Inglaterra ahoy!

Yes yes yes, it's been a while since my last post but you've had the fascinating photos of the Salt Flats to keep you entertained, so I don't feel I've been neglecting you too badly. Speaking of which, there's not much to say about the Salt Flats because it's all visual, and so that album shall represent that particular chapter of my travels. But I will say that it was lots of fun and Dave and Andrew had me in hysterics most of the time, and we played a lot of Yahtzee.

After the Salt Flats, we travelled a LOT. The bad kind of travel, where you spend a lot of time in bus stations, or on buses, or walking around dusty streets looking for the bus station. So basically - it was a marathon of bus activity. The Salt Flats tour ended in Uyuni, from Uyuni we got a night bus to Oruro, in Oruro we spent hours in the station then got a bus to Arica in Chile, in Arica we slept one night in a proper bed then got a taxi over the border to Tacna, Peru. From Tacna we got a over-night bus to Lima.

Ahh, Lima. My nemesis, my addiction, I cannot stay away. It lures me in like the cloudy, polluted web woven by a cunning spider that I shall call - Flying Dog Hostel. Arrived in Lima on Sunday, fully planning to head north to the coast on Tuesday. Unfortunately for those plans, but fortunately for having a lot of fun and meeting up with old friends, Steve and Mather and Nathan and Kaia were still in Lima because they were having serious car trouble. So I ended up staying for 6 days and finally heading coastwards on Saturday. In the interim, I didn't really do much except celebrate my first ever thanksgiving! Which was on Thursday - I baked an apple pie and a pumpkin pie and we all started drinking tequila at 12 in the afternoon. Ahh Thanksgiving, a wonderful celebration.

On Saturday, I bid farewell to all my friends and heading north, alone. All I had for company was On The Road by Jack Kerouac, and a white rose that an extremely drunk man had given me that morning. Yes, he was drunk in the morning. Such is hostel life. Mancora-bound I was, and on Sunday morning, in Mancora so I did arrive. The Mancora hostel was awesome, it had a pool! Nothing much happened in Mancora, but I did make some new friends (mostly Irish and mad, although one was German.) and dress up in not much more than coconut halves and a skirt made of palm leaves for an 'Anything But Clothes' party on the Monday night. On Tuesday, a huge group of us got on a bus for Montanita, which is very similiar to Mancora (surfer tourist beach resort) but in Ecuador. It was a very large group, let's see if I can remember all the names of the people I was travelling with:
Amanda, Paddy, Kevin, Ross, Heej, Hazel, Krishna, Kate, Kendra, Nick, Marian, Yvonne, Chris, Rory, Pierre, Tivo... and me. Yeah, I think that was everyone. In Montanita we stayed in a lovely place (although it possibly had bedbugs, definitely had at least one cockroach, and had power blackouts every evening) that was right on the beach and had hammocks. There was one street that was nothing but cocktail stalls - they looked healthy and good, because there was lots of fresh fruit in the front... and then your gaze drifted to the plethora of lethal-looking liquor bottles lurking in the back. One night we did a stall-crawl, taking photos at each one... by the 10th photo, Nick, Kevin and Ross were all naked, with nothing to protect their modesty but a cocktail menu. Don't worry, I managed to keep my clothes on. Another night, there was a beach rave, which was lots of fun and I didn't leave it 'til 8 in the morning.
Apart from partying (I do feel a bit guilty, it's not very cultural is it), I also tried body boarding, with a view to progressing on to surfing lessons. It was a complete disaster. I could NOT get past the white water to the place where you can actually catch waves. I'd manage to swim through 4 or 5 breaking waves, and then one huge one would come and sweep me all the way back again. It was hellish and undignified, and I eventually gave up after half an hour of bedraggledness, only to find that I couldn't get BACK to the shore because the damn waves kept dragging me out to sea, my flippers were making me fall over and the board kept getting wrapped around my neck. I literally spent about 10 minutes floundering and flopping in the shallows, swallowing far too much salt water and muttering angrily to myself.

From Montanita we headed to Banos, a mountain town with lots of adventure activites available. I was only there for two days, and we went quadbiking and did bridge-jumping (a bit like bungee jumping but with a rope, not a bungee). The quadbiking was fun; there was the stereotypical thing where all the boys want to drive and the girls look suspiciously at the strange machines and say 'yeah, I'll just be a passenger', but I did actually take over for about half an hour and it was awesome. So if I get another chance, I think I'll be brave enough to drive one all by myself. We got off the bikes at one point to hike up to a waterfall, that was AWESOME but my camera battery died . By this point the group had managed to get completely separated; some went up a mountain, some went down the valley.... so it was just Nick and I. We got a flat tire. Humm. Had to abandon the quadbike, hitchhike the half-hour back to Banos then get the rental people to drive us back so we could rescue the bike. Which was all fine. What was not fine, was when the rental guy pointed out that somehow the front axle had broken. And apparently that would cost $300 dollars to fix.

WHAT?! We did NOT have $300 to give these guys, and they had our passports as deposit. Panic. Spent about half an hour trying to explain in broken spanish that we didn't know how it had happened, we hadn't done anything risky or reckless that would have made it our fault, and it must have been weak to begin with. Then just saying 'we don't have enough money' over and over again and crying, and eventually persuaded them to accept $50 from both of us. Phew. They were probably swindling us, but I didn't care, this was on Tuesday, I'm leaving on Thursday, I really needed my damn passport!

Once my passport was safely back in my hands, I got a bus to Quito, a bus ACROSS Quito to ANOTHER bus station, and finally a bus back to Tory's house. Which took a very long time and was quite stressful and in the dark. But I got there, and here I am, checking up on the rescue-puppy, who is doing very well and has grown a LOT and can now walk on her injured leg. Today is Wednesday, which I'm going to spend relaxing, re-packing and generally preparing to return to cold cold lovely England.

Oh that reminds me. I land at 4.30pm Friday (fingers crossed the plane isn't delayed. It's so going to be delayed. Oh god.). At 6.30am Saturday, I have a flight to Italy to go to some big family celebration. So I land in Heathrow, and have 12 hours before I'll be back in an airport, Luton, heading off once more. So I'll be back in England and ready to visit people on Monday. Yay, aren't you all thrilled?!

Next time we speak, it will be through the magical medium of voice! Ahahaha, hurrah.

ps. This post covers about 4 weeks worth of stuff, crammed into one post. So only the highest of the highlights have been mentioned.

Look, no words!

Hello Bolivia, and hello lots of people I´ve met somewhere before

The Machu Picchu adventure was on Thursday the 5th (bonfire night! What were you guys up to?) and I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday relaxing and ambling around Cusco and partying because it was the weekend. I danced in some clubs, saw a reggae band, played some pictionary, read my book, met some llamas, bought a really comfortable really touristy cardigan, sunbathed in the hostel courtyard... all lovely but not very riveting for you probably. Then on Sunday night we all said goodbye and I headed to Puno, a port town on Lake Titicaca. Arrived Monday morning, and booked a boat trip to the islands of Lake Titicaca and ambled around the town. The boat tour left at 7am so an early night on Monday and then I spent Tuesday on the lake. We visited the Floating Islands of Uros - man-made islands made from reeds - and Taquile Island. It was very beautiful and relaxing and interesting.
Puno isn´t a very lively or interesting town though, so having ticked Lake Titicaca off my to-do list, I hopped a bus to La Paz on Wednesday morning. Hello Bolivia! It was a bit of a mad border crossing due to strikes, and I bumped into two Canadians who I´d met in Cusco, Dave and Andrew, who were trying to navigate the border crossing and strikes and somehow get to La Paz, which for complicated reasons involved them getting on my bus at the border. So happy reunion, and we all finally got to La Paz n one piece.
And actually, in La Paz I´ve bumped into many people I know, including the Australians Naomi and Tina, who are working at the hostel to save some cash, and the moto-taxi guys (they´re alive!!), and Tim Ellis again! The reason I came to La Paz was to do a jungle tour, maybe some river rafting, but due to the rainy season and the fact that I´m travelling by myself and it´s a lot easier to organise tours if you´re in a group... unfortunately it was not to be. So no jungle for Josephine, instead tomorrow I´m going to the Salt Flats with Dave and Andrew. Not too sure exactly what the Salt Flats are, except a completely mad and surreal environment with a lot of salt lying around. From what I´ve heard, and read. So that should be fun. So far I´ve been in La Paz for 4 days, and it´s a nice city. Andrew and I went for an amble and we happened across a cool art gallery, and really I´ve just spent my time walking around the city and also trying to organise a tour of some sort. But all that is sorted now and I´m off again tomorrow. Don´t know what I´ll do after the Salt Flats but I´m sure something will crop up.

I think of you all often, and I demand you let me know what you´re up to. Ayesha - a detailed account of Bummit! Heg, have you gotten a job? Kate - have you settled intoYork? Charli - I thought of you whilst hiking up Machu Picchu - ´Charli would be running up this, the mad fell runner´I thought to myself. Hellen - Tim says hi, and give my nephews lots of hugs and did I see that Daniel has said his first word?! Taylor and Julian and James, how´re the foreign countries treating you.... and Liz, I really really miss singing with you!

For some reason it´s impossible to put photos up on facebook, so I´m going to struggle on in this internet cafe for a while longer and see if I can sort it out. Watch this space....


xxx

Ancient Mountain, Jungle Mountain (continued)

^^The promised photos. We biked down that valley! The other photo is from the 3rd day. Me in from of Machu Picchu ruins. In case you couldn´t guess.

So mountain biking was something of a baptism of fire, and I still have the blisters on my hands to prove it. Due to reasons I can´t be bothered to explain, at the end of the first day I was leaving the group I had started with (bye bye Kaia and Nathan) and skipping ahead to join a new group in a place called Santa Theresa. So, feeling battered and tired and seriously needing a shower, I was unceremoniously plonked in a taxi and driven about an hour away to meet the new group. It was a precariously winding mountain road, which I thought was great fun, and I had a conversation in Spanish with the taxi driver and we stopped to buy mangoes and I washed my face in a mountain stream and he let me drive the jeep for a bit! So the journey was great, and when we arrived in Santa Theresa I was then driven to the hot springs where my new group were bathing their weary limbs in the warm pools. Mmmmm. It was slightly tricky finding the group, because by this time it was dark and I didn´t know what my new guide looked like, so it involved a bit of wandering around, peering into various pools at scantily clad relaxers and saying ´... Juan Victor? - which was embarrassing and I was very tired and grumpy and a bit worried I wouldn´t find the new group and would be stranded in some random mountain town.

Luckily I found them and hurrah and oh my goshness - Tim Ellis was amongst them!! Now, I knew Tim Ellis was in South America and I´d met him briefly in Lima, but there he was again, quite unexpectedly, swimming around half way through a trek to Machu Pocchu! Oh, fortuitous circumstance, how glad I was to see him. Yet more suprises awaited me, though, because also part of this new group were Steve and Mather - you may recall, the very American Americans I met in Lima also. Yay! A lovely group full of old friends. (Tim Ellis is a family friend of old, known since I was... 8 or 9, and used to be Hellen´s best friend as a youngster, for those who don´t know)
So I was very very happy and tired and joyfully paddling about in lovely warm water. After the hot springs we had dinner (oh my god, I ate alpaca!) and then some Walter (a strange liquor we didn´t know exactly what it was so we called it Walter. Good ol´Walter) and then went out dancing ´til the early hours. Not sure that was the best plan, because we did have to hike at 10 the next morning, but oh well, good fun was had by all. There was a pole in the club. Pole dancing ensued.....

Umm, but the less said about that the better, and we ended up hiking at 1sh anyway, because Victor was a very relaxed guide, fortuitously. The hike was quite easy in a manner of speaking, because it was all flat, and beautiful surroundings obviously. I kept having to pinch myself - hiking through Peruvian jungle towards Machu Picchu, chatting to Tim Ellis about the good old days and reminiscing about my lovely sister and the mad times we all had when ´twere knee-high to a grasshopper. A most bizarre and wonderful situation.

We arrived absolutely knackered in Aguas Calientes, which also had hot springs to bathe in but these were somewhat smellier and uglier than the ones in Santa Theresa, unfortunately. Didn´t do much really, because we had to be up at 3am the next morning to hike to Machu Picchu. So early to bed, ridiculously early to rise.

We set off at 3.50am, into the darkness. Oh it was so so hard. It only took an hour-ish but it was all uphill, a ridiculously steep climb up up up, always up. And the high altitude made breathing a bit harder than it would be normally. My D of E training kicked in though, and we kept up a sturdy pace right to the top. The reason we had to leave so early is because the gates open at 6am, and the first 400 people through are allowed to climb another mountain -Waynu Picchu- that gives panoramic views of the Incan ruins. And we really wanted to climb it! And we were the first 14 people in the queue. Our group would have been the very very first, but two people beat us. Still - not too shabby. Bloody awesome actually. We sat on the steps and waited for the gates to open at 6, feeling very smug as the queue grew longer behind us. We were the first in, and we ran as fast as we could so we could see the ruins whilst they were empty and not crawling with tourists (Typical tourist trait, by the way, disdian and distaste of all other tourists). Photos photos, lots of photos, then a two hour guided tour of all the temples etc. Absolutely insanely inspiring, by the way. I know it´s THE most visited tourist attraction in all of South America but it deserves to be. Then we had lunch. Hmm. I say lunch. This was at 9am in the morning, but we´d already been up for 6 hours. Then at 10am we climbed Waynu Picchu. By the way, Machu Picchu means Ancient Mountain in Quecha (indigenous language), and Waynu Picchu means Jungle mountain. Hence the title.

Waynu Picchu was again ridiculously steep (you had to haul yourself up with rope in some places) but we took it easy because there wasn´t reason to rush as there had been for the other climb.

You can see how steep it is. It´s that ridiculously steep mountain in the background of the photo at the top. (tried to put the damn photo in the middle of the text but can´t). I climbed that! So we hung around the top and took in the view, and contemplated the absurdly steep climb DOWN.....

Reached the bottom at 2sh, with very very wobbly legs and quite happy to be on flat road again. Then we ambled back to Aguas Calientes and had lunch (proper lunch.) Then it was time to get the train back to Cusco. Which proved to be something of an unwelcome adventure. Steve and Mather and I had been rewarding ourselves with some wine, and were quite trampily swigging from a carton of wine whilst walking to the train station we´d seen, about 15 minutes walk out of the town. Then we got there (having already hiked up two bloody steep mountains, I might add) only to be told there was a train station IN the town and that was where we needed to be. We had about 20 minutes, but it was 15 minutes back to the town and we were knackered and a bit drunk and we didn´t know WHERE in the town the station was. No taxis, the only option was to leg it back to Aguas Calientes (still sipping the wine... hmm). Mad dash, mad dash, donde esta la estacion de tren? Donde donde, run run, panic panic, madly flap the ticket in the face of the guard, jump on to the train. Phew. Sleep.

Slept all the way back to Cusco, went to the hostel and sleeeeept. Right. Thus ends the mammoth blog about Machu Picchu. More to come, however. Wow, it really is very long. I´m sorry.

Blog, interrupted

Ahh, what a tantalising cliff hanger upon which to end my post, what masterful skills of suspense I have.....
Yeah, so the internet is being ridiculously slow and I have to do stuff, but will pick up my tale where it left off when I find a better cafe and have more time

xx

Ancient Mountain, Jungle Mountain

A lot has happened since I last wrote; here is a brief summary of my time in Huancayo:

Spanish Lessons - 3 hours a day, I now know how to conjugate about 20 verbs in past present and future. And how to talk about the weather. Hurrah!

I stayed in a really nice hostel that was more homely than the one I stayed in in Lima, which was more of a party hostel. Casa de la Abuela had home cooked meals every night, a dog, two cats, 3 kittens and a parrot. The only other guests were about 14 or 15 truly mad people who were waiting to take part in a Moto-Taxi junket. A moto-taxi is a motorised rickshaw basically - and they were taking part in a charity event which was driving a moto-taxi from Peru to Paraguay. Except moto-taxis only go at about 50kph, and they definitely can´t go uphill without a lot of encouragement, and they break down all the time, and most of the people taking part had no mechanical knowledge whatsoever and a lot of them also didn´t speak Spanish. So an adventure indeed... an adventure doomed to failure! Things kept going wrong with paperwork and insurance, so they were supposd to leave on Wednesday but were still waiting when I left on Friday night. But from what I hear, they´ve all finally left and no one has died yet. Which is good, because they were all very nice people.

So yes, I left for Lima on Friday night, planning to hop straight on the next bus to Cusco, the city nearest to Machu Picchu. Except I got really really sick on the bus there (oh what fun, running to a bus toilet once every hour, vomitting whilst being thrown around every time the bus went round a corner..). Thusly, I decided to rest for a day in Lima - return to the Flying Dog Hostel, to greet my old friends and celebrate halloween dressed as a lion (see facebook for more photos).

And on Sunday, finally, I headed to Cusco. It was a 20 hour bus journey, enlivened by the movie Twlight in spanish (yes ayesha, moody silences and weird eye contact is the same in Spanish as English). Arriving on Monday - I promptly bumped into two australian guys, Nathan and Kaia, that I knew from Flying Dog. This happens a lot whilst travelling, because a lot of people do the same route without realising. I spent the day booking a 3 day hike to Machu Picchu (YAY!!) and buying things for the trip, like hiring walking boots, then packed and went to bed early.

Tuesday - up at 7am, eventually picked up by tour guide at 9sh - off to go mountain biking! (I say 3 day hike... it ws one day biking, one day hiking and the next day hiking to and wandering around Machu Picchu). By chance and fortuituous circumstance (of which there is a lot in this particular post) Nathan and Kaia were on the same tour. The mountain biking was awesome. All downhill, luckily, as I´ve never done mountain biking before, and dislike cycling at the best of times. But it was beautiful. So so so beautiful. I can´t do justice with words or pictures, but here´s a couple

Estoy bien!

I realise my last post may have made some of you panic a bit for my state of well-being, so this is just a mini-post to reassure you all that I am perfectly sane and happy and enjoying the new turn my adventure has taken. Huancayo is a lovely town with a vibrant market everyday, that sells alpaca ponchos, live rabbits, dead chickens, counterfeit DVDs and much more. Many of the locals dress in traditional peruvian skirts and hats, and yesterday was the festival of the mircale man so there was fireworks and dancing and artwork in the streets. All of which seems much more interesting and exotic than the life I was living in Lima. I have gone hiking in the surrounding hills and seen the Torre Torre as well. The spanish lessons are going really well and tomorrow Iàm heading to Cusco to hopefully see Macchu Pichu and maybe meet up with a girl I made friends with in Lima too.

my ringworm is nearly cured, my jaw has stayed firmly where it is supposed to, I've gotten over my anger at the landlady and the masturbating tramp has not given me any mental scars - more an interesting travelling anecdote with which to entertain people. So all is well

:D

xx