Trekking! (Colca Canyon, Peru)

Alrighty now! So, first things first, as you can see, I´ve decided to move the blog. I just had too much hassle with Ball of Dirt, and it didn´t let me post notes to facebook, and since I´m posting my pictures at facebook anyways, I just figured it was time for a change. This way you all can post comments too! You can still check on my progress by clicking the Ball of Dirt link to the right, I´ll keep the map updated just because it´s really neat for me to see where I´ve been.

So where have i been? After a solid week of sitting on my rear, playing guitar and what not, I finally got my stuff together and headed out on a 6 hour bus ride to Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world, second only to Cotahuasi which is just a few hours a way. I went with a group, recomended by Anival, the peruvian guide friend of my friend Rebekah, who lives next to me at the hostel and is from Boston of all places. She´s addicted to salsa dancing, and quite good at it, which means that she makes a lot of friends, most of which I´ve had the pleasure of getting to interact with too.

Anyways, my group was composed of 4 other people: Magnus, Beatrice, Rose, and Pill, from Sweden, Sweden, Australia, and England respectively (from Left to Right). Marcus, you should be proud to know that I told the Swedes the ´Biblio phi ket´joke, but of course they didn´t get it cause they´re not physics majors, but they appreciated the effort.

One of the best parts of the trip was hanging out and talking with our guide/leader Patricia. I was the only person on the trip who spoke spanish, and she only spoke so-so english, so it was nice to be able to talk to her in spanish. We just got along real great, she thought I was the wierdest tourist. She was really knowledgable and pointed out all the plants along the way. Ones that cure you, ones that make you blind or leave permenant scars, even a little bulb that is a strong hallucinagen. She was great at pointing out when I was being a conservative tourist, we had a joke that expressed it well,

¨¿Como se llama este? Miedo!¨

As for the hiking the walking was great, 3 days of going from villiage to village of locals who live inside the canyon. First day we dropped 1000m, second day we hiked across the canyon, and the third day we woke up at 2:30am and climbed 1000m up out of the canyon before breakfast. This is where I learned that 1000m is very different from 1000ft. Luckily I packed light and managed to fit everything I needed into the Peruvian daypack I bought in the market. The valley was beautiful and let my mind wander on all sorts of stuff from the type of music I´d play when I got back to the relationship between science and religion. Just try thinking about that for a while and you´ll find you´re up to the top of the canyon in no time.

I really enjoyed staying in a little town the first night. I was suprised to find a couple of Israelis staying in the hostel with us, more suprised that one of them had been to CAMP TAWONGA! 2 years ago, and he loved it, it was like an american movie for him, because they don´t have those types of summer camps in Israel. We spent some good time going down memory lane, trippy to be doing that in the middle of a canyon in Peru. Small world.

The hostel was owned and run by a really nice woman. I offered to help her cook and she was kind enough to offer to teach me. It all fell apart when I realized that I was hungry and that I would much rather have her cook my meal than have me masacre some Alpaca Saltado. She said I could cook the rice, but that if I messed it up, she was going to tell everyone it was my fault. We worked out a comprimise where I sat and played guitar while she cooked, better for everyone involved.

All around, it was a great trip. Now I´m back in Arequipa, resting for 3 days, taking spanish lessons (So that I can actually learn how to talk correctly, not just functionally), and looking towards a jungle trek in cusco (still working out the details on that). That and I´m spending time in Internet Cafes trying to convince Stephanie, Nick, and Marc to get their behinds down here so we can rock en español!

Ciao for Now!