Bill and Wendy's ickcillint adventures

We arrived in Cusco from Chiclayo via Lima yesterday and what a beautiful city up in the hills.  It is situated at 3,400 meters or 11,150 feet if you prefer. Elevation sickness is a concern and they suggest you leave Cusco to a place of a little lower elevation nearby upon your arrival for a few days and of course we didn't. We are taking medication to deal with altitude sickness and have been quite lucky. We may have some minor symptoms but we are doing fine. We aren't even sure they are symptoms but we aren't taking any chances. We are taking it slow as recommended. Tomorrow we will likely go out for a small hike-nothing too strenuous. Cusco is worth seeing and there are lots of things to do and see in a very old and clean city. We aren't able to compare prices here to other places in Peru but accept that prices are higher but not extremely so, we think. As you probably all know in Medellin I lost my merino wool top I planned to use as a middle layer when hiking. We w...

Today, we flew out of the Galapagos. On our way to the airport, the driver and I are conversing in Spanish. He asked us what our professions were.  I told the cab driver   that Bill was a retired judge and I was a retired clinical social worker. "Me espouso es a retired jueve" I said with confidence. (My husband is a retired judge). Hector, the cab driver looked puzzled.  Bill turned to me and said, "What did you say to him?" I repeated myself. "Me espouso es jueve." Bill said, "No, it is not jueve, it is Juez.  I think you just told him that I was an egg" Any of you that know me well know that I can be prone to fits of uncontrollable laughter.  Well this was one of those moments where my funny bone got tickled and I howled and snorted and cried for a good ten minutes. The cab driver was amused by all this and told Bill, "this is going to be a good day." Then again,on the plane I remembered that I had called Bill an ...

Bill and I are excited.  Read his account here: We went diving again today in this heavenly place called the Galapagos. We had two dives today at Gordon's Rock. And yes, we saw so many fish. We saw white and black tipped reef sharks (8-10 feet long) and we saw a couple of Hammerhead sharks. BUT WE ALSO  SAW MOLA MOLA (s) and up close. Fantastic! We have seen it all! We can now retire from diving because everything now will seem so boring. Well, we better keep at it a little longer. But Hammerheads and Mola Mola on one day! How can you beat that? We saw about 4 Mola Mola and about the same number of Hammerheads. We also saw quite a few Mola Mola at the surface, that is their iddy biddy little fins could be seen out of the water and they were visible in the water. At first it was thought they were sharks. We are very contented and happy.

Ciudad Perdida was more than a hike and more than a place where I nearly lost Bill. It was also our first encounter with indigenous groups of people who have had very little contact with the outside world for about 600 years.  Persecuted by the Spaniards, they fled into the hills of the Sierra Madre Mountains. Remember, the only way to their villages are three days of heavy mountain trekking or on horse back or mule. I will try and describe the Tayrona People in two ways: objectively and subjectively. Objectively, their stature is on the small side, about five feet in height and both male and females wear their black hair long and rather ragged.  They have brown skin, a bit darker than our own indigenous people in Canada, and have more pronounced hooked noses.  Men, women and children all dress the same; white heavy cotton smocks and white pants and gumboots. Both sexes and including children wear a hemp bag. The only thing differentiating males from females is th...

While preparing for our trip to Colombia I came across an article on Ciudad Perdida but thought it was not feasible to hike there as we already had planned to climb to Machu Pichu. But as our trip developed we decided to give it a go. Ciudad Perdida means lost city. It clearly is not the name given to it by the indigenous population. Trip starts from Santa Marta, an area in north east Colombia.  We began, first by highway travel of about  11/2  hours then 1/2 hour or so up a  4 wheel drive road  to a place called Machete.  Ciudad Perdida was built around 500 to 700 AD. We were told a little history of the people and the area but they had no written language and any biological building materials have long disappeared. It was the Tayrona capital and at its height 2000 people lived in the city. They traded with the Spaniards in the 1500s especially for their gold and other precious metal objects. The Spaniards were not happy with what the indigenous people had...

We arrived beat up and exhausted back in Santa Marta after Ciudad Perdida.  (Bill will be blogging on that experience). We showered the grime from under our toes and finger nails and hand washed the red mud from our clothes. Our new hiking boots look a hundred years old. Then, refreshed from a shower, we caught the rickety collectivo over the hill to Rododero (10 minute ride).  We had a dinner date there with Mark and Diane, a couple from Tacoma we had met in Zipaquiera at the Salt Cathedral. As fellow Norte Americano travellers, we had invited them to our little place for dinner in Santa Marta.  They returned the favour by inviting us out to their rented apartmento in Rododero. We all had a swim on the busy beach and then a feasted on a yummy supper they had prepapred for us. We had a good visit. They patiently listened as we processed our experiences in Ciudad Perdida and they amused us by telling us all about the antics at Carnival in Barrenquilla. We left Santa ...

Remember how I gloated about Bill losing his fleece and me still having mine? Well, the table has turned on me. I broke my IPAD screen.  Now, I am looking enviously at his whole, complete and unbroken IPAD screen and his lily like fingers.  My screen is in shards and my fingers ragged from swiping across broken glass.  My eyes are crooked trying to peer around and through the thousands of spider veins spreading across my screen.  Bill is calling it Justice.

Nosotros estudiamos espanol es terminal.  Nosotros estudiamos espanol en Santa Marta, Colombia for dos semanas.   Nostoros hablamous en present tense seulemente. Our lessons were really quite wonderful. Our teacher, Elsa was an excellent teacher and was always well prepared for her lessons with us. We sat each morming at her table on her leafy patio, where the breeze blew in to soften the heat of the day as we conjugated verbos.  We learned so much from her. Her husband, Sven, a man from Sweden, often popped in to teach some difficult concepts such as how mucho means so much more than to like. For instance, in English, we say, I like the plants. The person speaking is the object.   In espanol, you are really saying, the plants give me pleasure.  It changes who the object of the sentence is.  The plants are the object.  Es muy interesante. We can actually carry on a simple conversation in Spanish, although it seems very easy to regress to nouns an...