Back in the States

I'm back. In the United States. But I am way tired and I am starting grad school tomorrow, and I am starting a job maybe, and I am moving.... So, yeah...

Arequipa and the Nazca Lines

Well, we made it across another border, this time no one thought we were drug traffickers or illegal immigrants. We went to the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa that is surrounded by beautiful peaks of the Andes. The weather is warmer as we are entering spring, and it is good to see the sun after the freezing cold of Bolivia and the Chilean coast.

After Arequipa, we made it to Nazca and we... flew! in a tiny little plane, over the Nazca Lines. They are shapes made in the desert by ancient people. Some people claim they were made by aliens, but that is a pretty ridiculous theory. The huge shapes form animals and humans when viewed from the air... so there are a billion tourist angencies selling 30 minute flights in tiny bouncy planes to see the lines in the desert. You have to wait in the airport because they organize the flights according to weight, so two little people like us were balanced out by two big heavy people.

Now we are on to our last adventure, climbing Cerro Blanco, supposedly the highest sand dune in the world, where we will camp, and then SANDBOARD miles down to the bottom. We are leaving in two hours.

Then it´s on to boring dreary Lima, and the long ride to Ecuador, which we should reach by the weekend. The grand adventures coming to an end...

Salar de Uyuni and on to Chile...

Well, after the adventures of Lake Titikaka, we headed down to La Paz, the Bolivian capital. It´s an ugly place with commercial districts filled with the usual... food, cheap plastic stuff, and dessicated llama fetuses for your own homemade witchcraft.

We wasted no time and headed south on rough roads and no roads to the remote town of Uyuni where we arranged to go by Jeep through the largest salt flat in the world, the Salar de Uyuni. We had to buy hats, gloves, and jackets, because the measly clothes we had brought with us, back when the plan was Venezuela, felt like paper against the biting cold.

That region of Bolivia looks a lot like Death Valley or Nevada, except for the fact that it is FREEZING COLD! The Salar is a mystical land where all you see is white, a flat plane of white white white... like being on another planet. We even slept in a refuge made of salt with furniture made of salt. The first night we shivered in the cold, the two of us on a tiny bed huddled together trying to keep warm.

The next day we visited a chain of tiny high altitude lakes, the water frozen, and the surfaces crowded with... FLAMINGOS! Yes, flamingos! I had no idea flamingos lived at that altitude. We went to a very basic shelter at 4500 meters (meters, not feet!)... and the temperature dropped to 20 degrees below zero ... but in Celsius!!! not Fahreinheit... and I got sick and had to run to the bathroom outside four times! Talk about roughing it!

We got up early in the morning to see the sunrise above geysers that spouted boiling water hundreds of feet into the air. Crazy landscape! And we were freezing to death, despite the extra clothes we bought in Uyuni. So the hot springs close to the geysers were very welcome, soaking our cold bones in the hot water right next to ice and snow!

After passing by a frozen volcano, we reached the remote border with Chile, where we crossed, without problems!! We climbed into a bus, ready for a long bumpy ride through the high Atacama desert to the oasis town of San Pedro de Atacama... but five minutes later, to our great surprise, we reached a great paved highway that took us smoothly to the town.

We are now in one of the most developed countries of Latin America. The roads, the infrastructure, and even the businesses remind me of the States... unfortunately, so do the prices! So we are resting up in a cold foggy coastal city called Iquique for two nights before rushing on back to Peru tomorrow!