sun for the soul

We've recently returned from a much-needed break in Spain. At one point in the chaos that preceded the holiday I though it wasn't actually going to happen, but we made it off the island, Andy lagging half a week behind me, and enjoyed doing some serious relaxing in a remote mountain valley in the Sierra Nevadas. The region is called Las Alpujarras and was just so tranquil and beautiful - our little rustic cottage was in one of the tiny whitewash villages dotted throughout the mountains. With a balcony and rooftop with an incredible view, we spent our days reading, sleeping, hiking, and sampling our fair share of the local chorizo. I had the first three or four days as a solo retreat (long story) and to my surprise I lapped up every last peaceful, inert, sleepy minute of it.

Our good friends Sarah and KP happened to be staying a few hours away and so the following week, we invited them for a night in the mountains with us where we found the most incredible vegetarian restaurant in this teensy village, run by the immensely talented Frenchman Jean-Claude, who treated us single handedly to a gastronomically divine evening. The following day we all drove to Granada and stumbled around the breathtaking Alhambra palaces, slack-jawed, taking in the incredible Moorish designs and architecture.

The final few days we spent in Atequera, mainly sitting in the sunny town square reading papers and eating tapas, with the occasional random element thrown in like a blues festival and food poisoning. What holiday is complete without it? Though it feels like it was over all too soon, the sunshine and nature did some serious good for my soul and helped both of us let the dust settle on what's been a somewhat tough and draining few months. I tried to store up as much sunshine in my bones and in my soul to make in through the rest of this grayer Mancunian summer!

Reunion Tale

Last week, my friend Sarah and I orchestrated a grand surprise visit to our old home of New York. Specifically, we wanted to surprise our great friend and my old flatmate Jes and catch up with her and with the city. We met up at the airport having flown in from our respective homes in Manchester and Missouri, squealed like valley girls when we found each other, and waited for Jes on her stoop when she got back from work! The look on her face was worth all the plotting and planning and I had an AMAZING week catching up with familiar faces and places.

New York retains a certain hold over me. I assumed I would feel more like a visitor, this being my first return after leaving 9 months ago, but as soon as I arrived it really just felt like being home. Everything was so familiar, and it just made sense to me that I was part of the city again. I guess this is partly because the people I left behind really are like family to me, and partly because 4 years is long enough for a place to really get under your skin and never leave. I know it's New York, and this is all so cliched, but going back made me realise that this city just makes sense to me - I get how it ticks and find is easy to tick along in time.

And so the 6 day trip passed in a wonderful swirl of smiles and hugs, of sipping great coffee and catching up on eating bagels, frozen yogurt, sushi, cupcakes...you get the idea. I went with my gorgeous god-daughter to the zoo, I ate brunch (along with Chelsea Clinton!) in the sunshine in Brooklyn, spent an afternoon with dear friends in New Jersey at their amazing house and generally reveled in the city and her people. I felt more buoyant of soul than I have done in a while, but at the same time feel like I made my peace with the new life we're forging in Manchester. New York will always be there. I miss my friends terribly, but they will always be woven into my life, if from slightly further away. And who knows, maybe we'll boomerang back there one day for a more long-term reunion...

Jungle Extravaganza

Here we are in warm and sleepy little Rurrenabaque, a little town in the Amazon basin. We survived our three day jungle trip to get here which included boating along the rivers, hiking parts of the jungle and sleeping on the riverbed each night under millions of stars.

As ever on such trips, it was somewhat of a motley crew but with a few momorable characters and our very enthusiastic guides, Miguel and Ivon. Once I saw the boat I felt incredibly stupid for having asked after a bathroom, seeing as it really was more of a raft! (Each morning I saw the driver surrepticiously bailing water out of the boat...)

Turns out that the company we booked with is the only one of its kind that does this trip so it really felt like a unique experience. On the way we picked up Pedro, a local who lives in a small community along the river. Pedro was our guide for the jungle hikes and showed us the medicinal and poisonous flora and fauna in the jungle. We even had the priviledge of hiking through Madidi National Park, one of the most protected and biodiverse areas of jungle in the Amazon basin.

No jungle extravaganza is complete without getting up close and personal with nature! As well as seeing monkeys, stalking wild boar and of course receiving a plethora of mosquito bites, we had a few other memorable encounters...one one hike we stopped at a swamp to fish for piranas and yours truly caught the first one! Then on our last day as we boated toward Rurrenabaque, we stopped at a beautiful natural swimming hole with waterfall. Of course, I jumped in headfirst along with a few others before realising that there was some badass fish living in there with nasty stingers. OUCH! Three of us received several nasty swollen stings that left us in quite real amounts of pain for about 5 or 6 hours. Yikes. Not to be left out, Andy managed to pick up a couple of hardcore tick-like insects that well and truly attached themselves to him. Nice.

(I would also like to take this moment to share my personal pride and joy moment: needless to say, changing clothes was not something that really happened - at all - for most of us during the trip. So when I did get changed into my swimsuit to dive into the aforementioned pool, what did I find curled up in belly button but a little dead bug! Nice. )

We´re taking a day or two here in Rurre to soak up the sun and sample the numerous hammocks in town. Then back to La Paz for some more altitude and to continue our Bolivian adventures. Jungle pics to follow...

La Paz and beyond...

As our bus wound its way into La Paz from Lake Titicaca Millay worked out that when she did her parachute jump in New Zealand a few years ago it was from a LOWER altitude than the one at which we currently stand. We´re currently 3,800m (that´s 12,500ft) above sea level and trekking around this steep hilly city is a constantly breathless experience.

As it turns out though this time we´re just passing through, we´ve managed to find a jungle trip that is going to take us tomorrow by boat deep into the Amazon Basin. We signed up eager for the adventure that will take 3 days and involve camping in the jungle for 2 nights. It was only after we´d handed over our money that the reality began to sink in and we started to wonder what we had gotten ourselves in for. In this part of the world ´boat´ could mean anything from a pre-war rust bucket to a raft; my Spanish wasn't good enough to enquire about the existence of a motor. The one thing Millay did discover was that it definitely doesn't have a toilet, I don´t think we've ever prayed so hard for ´good health´ if you know what I mean.

Still if we survive the trip down there the town we´ll stay in for a couple of days, Rurrenabaque, should be gorgeous and chilled. The other slight adventure is that is that the only way back to La Paz USED to be (our mothers - notice the USED) via what was officially recognised as the "world´s most dangerous road". Apparently drunk driving, a 3.2m wide mountain road and 600m drops wasn't conducive to a happy driving experience. Luckily, thanks to a huge international development grant, a new road has now been built that is apparently a lot safer and the old road is now restricted solely to hiking and mountain bike tours that are advertised everywhere as ´ride the road of death´. Don´t worry Donna, I've got Millay on a short leash on this one!

If Batman was Peruvian - this would be his Batmobile

Goodbye Peru! We´re leaving for the sunny mountains of Boliva. You have left us with many memories :-)

Despite our best efforts ( last week I ate Alpaca - only learning afterwards that this is a type of llama) we are both well. Millay is speaking Spanish like a local, and I am speaking Spanish like a stupid white gringo.

All in all, life is good....

Machu Picchu

We're back in Cusco now after a great few days in the Sacred Valley and of course, at the holy grail itself, Machu Picchu. My stomach got its act together, we wound our way to the very picturesque Ollantaytambo and lodged there, catching the "backpacker" train to the town at the base of the Machu Picchu site, Aguas Calientes. Apart from some slightly chavvy thermal springs, the town boasts very little save for being the gateway to the site known (erroneously) as 'The Lost City of the Incas'.

We rose at 5 am and caught the bus up, up, up into the clouds, only for them to part for us as if on cue as we entered the site and feasted our eyes on this incredible wonder of the world. It really is true that no amount of pictures can do justice to this incredible Incan site: sweeping views of the surrounding valleys, the mountains plunging steeply into the Urubamba river on each side and, shrouded cloud and nestled in the middle of it all, an ancient city that mesmerisingly catches the sun as it rises over the mountains. I won't lie, it brought a tear to my eye. We stood in silence with a handful of other travellers and watched the sun rise and bathe us and the ruins in its golden light.

Machu Picchu, or 'Old Peak' was rediscovered in 1911 by Yale explorer Hiram Bingham and I like to imagine that we caught a glimpse of what he must have felt when he first layed eyes on it. (I wore my "East Village" tshirt, care of Jes, to represent NYC...) Not content with the usual postcard view of the site, we trundled off to climb the high, steep peak you see behind the site in all the classic postcards: Wayna Picchu, or 'Young Peak'. Looks steep doesn't it? Well we can testify that it certainly is! We huffed and puffed our way up and were rewarded as the sun slowly burned off the morning cloud and we got to see an incredible panoramic view of Machu Picchu and the surrounding valleys. We kept pinching ourselves, not only because we had been awake since 5 am, but because we could not believe we were actually there taking it all in. Its cliched, but Machu Picchu really was everything I would thought it be and more.

In a day or so we'll head down toward Bolivia to continue the next stage of our explorations. Word on the street is that these days they're charging Americans $100 at the border! Stupid politics. My stupid blue passport!! Bu for now we're back with "karaoke Eddie", mentioned in a previous post. It's all good.

Come along for the ride. We wish you were here...

Cusco

High up here in the Andes mountains it seems like life back in New York never even existed. The stresses of running around on the subway seem to pale in comparison to the taxis and buses here that fly down Peruvian hillsides favoring their horns over their brakes. The huge wide expanses of Broadway and the Avenues with their 6 lanes of traffic seem a distant memory compared to the tiny streets and alleys of colonial Cusco where mini Japanese cars the size of the average American hot dog stand squeeze through while locals and tourists hug the walls either side to avoid being squashed. Incidentally the only car here apart from the mini Japanese ones are Volkswagon Beatles that apparently got shipped over here when they were too trashed for European use to act as the official taxis. Who knew?!

Cusco is set in the stunning surroundings of the Andes mountains, where ever you look there are huge green peaks towering in the distance tethering puffy clouds like large white zeppelins. This is one of the main Peru tourist hotspots where nearly everyone stops off on the way to Machu Picchu and therefore the population is a funny mix of locals in traditional dress selling wares and photos of them clutching Llamas and the ubiquitous white tourists clutching cameras, spending dollars and keeping the city ticking over. The city has embraced tourism wholeheartedly and while the buildings and architecture still looks authentically Peruvian behind most of the doors in the city center now are small bars and restaurants of every shape and taste. It's almost like having NY´s West Village with it´s buzz and variety transported directly into the Peruvian mountains.

There are still moments of genuine local culture though that remind you that you are indeed somewhere very special and different to our western homes. For the last two days the local police force has been holding marching competitions for all the local schools in the main square. As the chiefs of police all sit underneath the shadow of the Cathedral and the local army band plays rousing tunes, about 30 strong teams from the local schools march past in military formation holding white sticks symbolising swords and flags. Unfortunately the national ´march´involves kicking your feet up high in a way not too dissimilar to the German goose step leading to the odd sight of kids ranging from about 7 through to 14 seeming to be doing a shambolic reenactment of the Nuremberg rally. While the historical echos may be unfortunate it was though thoroughly heartwarming to see a community get so much joy and pride out of such a simple thing. To see the concentration on the kids faces and their desperate efforts not to let their school or friends down by losing time or rhythm was an awesome reminder how distant our home communities and kids have come from these Innocent times where personal image or fashion is´nt as important as the local community traditions.

Travelling karma

Obviously I was owed some good travelling karma after all my exertions over the last week getting everything packed and cleaned while Millay lived it up in Peru. I whizzed through all my connections and flights without even a queue at security let alone a delay. Flying in to Cusco just after dawn over the Andes mountains was a spectacular reward for the previous 24 hours worth of travelling. The clouds we were flying above thinned to reveal the crinkled dramatic landscape of the Peruvian peaks below. Lower flying clouds clung to mountain peaks like lost cotton wool whilst the valleys looked like they were filled with the effects of discard dry ice. I´d forgotten how spectacular the Andes mountains are and how flat the rest of the world seems compared to them.

In typically odd South American style we were welcomed at the baggage collection at Cusco airport at 6.20am by a 5 piece traditional band standing next to the baggage belt playing through a loud PA system. Most people had been travelling for at least a day and many had been staying awake with me overnight at Lima airport and so unsurprisingly sales of their cd were low! After meeting a tired Millay outside we made our way through the streets of cusco in a typical taxi eg. small, falling apart and smelling like the exhaust pipe empties into the back seat. After living in Ecuador for 3 months when I was 18 it´s amazing how familiar all the streets, sights and smells all feel. I´ve even got some Spanish coming back to me and even though many of the locals in this tourist filled town speak English I appreciate their looks of pity as I try and order lunch whilst Millay hides her head in shame beside me. Luckily her Spanish is sounding awesome so all I´ve got to do now and avoid losing her and keep her healthy and we´ll be fine!

My turn....

The long goodbye is over and it’s finally time to strap on the backpack and head out to South America. There have been many times I’ve wondered over the last week whist I’ve been frantically packing, struggling with huge boxes up and down stairs and cleaning our apartment with the fervour of a medieval serving wench - where is my newly minted wife? Luckily I’ve been able to keep up to date with her fun and frolics in the beautiful city of Cusco and surrounding adventure sport spots via this blog as I on the other hand, in contrast, clean up our now desolate apartment and eat bad takeaway food because we don’t have any plates left. I forget now why this arrangement seemed like such a good idea at the time we agreed to it but needless to say it’s now definitely feeling good to be done with all the ‘things to do’ and head out for some fun and frolics of my own. 

I’ve just received an email from the Peruvian airline that I’m taking for the last leg of my trip that is entirely in Spanish which of course is complete gibberish to me (maybe that was why sending Millay to language school early seemed like such a good idea) I’m assuming it says “we’re looking forward to spiriting you away on our airline, we like you so much maybe you would like to fly first class?” and not “ha ha, now you are ours, we cancel all flights until February!”. We shall see….