But the two 22-year olds think it's a spectacular idea to watch for complete darkness settle. Fine, I'd go by myself, but having unfortunately read the LP version where stuff happens to tourists in remote areas, and where jaguars appear out of the middle of the jungle etc. etc. I'm freaked out. Also, I dont have the map of the site. Finally, after both me and the other girl (also my age) have been freaking out for a while, the boys decided to grace us with their presence (we'd gone down the stairs before, not wanting to break our necks on the steps without a flashlight). Unfortunately on the way back a) we only had one flashlight and b) the guy that thought he knew the place and we followed led us someplace weird and we ended up wandering around for a while getting progressively hungrier and hungrier in my case. I was ready to eat the jaguar if he decided to show up, never mind how i'd catch it. Of course at this point it's completely dark, but thankfully the paths are white sand, so we can follow ok whithout a light. I keep trying to avoid anything dark on the road, since who knows if it's a snake or whatnot (did i mention my vision is fuzzy at night?). And finally, when we are almost out, we notice a row of moving lights (must be the guards, who'll totally kick us out if they find us in the park after dark, we think!). So the most logical thing for us to do, of course is to get off the white road where we'll be obviously seen, and walk across the "lawn". Unfortunatley the lawn turns out to have one humongous rock in the middle that two of us hit and go head over hills over (rock! ..... OH F@*%^!!!! ROOOOCK!!!)... only to find out that the row of moving lights are in fact the little lights along the road to the next-door hotel. Yeah. Thankfully we made it back before electricity cut out at 9 and even managed to get some grub out of the kitchen staff.

2006-04-27T13:34:00.000-04:00

Belize-Part I

Well, I suppose I might as well start with some stories from my trip since I have to start somewhere. I got to Belize pretty much on my birthday, planning on at least some partying even if i didnt manage to get any monkeys to dance around me while clapping coconuts. After emailing for a while with the ever-amazing Cori, I decided against my original plan of Caye Caulker, since all the partying seemed to be located on the Ambergris Caye. Since I've heard of Ambergris as the "resorty" place and definitely as the "more expensive" place, I'd set about trying to find myself a roommate as soon as I got on the boat to the key. Found this seemingly normal tall bald dude, early 30s, seemed very laid back, who wasn't even going for the diving but just to check out the keys. Find roommate__x__. What I didn't expect was that most of the hotels I'd thought of staying would be booked (this as I'm lugging around a backpack worth half my bodyweight back and forth across town). We did eventually find a very nice room, even with a view of the sea off the balcony/patio thingie. Very very swank.
And of course I forget my PADI card at home. Let alone the fact that I'd never even sent out the advanced paper version to get the new card since oh, two years ago (they wanted a head shot, and what am i, an actress to have head shots lying around? then of course i did get some passport photos for the residency applications, but by then i'd forgotten all about the silly piece of paper, well, it WAS two years later after all). So anyway, I signed up for my dives and went booking over to the internet place to get a "replacement" card for my "lost" open water card (well, at least it gave me a number that the diveshop could look up).

Lucky me, I get to go to the famous Blue Hole for my first dive after not having been in the water for two years. And boy, do I know I'm going to have issues equalizing. But they have a trip going and so I pretty much need to go, since who knows when their next Blue hole trip will be. So I drag my sorry sleepy ass out of bed at 5am (and this is 5am central time so it's even earlier!!) and spend the next 2 hours on the boat getting my internal organs made into a smoothie by the boat while my sitting bones try to make it out through the skin every time the boat comes down hard. We finally get there.... and I get in the water early, knowing it'll take me a while to go down.... and I get to about 45 feet and can't seem to equalize past that. I watch pretty much everybody else go down as i try to force my ears to pop, but instead they just hurt and make me go up again. Finally, one of the divemasters shows up and tells me that they dont have the time to wait for me since it's such a deep dive and to go back to the boat. I almost cried. I tried snorkelling with my fancy oxygen tank but the circle reef is really shallow and not all that to see, so a basically spent the dive sitting on the boat burning my nose (all 15 minutes of it, since it WAS a 120foot+ dive). I did get to go on the other two dives on the way back, but between the 17 people that went, so much sand got kicked up, the visibility went to squat. I did get to see a bunch of flying fish on the trip back as well as on the next day's trip to Tenriffe (again, the two hour pounding of sitting bones... it hurt to sit down for the next couple of days). Surprisingly, the dives I enjoyed the most were the dives that were the closest and the cheapest--the reef right along Ambergris. You name it, I saw it (turtles, sharks, barracuda, tons of pretty fishies, eels, rays etc. I took tons of pictures on my handy dandy 50 ft disposable which I've yet to develop). I didn't see sea horses, but rumor has it they're around mangroves, so maybe next time.

2006-04-25T11:14:00.000-04:00

It's been only about a year or two, so apparently it's time to start blabbering again. I just got back from an amazing trip to Belize , and it seems that travelling brings out the verbal diarrhea in me. Unfortunately for the past several days I've been doing nothing but apartment searching, until I realized that what I would want and what I could afford in NYC never existed on the same planet or in the same dimension. And so I've decided to go for the dorm, uh i mean hospital housing. Yippie. If anyone wants to buy all my worldly possessions from Cleveland, lemme know! There's 7 years worth of stuff up for grabs!
OH, and to the right is the place I stayed for my wilderness medicine class in Belize. Did I mention it was SPECTACULAR?

2005-03-21T18:03:00.000-05:00

Makes me wonder..... I talked to someone today who says they tried to kill themselves... with a gun... by shooting at their foot. I wonder if they thought they were going to bleed to death out of a toe or something. Maybe hoped for gangrene... who knows.

2005-03-19T17:50:00.000-05:00

A few of the things being celebrated on Friday were a couple of birthdays (on off dates), an anniversary, and a thesis defense. There were about bizillion people between Sami's kitchen and the living room, of whom I knew even knew a few (a rather drastic change from the last party he'd thrown that I'd attended). You know you have a full bar going, when all the liquor bottles have a hard time fitting on the dining table, so nobody was complaining. I also think that some people permanently camped out by the bottles, either to keep their glass full or out of social phobia, you pick. Sami even worried about the music for about 5 minutes, even though if there was one person who could hear it over people talking that one person must have been sitting next to the speakers.
The conclusion? Today must be squished by a hangover the size of Wisconsin. And some junk food. In fact, I've reached NEW levels in that: I got McDonald's breakfast for the first time in my life. Yes, yes, i'm no longer a McD virgin. The fact that it was pretty good also kind of scares me--instead of being addicted to Big Al's #7, am I going to be a fast-food junkie too?

2005-03-19T17:48:00.000-05:00

Shawnsee and some dude stole my camera to take fuzzy pictures. Figures.

2005-03-19T17:46:00.000-05:00

Stefan and Maribel

2005-03-19T17:35:00.000-05:00

Everybody in the house say "awww"

2005-03-19T17:31:00.000-05:00

Les Belles--Maribel and Noelle

2005-03-19T17:29:00.000-05:00

Ben and Peter--the dudes with the beers

2005-03-19T17:25:00.000-05:00

Oh baby. What can I say? This picture just cracks me up. Dave and Lewis in conversation.

2005-03-19T17:18:00.000-05:00

The fresh doctor's in the house! Go Maribel!

2005-03-19T17:16:00.000-05:00

Maribel, Peter C., Peter O., Ben and Irene

2005-03-19T16:19:00.000-05:00

Sami-The host with the most caught in the headlights

2004-04-21T19:48:00.000-04:00

I do believe I forgot to tell yet another story! I got back from Colca canyon around 6 in the evening, after being on the bus for something to the order of 7 hours (which is unbelievable, considering Colca canyon is supposed to be in Arequipa's backyard!!!). In any case, I was exhausted from the hike, the nausea, the not being able to eat... so I just crashed, but not before finding out that the two aussies who had gone to climb Chachani (the supposedly easiest mountain over 6000 meters) had actually not made it to the top, that they both got really bad altitude sickness, so one of them turned around and one of them continued up but only until (drumroll please) their guide got swept down by an avalanche. The guide was apparently fine, and the kid made it back down alright, though going slightly hypothermic and incoherent. To celebrate the return of the crew all in one piece everyone went out drinking, except for me, i said i was going to crash for a couple hours and then join in. Around 12, one of the aussies woke me up to check on me (isnt that sweet?) and decided to accompany me on my quest for food (since i felt just fine when i
woke up... and hungry. We got food and hung out for a couple of hours and when we were almost back at the hostel we saw two guys walking in front of us.... one was the other aussie (the one who had to go back down after the guide got washed off)... the other was some dude in a trenchcoat and a wig.
Not knowing whether the kid was aware that the guy was a MALE, we called over to him, found out that he was completely wasted and was apparently bringing "her" back to the hostel where the danish kid was already waiting (getting ready? i dont want to know). The danish kid apparently saw "her" flash some breasts at him while they were walking back to the hostel, and decided that they just HAD to get her. And that was my first encounter with how one ends up picking up a male prostitute. Needless to say, up until I left the guys didn't live it down, and i'm sure that even after I left, they kept getting made fun of. Well, DUH!

2004-04-12T00:04:00.000-04:00

Some more photos have been put up on irrka.buzznet.com in the main gallery. I've heard comments that the images are small and fuzzy, so I'm going to try and move everything to the yahoo page once I get to the library (seeing as no one is using the actual comment function in buzznet anyway... or here for that matter :P)

2004-04-11T12:35:00.000-04:00

Joy to the world, i'm coming back to CLEveland today. How lucky am I that I went to Machu Pichu when I did?

2004-04-10T18:23:00.000-04:00

I cant upload pictures from here, but here's one I got from a friend

2004-04-10T18:12:00.000-04:00

LIMA, Peru - Heavy rains triggered mudslides near the famed Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in southern Peru on Saturday, killing at least six people. Eleven others were missing and feared dead.

Some 400 tourists were stranded when the mudslides buried a rail line and destroyed seven houses in the town of Aguas Calientes, below the citadel. The rail line is the only route in or out of the town.

2004-04-08T14:00:00.000-04:00

Whoops. did i say that? I meant a day later. Thanks to the massive buggery by the airport in general and continental airlines specifically of a large number of people who were not allowed to ¨make¨ the flight and have to pay to ¨change the dates of travel¨for today and pay the 30 dollar departure tax AGAIN so that they can be put through the same crap and hopefully be allowed to ¨make¨ the flight today. Wish me luck.

2004-04-07T13:46:00.000-04:00

Coming back to the states tomorrow. Back to winter and expensive stuff. Sigh.

2004-04-02T08:56:00.000-05:00

Lest anyone have any doubts, I think y'all suck, 'cause no one is writing me any comments. It's really not so much fun writing up all that crap into the void. Even the void has standards and all... Be that as it may, this will be a loooong looooong post, because I have a lot of time to kill until my flight to Iquitos and the airport is a boooooring booooring place and I already drank a bunch of coffee so for now that looks like a grim alternative to typing away at the computer.

That said, past few days have been a bit surreal what with running around the Colca canyon with food poisoning and such. Apparently even hiking downhill can be exhausting (yes, i know Sami, you think it's more exhausting in general) when you´re nauseous as hell. It was very beautiful, but I must say I didnt take many photos just because I ended up not pulling out my camera that much.

It all started around 1 am. Which is when I had to wake up to catch a three-scheduled (four-in-reality) hour bus to a town in the canyon. There, (and at this point it´s around 6am) I was supposed to meet up with a guide called Cesar for the trip. I was rudely awakened by the cold the moment I stepped off the bus (since apparently it´s much colder there then in the neighboring Arequipa--who knew and didnt tell me?) and waited around twiddling my thumbs in a bus terminal eatery 'till I heard yells from all around announcing Cesar´s entry. Apparently he´s a popular character. Either that or everyone was just bored out of their mind at 6am at the bus terminal and was excited to inform him/me of each other´s presence. Aaaaaaanyway, after leading me to a place where a previously formed group was sitting around getting breakfast, I was informed that i had about 3.5 seconds to eat (all the meals are supposed to be included in my luxurious 2-day $25 trip) before we are to set out. The group included two kiwies that were supposed to go hiking into the canyon with me and three italians who were to stay in the van. One of the italians had the biggest dark circles I had ever ever ever ever seen in my entire life. I know it´s not polite to stare, but you try and avoid not looking!!!!
After driving through a few villages in the canyon (how do people decide to live in remote places like that? i mean i can understand ascetics and such, but there are villages, so that doesnt seem out of self deprivation.... i dont know, i just dont know) we stopped at an overlook called Condor Cross. There is in fact a cross there. A rather big one at that. But for at least about an hour, there were definitely hoards more tourists there and locals touting souvenirs than condors. Up until those things appeared out of nowhere and started swooping down so closely i thought i was going to tip over and fall backwards while trying to take a picture of it and hoping it wont poop on my head aaand trying to keep myself wrapped in a fluorescent-orange-embroidered blanket that a local woman lent me for a while to keep warm (she was selling other stuff, but that stuff wasnt warm enough)--not being blessed with the best of balance even in a more rested condition--you can see my predicament, right?

After we had our fill of condor-viewing, the two kiwies and i were joined by another guy and tranfered into the hands of another guide, who was to take us down into the canyon. The sun actually came out during the walk, and it was generally very pleasant, though i had managed to slip down the rolling rocks on the path so many times that i think i may have been on a permanent adrenaline rush.

While we were getting lunch at the bottom of the canyon, it came out that one of the kids in our group was supposed to be on a 3 day tour, and had no idea where to go next, and obviously we only had one guide, and the whole thing just seemed a complete mess. At some point our guide said that he would go with this kid up the canyon to make another loop, while we were to be taken further by his sister. Since unfortunately the sister spoke no english and the kiwies spoke less spanish than me, I ended up serving as a half-ass interpreter (maybe I should´ve asked for a discount, but after lunch I started feeling so sick I was just looking forward to getting to any place where I could assume the horizontal position... the kiwies on the other hand were planning to ask for money back for not getting an english speaking guide). While on our way to the camp site (which was on a place strangely called 'Oasis' -- it did look an unusually dark green color from the top of the canyon) we got rained on, and seeing as I was too lazy to carry any rain gear with me (it hardly ever rains in arequipa supposedly, why should the canyon be any different?) I of course got soaked. The canyon looked gorgeous though, all misty and such, and we spotted a few waterfalls that seemed to be coming out of nowhere, like faucets out of a wall. Very cool. Also, on the way our guide picked us a bunch of fruit (pomegranate and some other stuff, the names of which i cannot remember now) but i only stashed a couple in my pack for later since the mere thought of food made me sick. Oh, and the smells were amazing!! I dont know if it was the rain, or our breaking of branches while walking through the shrubbery or what, but we walked through the most amazingly fragrant shrubberies ever! Smells ranging from the spice rack to the perfume store to the kitchen and everywhere in between. I do wish we didnt rush as much, but the guide and the kiwies liked walking fast and since i was sick in addition to everything i just trudged along.
And when we got to the oasis there was running water!! woo hoo!!! and we were staying in a bungalo! (never seen a bungalo before, dont even know if i´m spelling it right!) and i just passed out and slept through dinner and into the next morning, when we woke up at 5am to trek up the canyon with no breakfast. I´ve never been a breakfast person, but apparently after a couple days of not being able to eat, my body cant quite go up the canyon. I was pretty much as beat as could be by the time i made it half way up and it took me much longer than it should have and so when I saw a bunch of locals going down the path with horses and my guide suggested I might want a ride up, I pretty much jumped at it. You´d think I´d feel all losery about giving up on the hike? no fricken way!!! i´d NEVER EVER BEEN ON A HORSE BEFORE!!! AND NOW I COULD GO UP THE FRICKEN CANYON WALL ON A HORSE!!!! I was as psyched as could be pretty much!!!
And then I got to get to the top of the canyon first! Who´s king of the mountain?? I am I am!!!!

2004-03-29T17:05:00.000-05:00

I have put some more images up on irrka.buzznet.com lest the boredom strike you and since apparently the daily upload limit is 10 images i have also put some images in photos.yahoo.com/ig17 under Peru album. These are unsorted, and the most I can say is that they are from mostly from the Inca Trail.

2004-03-29T12:11:00.000-05:00

Last morning I arrived in Arica, a city in the very north of chile, and i must say, NOT IMPRESSED. I was thinking of spending the day at the beach, so i dropped my crap at some hostel and headed off to the beach. And now the tehnazified version of the event.... I waited forever and ever in the restaurant at night to get some food in me before the bus from San Pedro to Arica, and when it finally came it tasted like cardboard, so i wasnt even sorry i had to run off without finishing it. Unfortunately while in the overnight bus, the other defects of the meal caught up with me and I had to keep scrambling over an innocent Dutchman sleeping in the seat next to me so that i could go and toss cookies without everyone around me participating in the event. By the time i got to Arica I was just exhausted from having to wake up and run around the whole night. otherwise it was a lovely bus ride. In any case, since i couldnt make up my mind about whether i shoudl move on the same day or spend the night, I decided to take my stuff and leave it in the hostel a bunch of guys i was travelling with were planning to stay. We then wandered about for a bit in their attempt to find food (the idea of food made my own insides cringe) but apparently the town doesnt wake up until about 11am, and the only people out on the streets were either cleaning the streets or 'hitting' them after having an early-morning-start at the booze. We did make a couple dog friends though. Having given up on food, we figured we should just go to the beach, maybe something will be open there, plus it will be later by that point.
The beach was not exactly all that and a bag of chips. It was supposed to be the "best" one around there, and let's just say it made the Mentor Beach look fricken amazing. The waves did look pretty, and there were some people with boards (though i didnt see them going in). A couple guys ran into the water (which was pretty frigid, and that is not just by MY cold standards, so you can almost trust that description) and came out thinking that their skin is bound to break out into a festering mess within the next 24 hours, to say nothing of their stomachs--apparently the water not only looked like ass, it also tasted crappy.
So then we had to go back and since i was the only one with any sort of spanish skills i had to deal with telling the lady running the hostel that we were leaving. Which turned into a whole drama since she wanted to charge us full price, and the guys that had NO english skills wouldnt budge on not wanting to pay anything. Finally I got fed up and said that i was planning on paying half (about three bucks) just 'cause i didnt want to spoil my nerves and ddint care and just wanted to leave and the rest of them could do whatever. So pretty much i guess that settled it. After which we chugged back to the bus station only to find out that the bus we wanted to get on was full. We then ran aroud the different terminals trying to find the next bus leaving for Arequipa that would have a bathroom (after the night before, i refused to get on the bus without one, and i suppose since i was holding the other guys hostage 'cause of lack of spanish, they had to go along with it). In any case, we ended up having to wait until like 5pm to leave and didnt get to Arequipa until maybe around 11:30pm. All in all a long and and exhausting and frustrating day. But it will all be better today. and the day after and the day after that.

2004-03-27T09:56:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately it seems i typed these two blog entries yesterday at a coffeeshop where the computer seems to have eaten them. To recap--I am now in a town in the middle of the Atacama desert in Chile called San Pedro. The border crossing was a bitch, but at least the road from the chilean border was paved. As opposed to the streets in the town, which are sandy and people walk around barefoot. Another great discovery was flush toilets with running water AAAAND toilet paper actually there. A less enthusiastic discovery was the fact that everything was bizillion times more expensive. Sandboarding fell through yesterday since apparently not enough people signed up and I have not checked whether today´s trip is a go or not. For now I am planning on renting bikes with a bunch of people, rediscovering how the pedals turn, and biking 'round for some cool scenery.

2004-03-26T16:36:00.001-05:00

I suppose i should talk about the Bolivian trip some, huh? Well, the bus from La Paz in the north of bolivia to Uyuni in the southwest was interesting to say the least. From about 4 in the afternoon until about 6 in the morning, my insides were shaken enough to make numerous organ-shakes. I can only assume it was to ascertain the integrity of attachment of the abovementioned organs. No seriously it was incredible. Not only was the road not paved, but it must have also been super-pot-holed. I dont think anyone caught more than a snooze on that one. We got off the bus around 6 and immediately got assaulted by the usual slew of travel agencies (what a job!! to wake up in the wee hours to greet incoming buses... eeeek!!) which had to be wafted off (i was too tired to even try to say anything, i just took business cards and kept moving, saying 'un cafe primero' or something to that effect). Having heard that there was an open cafe around the corner (nothing opens that early normally) we chugged over there, dumped our packs..... and nothing happened. I mean people at the table next to us got food and all. Although I dont know how long it took for them to get it. In the end we ended up spending about 2 hours in that establishment. Of which at least an hour was waiting for the guy to bring us a menu and take our order. No the place was not crowded. We were pretty much the only ones there. But whatever. bygones.
We ended up booking a three day tour that left later that morning, around 10:30, taking us to the salt flats, volcanos, colored lagunes, geysers and hot springs. I took loads upon loads of pictures and now need to burn them on a CD so that i can take more, but this place doesnt have a burner. Now that I started describing the trip i dont think i can much without the pictures! So i guess I will just have to wait until i post those up. sorry.

2004-03-26T16:36:00.000-05:00

2004-03-26T16:09:00.000-05:00

Well, I just got to Chile. More specifically, I am at a little town in the Atacama desert in the north of Chile, where apparently a lot of chileans go to treck. So far what I know about the town: 1. It´s fricken hot. But it's dry heat. The lp book says it never rains around here. Which I suppose explains the noteable absence of running water in a lot of places (it cant explain lack of running water in the places in bolivia though!). At least there are flush toilets and i think i actually saw toilet paper actually present in a public restroom for the first time. All in all this is supposed to be the return-to-civilization type deal. Indeed, while getting to the bolivian passport control, the road was unpaved, and from the chilean border were were cruising on asphalt. But the moment we got to border control we wanted to go right back, since it took sooooo fricken long and was soooo ineffective. And the searched all the bags. All of them. They also disinfected my shoes. Thank you chilean border control for propagating sanitation in my clothing.
2. (you forgot i was numbering didnt you?) The town of San Pedro de Atacama seems to be made out of sand, sand, dust, mud looking houses and a maximum of like four streets. Most of the streets are of course lined with tourist agencies offering trips to the mountains (where i just came from but on the chilean side) for three or more times the price you would pay across the border. 3. The streets are not paved. In fact they are pretty much sand. People are prancing around barefoot. But at least I can wear shorts and not be terrified that the moment the sun goes down i will need to dash to my pack to pull out thermal underwear, pants, and sweaters. 3. Although to some degree you do see people who appear to be ethnically more indian, i was almost weirded out by the fact that i kept walking into tour agencies to face perfectly tanned caucasians (for the past three weeks, wherever i had gone, anyone appearing in any way lighter than normal was considered a foreigner. my chilean pen pal kept having english talked at him. his spanish is much better than his english, but what can you do when you´re blond?) 4. Can you say sticker shock?

2004-03-22T17:29:00.000-05:00

I had received comments from sources which shall remain anonymous saying that i should be uh... less verbose. Since I dont know how to make a survey, just comment back whether you're sick of them being too long or what. Whether I decide to do anything about the length of my tirades depending on feedback or not has not been decided yet.
Sincerely
Administration

2004-03-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

Happy birthday to me (khe khe)! Happy birthday to me (khe khe)!
I woke up to a blazingly fiery noze and came down feeling all groggy and ready to soak it in some cold water to chill it from its burning pain--only to run into the friends from the Inca trail that I was hoping to meet in La Paz. Turns out everyone is staying at the same hostel and were planning to go to Salar de Uyuni tomorrow night. Considering the concierge told me last night there was no one i asked about staying here and only some italians or what not (there is not a n italian in the group) it was a very pleasant surprise! now i dont have to spend my birthday by myself!! Plus i was thinking of tagging along so we all do the Salar trip together, should be more fun. So today and tomorrow i am planning to run around like a chicken with its head cut off, soaking in the smelly La Paz. Speaking of smelly, there seems to be so much pollution, i think if i smoke a cigarette it might actually prevent the crap from settling in my lungs. All this against the super dramatic backdrop of snow-capped peaks when you look down to the ends of the streets.

2004-03-20T18:12:00.000-05:00

I have just seen the most laid back border EVER. Crossing between Peru and Bolivia, the only reason you would know if you changed countries at all is because of all the tricycle drivers assaulting you to drive you to the frontera. Originally i was told by someone in my collectivo van that the border is only a couple blocks up, so i started off walking, but then got laughed at by another collectivo that was going to the border town. After I'd turned varied shades of carefully hidden pink (since i had been so generously sun kissed on the lake earlier) I was very happy i didnt plod through like 2 km of nothingness all the while having to watch my backpack against it being cut or what not.
You get to the other side and the biggest sign you see is: GO BATHROOM HERE. or maybe it was NEED GO BATHROOM HERE. around the sign are much the same spreads of blankets covered with trinkets and knit hats etc. The only way you know you already crossed is a condensation of money changing tables on the street. Only after careful looking around did i spot the immigration office where i needed to go get my stamps, cards etc. The only people going through the process were two swiss girls i had seen earlier on the trip to the titicaca islands (ooh, i stopped giggling at that one) and myself. The locals just seemed to be walking back and forth with the look of inpenetrability, covered by a bowler hat and supported by a huge colorful sack on their backs. well, at least in the case with women. men had no sacks. you know what i mean?

2004-03-19T20:48:00.000-05:00

I'd been sick for the past few days so nothing much has happened. I did move my snotty self to Puno, which is located on the peruvian side of lake Titicaca (giggle giggle). I did finally end up meeting up with my ever-elusive chilean pen pal who was also here for the same day i was. I also went on a two day island hopping thingamagig on Titicaca (giggle). Basically the first day the take you to these fake islands, well, not fake, but artificial, they're made of straw by the people that live on them. Mostly nowadays they are for tourists, but apparently they first emerged because the Uros (the people living on these floats) wanted to get away from the Incas and the such. Which gives me an idea... If i ever get sick of a whole bunch of people i should just make a float and... who am i kidding? There really isnt much to do on these islands. Basically the three and a half people there keep trying to get you to buy souvenirs made of that straw... They also eat the straw (tastes a bit like a cucumber but sweet... dont know if that made any sense).
Then the boat at the full 15mph or whatever it was able to pull took us to an actual land island (Amantayni or something like that) which ended up being about 3 hours or so away. At that point we were distributed equally and impartially to the dressed up local women who then took us to their houses: (with much huffing and puffing awaiting an oil painting to capture them), (apparently this happens every day with every tour, which takes on a surreal air when you try to imagine it... or at least when i do). I dont know what anyone else did, but i was feeling pretty nauseous at that point and i crashed, to be awakened for lunch, then for being asked twenty times or so if i was sure i didnt want to go up to the top to see the view with the rest of the group (yes!!! yes i DO want to go!! i just dont want to be turning inside out on the way!) and then for dinner... and then to go to the nightly feria.

It turns out that the feria consists of the locals dressing us up in native dress (was that un-pc? sue me) and then we all went and danced for a bit to the andean music, and looked like something out of a David Lynch movie... or something that belonged in one anyhow. The best thing though was the sky. On the way down to the party, you see SO many stars!! There is no electricity on the island or anywhere nearby for that matter so the sky is almost fuzzy with stars. Oh, and i saw the longest shooting star EVER!! It flew for so long i started doubting it was a real shoting star until it finally went out. It did go a lot faster than a satellite normally would. I wonder if i should've made more than one wish. At the horizon, where the sky and the water are broken a bit by the mountains there would be these incredibly orange flashes of lightling, that looked even more strange for the absolutely clear sky above the island and as far as i could see.
The next day it turned out that a whole bunch of us had returned the food that was fed to us either during the night or in the morning. I still dont know if it was the altitude sickness or the peculiarity of the local cuisine. Eg: soup with potatoes and pasta followed by rice and potatoes. Oh and the silly part came when we started comparing breakfasts and it turned out everyone had something cool, and i was the only one that got a couple pieces of bread. Am i getting fat and was that family trying to tell me something? Or maybe they figured it was the best way to fight against another bout of potential projectile vomiting. I will never know. And I must say, i dont even care now.
Today, on the second day, we visited another island but there is really not much of anything to say here except that the views of the lake were lovely. On the way back (yeiii!!! we go super fast!! i think we made it up to 15mph!!! oh wait.... that's the same as before) it turned out that half the boat was somehow educated in bio. A bioboat. Sort of sickening when you think of it. Or when i think of it. And then i was asked to go into the whole story of what i was doing school-wise. So that didnt really help. Thankfully the nausea gets abated by my anti cold pills!!

2004-03-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

At this point i must say i cant remember much about the third day. Oh wait, right, it rained more, and at night there was a parte with all the groups who were on the trail where two incredibly tall and incredibly stinky brits put on a show that would've landed them at an asylum had they performed in the midst of civilization. Speaking of civilization, on the third day most of us were more than happy to part with 5 soles for a hot shower. a hot loooong shower. mmmmmmmmm.... droool. Then our cooks showed us all the food that some of the other fancier groups were getting throughout their trip, by whipping up this amazingly enormous feast, and forcing us to leave uneaten tons upon tons of good food. Also on the third day I was bitten by some tiny insect. I remember brushing it off my eyebrow when it stung me. Several hours later my eye was the size of a small apple, hanging over and mostly obstructing my vision. I had tried hiding it under my sunglasses for the rest of the day and opted for looking like one of those people who think it's cool to wear sunglasses at night and inside. Not like i could even spend much time inside, since i was completely unable to move my feet in any semblance of a rhythm. In fact, mostly my feet behaved like stubborn donkeys that have to be convinced into moving by the sheer force of will. In addition in the middle of the night i realized that the cold and wet of the second day of the trail had not gone by without leaving its vicious mark on me, since i was trying to breathe and failing miserably, plus sneezing and coughing to such an extent, i was surprised to learn that the person i was sharing the tent with was able to sleep at all.
The next day we were woken up super early, at like 4am. No tea. Nada. Just annoyed yells: "matra, amigo, matra!"--apparently they were collecting the sleeping pads. I am generally slow in the morning. I am also generally cranky in the morning. I am generally better not approached in the morning and all i have to say is that i probably would've been beaten up if those guys heard what i was replying to them under my breath or in languages i hoped they wouldnt understand. Plus I lost my glasses and was extra pissed at having to deal with scared children asking mommies if i was a gringa bruja or something like that. When i got to breakfast, someone was literally standing over me, waiting for me to finish my coffee from like the moment they poured it. Apparently it's because the porters wanted to catch the 6am train back to cusco. Which i can understand, but come ON!!! no need to act like complete assholes! urghgh...
And then we walked for a couple hours to machu pichu and couldnt see anything because everything was covered in clouds, and all the vistas were pretty much nonexistent. In fact, when we got to the site itself we werent even sure that was it because so much of it was under the white milky mess. It also started raining. At some point it cleared up a bit, but only as a tease, so most of us decided to go down to the entrance and leave our packs there and then come back for the guided version and hope that the weather clears up by then. The weather did clear up, but when the guide started talking i realized i was really hungry. And taking after some people i know, i couldnt think of anything else much. Hungry hungry. Equinoxes were very important to the Incas. Hungry. Very very hungry incas. Incas had an agricultural zone. There was nothing edible there now. Arrrrgh.
When you finally get to Machu Pichu, there's an actual Machu Pichu mountain that you can climb. First I was too hungry to climb. After i ate i was too tired. It was supposed to be only about 45 slow minutes up. And i didnt. I guess I'll just live with that. For a couple days after I got back from the trail different parts of my legs would scream at going up or down the smallest number of steps, so i really will get over not climbing the last part. Plus everything was covered in clouds anyway, so you couldnt get a good view. Sour grapes anyone?

When you go down a million steps from Machu Pichu to the town of Aguas Calientes below, and after your ears pop about twenty times, trying to equilibrate to the changes in pressure, you arrive to a town that looks to be one street centered around a railroad track. It's actually a couple of streets and it does branch out away from the railroad a bit, if only to include the hot srpings which give the town its name. I'd never been to hot springs before, so i didnt quite know what to expect. In any case, i figured it couldnt be too clean and was happy to find that i could rent a towel there (they also rented bathing suits, which just doesnt seem particularly hygienic at all...). Anyway, I was pretty tired and sore from the four days' worth ofwalking and was pretty happy to jump into what looked like a regular swimming pool size-pool of greenish water that promised to be oh-so-nice-and-warm...
Well, the water was warm, but not as warm as i wanted. Which I thought was likely compensated by the fact that you could order all sorts of drinks directly from the pool and have them brought to you and then pay later. I opted not to go for this option, since i figured i might just fall asleep right there if i have alcohol. After a little bit, it became apparent even to my super-stuffed nose that some sort of a funk hung about the pool. I tried to relate it to sulfur, but unfortunately the only thing I could identify in the smell was... well.... a public urinal. The guys from my group that had used the changing rooms said that the changing rooms smelled exactly like that but even more intense. Ewwwwwww. Then of course my super slow brain turns on, or more like turns around and realizes there are at least 40 kids at the other end of the pool. I hope it was only the kids. At this point everyone was pretty much as grossed out as could be, and almost ran back to the hostel for showers.
I had planned on partying it up, to celebrate the machu pichu and the end of the trek and all that but instead i ended up feeling really ill and crashed around 7pm. And the next morning on the backpacker express (that's the actual name of the train, no lie!!) a couple of italian kids (maybe 2 and 5) got plopped down across from me, and i am convinced that they are the reason that i have not only superbruised shins, since i actually felt them kicking me over and over, but also some sort of a conjuctivitis. kids! why couldnt they sit across from their MOM or DAD!!!

2004-03-16T16:03:00.000-05:00

6am or so. 2nd day of the Inca Trail. I am aroused by the slowly approaching yells: Mate amigo? Mate amiga? has nothing to do with killing. They´re just waking us up by loudly brining hot coca leaf brew. (If i decline the brew, can i sleep longer?) the brew is good and warm and makes getting out of my semi-damp and semi-freezing sleeping bag much easier. (by the way, the second night i had been told the temperatures drop to a few degrees below freezing, and i am terrified of how this bag will hold up if it performed so poorly in the mild weather of the first night)
I am generally pretty retarded in the morning and it takes me a while to wash my face (with my drinking water--i was cursing myself for bringing 3.5 liters on the first day) brush my teeth repack the pack and get out to breakfast, so by the time i make it to the mess tent everyone is already there AND on like the third course as it appears. Did you know there were COURSES to BREAKFAST??????? I know i didnt!! So I quickly get a bowl of oatmeal, a boal of fruit salad and a pancake shoved onto my lap in different plates. Mind you my lap is not big enough for three plates. And the table is one of those foldeable thingers so whenever you put a plate or a cup on there it leans towards the middle threatening to spill whatever it contains into the middle of the table. Aside from the acrobatics of managing my three plates and attempting to eat at the same time and downing a cup of coffee and another one of something or other, hot chocolate, mate de coca, whatever, i really must say i was amazed about the huge quantities of food i was capable of shoving into myself. Oh and there was also bread and butter and jam. lest i forget.
Also in the morning we were told that for about 10 bucks we can hire a porter to carry our packs for the moslty upward trail today. Yes, yes i am a wimp. Yes my tent and food and stove etc are already being carried. And yes i fell for the porter. Best decision EVER!!!!! I was in such pain by the time I got to the second camp site, I couldnt even think of what it would´ve been like with the extra weight of the pack on me. Fine, call me a wimp. I´ll live.
Our guide described the meeting point at which our group is supposed to re-collect and get a "snack". Well, having ditched my backpack I decided that I would be warm enough walking so all i really need with me is my raincoat and some snacks (just in case) and the water obviously. And how happy was i that i didnt take anything else when i was scrambling to lift my weight from one stair that was at knee-height to the next.... and the next. and the next... and there was no end.... and then when i thought i was going to sit and cry for a bit before moving on i finally got to the snack site. A couple people from my group were there already (well, the ecuadorian stopped at the same time as me, without a pack, and a sweizerdeutcher had arrived earlier... WITH a pack). There was no sign of porters but a couple people who looked like they were organizing stuff for our group looked like they were boiling water. Which was a good thing for a while since i started shivering pretty much immediately after getting to the site, and for a while i tried to not get away from the boiling water for more than a couple of centimeters. Then of course the rain started. I looked around and noticed that other groups had gone into tents. We had no tent. We had no porters. We had no guide, who was doing the sweep at the back of the group apparently. Basically, it came down to us, sitting in our waterproofs, slowly getting wet wherever the waterproof didnt reach (in my case my pants) and freezing our respective rears off. I got desperate enough to start asking for clothes from the people that carried their packs, which helped a bit. Afterwards, when my pack arrived, along with a billion pounds of other stuff that porter was carrying, I was able to get my own clothes out, but the pants were still cold and wet. At least they didnt smell like wet dog.
About an hour or so of such sitting around and our porters made it to the site and set up a tent, into which we huddled to refill our cups with hot water over and over and over and over and... oh damn, where´s the bathroom?? Thankfully there was one on the site. God knows there wasnt anywhere to stop on the endless stairs that we had to cover before the end of the day, what with a sharply rising cliff on one side and a sharply falling cliff on the other. Not your prime bathroom territory you know.
When I finally got to the end of the climb, my hips were screaming curses in languages known and unknown to man, and had declared an ultimatum and then fulfilled it before i even had a chance to think about it. The view at the top was.... nonexistent. Everything around was covered in clouds so you couldnt see anything. I hung around for a long time, waiting for the weather to clear up, since it´s supposed to be rather finicky in the mountains anyway. But wait as i may, i only got colder, and only got closer to running out of cigarettes.
Thankfully the rest of the way was all down, although a bit of a scary down with really steep stone steps, some of which were very slippery but as far as i am concerned going down beats the crap out of going up, and i dont know what the hell those people who knock going down are complaining about. How many breathing stops do they take on the way down versus the way up? huh? huh? exaaactly!!!!
The downward trail went past a bunch of waterfalls, so i whipped out my trusty camera and kept shooting away up until i got to the campsite and realized i needed to shoot that too. The next morning the camera didnt work. The rain. stupid stupid rain.
I thought i was the first person to hit camp for a while, and was pretty bored, but then it turned out the guy with the backpack who showed up the first at the snack site also showed up first and was too occupied taking a nap to socialize with the likes of me.
Socializing came later, around 8, after everyone had eaten dinner (yes, multicourse) and the couples had rolled off to bed, and there were about 5 of us left looking for a party. No party for us though, everything around was quiet and dark. What a gip. We tried making our own party by gathering around the kerosine lamp and expecting it to generate heat. i think somebody took pictures so i expect to be eventually able to show how pathetic and sad we looked. There was no heat at ALL generated by that thing, but we figured if we waited long enough maybe.....
Finally everyone got cold enough to go and try to sleep. Have you ever tried to sleep in a bag that leaves you shivering in warm weather when it´s below freezing outside? Well, i didnt have to. One of the guys had been the best or worst packer ever, depending on your perspective. From mine, he was the best packer ever. He had two sleeping bags. one that he rented and one that he owned. He tried them both the night before and said they were too hot, so he let me borrow one to use with the one i had already. I was warm and cozy and had the best sleep ever. I was probably the only one in our camp to make such a claim the next day, so for the fear of having wet donkey poop thrown at me i just kept quiet.
By the way, INCREDIBLE amounts of horse-and-or-donkey poop on the trail. The most memorable encounter with one of the poop producers for me occured when i had accidentally bumped into a pig that was being carried by a horse that made such a squeal i thought i must be a criminal. The indian woman accompanying the animals just laughed, but apparently when a similar thing happened to Will, who had hit the pig with his pack, the humans of the party were nowhere near as amused and cursed at him (or at least that´s what i assume they did) in quechua.

2004-03-16T13:09:00.000-05:00

On thursday (last thursday that is) I was told that I would be picked up at the hostel to go to machu pichu between 7:30 and 8am. And such was my drive to go to machu pichu, that i was even out in the lobby having breakfast around 7. As it happened nobody came to pick me up until about 8:30, at which point an animated if not violent discussion ensued between the consierge and the picker upper: apparently the consierge had told the picker upper at 7:30 am that there was no one out and about... which is rather strange considering the only separation is glass and i was clearly visible. maybe he was just tired. In any case, hoping that the people who had been sitting in the bus for the past hour are not going to chew my head off i finally got to head off, leaving a bunch of my stuff in hostel storage.
The drive was interrupted after a couple of hours, when we were allowed to go get some coffee or food or bathroomate or whatnot. At that point we were accosted by about 5 women all of them selling a) bags of coca leaves, which are supposed to help with altitude sickness, and help you with the hard parts of the trail--you´re supposed to make a ball of them and chew them i think. another version involves dumping a bunch of leaves into hot water to make te (or ma-te), the effects of which are dubious but which does not taste nearly as nasty as the leaves; b) walking sticks of bamboo with embroidered handles--since i still haven´t figured out how to use a walking stick to make me walk better from the previous hikes, i´d definitely passed on this one, but a lot of people did invest in one and some in two. i kept waiting for starwars-type fights to break out, but that never happened. maybe i should´ve got one just for that purpose, to induce starwars type fights that is. c) water bottle holders--pretty much everyone except i think for me invested in those only to find out that the lock holding the adjustable strap held nothing at all, so they had to improvise the whole way through. I just used the side pockets of my pack. am i smart or what. d) hats--for the sun that is. i dont think i saw anyone wear one after the first day though. The ladies selling these marvelous goods moved around about 1 m of space, repeatedly offering the same stuff to the same people. Hope IS the last thing to die isnt it...
After another hour or two of exhausting travel on the bus (or something) we were introduced to what was to be the trend for the rest of the trip... the multicourse camping meal. And we´re talking soup, main course, desert, tea coffee etc etc. and that was lunch of day one before we even STARTED hiking.
And did i mention how incredibly cushy this trip is? There are porters to carry your tent and the mess tent, the cookware and the food and the plates and silverware and cups and such and gas canisters since fires are not allowed on the trail. Oh, yeah, and of course they COOK for you too. The biggest worry remains not to break a nail on the zipper of your own sleeping bag (or in my case on the zipper of my rented sleeping bag).
The first day we hiked for maybe 3 hours, which was not bad at ALL. The weather was lovely, the road was mostly even, it was not too hot or too cold... it was PERFECT as far as i was concerned so i was pretty surprised to hear a brit who looked like he could probably bend a car in two complain about how hard that was. By the time he complained at dinner at receiving fried fish with veggies and rice about the quality of food (uhm.. ·i· have never had such a spread campin... ever!) i figured he just liked complaining. When we first hit the camp site and whipped out our chocolatey snacks to restore some decent level of sugar we were accosted by a few locals, in whose apparently backyard we were camping--and by we i dont mean just my group. there were at least 15 groups stretched out along several houses worth of backyards. The locals consisted of 1 (one) cow (or perhaps a bull, i didnt check), 3 (three) at least that is chickens, 2 (two) sad and scared looking dogs that would walk up to you to look miserably up at you with their tail between their legs and 2 (two) disinterested donkeys.... and last but not least by the kids. The kids would walk up to you and literally stare you in the mouth while you chewed whatever chocolatey snack you stashed. Pretty much everyone ended up handing out some snacks. On the second round however just staring proved an insufficient technique, and kids had to insist on their right to sugar over your exhausted self by pressing¨"regalame tu chocolate!!" (give me your chocolate). As far as i was concerned that was the best phrase of the trip right there. Regalame tu chocolate.
Oh and while i´m describing the beginning of the trip, the make up of my group: a rather loud british couple who procured two large bottles of beer on the first night (and which included that strongman i had already mentioned), a less flamboyant british couple from sidney, two sweizerdeutchers, an ecuadorian, an israeli guy whose name no one could remember until i literally asked the guide to look it up in the roster, myself, and my travelmate will. I managed to avoid the latter pretty well during the trip since there was such close association with so many other people. I even got into a tent with someone else. Mental health gallore.
Regalame tu chocolate.

2004-03-15T16:56:00.000-05:00

Well, i feel like i have been off this thing for so long i will never be able to catch up. Let´s see... Last wednesday I went rafting down the river under the strange name Urubamba, just like the town out of which i had gone hiking previously. I had always thought that if the water was high, that meant the rapids were better, right? Well, obviously i have no clue, but apparently i have even less of a clue than i had previously suspected. In any case, many of the presumed rapids never had a chance (we were supposed to hit class III-IV), but aside from wishing for more bigger and better, the rest was great. We started off with changing into outfits worthy of versace. well, not quite, but once i finally get to a computer with xp or millienium windows on it you´ll judge for yourself. First you drag yourself into a 6-7mm wetsuit, which is already a rather difficult task, since those suckers dont bend or stretch without much grunting on your behalf. On top of that you add a "poet shirt" of a fluorescent yellow, to be offset in the future by a bright red floatie-jacket and a sky-blue skull protection gear. Far be it from me to knock skull protection but this sucker slid back, forth, sideways and in circles around my head (one size fits all... apparently some more than others). In any case, decked out in such outfits we then all climbed into the rafts--about 7-8 people per raft. i never knew you could fit so many people in. Then of course i also didnt know that 11 grown people could fit into a toyota corolla (i counted today!)... but i digress.
The rapids did turn out to be fun, although i dont think they got past a III. Afterwards, when I was taking the bus to 82nd km to start trekking to machu pichu, i think we drove past grade bizillion. Well, next time. or something. As my raft was mostly floating we could check out the amazing scenery with the snow capped and not snowcapped mountains, lots of random little shacks along the river and partake in the smells of the river, the greenery and of course the manure which took on an almost pleasant quality. did i just type that manure smelled nice?????????
As we went past the last rapid and were told we were done and were feeling so good about keeping shivering to a minimum, we were told that there was a bridge we were about to near where we could jump into the river. Sounds like fun? Well, sounded like fun to me!! Scared as i was i ended up closing my eyes, so i was surprised that it was such a long time before i hit water. And then i wished that i was still in the air because the water was so cold. The current was pretty strong and I got carried past the first raft before i even noticed what was going on, then, when i tried for my raft, i realized i was going to miss it too: did you ever try swimming with a lifejacket on in a current? Plus i was having problems breathing, probably from the freezing water. I did manage to catch the line and got pulled into the raft. Unfortunately the girl that jumped in immediately before me, missed the line by a couple of millimeters and ended up getting picked up from shore much later on. well sort of from shore. She had to swim to the raft, in the process freaking me out because i thought she had gone hypothermic for sure, she was so out of it by the time she was dragged into the boat. She recovered pretty quickly though. So all good.
Have any idea how good dry clothes can feel after that? Well, just imagine. The tour operators took a bunch of pictures and I did spend about a buck to buy a couple of them. though you mostly have no idea who is in the raft, and so there is pretty much no evidence i was ever there. Maybe it was brainwashing?
Well, that was all last wednesday.

2004-03-08T19:14:00.000-05:00

In case anyone was wondering, yes yes it´s hard to drink at high altitude but somebody has to do it. Being an avid subscriber to the theory that the highest effectiveness is achieved through regularity, i of course wanted to drink and try all this local stuff. A drink with dinner went alright, but going to a club afterwards and downing a free cuba libre (and no pun intended here) gave me the biggest headache. I guess it´s not the quantity that counts. We´ll see what happens today.
Speaking of free drinks--the moment you hit entrance to the main plaza at night, you get accosted with twenty thousand people shoving flyers into your hands that allow you and your friends to get free drinks. How they get anyone to pay is beyond me, but if one were to make a circuit of the bars before getting to the place they were originally intending to go, just for the free drinks, i doubt they would know where they were going in the end. That was the most convoluted sentence ever, but it makes sense to me, so it stays.

Anyway, it has been a lazy day today if i do say so myself. As i was trying to wake up with some hostel breakfast and insufficient quantity of coffee I got approached by an argentinian dude (and NO! not approached THAT way!) who explained that he was working on a flyer for this touchy-feely thing, something about self therapy, la dee da. So of course, i am just about to say no thank you, i already have one, he says that what he was actually asking was if he could take pictures of my face for the self therapy page. apparently i look self therapeutic. and so my mug will now bless some poor unknowing sucker who will be talked into looking at the brochure (ha! they wont know what hit them!) while i am getting a free shiatsu massage for it. i am not sure what a shiatsu massage is, but seeing as i have never had a massage in my entire life, i´m still psyched. One of the hollander girls (of which there are about a bizillion here) said that she was disappointed with hers when she got one, but hey, whatever--i am not even paying for mine.

And on the subject of paying for anything, did i MENTION how incredibly cheap stuff is in this country? And to make things even cheaper, the hollanders and i went to the market today, to explore. It was a unique experience i must say. I was tempted to take pictures, but having been warned about people getting their cameras and wallets stolen, i refrained from even pulling it out of the backpack. Aside from the numerous llama sweaters and hats and gloves and multicolored belts of all shapes and sizes and other stuff geared towards tourists, there were many rubber shoes being fixed, bras and underwear and all sorts of clothes being sold (who tries bras on in the open market is what i want to know), some old dude was trying to push toilet paper rolls. (speaking of toilet paper rolls, this country has an abhorrence about putting t.p. in public restrooms for some reason. in yesterdays bar the t.p was being kept in a cupboard and probably reserved for the VIPs) There were also sheep or cow or some other cattle´s heads being cut open (and i mean HEADS. there were no bodies on that table)... many strange and disgusting looking cuts of meet some of them blue some purple and very few red. There were live birds of all kinds, most of which i couldnt tell, I figured out the ducklings and the chicks but the rest eluded me. They were fuzzy and didnt have a clue they were soon to be dinner. or lunch. And here i get back to the cheap thing--$3 for a three course lunch with alcoholic or nonalcoholic drinks. Say whaaa? And then of course i ran rampant on the fruit market, since there were all these fruits i had never seen before and needed to ask about and forget their names immediately and see if i could stuff them in my bag for later. I tried cactus. I never knew cactus was a fruit. It´s yummy. Who knew and didnt tell me?!
Also i got to stock up on woolens for the inka trail to machu pichu--apparently on the second night it gets down to freezing. Weeee!!! going to machu pichu on thursday!!!!

2004-03-07T20:32:00.000-05:00

This one is going to be short, sorry. I figured out how to post pictures, which will now be at irrka.buzznet.com.

I went on a 3 hour hike in Pisac today--that is around an hour away from cuzco and was a settlement of sorts, up until the spaniards failed to take it, at which point it became known as a fortress. nuff said.
sights are spectacular and as soon as i can i will post the pics up

2004-03-06T20:27:00.000-05:00

After a loooooong long long loooooooong journey i am finally in Cuzco. Just so you have an idea: all the locals in Nazca recommended this one bus company called Molino, so that is what i went with. 55 soles for a 16 hour trip, them saying what a great bus it was. There was no A-C on the bus. Had to keep the windows open or closed depending on weather. There were kids all over screaming and throwing up and messing up my breathing are in very very very near proximity in other ways. Fortunately the scenery was enough to compensate for it, and the bus did leave late enough that by we ended up in Cuzco around 10am, giving me about 5 hours of awesome scenery-watching. well, ok, so i didnt watch the scenery the whole time, i did fall asleep a bunch of times but as it was rather uncomfortable that usually didnt last long. How lucky am i that i can curl up in a tiny seat--at least that way i could be sort of comfy. Oh, and for most of the trip i was afraid of drinking water since it didnt look like there were facilities on the bus. Despite the assurances from the person selling me the ticket. As it turned out, the facilities were indeed there but for their conditions they might as well not have.
An interesting bit of local color here--around 3 o'clock in the morning i woke up to the stopped bus to find that this was a bathroom stop. we were stopped in the middle of nowhere and you hit mud the minute you stepped of the bus. not only that, everyone was running off into the field to squat. i just went back for my cigarettes to get the smell of the bus children air out of my nostrils. yes i know that sounds mean, but trust me, the air was pretty vile, even though i WAS by the window.
Well, Cuzco turned out to be a much bigger place than i had thought and definitely many many degrees bigger than Nazca. And it is so incredibly cute!!! Yes, yes, it is very touristy and i think there may be more tourists here than peruvians, but that is almost small enough not to detract from the place. I had been wandering around the place for a bit and there are a bizillion travel agencies willing to take you whichever way wherever you want. I am still considering how and when to do what. For the Inca trail to Machu Pichu apparently you now have to make a reservation 3-4 days in advance, and i'm going to try and catch up with my student ID card before i go, so that i can get a hefty discount. yippie. well, off to dinner with me. Oh, and for anyone wanting to lose weight--appetite dies a sudden death syndrome at altitude for some reason. just a thought. maybe hit 99th floor somewhere or something. well that's all i have for now. And hey, now i have figured out how go get comments so you can actually make fun of me right here!!! woo hoo!!!
p.s. i am contemplating swiping a golden llama statue from some company's yard, i think it will look good in my apartment!!

2004-03-05T20:15:00.000-05:00

You cant really see me since i'm short AND in the back of another raft altogether

2004-03-05T20:13:00.000-05:00

Looking so cool.... or something. Rafting Ollantatamba river outside of Cuzco

2004-03-05T15:09:00.000-05:00

PURRTY
I am now in the desert. There is nothing growing. It literally is a flatness of dark stone surrounded by mountains of the same stone. Sounds depressing but it really looks rather beautiful. Since I apparently can now upload pictures i shall try to post tomorrow or the day after.

HOW I LEARNED TO SANDBOARD
Today i made the heroic effort of waking up about ¨4-45am to hike up the tallest dune in the world--Cerro Blanco--and to sandboard down that same dune. After much huffing and puffing and stopping and rationing of water we got to the top. Well, almost... Our guide ran ahead, seeing as he has already done this climb twenty thousand times, and we were left about 100m from the top or at least close to the top figuring out where to go for ourselves. As it also happens, the thin layer of loose sand that we were trying to climb was just covering a compacted'sand base, off which there was no way to push off yourself. after trying for a bit to climb up gollum-style on all fours, i had given up since i kept sliding down to no end. So then, brilliant thought hits me, must dig footholds. Unfortunately most´stones´´that happen to be in the area are also made of sand. so that didnt work so well. I did find a tiny rock that didnt fall apart and for a while tried to dig foot holds with that, but at some point i ended up slipping furter down than when i started. Then it dawned on someone that we had to dig a bizillion more of these little footholds that kept getting filled up with sand. Meanwhile, our guide has been gone for all this time we´re flopping around on our bellies. Having been defeated by the dune we figured we´ll try to make our way down and either do the less steep and less dense 4 hour ascent or go to another side of the mountain to go down the boards there and then just hitch back. As we were sliding on our butts trying to use sandboards as a break and getting underwear full of sand, our guide resurfaced and couldnt come up with anything better than to start throwing rocks at us. brilliant. anyway, we all ended up sliding-walking-slipping down another side of the dune, which turned out to be too densely packed to try to slide. you literally would go 10 feet and stop. Whimpering from the enormous blisters from the sandburn on my heels, I made it down only to be told that pretty much all other tourists with like one exception normally make it to the top. I dont think we were the most whimpy bunch, and dammit, i´m going to do that thing with clamp-ons one day!!

PENPALS
Well my pen pal has gone missing again. We´d been considering doing the circuit through northern Chile, Bolivia and some of Peru together. Oh well, off to Cusco i go then!

PICTURES
I am trying to upload pictures to irrka.buzznet.com