Peruvian Adventure

Last week Carrie and I took a little hiatus and went to Peru for the week. It was quite a bit more adventure than vacation. We had a great time traveling together, however not many things went as smoothly as they could have. . .

(if you just wanted to look at pics you can check out the slideshow here)

Here's a brief rundown of the craziness amidst the week. . .

We got to LAX on Friday night around 10:30pm for our 1am flight, preceded to board on time and then wait on the tarmac for an hour (LA flight traffic at 2am?). This made us nearly miss our connection in El Salvador -thankfully they held the plane.

From El Salvador, we arrived in Lima around 3pm with a layover long enough to need to grab a hotel, which was fine because we were a wreck anyway. We passed out at 6 and woke up at 2am the next day to catch our 5am flight to Cusco. Everything was going fine until the decent into Cusco when we find out that the airport is closed! So we circled the airport for an hour until we got the go ahead to land. We began our decent and as soon as the plane touched the top of the cloud cover the pilot for some reason decided he couldn't land, so we flew all the way back to Lima.

Upon arriving to Lima (again) we found planes taking off for Cusco immediately -but found ourselves stuck in the airport for another 3 hours. Eventually we found our turn to fly back to Cusco (and land) only to find that our luggage had been sent back to LAX! So we went through all the red tape, filled out the paper work and took off to bum around Cusco and Pisac (neighboring town) hoping our stuff would show up before our llama trek the through the Andes.






Thankfully by God's grace our things arrived Sunday afternoon, just in time for us to begin our trek early Monday morning.

We began our llama trek at 5am on Monday driving to the base camp from which we would hike. The trek took us 3 days and 3 nights over one of the oldest and original Inkan trails. We typically hiked 7 hours a day, usually 5 before lunch and then we'd crash after dinner.

The next couple pics are the view from our tent at the first campsite at 13,000ft -where I was pretty much worthless (for some reason my body prefers breathing oxygen and Carrie's didn't seem to care too much).



As we hiked, our porter, horseman, cook, -and llamas, schlepped our gear ahead of us to the next site and had everything waiting for us. Everyday, they would pack and unpack our tents, cook our food, bring us tea in our sleeping bags, and hot water to warm and wash up. Until the last couple hours on the last day of the hike we saw no other tourists, just local Peruvians that farmed in the mountains.



On the second day of the trek we reached 15,400ft and then began our decent. (-The oxygen tasted better with each step down.)

Carrie's baby alpaca.

After the trek things got just a little hectic as we made our way to Machupicchu. Seeing as how there weren't too many ATM's in the wilderness and we needed to pay/tip our guides, we were running quite low on cash -actually we had 14 soles ($4.50) and 10 soles of that we needed for bus fares to get back to Cusco at night. At this point my credit and ATM card were not working (in all the times I've left the country this is the only time I've had any problems with cards). So I preceded to call Washington Mutual with the remaining 4 soles. After explaining to the Wamu lady that we were stranded in the freaking jungle, I was put on hold to watch 2.50 soles melt away. After hanging up, ready to eat the poor internet cafe girl for lunch (who tried to overcharge me), I spent one more sole on the internet and sent out a mass email explaining the dire situation (with all the sensitive material one should never send out).

Then we waited. (with our .50 sole/17cents that was left over)

We decided to try the ATM one more time, and praise Jesus, the card worked and we were able to eat!

After this extravaganza Carrie and I were able to tour around Cusco for our final day peacefully. All in all, though it might sound like our trip was nothing but shenanigans, Carrie and I did have a great time and really enjoyed the Peruvian people. We would definitely do it over again if we had the choice and realize we were lucky to be in a place like Peru at all.