I was just about to work on writing a new blog post, when I realized that I had forgotten to upload the last post I wrote. That leaves nearly a month long gap. For now, here’s Puno and Southern Peru. At the moment on I’m working on catching up to Santiago de Chile, where I am for the next couple of days. 

Haven’t posted since Puno. There’s both a lot to say, and nothing to say about Puno. I’m not sure which details are incredibly boring, and which are genuinely interesting, but I’m leaning towards omitting the rest of Puno save a few exploits.

The last several days we were in Puno, I bought a hotel room for $8USD a night in town. I had to work on the new cell phone one of those nights, and needed wifi. The other night I just wanted something different, and $8 dollars is the same price as the cheapest lunch you can find in Fairbanks. The day the phone came in, I went and bought the best things you can buy in Puno for dinner: french fries, olive paste, avocadoes, salt, bread, a candy bar, some street cart desserts and a couple of bottles of soda. I got back to the hotel and turned on the TV to Forrest Gump dubbed in Spanish, opened my computer and ate dinner using a $.40 spoon. I’m pretty sure the lady screwed me on the price, because spoons are five for a dollar at Walmart, and don’t have edges so sharp they double as knives. It was like the design for KFC’s other utensil that they threw out in favor of the Spork due to safety issues.

The last day in Puno, I went into the city to buy a couple of last minute things: choclo seeds, half a litre of prescription strength mouthwash and some cavies for the people who owned the gas station that we stayed at. In between buying seeds and mouthwash, someone started following me so I had to hail a cab for the next street over. After walking through the market for forty minutes, and asking upwards of a dozen people, I located the ‘cuy’ aisle. Directions here are terrible, people say ‘up and to the left’ or, ‘down and to the right’ and you’re supposed triangulate from that, or find another person until you zero-in on it by taking so many up/downs and right/lefts. It’s like the orienteering version of twenty questions. Cuyes go for S/10, or 4USD, and all of them had far more toes than they were supposed to. A cavy should have fourteen. One of the ones that I bought had twenty three. There was also a cage of incredibly cute, cartoon-looking animals called ‘capas’, sort of like if you engineered a cuter guinea pig. They were S/12, so I decided to buy one after the lady told me you eat them as well. During this process, looking at different cavies, asking questions, an old cholita woman walked up, bought a capa, had it stuffed in a form fitting mesh tomatillo bag, then walked away with it tied to her belt. I bought two cavies and a capa after scraping together all of my change, leaving just enough for a combi ride back.

We camped that night on the altiplano. I do not like the altiplano. It’s great during the day, but at night it’s utterly black, cold and isolated. Also, most food doesn’t cook at 14,000 feet. The next day we climbed to over 15,000 feet on a pass that over looked two valleys, one being desert and the other wet plains. There was also a lightning storm on the one end of the valley, but it was still sunny. Overall, a very impressive view that can’t really be captured. Then the long descent into the desert. We stayed in Monquegua the next two nights, then spent one more night in Peru at an abandoned border station.

That, happened to be one of the most interesting nights yet, as I’m nearly certain people were smuggling stuff into Chile all night long. They kept running out of the desert, across the parking lot, dressed in all black with huge sacks to cars that would be hidden, idling, with their lights off, then drive away into the night. Every couple of minutes, a car would speed through the abandoned complex with its lights off. A couple of them kept coming back, an early 2000s all-black sedan, an old VW van with a bad motor and a generic 90s model car. The cops pulled a couple of times and everyone split.

The next day Chilean customs took forever. They had to search our whole car and trailer with a dog, which was better than putting everything we owned through an x-ray machine.

Chile is a developed nation. There’s not burning trash along the highways, or even trash at all for that matter. You can drink the water, and people drive on the right sides of the roads. The houses and buildings are finished, and look like they would withstand an earthquake thanks to building codes. There’s Walmart, under the moniker of Hiper Lider, and everyone owns cars. It’s actually quite nice, and everything seems to be of quality—no surprise anise cakes or syrupy bread filled with small rocks. It’s also expensive, in Peru it was half to a quarter of the price of the United States, sometimes less. In Chile, it’s about the same price as Florida, sometimes more far more in places like Arica. Still, the trade-off is worth it at the moment.

We spent a few days in Arica on the beach, and then drove to San Pedro de Atacama. San Pedro was a giant scam, prices were incredible, and everything about it was lackluster and expensive. Nothing compared to Peru. Some $16USD for lunch without drinks, more than $3USD a kilo for bread, and $19USD for a jar of Nutella. After spending too much time there, debating whether to cross the mountains to Argentina, we left for Calama and spent the night there. We had meant to do an open pit mine tour, but we got there on the Thursday night before Good Friday, and everything was shut. Considering the tour looked mediocre, we left after stocking up at Walmart (which was considerably cheaper than Arica, and had all the things that a Walmart should, the first time since Florida).

That was earlier today, and we’re outside of Antofagasta in La Negra, a city that exists solely because Antofagasta is 2000 feet and 10 miles down on the coast via a narrow, winding, road. To avoid hauling everything for the mines back up the hill, La Negra was built. I’m not sure anyone actually lives here save an old guy in a broken-down bus on the south end of town who sells sodas and two massive lithium refineries.

Another fascinating thing about Paraguay is that after the War, there were no men and hardly any sickly women. Something like90% of the men died and the rest were sick and wounded. So Paraguay tried to get people to come settle their country. Of course, the usual suspects showed up, and soon the land was filled with Mennonites, Nazis and utopists. The first Nazi party outside of Germany was ruled from Nuevo Germany, and to this day some 30,000 Mennonites live in the Chaco and in the city of Filadelfia—a German speaking city. That’s not to mention the troubled history of Nuevo Australia.

Paraguay also loved the Nazis. The chief of police in the 30s named his son Adolf Hirohito. Seriously. He also made swastikas part of the police uniform in a maneuver of awkward foreshadowing for the US-backed rule of Dictator Alfredo Stroessenor some twenty years later.

Anyways, enough about Paraguay, but before I leave the ‘guays, I thought I’d include this paragraph which I liked but couldn’t find a place to work in.

My Lonely Planet book called Montevideo a ‘Necropolis of broken dreams’. Something tells me that Kansas won’t take kindly to it when they find that their poetically honest State Motto has been stolen by Uruguay’s fading Art Deco Capital. But my point is that travel books aren’t necessarily to be trusted. I’m sure Wichita still clings to its crown, and that Montevideo is not a city of dead dreams any more than other cities. Although there is a certain ironic beauty in having even this motto stolen from your bleak city.

Now, on to what I’ve been doing since Trujillo. At the moment, I’m typing awkwardly and slowly on my laptop. I just can’t get my touch typing down tonight for some reason, and I keep making mistakes every other word. I’m in Abancay, three hours away from Cusco—the Orlando of South America.

Peru, is all desert. Why, was I not informed of this before? At least this isn’t strictly true, there’s the Amazonia and the Mountains, but hardly any people live there. They live in the dusty arid valleys of the coastal desert, where it’s so dry not even cacti can grow. Most cities are centered on rivers that are irrigated into green fields, a practice which is strangely thousands of years old, so it’s not as bad as it seems. The coastal cities were very unappealing, like driving along the Rust Belt in the late 70s. I affectionately dubbed Chimbote the ‘Cleveland of Peru’, which is saying a lot since Peru is like the Cleveland of South America. I would come up with a clever thing to call Chiclayo, but I can’t think of anything to do it justice, with the miles of burning landfills.

I did find some great quartz crystals in the Desert Mountains, and I am a lover of the desert. It wasn’t all bad. But looking back I’m struggling to come up with what to say about the area north of Lima, so I’m skipping ahead to the capital.

Lima. I had pictured a hot, giant, dirty slum, like the photos that come out of India. I was pleasantly surprised by the Anchorage (or Houston, for the non-Alaskans) on South America. It was modern, clean, moderately attractive and not terribly hot. Of course, the barrios spread miles in every direction, and there is plenty of awful poverty to see, but closer to the center is quite nice.

We came into Lima on the highway, and halfway through the city, the grease cap on our trailer broke, leading part of the brake drum to shear off in a barrio East of Miraflores. We were able to park in front of a mechanic’s shop on the side of the highway near a middle class, semi-gated community. The next day me, my dad and a taxi driver (whose family worked at the mechanic shop and lived upstairs) drove into the city to get parts. We drove around La Victoria for an hour or so, looking for the right stores, and had to make the twelve mile trip back to the trailer once to grab another part. I got a pretty good tour of the city, or at least one of the seedier areas of it.

La Victoria was rather surreal. At one time, it must have been a nicer, separate city from Lima, judging from the Art Deco and Art Noveau buildings lining the streets. However,  La Victoria has since fallen into disrepair, and many of the buildings we drove past had mechanic shops on the first floor. It must have been at least a little difficult to turn a 1920s mixed-use apartment building into a drive-in auto repair shop…

The mechanic who was machining a new part for us said it would be done around 4:00pm, but when we got there in the taxi he said it would be another half an hour. We drove a couple of streets down so I could add a few Soles balance to my iPhone, then returned to find that the mechanic hadn’t given us another grease cap. By now it was five-something, and most of the stores were closed, but we drove around for twenty minutes looking anyways.

On the way home, we got a flat tire on the expressway. Lima’s expressways don’t have exits like American ones do. There’s maybe an exit every three or four miles, so we had to drive a while with the flat until we could pull off into a very upscale neighborhood. We got a couple of glares from formally dressed, rich looking people while driving with the tire flapping around. We got the tire changed and were back on the highway in time to make it back at about 7:00pm.

The next day we drove down the road to a Petroperu station where we parked for the day and drove into the city. We spent most of the day seeing Lima—we drove through Chinatown and several other neighborhoods before the last stop at a fountain park complete with laser shows. My mom and I went into the grocery store next to our trailer when we got back at about 9:30 to buy a few things before they closed. There was a creepy guy sitting outside the store at a table on the patio creeping. He looked sort of like if you combined a Germanic Professor from Back to the Future with a homeless Chilean ex-con—just sitting there, staring people down, unblinkingly.

We bought a few things, and went back to the trailer. Not half an hour later, I was sitting in the car when I heard someone walking outside. Lo and behold, he was there, standing five feet from my window, watching. He walked around our trailer a couple of times, then started talking to another woman from behind a truck in German while continuing to creep.

He left after five minutes or so, but not before I tried calling the other cellphone to tell them to lock the trailer and locked all the van doors.

There are some nights it’s nice to have a can of pepper spray by the door.

We stayed one more day in Lima, which was a failure. My iPhone died that morning, which was a bad start. I don’t know what happened to it, but now it’s bricked and won’t come out of recovery mode, and my only hope is to install iOS 6.1 on it and hope for a new unlock. But the software is 700mb so I haven’t had an opportunity to try that yet. We couldn’t find anywhere to park in Lima, not even at a grocery store. We gave up and drove back after several hours.

We stopped at a ruin site before leaving the city for Ica, where we spent the night and stopped at a supermarket before continuing to Nazca.

Nazca—home of the world famous Nazca Lines, or “Lineas y Geoglifs de Nazca”. Nazca is a poor city sustained mainly by tourism. We saw the Nazca Lines from an observation tower and a mountain, deciding against paying $150+ to charter a Cessna. The flight is supposed to be awful too, with lots of dipping and banking so everyone on board can get a full view of the lines. The observation tower wasn’t bad, and I got to see three separate figures. The mountain lent a more panoramic view to illustrate just how massive the lines are, and between the two, I had a thorough Nazca-Line experience.

The road out of Nazca to Cusco climbs to 13,000 feet in less than sixty miles. The altiplano was kind of a shock after months of warmth. The last time it was cold out was Colorado back in the end of October, it’s been warm to hot ever since then, so the cold was exemplified. I never really understood plateaus before, but there’s something really surreal to being fourteen thousand feet in the air on a frigid, rugged grassland populated solely by Vicunas and Chinchillas. It’s also utterly black at night, like when you’re in a cave with the lights off. The huge expanse makes your lights seem even less effective sense they just dwindle off into the darkness. There’s definitely an ‘out there’ feeling to it; the plain is a completely different environment, there’s not one familiar thing, or even sign of humanity aside from the two-lane road. Nothing lives up there but Vicunas and Chinchillas, as evidenced by the scattered camelid skeletons littering the ground.  Elsewhere, something might have carried them off, but not there.

I didn’t suffer from altitude sickness much aside from a slight headache the first day. The thin air makes everything a little heady, but I don’t think that goes away in a shorter time frame, you just get used to it. The rest of my family was sick though, and we camped the next night even higher at 14,500 feet because we couldn’t drive in the dark.  This was probably a bad idea, ascending 12,000 feet in 36 hours, but we didn’t have much of a choice. We ended up getting up early the next to go to a lower elevation since other people were sick, but the car didn’t start until an hour and a half later, at about 7:00am. Seeing the sun rise on the altiplano is a lot less fantastic than it sounds.

We drove for a while that day along some spectacular Peruvian scenery, and even saw chinchillas in the wild—for real. We dropped down about eight thousand feet to a low river valley that we followed for some time before climbing a thousand foot hill to Abancay (which rests at about eighty-five hundred—there’s a lot of ups and downs here). We were stopped in town by a huge Carnival parade for about an hour. We dodged water balloons and spray foam for a few minutes before giving up on finding the ATM and watching the parade which consisted of traditional dancers and bizarre, mildly disturbing, psychedelic parade floats (I’m nearly certain one was a giant disembodied mouth surrounded by Venus Flytraps). We were able to drive through at the tail end of the parade, along with all the other trucks and buses that had been stopped and parked for the night at a restaurant on the east end of town. I took a combi into town with my dad to pick up water and withdraw money from the ATM and became completely soaked with foam on the way.

We were in Abancay for several days because we needed to fix the car. I think five, maybe six. It’s easy to lose track. It was a really nice city, and had these incredibly steep hills. The town center smelled like brake pads.

Cusco was a one-day  drive from Abancay. We stopped at a gas station right on the edge of town for the night. It was  then that we discovered that the Shining Path had threatened to kidnap Americans from Cusco, and the US Embassy had issued a very high-risk warning and forbid foreign service employees from venturing to the area.

We decided that it would be best to drive through the city and not stop.

We drove through a few very picturesque Andean villages before stopping at a large market, where I bought a collar for my dog and my goat.

We camped that night at a hot springs on the railroad tracks on the altiplano. It wasn’t a particularly nice hot spring, but it wasn’t bad either. We paid for a private bath for S/1 ($.40) more per person, and got two baths inside a corrugated steel and cement building illuminated through the open ceiling by a single 29-watt compact fluorescent. The baths were the size of a normal hot tub and filled with murky 38C mineral water. Still, it was a really nice diversion from the cold and bland altiplano. I also got some really great photographs the next morning at the railroad station when the PeruRail engine pulled in.

We drove from Agua Caliente to Puno in one day. Most of the route was the same as before, obscenely picturesque with small villages, sheep, and people dressed in traditional clothing. That was, until we got to Juliaca. I don’t even know what that city was. Like some sort of awful boom town. The road had holes two feet deep  and filled with polluted sludge. The road was packed too with buses, motos and cars. I have some good photos of the city that was situated on what I would call the “Urban Marsh” biome.

Puno has a bad reputation in guide books. I’ve heard it called anything from “windswept and barren” to “a frozen slum at the end of the earth”. Contrarily, Puno is actually a very nice city situated on the shores of Lake Titicaca with a pleasantly temperate climate. It’s far from barren, and actually quite bustling and picturesque. There have been thunder storms over the lake every night since we’ve been here, and the cobbler at the central Mercado said he would fix the four-inch whole in my hiking boot for S/5 ($2).

We’re going to be here for a while since our new phone is being shipped to the iPeru Tourism Office. My iPhone broke in Lima, and we need a phone. Smartphones are $1000 here, so I found a Galaxy SII craigslist in Fairbanks and had a friend buy it for me. Then we worked out the shipping paperwork (it goes USPS to the Anchorage DHL Office where it’s shipped express to Puno, Peru), had it mailed, and now it should be here within ten days. The next time someone tells me Globalization is ruining the world, I’m going to hit them.

In a moment of surreality, I’m sitting here, in Puno, Peru, in a gas station overlooking the freshwater-estuary of Lake Titicaca, eating Lays brand potato chips (or papas fritas), with lightning stuttering across the valley behind me.

I literally just found a sachet of ‘Aji Criolla’, which is literally ‘the sauce of white people’, in my bag of potato chips. It also happens to be vegan, which is even more awesome.

Yesterday, my brother max was bit by a dog at the gas station. I got to go with him and my dad to the hospital since I’m the only one who can speak Spanish. I can’t even speak Spanish, but I know enough to communicate, and after all the dog adventures I have a good understanding of medical terms. We got in a cab and went to the Clinica Puno, which couldn’t take us because we might need rabies vaccinations. The Hospital de la Nacion was like something out of a movie. First, it has a huge courtyard which was filled with people hanging around. I’m nearly certain they weren’t visiting someone in the sprawling, yellow, one-story complex—they were just there. The emergency room also had half a dozen older Peruvian guys hanging out in counterfeit Northface parkas. We got signed in, then after ten minutes we were able to see a doctor. Instantly, there were seven or eight people in the hospital room, in various stages of doctor-ship. There was one woman wearing heels, black pantyhose and a leather jacket, who I think was the head doctor who just supervised. Then there was a younger guy who wore white scrubs and treated Max who seemed to be the head operating doctor. Then there were a couple of other people in varying stages of medical dress who must have been nurses. It was very third-worldlike. They even had the metal tray filled with gauze soaked in a yellow antibiotic.

After they dressed the bite on Max’s leg, the doctor told us to meet with a guy outside who would come with us to the gas station to see if the dog had a rabies card. Miraculously, the dog did have a rabies card, so Max was spared rabies vaccinations at the Peruvian hospital.

All of this cost less than fifteen dollars, including the prescriptions and cab fares.

Now we’re just hanging out in Puno for the next week until the phone gets here. We’re going to take a boat out on the lake to see the famous Floating Islands, I’ll get my shoes fixed at the cobbler, and hopefully I’ll be able to get real coffee somewhere in the city. We also needed some time to prep for Bolivia. I was (well, we all were, really) on the fence about going to Bolivia. It’s $1000 in visa fees to get in, and it doesn’t sound particularly pleasant. But tonight it was finally settled when we came across “Cholita Wrestling”.

For those who don’t know, a Cholita is an indigenous woman who wears traditional dress. They’re very common here, and you know exactly what they look like—the tall, undersized bowler hats, the many fluorescent and Andean-patterned shalls and skirts, the hair pleated into the two braids. Cholita wrestling combines all of the greatest forms of wrestling into one, then adds more. The five foot tall women completely attack each other, climbing the ropes, throwing chairs, bodyslamming. Combine this with Mexican wrestling, props and an underground cage-fight atmosphere. Just google it, you can find some pictures.

Now I’m really excited to go to Bolivia.

The drive between Cuenca and Loja wasn’t very far but it took all day. Lots of steep, narrow mountain passes and the blowing fog that reduced visibility to less than fifteen feet. A lot of the distance between Loja and Cuenca was idyllic looking, like some sort of mountainous Shire populated by elderly indigenous farmers wearing cowboy shalls and bowler hats.

We stayed in Loja for a couple of days. I really liked the city, and we needed to prepare for leaving Ecuador.

I managed to find Cephalexin and Baytril for Trek after searching the city for a couple of hours. The Cephalexin was easy since it’s a human medication and I found it at the first pharmacy I checked. However, the Baytril took a lot of searching until I finally found a veterinarian who had half a box left. I did get a great tour of Loja, though. I even went through the three-story, six-block central market which was incredibly busy. Before calling a taxi I stopped in a café to get an espresso (non-Nescafe coffee is something that can’t be passed up in South America) and a humita, a type of meatless breakfast tamale. The cafes in Loja were high-ceilinged storefronts which had been narrowly split into two floors at a height of about seven feet. You sat downstairs and ordered with at a cashier in the back corner of the store, who then climbed the ladder-stairs to the second floor to prepare the food. It’s a unique setup that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Plus, $2USD for an espresso and lunch is a great price.

Before I flagged down a cab I saw a guy selling holographic 3D posters in the main square. Deciding I couldn’t pass up a $3 thirty-inch holographic Jesus, I walked over to buy. Then, armed with a stack of antibiotics, a bag of eggs, and Spanish-English dictionary and my newly acquired meter-of-3D-Jesus, I flagged down a two dollar-taxi to Parque Jipiro. I don’t know if I had a particularly good accent or if it was just the Jesus poster and the medication, but I was only charged $1.50.

We went to Catamayo the next day and camped at a derelict gas station on the edge of town. We drove in the next morning to pick up a few things, namely US Dollars, water, and shoe glue, before heading into the desert. There were thousands of dead or dying insects around the town center, mostly huge moths and beetles. I was looking at an intact six-inch moth on the ground when an old man came up to talk to me. I asked him why there were all of the dead insects, to which he replied in a slow, dusty Spanish befitting of a five-foot septuagenarian bedecked in a shall and bowler hat, that “It was their time”. “But, is it from insecticide?” I asked as a follow-up question, to which he replied “Ah, si. It is.”

Macara is the Ecuadorian border town. In the “Dry Forest” region, it also seems to be a hub for rice cultivation. When we stopped there, it was in the low 80s with no wind, the stale air lending an almost claustrophobic feel to the place. About 12,000 people live there, but the town was dead. My dad and I caught a cab into town to an ATM, which happened to be out of service for the day. Then we left for Peru at about 4:00pm. Border proceedings took about an hour and a half, and by the time we were in Peru, it was forty-five minutes until dark. It was then that we had our first encounter with Peruvian police, when two officers pulled up in a 1989 Toyota Corolla Hatchback to ask why we pulled over. Late 80s Corolla Hatchbacks, it turns out, are extremely popular in Peru. In fact, it was the only make of car we saw for 120 miles besides motos and semitrucks.

We descended into the fringes of the Sechura Desert through half a dozen villages filled with goats. Thousands of goats. They were actually quite good looking goats, something I wouldn’t have suspected seeing as most goats in America (especially free ranging and/or desert goats) look awful. It makes me wonder if the obsession with purebred animals combined with a lack of care has made American animals poor stock. I don’t know any really good dogs in Fairbanks, they’re nearly all weird, unattractive and unhealthy, and poorly behaved. I found Lucy in Otavalo, and she’s a great dog and a stray. I have actually seen five or six great looking, well behaved stray dogs in the past couple of weeks. And that’s more than I can say for a year in Alaska, or even the United States in general. The same thing applies to goats, chickens, and pigs as well. There are massive chickens down here, and they look far better than the runs of whatever-we-would-buy at the Feed Store. It makes me wish I could import Peruvian animals into the United States easier.

We stayed in Las Lomas for our first night in Peru. In a gas station with a buzzing neon sign fitting of an Alternate Peruvian Route 66, the desert night made it feel more like Eastern California than an equatorial desert. My dad and I changed some dollars for soles at the gas station and bought water at a tienda across the street. The next day we got up and my dad and I took a moto into town to buy propane, a Claro SIM card and bread. Las Lomas wasn’t unlike Bethel in a lot of aspects—the same look to the houses and the way the people acted.

We jogged to the North to the Peruvian Desert Coast, all the way to Mancora, for a couple of days. We stayed in Cabo Blanco and made daytrips from a PetroPeru station. Deserts are home to refineries. I don’t really know why. It makes all deserts feel similar in a way, especially at night. Mancora is a large Peruvian beach-vacation destination. It was a really nice beach town, cheap and slightly idyllic in a touristy-way. I bought a pair of counterfeit Oakleys there for six dollars, and went to four different Claro stores because my mom needed the internet on my phone to work. I’m pretty sure one of the Claro people I stopped to talk to was drunk, because it took her four minutes to dial a phone number before her husband came out to help. Didn’t get the problem fixed though.

We also went to the desert beach, which, although vaguely reminiscent of a science fiction movie, was exactly what it sounds like. A beach, where it’s hot and dry, and there are desert mountains bordering the ocean. On the way to the beach I found an earthquake-ruined hotel complex that I was able to photograph while risking giant tarantulas and scorpions. I did get quite a few awesome photos that I have yet to process.

South to Piura, we stayed outside of town while my dad and I took a cab to the city center to fix the Claro issue and buy a USB modem. A Geo Metro would have put this car to shame. I was afraid to shut the door in case it broke off (Kiev is probably running out of parts for these things). At least two of the windows were broken, it looked like someone had tried to light the door on fire at some point, and the whole thing rattled violently whenever we hit a speed bump (which the driver took at 25mph). When we got to the Claro store, they needed our passports, so we took another taxi back. This one looked even worse than the first, as the windows that were still intact were stuck at awkward angles in their frames, and the seat belt was shredded and repaired like some sort of prison-friendship bracelet. We got the taxi to the trailer and back for twenty soles, the same price we had paid for a one way cab ride the first time.

Claro took two hours. Standing and waiting. Then waiting at the caja. Then fixing the iPhone. Then waiting. Then recharging the iPhone and waiting for the Visa to go through. Then more waiting inexplicably. Telecommunications is way more laid back here than in the US, so time is not anybody’s priority. After all, I’m sure Claro pays by the hour, and it’s not like you really have anything else to do that day. After Claro, we stopped at a grocery to buy bread, then hailed a taxi back. It’s almost like riding in one of those airport cars that drags out the luggage rack, but at fifty miles per hour through a crowded slum. Oh, and the last denizen of the cab presumably had a sack of day-old fish sliming the inside of the Soviet car.

Piura to Lambayeque. Peru at this point had turned from charming desert goat-land to a disgusting never ending landfill. Drifts of trash like sand dunes along the highway spread for miles in every direction. Every piece of scarce shrubbery, tree or grass was blanketed in white and brown tatters of polyethylene that had caught hold while being blown across the desert. There were walls everywhere, giant brick walls, eight to twelve feet high, and hundreds to thousands of feet long. All were whitewashed, then covered with some sort of advertisement . The way to dispose of trash in these towns was to sweep it into piles along the walls, douse it in gasoline, and set it on fire; leaving it to char the latex-based ads for petrochemicals. Because everyone knows how attractive brick walls are, especially when used as giant, oblong billboards, but when you burn trash fires on them to leave huge, peeling, scorch marks and puddles of melted plastic—that’s a whole new level.

The region around Chiclayo was thick with smoke and dust. The make shift landfills were always burning, and acrid black plumes from garbage fires in the cities and towns were a common sight. I saw at least three piles of burning tires on the side of the highway. And, on top of all of this, the sugar cane fields were being torched.

We stayed in Lambayeque for two nights. Most of us went to the Lord of Sipan museum the one day. I’m not very interested in anthropology or archaeology. We went to the other side of Chiclayo the next day. Driving on the hazy, empty highway past trashfires and endless advertising walls in the desert was postapocalyptical.  I think a lot of it comes from not being able to see the sun; it makes it feel like you’re in a Ray Bradbury story.

We meant to go to the witches market in Chiclayo, but when we arrived the Central Market was completely shuttered. We walked around for a while, bought some groceries, and Jack and Max had their hair cut at a barbershop from 1958. The barber even had his licensing certificate for Chiclayo from 1958, and all the furniture and style types were in suit.

Chiclayo to Trujillo. More burning tires and cane fields, but it was getting better. Trujillo is where I’ve been for the past four or five days, on the beach. It’s not so bad, the center is beautiful. Better colonial architecture and cleaner than New Orleans. There’s a really fancy mall about ten minutes by car from where we’re camping at on the beach, with all the American stores.

It’s been a long time since I last posted. A lot has happened. I have been busy. I almost missed the entire country of Ecuador.

I had to check my website to see where I last left off.

I have a couple of gigabytes of photos to sort through; I haven’t uploaded yet. I dislike scenic photos—they hold no artistic value beyond a certain point. Anyone can go to a beautiful place, like Andean Colombia, and take a good photo. There’s no challenge. I don’t want to look through a book of photos of beautiful, over saturated landscapes. I much rather would look through a book of interesting and unique photographs—ones that capture a unique and interesting point of view.

^This, is my paragraph explaining why I don’t plan on uploading many scenic photos. If you want to see them, I’ll be happy to email them to you, or, better yet, come over to my house. But I don’t want a website filled with mediocre photos of excellent, albeit uncaptureable, subjects.

I have ~3GB of photos to sort through, then once I have the good ones, I need to mark them up digitally, adjust color spectrums, or the lack there of, adjust settings… Then to upload them, I have to condense the 5MB files and put a stamp on them. It’s an arduous and time consuming process especially when I have so much other stuff to deal with.

Enough with photos.

I have a new dog. Her name is Lucy—or maybe Salchi. It’s actually both, she’s confused enough already, why not add another thing? I found her in Otavalo, where she started following me in the town square. I’m nice to animals, I give food to stray dogs if I see them when I go out for lunch, those sort of things. But I didn’t do anything to Salchi when she started following me. She followed me, my brother and my dad five or six blocks one night to a restaurant, then found me again when I walked by the square. The next day she followed me all day long, sleeping under our trailer. It was really impressive for a stray dog, let alone any dog. The second day, I went out to the square to ask if she was anyone’s pet—she wasn’t.

It’s a bad idea to take a stray dog from urban Ecuador. That’s where we were for a few days. But she was extremely well behaved, and she followed me for four miles the one day while I walked all over the city. I asked the veterinarian across the street if he neutered dogs and gave vaccinations; that would come to $120 total, he told me. We decided to get Trek fixed as well, and that we were going to keep Salchi.

These two operations have consumed my past week almost entirely. I already wrote an incredibly dry page on it for my Veterinary Science class. In summary, the vet screwed up Trek’s surgery, never sealed off the blood vessels, and didn’t put stitches in. I got him to put some in after the fact, but it was a little late, and the stitches were awful. Trek broke them open three times before we left Otavalo. I took Trek to a Veterinarian in Latacunga, and she put in another set of sutures and gave him half a dozen different medications. But Trek broke those stitches open. Now I’m going to head into town today or tomorrow to try to find surgical glue. Because it’s so much fun to try to communicate something that may not even exist down here. I had to ask eleven people in Latacunga for directions to the vet. But doesn’t it seem like surgical glue might be more common down here? The FDA didn’t approve it in the States until; the late 90s, but it had already been in use in the rest of the world since the 1970s.

So, in Otavalo, I lost a dog, then gained a dog, then had a dog injured by an incompetent veterinarian.

Salchi seems to be a really great dog so far. She’s small, she has Doberman Pinscher eyes (though it’s not unattractive) and an almost Siberian Husky body/coat. She’s about thirty-some pounds because she’s really overweight—she subsisted almost entirely off of French fries in Otavalo—but she should be about twenty when she’s down to a normal size. She’s about sixteen inches tall at the shoulder.

We left Otavalo late in the day because of veterinary problems, and made it to the other side of Quito by about 8:00pm. Quito looked beautiful, but we couldn’t stop because the trailer was too unwieldy. We stayed at a gas station covered with beetle carapaces—piles of them, all about the size of a penny.

The next day we got to Latacunga. We saw a Ford Dealership on the way in, so my dad stopped to see if they sold leaf springs for the van. The rest of us went to the huge mall to wait. I got my Claro problems sorted out at an office there, so I now have data on my iPhone. I also realized that my Galaxy S II retails for $1100 down here, and my iPhone 3Gs would probably get $600. Anyone from South America who’s reading this: I paid $150 for my iPhone used, and $200 for my Galaxy S II. I’m not nearly that rich. The mall in Latacunga had a fast food cuy restaurant named “King Cuy” and wallpapered with anthropomorphic guinea pigs.

Someone offered to fix our van for cheap, so we drove it down the road about 500 meters to his shop, and waited. About this time, we decided that Trek needed more medical attention, so I left to look for a veterinarian. An hour and a half later I found one, then called a cab back to get Trek. Once I got the dog to the veterinarian it took about two hours. He needed to be anesthetized again for more stitches, and he had several more injections. I bought him an e-collar, which it turned out was two inches too short.

We left Latacunga late and drove to a gas station where we could park for the night, about an hour’s drive from Banos.

Banos, had giant spiders. I haven’t seen many bugs since I’ve been down here, the Washington DC greenbelt still holds the Western Hemisphere record for incredible amounts of bugs. Nothing has even come close. But Banos did have very large spiders. I saw a two-inch, yellow one in a web near the ground while walking my dog, at which point I decided the walk was now over, and then turned around to see a 4+ inch spider run under a rock. At that point, I had had enough of Banos for quite some time.

We drove down the valley that day, and then took a spontaneous detour to the Amazonian city of Tena—something you can do when gas is a dollar a gallon. It was a great trip, completely exotic. Somehow, we had managed to drive from Cartagena to here without actually seeing the rainforest. It was like being in a completely different country. One website described it as a town where Indiana Jones would stop for supplies before venturing into the jungle. It’s an apt description if Indiana Jones also had a passion for cellphones and playing MMORPGs or updating facebook at one of the numerous internet cafes. Tena even had this awesome rickety suspension footbridge made out of rusting steel beams and heavy steel chains over a jungle river. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend there as we wanted to get back to Banos by dark, and it was a two hour drive away.

Back in Banos, we spent the night in a parking lot and got up the next morning to go to the thermal baths, then we left town. We spent that night in the parking lot of the oldest church in Ecuador that was also the cross roads for the mountain highway and the coastal highway. We decided to go through the mountains the next morning to avoid the coast. It turned out to be a good idea, and we drove for several hours through what looked like a mountainous Shire, until we hit clouds on the other side of the mountain range. We got into Cuenca at about 6:00pm, where I’m at at the moment. It looked like a beautiful city when we drove through, and we’re going to drive in tonight. I need to buy some surgical glue, which I’m expecting isn’t going to be pleasant.

A lot has happened in the past few days. I really should have been writing every night, but I’ve been a little afraid since my laptop no longer charges consistently. I think that’s a problem I haven’t brushed on yet: the DC-in jack on my laptop is broken. Again. This happened to me on the last trip. Thankfully, Dell’s DC-in jacks are all-in-one components. I just have to entirely disassemble the computer, and screw the new one in. No soldering involved. It’s still a several hour job for me, and it’ll take me all night to finish. I ordered the part in Dunedin and had it Fedex’d to our Grandparents house on Second Day Air ($13 in shipping for a $2 part). Actually, I might have already covered this…

We left Cartagena at about 4:00pm—too late, in retrospect. I have mentioned this before, but Cartagena is hot. I thought I was coping with the heat moderately well, especially as an Alaskan. The temperature difference was 150F from Fairbanks the day we left Cartagena, not including humidity (0% in Fairbanks). We took a wrong turn into Turbaco ten miles outside of Cartagena, and ended up trying to navigate the center of town at 5:30 at night. We were stopped by a police officer who almost demobilized our car for having a cracked windshield, but let us go at the last minute. We got out of town as fast as we could, and ended up driving into Arjona at night. It was a stressful, hot day. Our trailer was probably 100F by the time we stopped for the night, and it felt more than a little isolating to be in a small village in Colombia at night in a climate that’s quite literally the opposite of Alaska’s where we didn’t speak the language. However, a few minutes after we pulled in several children came up to our trailer to check it out. My mom let a few of them inside, and all of a sudden people started coming over to check us out. We started talking with them, and they brought over a man named Hillo who could speak English. We ended up sitting outside with more than fifty people until 11:00pm in a spontaneous party. The language barrier suddenly didn’t seem so bad either, with a phrase book and a laptop, we could translate most things and were able to converse quite well. By the end of the night I had a slip of paper with several facebook names, email addresses and phone numbers. The feeling of isolation was completely gone, and we had the best night of the trip so far.

The next morning we went to breakfast as they insisted and had bollos (sort of like a tamale without a filling), cheese and a type of cured meat. Hillo also gave me a much needed haircut and did a great job at it. I ended up giving all of my American coins to the group of children waving goodbye to us right before we left.

We got on the road, and took a wrong turn down the non-toll highway. The road got progressively worse as we continued until it got to the point where we couldn’t go more than five miles an hour. The car was really hot because the windows hardly open, and there was no air exchange. The road was physically painful—huge potholes, ditches, speedbumps… People would stand in the road and fill the potholes for spare change. It was harsh. We turned around after about forty minutes or so. It was hard to tell how far we went, but we couldn’t take it anymore.

The main highway was much, much better. It was twisting and windy, but we could go reasonable speeds on it. The stretch of road was vaguely reminiscent of a tropical British Columbia, really beautiful. We camped at about 4:00pm near La Ye in a truck stop. It was cooler that night. Still in the 80s, but it seemed a lot less hot than the previous night. We all took showers and went to bed at about 10:00 so we could get up early and drive to a cooler region.

A little after 2:00pm the next day, we started going uphill. The thing is, we didn’t go down. We went up hill for hours on the slow, narrow road carved into the mountains. The scenery was spectacular, It easily beat the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park. The road was carved into the mountain, with a cliff sometimes thousands of feet high on the opposing side. Along the cliff were tiny houses supported on stilts and cement platforms. The grade was so steep that the fifteen-foot wide houses could have a ten or twelve foot drop off out the backdoor. Our car started to overheat and we had to pour water on the radiator to cool it off while huge trucks trundled past.

Eventually the views succumbed to clouds, and all sense of perspective was lost—an unnerving prospect when you’re clinging to a twenty foot, laneless road shared with tractor trailers thousands of feet above the valley floor. On a particularly steep grade our car stop moving forward. The transmission must have overheated, but we could only roll backwards down the hill. We turned off the car for a few minutes and put in some more transmission fluid. All the while we were being passed by huge trucks and buses. A few pothole-fillers came to see what was wrong, and we tried to explain to them what was wrong. Eventually we got the car to move forward again, but there was enough time to think about how we would ever get off the top of a mountain in rural Colombia.

The road went higher, with visibility steadily decreasing to fifteen feet. And yet, the whole time we’ve been in Colombia, I haven’t seen one accident, or even near-accident. Traffic is a free for all here, there’s no lanes, few signs and traffic lights, and the only rule seems to be “Don’t hit me and I won’t hit you”. In St Petersburg, I saw accidents every single time I left the house—sometimes two. Awful accidents, in the middle of a well regulated, eight lane road with all licensed drivers.

After we got off the mountain road last night, we drove in the dark for about an hour because it seemed safe, then we pulled into some sort of travel stop for the night which happened to also be a cheese factory, restaurant, bakery and convenience store that’s open 24 hours a day and has free wifi. I think we’re staying here for Christmas, in a Colombian truck stop seventy miles from Medellin.

This is a back-dated post. I originally wrote several days ago while we were in Popayan and added to it for several days since I didn’t have internet. I’m in Otavalo, Ecuador right now, and a recent turn of events has prevented me from uploading it and writing a new post covering the last four or five days.

A lot has happened in the past few days. It’s harder to keep up in South America, everything’s so different and interesting. In the United States, it was hard to come up with anything interesting at all to say about Southeastern Colorado and rural Idaho. Even my posts in Canada were mostly Tim Horton’s jokes.

We spent Christmas in Santa Rosa de Osos, behind a 24-hour travel stop/cafeteria/quesodero. We left the morning of the 26^th and headed south towards Medellin. We had wanted to stop and walk around Medellin, but the traffic was too chaotic, and the only parking lot we found was quite a distance from where we thought the city center was. A lot of businesses employed armed security guards to patrol their property with slackly-held pistol-grip shotguns. With safety and logistics in mind, we decided to move on, albeit disappointedly, without seeing the city.

We drove further south through the spectacular Colombian countryside, on narrow shoulderless roads carved into mountains thousands of feet from the valley floor. The scenery in the United States pales in comparison to Colombia. It’s indescribable. The mountains are terraced here, so cows can graze on them (I think? It seems like an incredible amount of work to raise a cow), perched on a 40%+ grade. It seems like they would fall more since cows aren’t known for their agility.

We found a hotel in La Pintada with a pool to stay at, about seventy kilometers outside of Medellin. We spent two nights there because of the pool. The first night we drove into the town of La Pintada, two kilometers away at the bottom of the mountain. We parked, and walked around for a while. We needed to buy a few things, namely bags of water (or boulsas de agua, an ingenious and yet incredibly unwieldy way to sell it). When we walked back to our car we were greeted by a couple of people who gestured for us to come over to their restaurant. Our Spanish isn’t very good, especially the ‘listening’ part, so there’s a lot of guesswork. They gave us bottles of juice and suddenly we were surrounded by incredibly nice and inquisitive people. We talked to them for about an hour before we headed back to our campsite. Several of the people were in a band, and they gave a copy of their CD which is great, downtempo, Colombian music.

The next day, my brother, dad, and I drove into town to buy groceries, look for an ATM and email a photo to our insurance company. We found the ATM, then began to look for Wifi. There were several internet cafes in town, ranging from dust caked, sun bleached Gateways sitting on a dirt floor to shiny new 32” LCD monitors with webcams and headsets. But everywhere seemed to run their computers on Ethernet cables. It looked like nearly every storefront or house in the town had a Wifi router from the scanner on my phone, but every single one was locked—a feat that the people of Louisiana or Florida still can’t seem to achieve. We found a restaurant that had free wifi, and ordered three pandequesos; a bread that theoretically has cheese in it, hence the ‘queso’, however every pandequeso I have seen has been all pan and no queso. The restaurant was an open air café, and surprisingly upscale for the area. They did all of their cooking on a charcoal stove, and the whole kitchen was visible from the seating area. They have no idea how incredibly hip they are—a restaurant serving traditional, locally grown, Colombian cuisine cooked over a biomass stove… We finished using the Wifi and went to pick up some produce before heading back to our camp site for the night.

The next day we got up and stopped in town to attempt to get the address of the family we talked to the first night in La Pintada so we could send them postcards. It was then that we realized that Colombia might not have a national postal service. We talked to them for twenty some minutes trying to convey the concept of postal mail, and ended up with two pages of contact information (no physical address still). I wrote down the name plate on their store, their names, and the road; I think with that I can deduce how to get mail to them if something like that does exist in Colombia.

We drove south towards Cali out of La Pintada. Another 200km of winding mountain roads through rural Colombia. It’s stunningly beautiful, but after a week and a half of it, you become a little jaded. The sun is hot here, nothing like the sun in the US, and especially not like the sun in Alaska. In Alaska, the sun contains barely any heat, like holding your hand inside the lampshade of a 70w bulb. Here it’s like holding your hand near a gas stove. Our van overheats going up the huge hills, and we have to turn the heater on in the already hot climate. I think I’ve acquired some minor heat resistance from the 110F car. That day we figured out that we could take the one window off to allow some airflow, which helped tremendously. The temperature decreases substantially as you go up—from the mid 90s at sea level to the mid 70s at 6000 feet. The difference might be from Houston to Denver, but here you can traverse it in thirty kilometers.

We spent the night that night near Tulau, forty kilometers outside of Cali. We pulled into a gas station and, as always, were the center of attention. After about forty minutes of talking to people about our trailer and Alaska, we were able to retreat inside. The people were incredibly nice yet again, and I think we made a new facebook friend or two. The place we were stopped at was like one of those exits on the interstate outside of a major city where all of the seedy hotels congregate, except in Colombia. Several of them had their hourly rates on their sign. We were almost out of drinking water, but all we could find in the village was 600ml bags of water, and we ended up paying ~7000COP a gallon for it. We saw a bus hit a taxi in front of our gas station—about all the excitement for the night. Nothing appeared to have happened to the taxi, but the Mercedes bus probably had $1000 in frontend cosmetic damage. Everyone on the minibus got off right away and walked to the adjacent restaurant where manager looked excited that he’d be able to sell the three empanadas that had been sitting under a fluorescent light bulb since 4:00pm.

This morning we got up early before the heat and left at about 7:00am. We stopped at a truck stop with Wifi to check a few things before proceeding on past Cali to Popayan. We made good time across the flat plain, and had climbed the three thousand feet to Popayan by 3:00pm. We looked for a parking lot for the night, but couldn’t find one so we drove to the next town. We also needed an ATM, but after twenty minutes in the town we figured out that the only ATM was out of service for the day, forcing us to go back to Popayan. We found a parking lot on the way back and dropped off our trailer before we drove into the “White City”. Popayan’s historic town center consists of hundreds of whitewashed Colonial buildings densely packed into a valley. Popayan also happens to look very American on the main roads, strangely so. There were more than a few times when I like I had been transported to some sort Spanish-speaking United States. One giveaway, though, is that the United States seems to be the pinnacle of cool in this Southern Colombian city. In the mall we went to, nearly all the stores were tapping into this market. One was called “JOSH: define yourself”, another was all about the wonders of New York, and had giant pictures of New York symbolism “Subway Wall Street Empire State Building Times Square Brooklyn” proclaimed a giant green sign also filled with pictures of buses, taxis and other urban miscellanea. I am far from a mall person, I can’t even ironically go to malls in the US, they just grate on me, but this Colombian mall was pretty awesome. Most of the stores actually had cool stuff, from a vintage South American leather store with a window full of Che Guevara-Motorcycle Diaries bags and jackets to a Colombian Hot Topic (titled “B KUL”) and a Latin American watch designer.

At the mall, I hunted down the Movistar store to try to buy an unlocked broadband router. The clerk spoke some English, I spoke some Spanish, and together we figured out that I would have to buy it myself in Ecuador and that “unlocked” doesn’t seem to translate. I looked for a Claro store, but only found a kiosk in the upscale Supermercado that anchored one side of the mall. From what I got from them, their modems are unlocked, but they only sell modems and not routers. It amazes me how pervasive the incongruency seems to be in cellular providers down here. Claro is a giant company, but it appears that their phones don’t work from country to country, even though they exist in seemingly every nation from Mexico down. Movistar, I still can’t figure what they are. I did some research in the mall last night on my phone, and I think that Movistar and Clara moved in recently and bought old telecommunications networks in different countries, making them more like a conglomerate than a single operator. While this may explain why some phones wouldn’t work internationally, it doesn’t explain why a Claro SIM card in my iPhone would work in Colombia but not Ecuador. I’m hoping that the Claro dealer in Ecuador might have an English speaking clerk to help me buy a data plan for my phone, as unlikely as that sounds.

We stayed late at the mall, we spent an hour or so sitting in some sort of indoor park checking things on our phones while my dad, Sylvia and Annebelle spent time at an amped-up Chuck E Cheese. A couple of people eagerly tried their English on me; it must be how a European person would feel in the US.

We left the mall at about 8:00 and stopped to buy water but were only able to find 600ml bags for 700COP each. We bought twelve (because I couldn’t remember how to say fourteen), and drove back to the parking lot where we were staying. The parking lot wasn’t in the best area of Popayan, sort of like the end of Peger Road in Fairbanks. At about 9:00pm, and bunch of people started fighting and chanting across the street—it sounded like a two-by-four brawl. That was when I went back into the trailer. Sometime around 11:00pm, a giant trash pile was set on fire at the bus barn next store and a plume of acrid smoke settled over our trailer.

We left the next morning to head to Pasto, but the road was slow going. We made it within 100km of Pasto, but the road climbs 7000 feet in the next sixty miles. We camped at 4:00pm at Texaco station because this is one of the most dangerous stretches of road, and we didn’t want to be caught out after dark. I don’t know the name of the town where we’re at, but it’s in the center of the weird part of Colombia. It’s in some sort of desert complete with giant cacti. It actually isn’t dissimilar in appearance to the Sonoran Desert, but it’s a little more verdant. We’re in some sort of plain at an elevation of 1700 feet. People stand in the road with bamboo poles so you can’t drive past in your car until you give them change. It was kind of amusing at first, but after six roadblocks in the same village… You don’t have to pay them, but it really helps expedite the process. Several of the groups of people at the roadblocks were in costumes, including a guy in a wig pretending to be a pregnant woman. There’s also faded billboards with a Junta Hotline on them—completely serious here, you call the toll free number if you have Junta problems.  It’s a very desolate place.

Tomorrow we’re planning on making it to Ipales, the Colombia-Ecuador border town about 150km and 7000 feet away. We need to find wifi somewhere, so we might be in an internet café for a few hours in Pasto. These major Colombian cities are extraordinarily difficult to navigate, so it’s hard to tell where we’ll end up. Internet cafes are really hit or miss too, most seem to have dusty emachines in a particle board booth, and none that I have seen have wifi.

I’ve been updating this nightly for the past several days, so the continuity might seem jarring. It seemed like a better idea than publishing three separate posts at once.

Writing this post on a bus after touring Simon Fraser University. Ended up getting stuck in the middle of an articulated bus. Spent all day yesterday in Vancouver, had a great time. Food is the same price in a convenience store in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in downtown Vancouver as it is at Walmart in Fairbanks. Vancouver is the second most expensive city in the Western Hemisphere.
I had a lot of fun, got an all day transit pass and went all over the place. Got really good Malaysian food, saw a lot of different places.
Right now I’m heading back to a park to meet up with my family. I just got off the bus at a kind of seedy looking station, waiting for the next one to come… The photo of the bus stop is where I’m at right now.