Spring 2007

Acadia National Park, Maine. Taken in August 2006.

“These five words I swear to you...”

A week or so ago we spent some time in Cabanaconde, a tiny little town deep in the Colca Canyon, which we used as homebase for a few days of hiking. The town is insanely small, with just a few guesthouses and no real restaurants to speak of -- generally, people just eat dinner at the guesthouse where they are staying. We stayed and ate at a great little place we found in The Book (Hostal Valley del Fuego, for those keeping notes).

The place was run by two very friendly, laid-back guys, and two sweet cats (which the guys dote on) prowl around constantly. The restaurant is an interesting combination of rustic and high-tech. There are no lights, so once the sun goes down the place is lit by candles. There is no heat, so they light up the fireplace to keep the place warm at night, although hats and gloves are still the norm unless you´re sitting right next to the fireplace. Dinner is Peruvian rustic -- a bowl of hearty soup served in a ceramic bowl, and then grilled alpaca with spaghetti. (All in all, the food was not bad, although each time they plunked that big bowl of soup in front of me, I flashed back to the first scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where they´re drinking in some little dive in the middle of Nepal.) But despite the lack of electricity and heat, there is a satellite television, so we enjoyed quite a wide variety of Spanish- and English-language programming while we were there.

On our second night at the hostel, we had just finished a grueling hike:


After climbing to the bottom of the canyon and then back up in the heat of the day, we felt like kicking back. So at 5pm, we grabbed a table by the fireplace and cracked open our first beer:


And then our first (yes, first) bottle of wine. And then some whiskey, which came out of a bottle that probably hasn´t been opened since the Reagan administration. And then some pisco, which came out of a gasoline can. At this point, I think our judgment was slightly impaired.

All the while, the satellite TV was tuned to a station playing American music videos. From the 1980s. Mostly ballads by hair bands. Oh yes. Let me tell you, I know the words to more Bon Jovi songs than I ever realized, and by the time we finished our pisco, the rest of the place knew this too. But as I think about it now, we definitely should have realized that the guys running the place have an affinity for certain American music when we first arrived and one of the cats was introduced to us as ¨Pantera.¨

A Very Good Travel Day

The kind of travel that J-P and I have been doing isn´t always easy. Sometimes it´s downright hard, and on the really Bad Travel Days -- when one of us is sick, or cranky, or cold, or just tired of being on a bus for the seventh hour straight -- the idea of being at home (of course, not that we have one at the moment) sounds like heaven. But then there are the Good Travel Days -- the days that we end up visiting an unexpected place, or eating an outstanding meal, or having a completely unique experience -- that make all of the Bad Travel Days worthwhile. Our hope, of course, is that the Good Travel Days outnumber and outshine all of the Bad Travel Days.

Today did not start out as a Good Travel Day. In part, this was fallout from yesterday, a certifiable Bad Travel Day. Yesterday we flew from Arequipa in the south to Iquitos in the north, changing planes in Lima. Because of a last minute change in the schedule of the flight to Lima, we barely made our connection. Our backpacks did not. So today, we had to head back to the airport at 7am to track down our packs. Two hours later, with no breakfast, no caffeine, and already sweating like pigs in the jungle humidity, we finally had our bags and were headed back into town.

Then we stopped at the ATM to replenish our stash of cash, and I realized I had misplaced my debit card. I say ¨misplaced¨ and not ¨stolen¨ because my wallet was still in my bag, my card had no unaccounted-for charges, and I am prone to misplace important things like my debit card. I know I have it, I just don´t know where. But after a thorough search of all of our bags, I resigned myself to spending a half hour on the phone with the bank cancelling my card and ordering a replacement, just to be safe. The day was looking more and more like another Bad Travel Day.

Having dealt with the Case of the Missing Debit Card, we turned to the day´s originally scheduled activity: visiting Pilpintuwasi, a self-styled ¨butterfly farm¨ and animal orphanage several kilometers up the Amazon accessible only by boat. We hopped in a mototaxi (the town´s primary mode of non-aquatic transport, a mototaxi is a combination motorbike-rickshaw), and took off for the port of Bellavista-Nanay north of town. When we arrived in Bellavista-Nanay, we found a tiny town alive with a carnival atmosphere, which we learned was in anticipation of a major festival taking place tomorrow. People were setting up carnival rides, ladies were cooking fish and plantains at grills along the street, and a group of girls were playing soccer (needless to say, that fact that it was girls playing made me especially happy). We watched the thrilling shootout that ended the game:


After the game, we asked around for a boat to take us to the town near the butterfly farm. An Austrian woman named Gudrun approached us, asked where we were heading, and then informed us that she owns the farm and offered to take us there directly on a boat she had hired. We joined her on a tiny wooden skiff and set off up a tributary of the Amazon. As we rode, Gudrun shared some of the voluminous knowledge she has gathered about the Amazon, its people, and its wildlife in her twenty-five years here. Meanwhile, we couldn´t keep our eyes off the scene as we motored upriver:


When we arrived at the butterfly farm, we were enchanted by the many animals that have the run of the place. The farm is home to a number of animals that have been injured or abandoned by human owners, including a tapir, an anteater, a jaguar, and several very funny monkeys. One monkey had been taught by its unscrupulous previous owner to pick pockets:


Generally, though, the monkeys were just curious:


and tenderly groomed J-P and me once we made friends:




(We included both of those last two pictures so that no one would miss the simultaneous gasp heard from New Jersey to Idaho when both of our moms see a picture of a monkey combing their child´s hair.)

The butterflies were also spectacular, though they had somewhat less personality than the monkeys:


A few hours later, we wandered back through the jungle to the nearest town, where we caught a boat back to Bellavista-Nanay. And because no Good Travel Day would be complete without some good street food, we snacked on grilled whole fish, chorizo, and plantains at the pre-festivities in Bellavista-Nanay:


Today was definitely the kind of Good Travel Day that makes me so glad to be right here, right now.

[If you´re interested in seeing more video from the day and from our trip, visit J-P´s YouTube page. I´ll also be posting all my pics to Flickr under the username ¨limeass,¨ but probably not until we´re back stateside.]

My law school friends would be so proud

We managed to find, in the town of Yanque (population 1400) probably the only hotel with a hot tub for a hundred miles. But alas, no illicitly modified V8 Splash bottle to be found.

Of bikes and strikes

Shortly after we arrived in Arequipa, we heard that there would be some sort of strike on June 20 relating to the price of gas, and that the strike might affect transportation in the region. We didn´t know any more details. Would it be the taxi drivers striking? The bus drivers or bus companies? Would it be just the city of Arequipa? The whole region? Regardless, we didn´t think it would affect us because we didn´t have any immediate travel plans other than wandering around the city, which is easily accomplished by foot.

One of the first things we did upon arriving was to sign up for a day-long mountain bike trip. We were excited to get outdoors and to enjoy the mountains and volcanoes that ring the city. We happened to schedule our trip for June 20. The plan was to leave at 8am with a guide and driver in a sturdy 4x4 loaded up with mountain bikes. We would drive a few hours up into the mountains, the driver would let us off at the top, and we would bike back down with the car following behind us. (Kind of like the Tour de France, actually, but without the juice. But I digress.)

The night before the trip, we met with our guide, Aldo. Aldo mentioned the strike, and suggested that we start a few hours earlier than planned -- 6am, instead of 8am -- to avoid any ¨trouble¨ relating to the strike. We asked what kind of trouble we could expect. Aldo, a biker if I ever met one, just shrugged and said, ¨Nothing much really, just small stones.¨ J-P and I both imagined the damage that could be caused by protesters pelting the car with small stones, but Aldo seemed untroubled, so we didn´t worry too much about it.

We woke up ready to go at 6am. Aldo and our driver, Denis, were waiting for us outside our hotel. We hopped in the truck, along with a couple of women from Canada who had also signed up for the trip, and took off. As we drove, we grilled Aldo about the strike. Aldo told us that the strike was related to gas prices, but it wasn´t a single constituency that was striking -- it was the ENTIRE COUNTRY. Seriously, can you imagine the ENTIRE UNITED STATES agreeing about something, let alone coordinating a nation-wide strike? I didn´t think so.

(As an interesting counterpoint to the report of the strike we received from Aldo, you can read the BBC´s coverage of the strike here. The BBC reported that it was a workers´ strike, and didn´t mention any connection to gas prices. The BBC also completely ignored the fact that the strike was nation-wide, intimating that it only affected Lima. While a lot of people in Arequipa got to work one way or another, the strike absolutely affected the entire city and the economy, and all of the international news reports we´ve seen completely disregard this fact.)

As we made our way through Arequipa´s outskirts, we realized why Aldo and Denis wanted to leave so early. Groups of men had already gathered every several hundred feet, erecting roadblocks of stones and bricks to prevent people from driving in or out of the city, essentially enforcing participation in the strike. (These were the small stones Aldo had mentioned -- they were being used as roadblocks, not as missiles.) Because we were in a 4x4, we were able to drive over or around most of the roadblocks without much trouble. But judging from the looks we got from people on the street, our failure to participate in the strike was not appreciated.

Shortly before we reached the city limits, we came upon a group erecting a roadblock. One man was particularly offended, and came right up to the car to yell at Denis for not participating in the strike. J-P caught a video of this interaction (when you watch the clip, keep an eye on the guy with the hoodie):


When I saw Hoodie Guy walk over and peer into the car, I told J-P to turn off the video and stash his camera, thinking that Hoodie Guy was likely to be even more aggressive then his friend. That´s why the video ends when it does. But here´s what happened next: having peered into the car and seeing that there were a bunch of gringos who clearly were heading up into the mountains for a bike ride, Hoodie Guy pulled his friend back, saying ¨they´re tourists, it´s ok, let them go.¨ At which point the aggressive guy looked at us, looked back at Denis, smiled, and stepped away from the car to let us pass. Someone pushed a block out of the way, and we made our way through.

Once we were outside the city limits, there was no more strike activity, and we drove uninterrupted up an unpaved road into the National Reserve of Salinas and Aguada Blanca. Of course, even at the top, it seemed we were barely a stone´s throw from the city, as we had spent most of the drive climbing to over 15,000 feet. J-P took this amazing video from the top:


After a quick bite to eat, we were off, and cruised across the altiplano:


We biked around rocks, through sand pits, and then switchbacked down to lower elevation, all the time in the shadow of El Misti, the enormous volcano that towers over Arequipa:


(In that last picture, you can see the switchbacks in the road if you look carefully.) About an hour in, we ran across a mother vicuña and her baby grazing on the plain:


Finally, after several lovely hours, we cruised back into town. Denis had been listening to the news reports on the radio and had given us periodic updates on the strike activity. People were gathering in the main square a few blocks from our hotel, were blocking regional and long-distance bus lines, and had gone to the mayor´s office only to find it empty.

The roadblocks were still there as we drove into town, and sections of road were booby-trapped with broken glass, but the groups of men setting them up had left presumably to join the crowds downtown. The roads were deserted, with only an occasional car making its way through the roadblocks, and lots of people walking or biking:


It was really interesting to be there for this. It reminded both me and J-P of the transit workers´ strike in New York last year, except that in New York, the transit workers were the only people on strike and the rest of us just had to deal with it. Here, by contrast, everyone (or at least lots of people) were on strike. While there were some businesses open, and some people at work (like Denis and Aldo, for example), the effect of the roadblocks and the community-wide enforcement of strike participation clearly had a major impact on economic activity in the city. It´s really shameful that this was ignored in the press reporting, which consistently minimized the size and impact of the strike. We were here, and believe us, the impact was palpable at every turn.

Menu hawks and menu wars

In the more touristed areas of Peruvian cities, as we walk down the street we are immediately identified as tourists and are accosted with opportunities to buy finger puppets, postcards, watercolors, bracelets, hats, you name it. The most aggressive of these street salespeople are what I call the menu hawks, who stand outside restaurants with their menus in hand, offering to give us their first born if only we´ll come and have dinner. (And if we tell them we´ve already eaten or give some other excuse for not stopping, they inevitably respond, with seemingly genuine enthusiasm, ¨maybe later!¨)

The thing is, the restaurants that employ menu hawks all serve EXACTLY THE SAME THING. They have hamburgers, pizzas, spaghetti, a few chicken and beef dishes served with french fries and rice, a couple of soups, and sandwiches. Looking at the menu is hardly a means of distinguishing these restaurants. If anything, it just strengthens our collective resolve to find something, anything, different.

But the menu hawks hardly seem to realize this. In a few cases, two hawks from neighboring restaurants have approached us simultaneously, resulting in a menu war in which each tried to convince us that their restaurant was the better choice. Normally, we would walk away and refuse to dignify such insanity. But a few days ago, stuck for an hour on a layover in a bus terminal in Puno, we had no choice but to eat at one of two neighboring restaurants, employing two intensely competitive menu hawks.

As soon as they saw us coming, they approached us eagerly. The hawk for Restaurant 1 shoved a menu into J-P´s hands, and the hawk for Restaurant 2 shoved one at me. At a glance, the menus were identical -- same font, same layout, same dishes, same prices. In a sense, we were being forced to choose between which PERSON we liked more, because the menus gave us nothing to go by. Frustrated by the absurdity of this, and feeling more than a little bitchy, I decided to play along with this ridiculous game.

I took Restaurant 1´s menu from J-P, and held the two side by side to compare them item for item. Ham and cheese sandwich, 6 soles? Check. Orange juice, 3 soles? Check. Cream of asparagus soup, 5 soles? Check. Pre fixe menu, 10 soles? Check. Finally, halfway down the second side of Restaurant 1´s menu, I spotted this: carne sandwich, 4 soles. And on Restaurant 2´s menu: carne sandwich, 3.5 soles. AHA!!! There is a difference! There is a basis for choosing! Foolish Restaurant 1 -- CLEARLY Restaurant 2 is the superior choice if they are offering a carne sandwich for 50 centimos less! Who cares that I don´t even WANT a carne sandwich?!? Now I know where I should eat! Restaurant 2 it is. So J-P and I sat down at Restaurant 2, and, not feeling much like a carne sandwich, ordered the pre fixe menu. Oh well. It´s the principle, people.

John Medina for Presidente

As you drive through Peru and Bolivia, you notice that candidates for public office do not use billboards and posters to advertise. Instead, their names are painted on the sides of houses, shops, or any other blank wall. Here is a picture of one of these signs, which I snapped last night as we rode into Arequipa:


Some of you may know our good friend John Medina: social entrepreneur, grad student extraordinaire, and former Wagner Student Association president. Now John, we all know that running for public office is a not-so-secret ambition of yours, but really, did you have to go all the way to Arequipa to do it?

Hiking on Isla del Sol

Lake Titicaca is a huge basin nestled in among mountains, and Isla del Sol is just the tip of a mountain, most of which happens to be submerged by the surrounding lake. The island rises sharply out of the water, and tops out at over 14,000 feet. There are no cars here, mostly because there´s nowhere to put them. The ¨roads¨ are just stone footpaths and stairways, and anyway the donkeys would get in the way if you tried to drive a car around.

The entire island is probably less than 10 miles long, and it´s theoretically possible -- at least according to The Book and a few people we´d talked to -- to hike around it in a day. We were staying in the south, and there are two routes to the north -- one via the east side of the island and one via the west. We set out one morning in search of the eastern route, with the vague notion of making a circle and returning by the western route.

Seemed like a great idea at the time, except for a few unexpected problems: first, we couldn´t find a single map of the island a single map of the island that remotely resembled reality. The maps generally agree that the island is longer than it is wide, and that it has a couple of inlets breaking up the coastline, but beyond that they´re, well, all over the map.

Second, trails here are...different. That is to say, so long as there is not a stone wall or some sheep in your way, it´s safe to assume that you´re on a trail. Which is great if you know where you´re going, but not so great if you´re counting on a trail to lead you around the mountain in front of you in the least painful way possible. Needless to say, we spent at least an hour wandering pretty aimlessly through terraced pastures, and were up close and personal with more livestock than I´ve ever seen in my life.

Finally, when we asked for directions we ran into predictable language and cultural barriers. Where there aren´t any obvious landmarks, no well-defined trails and certainly no street signs, the best we could get by way of directions is ¨this way, then down¨ or ¨that way, then up.¨ Um, okay. We´ll try that and let you know how it works out.

We were ultimately pointed in the right direction by a little girl of about ten years old, who looked very exasperated with us after we passed her on the road twice going in different directions. She put down the water she was carrying, walked us back up the road in the direction we had just come in, and gestured at what seemed to be a crumbling stone wall along the side of the road. It seemed that the wall was crumbing ON PURPOSE -- the broken section OBVIOUSLY indicated where the trail to the north peeled off from the main road through town. Well duh. I don´t know how we missed that the first two times!

Technical difficulties

Been experiencing a few technical difficulties as of late, and I´m not exactly in the most convenient locale to try to remedy them.

If you can´t see the pictures on the Corpus Christi post, suffice it to say that they are pretty pictures of colorful floats and costumes at the parade, and one of the gnarled guinea pig paw that was my dinner.

If you´re trying to reach the site by entering www.rhinolegs.com and keep getting error messages, try to use rhinolegs.com instead. (But I suppose if you´re reading this, you´ve figured that bit out already.)

Thanks for your patience as I learn slowly, by trial and error!

UPDATE: I just re-loaded the pictures for the Corpus Christi post, so hopefully they are visible now. Let me know if you run into further problems with this or any other posts.

Where everyone´s a mechanic

On one of our first days in Cusco, we decided to go see the ruins at Pisac, about an hour outside of town. Instead of taking a tour to the ruins, we hired a taxi, because it is a faster and more interesting way to travel, and because it gave us flexibility to leave when we wanted and to enjoy the ruins for as long as we wanted.

We hopped in a cab helmed by a fellow named Julio. The car was a tiny little Daewoo that, like most in Cusco, had seen better days. Because Cusco is filled with hilly cobblestone streets, cars (and their passengers) take quite a beating:


About halfway to Pisac, we noticed that the car was flagging as we puttered up an enormous hill. As we coasted down the other side of the peak, Julio pulled over at a gas station beside a stream. It seemed that the car was overheating from all the stress:


But it wasn´t the gas station that Julio stopped for -- it was the stream. He proceeded to fill up four empty water bottles that he conveniently had stashed in the glove box with water from the stream, and poured the water from the bottles, one by one, into the radiator. I had the distinct impression that he had done this before. About fifteen minutes later, we were back on the road. We made it to Pisac without further incident, but on the drive back, we had to stop not once, but twice more to repeat the water-in-the-radiator procedure. I mentioned to J-P that Julio was quite the mechanic-on-the-fly.

Then, a few days ago, we took a boat from Puno to see the islands of Los Uros, or the ¨floating islands.¨ The boat we took seemed only marginally seaworthy, and it took some work on the captain´s part to get the engine started. On the way back from the islands, as predictable as clockwork, the engine stalled out as two much larger boats were bearing down behind us. The captain, Mayrol, pulled the top off the engine, tinkered around inside with help from a Peruvian passenger, and soon had us rolling again.

It occurred to me that, as we rode through the Peruvian countryside on various bus rides, we saw all sorts of amateur repair shops along the road, and guys (always guys) bending over their engines and coaxing them back to life. J-P and I were impressed by the abilities of Julio, Mayrol, and all of these other amateur mechanics, given the miserable condition of most of the cars, trucks, buses, and boats we have encountered.

Then, as I lay in bed a few nights ago catching up on back issues of the New Yorker, I came across this book review in the technology issue, which contained a very prescient comment about technology and car maintenance in developing nations:

¨In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire. . . . John Powell’s marvellous study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, `The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers´ (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: `As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair.´ Much of the world’s mechanical ingenuity is devoted to creating robust, reliable, and highly adapted `creole´ technologies, an ingenuity that is largely invisible to us only because we happen to live in a low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime.¨

I realized that all of the amateur mechanics that we had observed were examples of precisely the phenomenon described in the article. While these cars (and boats) seemed to me, from my throw-away perspective, as pieces of junk in desperate need of replacement, they are immensely more valuable to their owners and, from their owners´ perspective, are worthy of being repaired again and again. The cost of repair is certainly far lower than the cost of replacement, and, even if the car or the boat were to be replaced, it would undoubtedly be replaced with a specimen in as much need of repair as the original. Julio and Mayrol simply don´t have the option -- whether because of access or affordability -- to replace the car or boat with a brand-spanking new version. This is the best it gets, and better to keep that car or boat running than not to have one at all.

El Festival de Corpus Christi

We woke up on our first day back in Cusco to the sounds of firecrackers being set off nearby. We had heard that June 7 was a feast day, and that there would be a parade, but we had no idea what to expect. After lunch, we wandered down to the central plaza, which is usually filled with tourists and locals shilling postcards, tours, and restaurants to said tourists. Well, this day was different. Every inch of the plaza was filled with Cusqueños out to celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi:


The parade was happening before our eyes -- floats of various saints moved slowly around the perimeter of the square:


The floats were interspersed with groups performing traditional dances and songs:




Families and their kids were out and about in their colorful parade best:



Everywhere we turned, people seemed to be enjoying festival food ranging from ice cream to traditional plates of chiriuchu. Not a single funnel cake to be seen.

As the parade wound down, we made our way up a cobblestone street where dozens of abuelas were preparing chiriuchu, which is a plate consisting of small servings of ten or twelve traditional foods, and which people ate while sitting along benches lining the street. J-P and I decided to partake, and approached a lady whose bench had space. As soon as we made eye contact, she got a huge smile and wildly gestured us to sit. We had no idea what would happen next, but it was too late to back out now!

The woman proceeded to make up two chiriuchu plates: first she carved up a stuffed chicken that had been roasted. Then she cut some pieces of sausage of unknown origin -- who knows what kind of animal it once was? Then she carved up some salted, dried beef. After that she added some seaweed, fish eggs (still all clumped together like they just came out of the fish), really hot pepper, fried cornmeal with onions in it (so fried it was practically translucent), dried cornnuts, slices of salted hard cheese, and then came the piece de resistance: the chopped piece of smoked whole guinea pig! The woman put one knife on a section of guinea pig (the thing was extremely whole, with the teeth bared from its shriveled head) and then started whacking away at the back of the knife with her butcher cleaver. You can watch her carve up the guinea pig for yourself:


The butt end of the guinea pig promptly fell onto J-P´s plate. I got the middle section, complete with a dried-up claw. The two plates were gleefully placed in front of us and it seemed as if everyone around stopped to watch what the gringos would do...


At this point, what could we do? We chomped down, ignoring every sign that this was a bad idea that could result in the worst bout of food poisoning this side of a Mexican latrine. Let us consider now all of the food safety tips we ignored:

(1) Don´t eat raw veggies washed in unpurified water
(2) Don´t eat meat products that have been sitting outside all day
(3) Don´t eat in an area that has an ever-strengthening smell of urine
(4) Don´t eat without washing your bacteria-ridden hands
(5) Don´t eat food prepared by a person who no doubt has bacteria-ridden hands

We started in on the guinea pig first, as it is the local delicacy. We had heard it tasted like chicken. NO siree. It did not taste like chicken, it did not taste like pork, it just tasted, well, not that good. The best parts of the plate were the hot pepper, the cheese, and the mystery-meat sausage.

We were proud, however, to be the only gringos partaking of the chiriuchu, and after keeping our fingers crossed for a day and half, were convinced we were in the clear on the food poisoning front. I think those typhus shots just paid for themselves in gold.

[Thanks to J-P for writing most of the food description. Internet, I present to you my husband, the former vegetarian.]

Poo-NO!

Yesterday we arrived in Puno, right on the shore of Lake Titicaca, (I´m trying to suppress the urge at adolescent humor, really) after a long bus ride from Cusco. Conveniently, my digestive tract decided to act up halfway through the bus ride, right as we reached the highest point of the journey (almost 15,000 feet above sea level), so I was suffering a bit from altitude sickness at the same time. Lovely, just lovely. Really, you haven´t lived until you´ve tried to hover over a nasty toilet in the bottom of a bus careening across the Peruvian altiplano. Ah well, feeling better now.

Have a great post planned about a festival during one of our last days in Cusco, but upload speeds here are too slow to handle a bunch of pics -- hopefully will get them up in the next few days though. By the way, thanks for all the birthday wishes, we had a great day just wandering around Cusco, had dinner in a great restaurant there, and finished with nightcap at our ¨local¨ bar -- I think we can call ourselves regulars after spending three nights running there!

Those Incas were f*cking nuts

Yesterday we got to Machu Picchu. Here is the classic postcard Machu Picchu picture, which I took when we arrived:


I´m sure you´ve seen this image a thousand times. I had too. But let me fill you in on something. You see that mountain in the back on the right? That big, huge, hulking mountain, with the sheer cliff walls? That´s called Wayna Picchu. Now look carefully at the top of Wayna Picchu:


See that little building on the left? That´s the Temple of the Moon. And can you make out those straight lines cutting across the peak? Those are various terraces and outcroppings that the Incas built hundreds of years ago.

So, how did they get up there, you ask? Well, there is a very steep trail that zigzags up the left side of Wayna Picchu. At times it is so steep that you climb it on all fours. Just to give you a sense of the perspective, here is a set of stairs that lead to the Temple of the Moon:


If you stand up straight while you are on these steps, you can put your hand out and touch the steps in front of you. There are no handrails, guardrails, or anything else that would prevent you from plunging right off the face of that mountain. But, I must say, even though Incas may have been nuts to build up here, my god the views are spectacular:


By the way, there were a few terraces below us in that last picture. We were not sitting right on the edge, so stop white-knuckling the mouse, Dad.

Que sera, sera

Welcome to the first installment of Rhino Legs Peru. We arrived in Cusco (via Lima) yesterday. We spent a few hours in the airport finally planning some of the details of the trip, which somehow got pushed to the back burner in the last few months. Such slackers, we are.

We had dinner last night with a friend that we ran into here. Funny that she lived less than a mile away from us in Brooklyn for the last year, but we had to come to Cusco to manage to schedule a dinner date.

Cusco is hilly and is filled with tiny squares around every corner -- it actually reminds me of Italy´s hill towns in a way. It sits at more than 12,000 feet above sea level (and that´s before we start climbing), so we´ll be getting acclimated for the next day or two. Tomorrow we will leave for Machu Picchu, and after that we´re hoping to trek to the other Machu Picchu. We´re hoping since the Times´ story came out the day we left, it won´t be overrun quite yet.....

Goals for today: check out whether the sinks actually do drain counterclockwise, and find sleeping bags to replace the perfectly good sleeping bags that are sitting in my parents´ basement. Oops.