Red Beans, Rice and the rest...

Well we are well into the heart of red beans and rice country now and every time I have a plate of the stuff, I can't help but think of the Michael Franti and Spearhead song of the same name.
"Red beans and rice, I could eat a plate twice". Nice work Mr Franti! That said, in the same song he didn't need to mention that eating a lot of prunes will keep you loose. That was too much information. :)

So we left Samara about a week ago. One thing I forgot to mention about Samara was that the bank was very well protected. For a small bank in a small town, they needed three security guards with pump action shotguns to keep things in order. Not sure if that makes it more or less safe. It felt like a scene from a bad 80's action movie.

Then it was onto Monteverde. It means Green Mountain and although their naming skills lack a little imagination, they make up for it with their truthfulness. Its basically in a cloud forest so it rains a lot but is still kind of warm. We did a canopy tour of the forest where dudes strap you into a harness and you are hooked onto a cable and cruise through the sky over or through the trees, sometimes right through the clouds as well. It was pretty cool. We also did a couple of nature walks in which we saw a couple of sloths very high up in trees, an awesome looking toucan (Imogen, we have photos of both sloth and toucan! Will post some other time), a small tree snake, an agouti which is like a large rat, and then lots of other birds. Monteverde was well worth the visit. I even liked the restaurant that provided Alka Seltzer at the counter! Very thoughtful of them to cater for if their food gives you trouble.

After that it was onto the Arenal Volcano near the city of La Fortuna. It's claim to (in-)fame is that it blew up in 1967 and killed 87 people. We did a tour that took us out to see the lava running down. Naively I kind of thought I would be able to look down and see a stream of lava running past my feet with a guide repeating occasionally not to put our feet in the lava if we like our feet the way they are. Very wrong. We were parked about 2kms from the mountain (there is an exclusion zone to protect people who don't get the dangers of lava like myself) and when it got dark a large mini-van (a three-quarter van?) full of mostly north american tourists stared at a black mountain covered mostly in clouds. Then eventually we saw a red dot roll down the mountain and that was the queue for some "oooohs" and "aaaahhhss". I was a tad underwhelmed but then it got a bit better as more and more large chunks of red hot lava (coincidentally the size of a mini-van) rolled down the hill at 1000 degrees celcius and damn fast. After that we drove away and went to the Baldi Hot Springs which is actually much like going to the swimming pool as it was like a resort except that the water ranges from nicely warm to bloody hot! We found a nice bar that you could sit at while still submerged in the water and we toasted Dave and Annette's "got a baby on the way" news with a couple of beers and a Crazy Monkey cocktail. (Good name for the baby eh Dave? The second name still has to be Damien though. Best man gets middle name naming rights as I've explained!)

Now we are in the town of Copan Ruinas. We arrived today after about three days of bus riding. We passed through Nicaragua and saw some rain, a hotel and some sun. Now we are in Honduras. We start at a spanish school I think tomorrow. We meet our host families in about an hour. Craig and I requested separate families because frankly, two and a bit months of hanging out almost constantly has meant we could do with some time off! As he put it, I'm the first person he sees in the morning and the last person he sees at night and both of us agree that's just not right! So we now have two weeks of spanish tuition and living with a family in Copan. Copan is next door to some supposedly awesome ruins which I plan to check out very soon. This place is really nice actually. The countryside has a very rural feel with rolling hills (some covered in trees, others nude) and lush green pastures with grazing cows atop them. The town itself is old Spanish colonial style with cobble stone streets which look great but can't have done the rickety old bus we rode in on any good. I'd better go get stuck into it now. Time to meet my new family...

Samara Beach

We've had a few days kicking back on Samara Beach now and its been great. People think that I'm a local now because my skin is basically tanned black. Ummm, I don't have any photos of my new tan so I guess you'll just have to believe that it's possible. :)
The basic plan for what happens most days here is as follows:
8am - get up, walk down the road for a breakfast of pancakes and coffee.
9am - put the boardies on, kick back on the beach with a book or mp3 player, have a swim, go for a walk.
11am - morning tea is usually a banana milkshake.
11.30am - more kicking back on the beach with book or mp3 player.
1pm - lunch.
2pm - afternoon nap (tired from the mornings exertions).
3.30pm - afternoon swim, walk, read more book.
5pm - beer o'clock.
6.30pm - dinner
7.30pm - write in diary, read more, relax, listen to music.
10pm at the very latest - asleep.

We leave tomorrow at 2.30pm and that's a good thing because if we keep this up for much longer we're likely to get harpooned next time we go swimming! :) We are off to Monteverde next which is a rainforest area so we can do some hiking and hopefully see a toucan and maybe a sloth or something. We've just found a great place in Honduras too where we are going to both book in for 2 weeks of living with local families in a town called Copan. You get one-on-one spanish tuition, you live with a family who feed you and you eat lots of empanadas. Sounds great! Gotta book that in soon.

Miami Airport

To get from Peru to Costa Rica, we had to fly via Miami, USA. We had heard much about the problems that could arise due to George "Brainiac" Bush's over-the-top rules about getting into and out of his terror besieged country. :) So armed with a large dose of cynicism and its good friend sarcasm, we arrived in Miami expecting it to take hours to get through Homeland Security and Customs. I guess we were lucky because it took only about half an hour. Sure we had to get fingerprinted and have our photos taken like common criminals but in general it was pretty pain free. We were so stunned we had to find a nice little sportsbar where we could kick back with a couple of pints of Guinness while we waited for our flight out of Miami at 6.10pm that night.
It was the flight out where our fun began. After an hour delay as they couldnt find enough staff to work on the plane, we were up in the air. After an hour and bit of flying (more than half way there) we were told that there was a problem with some sort of equipment. In nice calm tones our captain said that it was not a worry because they have three of them, so the other two, umm, thingies were working fine. But, we had to turn back to Miami. We arrived back in Miami at around 11pm and after about 20 mins of the flight crew being unable to attach the bridge thingy to the plane, we were finally able to get back on the ground. We were then told that they had arranged us another plane that would leave at 12:30am. This wasnt really a good option for us because we were then going to be arriving in the city of San Jose at around 2am, without anywhere to stay. We were starving at this stage as we hadnt eaten dinner yet and all of the food joints at the airport had closed for the night. A hungry Damo is a grumpy Damo and I decided to have a word to a dude to see if we could be put up in a hotel and fly out the next day. I figured the chances of this were slim but the growl in my stomach told me to try anyway. Before I had even mentioned the reason for why we should get a free hotel stay, the guy was organising it! Great stuff! We arrived at the Marriott Hotel to find ourselves in a room with a double bed each and about fifteen hundred pillows on each one. This was a damn nice room! In 32 years, I have not slept on a more comfortable bed. This bed is the closest I will get to having a nap on a cloud. I kid you not!
The next morning we ate the biggest pancakes I have ever seen and caught a trouble-free flight to San Jose. So while our experience with Miami airport was interesting, it kind of worked out alright in the end.
Now for a week or so relaxing on the beach of Samara.

In Lima

Well we are back in Lima. Lima is very much just another city. Its got grey cloud hanging over it 24 hours a day and seems to maintain a constant 17 degrees. How the whole population isnt depressed 24/7 I will never know. A very average city that we both look forward to getting out of in a couple of days time when Craig and I head for the beaches of Costa Rica where I will be tanning up like there's no tomorrow. (Ok funny bastards, write your jokes about me and tanning now - come on, I know you wanna!).
Actually, what Lima does have is a nice little Brazilian bar that a few of us from the Peru tour checked out a couple of nights ago. Great tasting drinks and really good music had us all up there dancing with the Brazilians. Those guys have more rhythm in one big toe than all of us whiteys combined but we did our best and had a lot of fun doing it.
The last few days of our tour were spent in a jungle lodge in the Amazon. We went to Monkey Island with lots of monkeys that made Craig and I miss the animal park back in Bolivia, did a freekin huge walk through the jungle to The Lost Lake that was obviously not lost at all, saw an awesome night sky with next to no light pollution to spoil it and got bitten by hopefully non-malarial mozzies.
I've added 5 more photos. Check 'em out:
http://picasaweb.google.com/damien.evans/Holiday2007

Inca Trail and Machu Picchu - Done!

Yep, we are now back in Cusco after completing the Inca Trail and seeing Machu Picchu. The Inca Trail itself was just amazing. 45 kilometres in 3 and a bit days seemed like a big ask but in the end it was tough but quite do-able. The hardest day was day 2 when we had to hike 16 kms including a steep climb up many rocky steps to what is known as Dead Womans Pass which is at 4200 metres above sea level. So not only was it a long walk but the altitude meant that it was very slow going. Every now and then i would look up and see the top of the mountain that I was aiming for but it didn't seem to be getting much closer. One guy on my tour got through it by listening to angry music on his iPod. I got through it but trying to remember as much as I could about the Smurfs, Fraggle Rock, Star Blazers and Astroboy. Cartoons got me there in the end although trying to remember the name of Gargamel's cat from The Smurfs (Azriel) was too much for me. I had to ask an Irish couple for the answer to that one!
What amazed me was the porters. For 12 tourists and 2 guides, we had 18 porters carrying up to 20kgs each on their backs, cooking awesome meals, putting up tents etc. Those guys are so fit. We all got to try on one of their heavy backpacks during day 3 for a photo and then 4 of us guys decided to just walk up a small hill while wearing them and it nearly killed us! I reached the top and was really struggling for air!
Day 4 was just a two hour hike before the sun came up in order to reach Machu Picchu. The sun illuminated an awesome view of the Incan city ruins, surrounded on all sides by mountains. The tour around the ruins itself was great too. You get to walk amongst them, climb the steps as the Incas would have etc. A few of us finished it off with a hike up a mountain next to it called Wayña Picchu which was a very steep climb of about 50 mins which ended with us (and so many other tourists) jostling for a position at the top of the mountain and looking at an awesome 360 degree view of the area. It was quite dangerous up there with very little in the way of ropes or anything to stop you falling off the side. There is no way it would be allowed in Australia. The only safety precaution they really had was a limit of 400 people per day and a system where you sign in when you start and sign out when you finish. I guess at the end of the day if someone hasn't signed back out, they go looking for bodies or something. Crazy. Still, it was well worth the climb and we didn't die so that was pretty cool.
Back in Cusco for a free day it has been both entertaining and frustrating. An ATM machine has confiscated my bank card cos it reckons incorrectly that the card has expired but today is a public holiday so i cant retrieve it. We fly out to the amazon jungle tomorrow and hopefully I can do something about it tomorrow before we leave. It's a concern although i have a visa card i can use in the interim. The public holiday is for the feast day Corpus Christi. The whole city is celebrating with music, massive crowds converging on the city centre etc. There are lots of stalls too where you can buy the local delicacy - roast guinea pig. Not just a slice of meat, it looks like a charred rat. I guess you just gnaw away at the meatier parts. Every time I see them I think of the guinea pigs we used to own as kids. Poor little Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum and Alice! (Geez, those names were bad! :) )
I have heaps of photos of the hike and of mountains and Machu Picchu etc and will upload a few when i get a chance but right now i dont have the right cable on me so it will have to be some other time.

The Yak turns 40

Yep, today is a little bit special because it´s Craigs birthday and he's turned the big 40! Three cheers for the old fella! I probably shouldnt make jokes about his age because I would say that he's probably the fittest person on the tour. I expect that on the first day of the Inca Trail hike, we'll just see a blur of metal as his old man walking frame zooms right past us! Tonight there will be a beer or two to celebrate. Probably no more than that because we've got so much hiking to come in the next few days that a couple of beers at the altitude we are at now should be more than enough. We will celebrate more later.
We are now in Cusco. In the last few days we've been to Lake Titicaca (I think I still have a mental age of about 5 because i still chuckle a little each time I say the name) where we visited the Uros islands which are made of floating reeds and made by locals who live on them and then we visited a rocky island where we stayed the night with local families. The island was at 3800 metres above sea level and we then had to hike up to 4000 metres to where our house for the night would be. This was our first serious bit of exercise since arriving at high altitude and it was a bit of a concern as we all huffed and puffed while walking really slowly. We later hiked to the top of the island which was at 4200 metres and again it was very difficult. Still, it will have helped to acclimatise us to the altitude for the Inca Trail. The Inca Trail starts in two days and is often now the topic of conversation as we all hope we can actually manage to walk about 40 kms over 3 and a bit days. Everyone keeps saying "its not a race, as long as you make it eventually" to help themselves feel better. I like it. :) I'm a bit nervous myself because its a blo0dy long way. Walking through Cusco before, we could see massage places everywhere so i will have to keep that in mind when the going gets tough. Anyway, should be a great experience!