i have finally gotten around to getting the Peru pics off the camera. so my avid fans, here is the well anticipated Peru post. Well it is the beginning of the peru trip. there are too many fotos and too much to write to fit it all in here. i'll get bored. So here it is, Part 1.

Adam and I decided to go to Peru. I'm not sure exactly why we decided on Peru. We both wanted to check out Machu Picchu, so we bought some plane tickets and the adventure began.

Well here I am in baltimore getting ready for the trek. I was very excited.


adam was also very excited about the trip, as demonstrated by the toothy grin.

the flight to peru was not bad at all. we left midday, spent a short stint in atlanta, and arrived at the very nice Lima airport around midnight. Sadly, the airport is really the highlight of Lima. We took a taxi to our hostal in Lima (since Santos, the man who worked for the hostal, was not there holding my name on a sign. guess he forgot us). The hostal was in a pretty cool old house, but it was so cold and dank. frigid actually. and everything just felt wet. miserable.


Luckily, the next morning we had a flight to Arequipa. Arequipa is a much nicer city set in the middle of the Andes and some volcanos.


Arequipa has a really pretty Plaza bordered by lots of restaraunts. i had some yummy potato thing. adam had a (supposedly) yummy meat stuffed pepper. the pepper top was so hot it burnt your tongue just to lick it. fyi.







Arequipa also has a small museum that houses "Juanita" the ice princess. It is the uber-well preserved body of an Incan girl that was sacrificed on top of the volcano. She was somehow preserved in the ice and ash until someone found her. Uber creepy. We weren't allowed to take fotos of her, but adam does a great impression so you can ask him if you want. We did take some fotos of us outside her house.




In arequipa we stayed at a very cute hostal named Tambo Viejo. The hostal even had a crazy dog named "Conditas" that ran around the backyard peeing on the little gnome statues.


The next day we started our trek to the colca canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world. (#1 is somewhere in peru too). To get there you take a bus (or ride your bike as we saw some insane people doing) up a volcano, passing thru a wildlife refuge full of llamas, alpacas, vicunas, and guanaco (i forget how to spell that one. but j crew currently is selling a coat made of guanaco-whatever wool that costs $1,500. its a very rare member of the peruvian camelid family).

At some point in this trek you get to a spot that is 16,000 ft. in altitude. The air is so high and your heart is thumping. Luckily, i was sucking on my coca leaf candies to make it through.


We finally reached Chivay, the first city in the colca canyon. Here we discovered that we had to pay a 75 sole ($30) entrance fee to the canyon. Our hostal, who helped arrange this trip, forgot to mention this fact. And our lonely planet was a few years old and i guess this fee is new. We only had like 100 soles on us, and that was supposed to last 2 days. We paid the entrance and I started to freak out. How were we going to eat? There were no ATMs in any of these small villages we were going to be in. We had zippo way of getting funds. Until the random Italian man on our bus, Luca, leans forward and tells us "You borrow soles". In a stroke of luck we traded Luca 8 dollars for however many soles that is and were able to eat. Luca saved the day. I had been so sad about this near terrible experience that I had to go relax in the hotsprings. The water was very hot and soothing but started to be a little gross when you thought about how you were sitting in a hot water pool with like 20 other tourists.



The next morning we passed through several villages and lots of incan terraces to get to a certain spot of the canyon. The vistas were amazing.






to be continued.......