30th October 2006 - I miss you all very much and want to come home...
Ok, maybe not wanting to come home, but I do miss you!
(thanks gille´s pie)
We've finally left Cusco, yay! As beautiful as the city was, we'd spent almost three weeks there and became sick of the place. We are now in a lovely city called Arequipa, known as the White City as most of the building are made of a volcanic rock called sillar.
So, Cusco. The tooth is fine now, no problems. As a reward for dentistry, I forced David into doing a three day white water rafting trip on the Apurimac river with me. Oh, if only we'd known what was to come...
There were five of us in the group plus our guide and a trainee guide in the raft and a cargo boat and safety kayak rafting along side. Two Israelis, a frenchman and us, quite an odd group. First day was great, just simple rapids with a few class 3 and 4. We camped overnight on a beach after eating delicious food.
Second day was even better, the arms were aching a bit but nothing too bad. We had great fun running many class four rapids amid shouts from Jose, our guide, of "Forward hard! Hard! HARD! Did I say stop? No! Keep paddling". He should be in the army.
We got to try a thing called "surfing" where you just paddle the raft straight forward into a wave and jump forwards so the raft "surfs" the wave. So. Much. Fun. I fell out the first time we did it, only person of course, but falling out and running the end of class 3 rapid was great fun!
That night we camped on a beach again, but the night before there must've been lightning as the entire top of canyon on one side was covered in fires. It was such an awe-inspriring sight. When we got there it was still day light, so not too impressive, but as dusk set in and the fire just lit upthe canyon with an orange glow you could do nothing ut stare as the flames grew or smouldered, as things crashed causing another fire. Throughout the night you could hear massive rock falls crashing down the side of the canyon in the river. May sound dangerous, but luckily it was on either side of our beach and we never had anything crash near us.
Next morning, more rafting! Absolutely knackered by this point, but managed (somehow) to keep going! More great rapids and then a delicious BBQ kinda meal at the end before getting the bus back to Cusco. Ahh... sleep!
Only thing was, the night we got back to Cusco I got a fever and so spent the next three days in bed. Argh, stuck in Cusco again! Sadly, I missed going to celebrate Diwali at the only Indian restaurant in Peru, but David went and loved it.
As I said, we are now in Arequipa. If there's anything that the UK (and US) shoudl learn from South America, it's buses (well, and the fact that fruit juice should be that - pure fruit with a bit of water!) We travelled from Cusco to Arequipa, 10 hour journey in aboslute luxury for 90 soles, around 15 pounds! We got food on the coach, a movie and the seats! My word, we were
on the downstairs of a coach and there were three in a row and only 12 in the whole downstairs. So comfy!
We met up with Sancha, Michelle, Vicks, Gareth and Stefan who we'd met in Chile on the Pachamama tourbus thing and went on a 2 day tour to the Colca Canyon. We got to boil in hot springs and have traditional food and watch strange local dances. One of the dances (all involved one man and one woman) had the woman lying on t
he floor and the guy humping her and then vice versa and then they swapped so the woman was on the floor and the man started hitting her with a strange rope thing, of course they swapped so she hit him, but strange all the same. They goit members of the audience involved, but we managed to miss that! Next morning was early and we went to a place called Cruz del Condor and sat and waited for condors. We were lucky and saw a fair few, they are massive! 3 metre wingspan! Very elegant and beautiful as they glide through the air.
So that's where we are now, just a little update.
Tomorrow we are going white water rafting again - yay! Just for a morning this time. Then it's a bus to Nazca to fly over the lines, very exciting.
To keep up to date, you can follow our progress on this map here:
http://www.getjealous.com/getjealous.php?action=map&go=eleanoroundtheworld
I'm gonna try and prempt what we're doing, but things are very much subject
to change in the future.
Also, our most beloved technically minded friend, the very lovely Adrian
Hull, has uploaded ALLLLLLL our photos on to the internet, which can be
viewed here:
http://www.adrianhull.com/gallery/travel1?page=1
There's some videos but they'll have to be updated somehow else. We'll see.
And eventually I'll get round to captioning them
We've finally left Cusco, yay! As beautiful as the city was, we'd spent almost three weeks there and became sick of the place. We are now in a lovely city called Arequipa, known as the White City as most of the building are made of a volcanic rock called sillar.So, Cusco. The tooth is fine now, no problems. As a reward for dentistry, I forced David into doing a three day white water rafting trip on the Apurimac river with me. Oh, if only we'd known what was to come...
There were five of us in the group plus our guide and a trainee guide in the raft and a cargo boat and safety kayak rafting along side. Two Israelis, a frenchman and us, quite an odd group. First day was great, just simple rapids with a few class 3 and 4. We camped overnight on a beach after eating delicious food.Second day was even better, the arms were aching a bit but nothing too bad. We had great fun running many class four rapids amid shouts from Jose, our guide, of "Forward hard! Hard! HARD! Did I say stop? No! Keep paddling". He should be in the army.
We got to try a thing called "surfing" where you just paddle the raft straight forward into a wave and jump forwards so the raft "surfs" the wave. So. Much. Fun. I fell out the first time we did it, only person of course, but falling out and running the end of class 3 rapid was great fun!
That night we camped on a beach again, but the night before there must've been lightning as the entire top of canyon on one side was covered in fires. It was such an awe-inspriring sight. When we got there it was still day light, so not too impressive, but as dusk set in and the fire just lit upthe canyon with an orange glow you could do nothing ut stare as the flames grew or smouldered, as things crashed causing another fire. Throughout the night you could hear massive rock falls crashing down the side of the canyon in the river. May sound dangerous, but luckily it was on either side of our beach and we never had anything crash near us.
Next morning, more rafting! Absolutely knackered by this point, but managed (somehow) to keep going! More great rapids and then a delicious BBQ kinda meal at the end before getting the bus back to Cusco. Ahh... sleep!
Only thing was, the night we got back to Cusco I got a fever and so spent the next three days in bed. Argh, stuck in Cusco again! Sadly, I missed going to celebrate Diwali at the only Indian restaurant in Peru, but David went and loved it.
As I said, we are now in Arequipa. If there's anything that the UK (and US) shoudl learn from South America, it's buses (well, and the fact that fruit juice should be that - pure fruit with a bit of water!) We travelled from Cusco to Arequipa, 10 hour journey in aboslute luxury for 90 soles, around 15 pounds! We got food on the coach, a movie and the seats! My word, we were
on the downstairs of a coach and there were three in a row and only 12 in the whole downstairs. So comfy!
We met up with Sancha, Michelle, Vicks, Gareth and Stefan who we'd met in Chile on the Pachamama tourbus thing and went on a 2 day tour to the Colca Canyon. We got to boil in hot springs and have traditional food and watch strange local dances. One of the dances (all involved one man and one woman) had the woman lying on t
he floor and the guy humping her and then vice versa and then they swapped so the woman was on the floor and the man started hitting her with a strange rope thing, of course they swapped so she hit him, but strange all the same. They goit members of the audience involved, but we managed to miss that! Next morning was early and we went to a place called Cruz del Condor and sat and waited for condors. We were lucky and saw a fair few, they are massive! 3 metre wingspan! Very elegant and beautiful as they glide through the air.So that's where we are now, just a little update.
Tomorrow we are going white water rafting again - yay! Just for a morning this time. Then it's a bus to Nazca to fly over the lines, very exciting.
To keep up to date, you can follow our progress on this map here:
http://www.getjealous.com/getjealous.php?action=map&go=eleanoroundtheworld
I'm gonna try and prempt what we're doing, but things are very much subject
to change in the future.
Also, our most beloved technically minded friend, the very lovely Adrian
Hull, has uploaded ALLLLLLL our photos on to the internet, which can be
viewed here:
http://www.adrianhull.com/gallery/travel1?page=1
There's some videos but they'll have to be updated somehow else. We'll see.
And eventually I'll get round to captioning them
posted by Eleanor @ 11:18 am
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