Let´s meditate a while...

Things have been busy since we left Lima, and we´ve put a lot of miles behind us.

On our last day in Lima we headed down to Central Lima to take in the sights- we decided to take our camera and bag with us despite the previous days incident, as we didn´t want to be defeated! Central Lima has some amazing buildings, but they lose their novelty a bit since they have all been restored multiple times after multiple earthquakes, so nothing is really that historic. These people are persistant though- they get hit by major earthquakes every 30 years at least. One cool building we saw was the cathedral which had catacombs underground. Not as impressive as those in France, but still pretty spooky to see patterns made of bones and skulls...

The next day we headed south to a small oasis town called Huacachina, where we did some sandboarding. Huacachina is nestled amongst miles and miles of towering sand dunes. We have never seen so much sand- these dunes put those in Oregon to shame. We took dune buggies out into their vast expanse, and you could see nothing in any direction except more and more dunes. Sandboarding down them is quite an experience, and potentially quite dangerous. Down here you don´t have to sign waivers for ANYthing. We ended up with a small beach worth of sand in every crack you can imagine (don´t imagine...) but no serious injuries. From there we headed further south to Nazca where we flew in a Cessna 172 over the Nazca lines (google them, if interested). The flight was expensive, and pretty uneventful, but it was cool to see the lines from the air. Kristin was disappointed that there was only one set of controls in the plane, and spent most of the flight watching the instruments to make sure our pilot knew what he was doing. Nazca doesn´t offer much else to do, so we took off in a night bus for Arequipa, where we are now.

Arequipa is Peru´s 2nd largest city, and is very beautiful. One of the cleanest cities we´ve seen so far. We spent the first day touring the Santa Catalina Monastery, which was founded 400 years ago and still houses 30 nuns who live a completely cloistered life. The Monastery is beautiful, and a mecca for photography, but the highlight was our eccentric guide who kept saying things like ¨Come to my reality...¨and ¨Let´s meditate a while...¨. The insides of our lips were bleeding by the time we were done since we had to bite down to stop from laughing.

That same day we booked a 3 day trekking tour into Cañon del Colca for the next morning. The advantage of travelling during off season is you can book things extremely last minute. The tour was awesome, but hard work. The first day included a 5 hour bus ride and then 5 hours of trekking- 3 hours straight down hill, and then 2 hours up. The canyon is considered the deepest in the world, and we went to the bottom of it, and then back up... That night was spent at a tiny village deep in the mountains- we slept in a mud brick room, with a dirt floor and no hope of electricity. The next day we walked 2 more hours down hill (this is much harder than it sounds...) and made it to an amazing Oasis with bamboo huts and swimming pools fed by natural waterfalls. We relaxed there for a few hours and then went up... and up... and up... We climbed 1250 vertical meters, by walking 8kms on a switch back trail. It took us 3 hours and 2 minutes, but a young Swedish couple with us made it in 90 minutes (or so they say... our guide is skeptical)! We had the option to ride a mule, but since we are doing the Inca trail in a week we figured this would be good training, especially since we were carrying backpacks (lighter than normal, but still there). Anyway, we survived, and the views and scenery were well worth the work. We are back in Arequipa now and are finally doing nothing, for at least a day! Tomorrow night we take a bus to Cusco where we´ll be until we finish the Inca trail on the 22nd.

All is well, 43 days in.

Cam and Kristin.