Before and After!

Thought this was pretty funny!
Day before we left:

Day we got back:

Quito to the Jungle - our last Adventure!

Our first day in Quito we toured around some the city´s squares and looked at a few churches - the city has tons of them! As we were walking around we came to the main square and is was swarmed with police in riot gear. We asked a local what was going on and apparently Hillary Clinton was inside the Presidential Palace. We never saw her but still pretty random!

Since it was our last week we decided to take one last adventure and booked a jungle tour. We went by bus/boat deep into the Amazon jungle and stayed at an ecolodge. It was great! On the boat ride to the lodge we saw an Anaconda, troop of squirel monkeys, and lots of birds. That night we went on a night hike and checked out the various insects and spiders of the forest. Many of the trees, etc are similar to what we saw on the Bolivian jungle trip we took, but this was surrounded more by the river. In the morning we took the boat to a local community and learned how they live. Ripped up one of their Yucca plants to make Yucca bread and they let us have some of their hot peppers so we could make salsa later on. It was interesting to see and even more interesting to visit their shaman. He was traditionally dressed and described what he used the various plants for; including one that apparently causes someone never to have the flu. After he explained all the plants around his hut, he went through a typical ceremony of curing someone. They have something called ayahuasca which allows them see what is wrong and determine whether or not them can fix it. It causes people to get really sick and hullucinate - sounds like great healing huh?

We ended up spending the rest of the days touring around the various laguanas and hiking. Ended up seeing 4 Anacandas; a few pink river dolphins; 3 types of monkeys; lots of birds, spiders, and insects. Our guide even took Ben and I fishing for peacock bass since Ben was really excited that our guide killed one with a paddle one night. Unfortunately we didn´t catch any when we went fishing for them, but got some pirhanas.

That was our last adventure! Now its back home to the good ole USA!

Our mini Galapagos

Our first stop in Ecuador was Puerto Lopez. It has a decent amount of wildlife and since we are not going to the Galapagos this trip, we decided this would be our mini version! It was raining a bit when we arrived so we just checked out the town a little - doesn´t take very long as it is mainly a fishing town. It is right on the coast in a horseshoe shaped bay with lots of fishing boats tied up around the beach. In the morning we headed out for a day trip to La Isla de la Plata. On the way we saw some humpback whales coming up out of the water. They travel from Antarctica during June - October for mating. Normally the mating season is mid June so we mainly saw them spray the water. If we were just a week later we could have heard them singing and jumping out of the water. Still cool to see them. When were almost to the island we were surrounded by the largest school of dolphins running on top of the water I have ever seen in my life! There were hundreds of them jumping all along the boat and doing tricks in the air. We got some good videos of it on our Flikr page. On the island they have blue-footed boobies, red-footed boobies, and frigatebirds - to name a few. The blue-footed boobie is the funniest looking bird with bright blue feet. The frigatebirds were in mating season so we got to see the males blow up their red pouches and make a deep drumming sound. Really cool trip, and deserves the poor man´s Galapagos name.

Pisco, the Capital, and the Beach

We travelled up the coast to a town called Pisco to set up a tour of the Ballestas Islands which are supposed to be the `poor man´s Galapagos´. When we arrived we noticed most of the buildings where destroyed and learned later that a huge earthquake hit in 2007 and the town is still slowly trying to rebuild. We headed to the boats at about 8 am with out group - it was raining and visibility on the sea wasn´t very good so we sat around for about an hour and a half before they told us they would have to cancel the tour. Bummed, but what can you do. A guy in our group was signed up to help rebuild houses in the area for a month; personally we could not imagine spending a month there and actually decided just to hop a bus from Pisco to Lima that day.

Lima is huge - much bigger than I ever imagined and fairly spread out. We stayed in Miraflores which is right next to the coast. There are quite a few parks around the city and a fountain park in the city center we checked out. The same guy that designed the Bellagio´s did all the fountains in Parque de Reserva which is pretty cool but really weird to have in the middle of the city. At night they play a bunch of music and have a laser light show to go with the fountains. Basically shopped around a bit and went to some really good restaurants. Ben bought a cookbook on Peruvian food and we tried some of the places it recommends in the back, including a buffet lunch at El Senorio del Sulco. It was amazing but we both regretted eating as much as we did before getting on our bus from Lima to Mancora. Not really what you should do prior to an overnight bus!

We stayed in Mancora for 2 days. It is a great beach that most people come to hang around for the surfing. We just relaxed with all the fresh seafood and got roasted on the white sand beaches. A really nice change of pace from the city!

That´s it for our Peru trip and now we are off to Ecuador!

Sandboards and Dune jumping!

After we left Cusco, we headed to a tiny town, which is really just an oasis in the middle of the desert near the coast. The town is outside of Ica called Huacachina, and about the only thing you do there is rent sandboards and surf the huge dunes they have around the oasis. The place truly is an oasis - a tiny pond outlined by palm trees surrounded by huge sand dunes. We took the tour where they take you in a dune buggy, and drive you to the top (much easier than trying to walk up dunes). The dune buggy was just as fun as the boarding, as the drivers are crazy and go real fast over huge dunes, getting airborne on occasion. The boarding was hard compared to snowboarding, but very fun. At the end we went to the top of a huge dune and watched sunset before lying face down on the boards and skidding to the bottom of the biggest dune of the day! Naturally Ben offered for me to go first in this venture out of the group, but I set a fast pace for everyone else. Tons of fun!

Rafting down the Apurimac!

Took a 3 day white water rafting trip down the Apurimac river from Cusco. Our first day was a 5 hour drive to the river then about 1-2 hours on the river before camping on the bank. We had a group of about 21, everyone was from Israel except one other American. The second day we got to spend a lot more time on the river hitting class 3, 4, and 5 level rapids. Our guide was awesome and I think the best one. He was super nice - got in the cold water with me to practice my kayak roll, travelled all over the place guiding, and was really knowledgeable about the river. It gets pretty narrow at some points and you can see how high it gets along the gorge during the rainy season - a huge difference. The canyon is pretty deep but we could still see some condors flying high above the peaks as we rafted along. At some parts we had to walk around a chunk of the rapids because they were too dangerous for commercial rafting, but we got to watch our guide and some of our groups´ kayakers go down them - crazy to watch! Throughout the day we didn´t have too many swimmers, but one raft did flip which meant that guide had to buy all the others 6 beers - one for each passenger he dunked. That night we roasted marshmallows over the fire and explained to everyone what a s´mor was, even though we didn´t have any chocolate. On the third day we hit our biggest class 5, and jumped off a cliff into the water (not very high though). Ben and I determined that river kayaking is more fun than rafting, but we still had a really great time.

Salkantay Trek, Machu Picchu and The Sacred Valley

From Bolivia we traveled to Cusco to sign up for a trek up to Machu Piccu. We decided on the Salkantay Trek that lasts 4 days and was amazing!! The hike took us up to 4600m in plain veiw of the Salkantay Mountain and then decended to tons of bananna plantaions and fruit trees - we were able to pick our own avacados and oranges for our breakfast, delicious. On the fifth day, Kristin´s birthday, we met Tom and Becky at the top of Machu Picchu. The ruins are absolutely gorgeous surrounded by mountains and live up to every and any expectation you might have. After spending the day taking a tour of the ruins, the four of us spent the night in luxury at the Sanctuary Lodge; sipping Pisco sours in the hot tub and enjoying a great dinner where the staff actually baked a cake and sang Happy Birthday to Kristin.

From Machu Picchu we travelled to Urubamba. We toured the market and the Maras Maray ruins while stopping to take some really great landscape shots. Back at the hotel we indulged in a foot massage and then had dinner in front of their fireplace. Man we can really get used to this type of travel!!! After Urubamba we took a bus to Cusco to spend our last night together. While there we saw Sacsayhuaman and the nearby ruins as well as the Cathedral. For dinner we went to ChiCha´s from a local tip we got from our guide and they had some amazing ceviche (something Ben has officially become addicted to since we have been here).

In the morning Tom and Becky had to fly out to begin their Amazon trip. We had so much fun together, and I must say that we had a hard time adjusting to hostel life after we left them but managed!!!