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Our time in Peru was split – half (two weeks) during the first half of our trip and half during the second. This is about the most important gear we had for the whole time, including two weeks of Andes and coast, and two weeks of Cuzco, the Amazon jungle, and Lake Titicaca. Here’s what we appreciated having:

• Backpacks. You could travel long-term without them, but its not easy. You can’t hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu without them. Ours are really comfortable, and they have survived everything we’ve thrown at them.
• Sleeping Bags. We brought them with us for part 2 – and used them every night on the Inca Trail. Synthetic 40 degree bags from REI, they work great and pack into cubes which fit side-by-side in the bottom of my pack.
• Camera. Between the Inca Trail, the Amazon Jungle, and Lake Titicaca, I shot over 600 photographs. The places – and people – that we saw were incredibly photogenic, and having an easy-to-use camera that has awesome image quality made it all the more fun!

That’s what we found useful in Peru!

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Here’s another look at how we spent our time in Peru:

• Days in-country: 30
• Passport stamps received: 7
  • 2 entry, 2 exit, 2 for Machu Picchu, 1 for Lake Titicaca
• Days in the mountains: 10
• Days in the desert: 5
• Days in the jungle: 2
• Days in cities: 6
• Days on the Inca Trail: 4
• In-country flights: 4
  • (Lima – Cuzco, Cuzco – Puerto Maldonado, Puerto Maldonado – Cuzco – Juliaca)
• Longest layover: 8 hours (in the International Terminal of the Lima airport)
• Bus trips: 8
• Overnight bus trips: 3
• Movies seen on buses: 11
• Matt’s bingo wins on a bus trip: 1
• Percentage of the local population that we were taller than: 87%
• Chifa (mixed peruvian-Chinese cuisine) dinners: 8
• Ancient (pre-1800) cultures we learned about: 5
• Times we were accosted for massages: 17
• Times we were accosted for massages in Cuzco: 17
• Spiders seen in the jungle: 5
• Polar bears seen in the jungle: 0

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While Jack and Jen were still on vacation, we all flew from the jungle to a town called Juliaca near the southern tip of Peru. There, we hopped into a collectivo bus that took us from the airport to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca (an hour’s trip). Here are a few shots from that trip:

We were able to walk around Puno a little bit, and saw some interesting sights:

Since we really only had one day to see the sights (we were on a tight schedule to make sure that Jack and Jen got back to the States), we booked an all-day tour with our hotel to see the Uros Floating Reed Islands and Isla Taquile. It turned out to be a good choice.

We started our day off early and traveled by boat out to the Floating Islands. Not only did we see some really cool boats, but we saw some of the people who live there moving around on their way that morning:

And here are the islands we saw as we traveled around:

Then we visited one of the islands (I think it was called CCapi Nativo, but I’m not sure), and learned about them. The people there have lived on the islands their entire lives, and most want to continue the traditions that their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. The islands are pretty well-supported – not only do the kids go to school (they row or get rowed – check out the photos), there are even solar panels on them! Check out the details:

After that, we headed to Isla Taquile, an island known for its fine sewing (by both the men and the women). We walked across the island, and had a great lunch in the main town along the way. The walk took about two hours, and we saw a few cool parts of the island. Check them out here:

And then we returned to our hotel and found dinner. The following morning, we met Jack and Jen for breakfast, then hung around Puno and rested for a day before heading across the border to Bolivia. We were delayed because of a Bolivian border strike that made crossing it impossible during the week. That wasn’t the first border strike we encountered on our trip, and it was only the first of several travel difficulties we would encounter in Bolivia…

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After a rest day in Cuzco (we got back to Cuzco at 2am after a 23-hour day in and around Machu Picchu), Jack, Jen, Stef, and I all flew to Puerto Maldonado to spend a few days in the jungle. We reserved a few rooms at Inkaterra Lodge – a semi-luxury resort on the banks of the madre de dios river. After our month in the Galapagos cloudforest, Stef and I had decided that we would only go to the jungle if we were staying at a high-end place – otherwise it is just not fun, comfortable, or worthwhile for us.

Our two days were fun. We visited a “native family” (yes, liberties were taken with the definition of “native”, but I got some good photos so I was ok with that):

We saw some more stuff, too – here’s everything else we saw:

But that’s the jungle! Then we went back up to altitude in Puno to visit Lake Titcaca….

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This is the grandaddy of South American treks (literally – the Incas were using the trail 700 years ago!). Some people consider it the most important experience on the continent (I would go with Galapagos). Its destination – Machu Picchu – is the primary driver of Peruvian tourism (most two-week Peruvian tours stay south of Lima – they see Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Arequipa, and sometimes the jungle around Puerto Maldonado – they never get to the archaeological digs in the northern desert, or the cordillera of the Andes).

Given all that, the Inca Trail is pretty freakin awesome. It’s a four-day hike that:

• Starts at 10,000 feet
• Ascends almost a mile on the second day
• Descends a full mile on the third day
• Starts at 5am in the cloudforest on the fourth day
• Ends at Machu Picchu – one of the most well-preserve indigenous sites on the South American continent

Along the way, you see villages, ruins, valleys, and lots of llamas, donkeys, and of course, porters.
Eco-tourism note – the porters on the Inca Trail are an important target for ecotourism spending. They are all from Quechua mountain towns near Cuzco, almost none speak English and only some speak Spanish, and have the hardest jobs of anyone on the trail: they carry 25 kg (about 56 pounds) on the trail, every day that they work. Keep in mind that they are all about 5 feet 5 inches tall (or shorter), and typically only weigh about 120 or 130 pounds. And they’re doing all of this at altitudes that most of us have trouble standing up straight when we’re at them! They’re great people though – and obviously very strong. Check out some of them here:

There are a lot of debates about the “classic” Inca Trail (what we did) versus alternative treks – hikes that follow different routes (sometimes with horses, bikes, and/or kayaks), but end up at Machu Picchu one way (walking into the ruin) or the other (busing or hiking up from Aguas Calientes). A lot of the self-proclaimed backpackers look down on the classic trail, although their reasoning is unclear to me. It could be for any one of the following reasons:

1. You need to sign up 5-6 months in advance to hike the classic trail (most backpackers are procrastinators)
2. The classic trail is really popular (most backpackers like to think of themselves as counter-cultural)
3. The classic trail is luxurious (read: expensive) for what it is (backpackers are notoriously cheap except when it comes to booze)

Oh, I almost forgot – we went to machu picchu at the end of the trek! It was awesome – really cool, and we learned a lot on our mini-tour of the ruins. They really are pretty incredible – and for the amount of foot traffic they get every year, the Peruvian government is doing a good job of maintaining them. Take a look at Machu Picchu:

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We had an all-day flight from Cordoba to Cuzco so we could meet our friends Jack and Jen.

Actually, it was more like a 2-hour and a 1-hour flight, separated by an 8-hour layover (during which we sat in Lima’s International terminal – a nice, clean place, but really boring if you’re spending 8 hours there). Our flights were good, though – comfortable and on-time.

We arrived in Cuzco and experienced major culture shock, going from the sanity and normalcy of Argentina to the chaos and over-touristyness that is Cuzco, Peru.

You see, Cuzco is one of the top 5 most touristy cities on the planet. It’s the only major city with an airport within driving distance of Machu Picchu, probably the most famous historical site in South America. So everybody who goes to Machu Picchu goes through Cuzco, and they estimate that more than $1 million in tourist money goes through Cuzco EVERY DAY.

So, we arrived in Cuzco to 15,000 repeated offers of “hotel” and “taxi” and “Machu Picchu”, which was a little overwhelming – and extremely annoying – after the relative peace we experienced arriving in Argentinian towns. Also, its important to realize that we blended in pretty well in Argentina (with all of the Europeans – we have German and Italian blood). But neither of us have any Inca or Quechua in us, so we will never blend in in Bolivia, Peru, or Ecuador. Luckily, we had pre-arranged a taxi pickup at the airport to bring us to our hotel, so we avoided most of the chaos.

We spent most of our time in Cuzco acclimatizing. It’s at about 11,000 feet (3400 meters), so when you’re not used to the altitude, it takes a few days to adjust. We walked around, checked out the city plaza de armas, and waited for our friends Jack and Jen to arrive.

They got in a few days later, and we spent three days catching up and hanging out. And of course, getting harassed by all of the vendors trying to sell us things in the city (I photographed one of our harassers after she had repeatedly ignored our “No, gracias”s. She’s in the slideshow). They’ll sell you one of 5 things:

• Massages
• Tours
• Paintings
• Postcards
• The “right” to photograph – either a Quechua woman in traditional dress or a goat – with a Quechua child or with you

Needless to say, we didn’t need any of them.

There are a lot of cathedrals in Cuzco; we saw the outsides of a few of them. I’ve been cathedralled out since late 1996, so I didn’t photograph the insides of any of them. They are big, and a mix of catholic and inca architecture.

We were really glad to head out of Cuzco and go to our campsite at the head of the inca trail to start our hike.

Here’s what we saw around Cuzco (Click on any of the images to see the shot up closer):

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As we’ve mentioned before, we were on a schedule on our way through Peru. After a couple of days in Arequipa (and our GREAT Colca Canyon trek!), we decided to travel:

1. Tacna, Peru
   • Takes about 5-6 hours by bus
2. Arica, Chile (includes the border crossing)
   • Takes 1-2 hours by bus
   • Takes 1.5 hours by train
   • Takes 45 minutes by collectivo Taxi

So we made reservations at a hostel in Arica (via Skype, great for cross-border phone calls), bought our bus tickets to Tacna, and got ready to head out.
If you remember, our previous border crossing was pretty uneventful, even though it happened at 3a.m. on a bridge over a river. While we really enjoy easy, simple border crossings, I was beginning to worry that I would miss out on the full Latin America experience if all we had were easy border crossings. Thankfully for me , this one turned out to be pretty interesting.

Paro – Chilean border strikes!
Our morning trip to Tacna was pretty straightforward; the bus had lots of music, a movie, but unfortunately no food. We stopped in a bus terminal restaurant for an almuerzo. That worked out well, and we walked from the intra-provincial bus terminal to the international bus terminal. Along the way, we spoke with three or four people who all explained that the border crossing was really difficult, because there was a strike in Chile. It took a while to sort through the language and cultural obstacles, but after the third conversation I began to get the point:

• The Chilean customs workers were striking, but their office could not “close”.
• Instead, they took a 20 minute break between letting each visitor pass through the border
• This effectively changed everyone’s border crossing from a 20-minute affair to a 2-3 hour affair.

The paro, or strike, made it much more expensive to cross the border. Why? The delay caused the buses and taxis from Tacna to only travel to the border, then you needed a Chilean taxi/bus to get to Arica. Normally one taxi or bus goes from Tacna to Arica.
Everyone recommended the train, but the line was very long. So after investigating our options, we changed some money, and took a collectivo taxi to the border. It was the craziest taxi we had seen yet – a 1970′s Buick with an automatic transmission that had been converted to manual, and a radio that used a pen for the controls (Click to see the rest of the photos from our border crossing)

Check out the video of our taxi ride!

Border Surprise
When we arrived, there was no one waiting at the border. We arrived at Customs, and walked through the entire process in about 15 minutes, found a Chilean collectivo taxi, and went to Arica. It turns out that the Chilean customs officials were only striking between 8am and 5pm Chile time. We had arrived at 6pm Chile time (4pm Peruvian time), so we missed all of the strike activity.

Skip to the end!
When we arrived in Arica, we thought we were feeling ok, so we decided to push through to our real destination, San Pedro de Atacama. We bought bus tickets and got on a night bus headed to San Pedro…

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We had read in our guidebook that Colca Trek was the most-recommended guiding company in Arequipa. Apparently, there are a lot of third-rate and somewhat sketchy companies (all of which are along the same street as Colca Trek, too). We skipped all of them and went straight to Colca Trek on Saturday morning. We were in luck – not only did they organize treks of Colca Canyon, but they had one leaving on Sunday morning, first thing! We signed up and spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready. Our three-day trek included:

• A real international group, including 4 Italians, 2 Dutch, 2 Germans, 2 Americans, and an Israeli. Our guide was Peruvian, and so was our driver. Everyone on the trek spoke English; the Dutch also spoke German, and our driver spoke Japanese (yes, our bus driver! Very impressive). Besides the Peruvians, we were the best Spanish speakers though
• Trips around the back of several mountains near Arequipa, and a visit to strange rock formations (where we saw a halo around the sun!)
• A stop at the high pass across the mountains, at 4910 meters (where I got a peruvian wool hat!)
• A couple of great buffet lunches
• Hiking along the canyon ridge until and through sunset – we saw some great light!
• Night in a first-class hotel
• Party in Cabanaconde where we celebrated the 412th anniversary of the town’s founding with the locals (lots of fire, drinking, and dancing)
• AM hike (3 hours or so) down the canyon wall from Cabanaconde
• Afternoon hanging out at the Oasis on the canyon floor, and enjoying the pool!
• Two great professionally-cooked meals, with wine!
• Hike to the bridge over the river, and to see some of the medicinal cactuses
• Camping in tents (yes, this was luxury camping, as the weather was great, everything was set up for us, and we didn’t even have to carry our own gear!)
• 4 A.M. wakeup for a 5 A.M. start to return to the canyon ridge. We expected about a 3-4 hour return hike; we needed 2 hours 20 minutes to get back up. One person in our group made it in 90 minutes!
• An hour searching and finding condors cruising the thermals

We really enjoyed our trek, especially meeting all of our new friends. It was truly a great way to spend three days; check out the rest of the photos below!

Click on each photo to see the full set of pictures…

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We were really excited to visit Arequipa. We had always thought we would really enjoy it – not for any particular reason, but “just because”. We were more excited when, during our first week in Quito, we met a couple from Seattle who were on their way back from a 6-month stint in Arequipa.

We had high expectations for this place – after all, we spent about 2-3 months building it up in our minds!

Our arrival, though, was a different story. We got to the bus terminal alright, made reservations (gotta love the cell phone!), and confirmed taxi costs to the center of town. Then we walked outside to find a taxi. Of course one picked us up quickly and agreed to take us to our hotel. As soon as we left the parking lot, he asked us if we really wanted to stay at that hotel.

And that’s where the frustration started. We went to our hotel, found it underwhelming, and then discovered that he had waited outside the hotel for us – probably assuming that we wouldn’t like it (which, unfortunately, we did not). So he took us to 2 or 3 other hotels – all of which were too expensive for us. After a few unsuccessful stops (and gradually tiring with each), we settled on one hotel. We brought our bags in, and out of courtesy, I offered our driver a small extra tip.

Here’s the kicker – he actually made me give him MORE money! The nerve! Not wanting to hurt our travel karma, I paid up.

With the exception of our frustrating arrival, we had some fun in Arequipa. A couple of things that we did:

• Visited a city-block-sized convent built from the 1500′s to the 1800′s. It was really well-financed – every nun basically had their own 4-5 room house! Some great colors there; see all the pics by clicking through here:
• Saw the “Juanita” mummy – a 500-year-old mummy preserved in the ice and snow of Mount Ampato, one of the highest Andean mountains. Really interesting explanation of their culture and of the mummy’s discovery – only made possible by the eruption of nearby Sabancaya (which both caused the archaeologists to climb, wanting to see Sabancaya from above, and enabled them to find her, as the associated earthquakes unearthed the mummy). There is a great National Geographic video about this expedition, too.
• Walked around the Plaza de Armas, and caught a few good sunsets
• Planned and went on a 3-day hike with Colca Trek in the Colca Canyon. Great trip! We’ll post separately about it.

Enjoy the rest of the photos of Arequipa!

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We only spent three days in Lima because we were on a schedule. It was plenty of time to recover, see some sights, and enjoy the craziness of traveling in Lima. Before we arrived, we had expected that we wouldn’t enjoy it very much. We were surprised – we actually had a good deal of fun! We spent our time there:

• Visiting the catacombs in the monastery of San Francisco (and seeing all of the skulls)
• Enjoying a CRAZY collectivo ride from central Lima all the way back to our hotel in miraflores (45 minutes to go about 6 miles, and I’ve never been so close to the other traffic on the toad as we were in that bus)
• Hanging out at the South American Explorers clubhouse – good atmosphere, fun people!
• Walking down to the pacific ocean, which was only about 25 minutes from our hotel
• Food – great food all over town!
• Paragliding: we hung out at the paragliding field (about 50m above sea level – you know because the ocean is right there for an afternoon. Stef had a flight , but the wind was so light that no one else could get airborne (in the tandem parachutes)

Funny Marketing Story: I had mistakenly not told the paragliding company exactly which pilot we wanted to fly with, so when the pilot I had spoken with realized that we arrived, he wanted “credit” for us (commission). But I had written down that I first heard about it through a guidebook. So they had a marketing channel attribution problem – they couldn’t tell if I found out about it from him or the guidebook. I had a long chat with Jose, and even tried to put on my consulting hat (since I’ve been helping companies to figure out how to attribute marketing spend and value for the past 8 years or so). However, Jose wasn’t really into it – and our language barrier (primarily my limited Spanish; his English was pretty good) also got in the way. oh well!

Enjoy the rest of our photos from Lima below!

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Huaraz is a classic mountain town in the Cordilleras of Peru. We arrived in the morning after a night bus from Trujillo, a little dazed and confused (we basically slept through a gain of 10,000 feet in altitude). After sleeping through the morning, we walked around town for a little, checking out lunch options and looking for the guy who runs the best mountain biking tours in Peru. We had some difficulty (the office was closed; we found out later that he was guiding all day), but did find a good cafe to hang out in! Late in the evening I met Julio, and we talked about doing a ride in the morning. I ended up riding twice (on different days) – once in the Cordillera Negra and once in the Cordillera Blanca (the two mountain ranges that flank Huaraz). They were great rides – a mix of pure cross-country, singletrack, and rockier and steeper descents, and I had a great time.

Between rides, Stef and I hiked up to the Lazy Dog Inn from El Pinar – about a 90-minute hike. It’s not so much long as it is steep – you gain about 500 meters (1600 feet) of altitude during the hike.

We really enjoyed Huaraz – even though we didn’t spend much time there. There are a lot of opportunities for multi-day hikes, and if we come back, we might try one come 2010. In the meantime, there is some really impressive scenery throughout Huaraz, and some of the highest mountains in all of South America. You can see more of it below (and click for more photos):

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We realized in Chiclayo that, while we loved traveling slowly and without a plan, if we continued at our previous pace we would need about 8 months to get to Patagonia. By then it would be the middle of winter there and we wouldn’t be able to do anything. So we put together a schedule, and started pushing through Peru. We’re hoping we can come back in early 2010 to spend more time here. Hence, we spent about 29 hours in Trujillo, and most of that was on tours outside of the city!

1. We went to Huaca de la Luna in the morning, and saw an amazing site of the Chimu people. It was a huge temple (a bit larger than a football field), built out of mud and clay over the course of a few hundred years. Every time there was an El Nino storm (about every 50 years), the temple would fall apart. Instead of rebuilding it, they would build a new temple, almost twice as big as the old one, on top of the old one. After 5 rounds, they basically got assimilated by the Incas (I think). The designs are pretty intricate; and you can see some of the patterns in the photoset…



2. In the afternoon, we visited Chan Chan, a huge (like the geographic size of Philadelphia) site just outside of Trujillo. Again, mud and clay construction, but the interesting thing is that the palaces and temples were combined here (this group came after the chimu, I think). Chan chan sprawls all over the place (the Peruvian Panamerican highway actually runs THROUGH it), and we saw the third-SMALLEST of the palaces there. Pretty impressive – designs representing the different forces in the people’s lives (fishing nets, waves, lizards, cats, etc), and really interesting to visit. There was a museum too – and I have a few photos from there as well…

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Trujillo was an interesting town. We spent two evenings there (leaving on a night bus the second evening after dinner, to go to Huaraz). It’s setup very much like an old-school European city-state (with the main city inside a circular, protective wall, and the rest of the city outside the wall), and we stayed in the center of the city while we were there. It has some pretty colorful colonial-style architecture, and a large statue in the middle of the main plaza.

We learned two interesting things about Trujillo:

1. There are a lot of street performers. When we were walking around town the first night, we ran into one performing a musical-robot-mime act. It was pretty funny, and some of the crowd got into the act, too!
2. Trujillo has a lot of banks, and a lot of casinos. I don’t know why, but there are three huge casinos on one city block, and throughout the center of the city there are more casinos! It seems like most of the businesses in Trujillo are set up either to loan money to people, or to take it from them…

Check out the rest of the pictures in the set below…

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We spent a couple of days in northern Peru, in Chiclayo. Northern Peru is a desert, but it hasn´t always been that bad. The Incas moved through here and took it over in the 1400s, and there were actually several civilizations living in the area before that.

Chiclayo was a good place to rest for a few days, get our bearings for Peru (getting money, cell phone SIM card, checking out the local situation, etc), and to visit a few places. It was a little crazy though – Chiclayo has about 500,000 people, and in all of our walking around the city, we only saw three stoplights. Traffic was busy here – almost every intersection has a few cars arriving simultaneously, slowing down, and basically playing slow chicken with each other to see who gets to cross first. It’s one thing to watch this, and another to figure out how to cross while it’s happening!

We also saw a few really interesting pre-Inca historical sites. We went to the museum of Tumbas Reales in Lambayeque, and saw the collected excavations from a site that’s estimated to be about 1400 years old. It’s really impressive because the main graves had all been untouched by grave robbers, and it was found in the last 30 years. You can read more about the culture and museum on wikipedia. They are still working on the site; in face, in the past few months, they found another tomb, bringing the total to 14. The museum is modern (constructed about 5 or 6 years ago), well-lit inside with air-conditioning, and apparently cost about $4 million to build (according to the Peruvians we met there). The museum was really interesting, and all in spanish (so it took some effort to understand); they don’t allow cameras so the only photo we have is:

In the afternoon, we took a collectivo bus to Tucume, which is about 20km north of Lambayeque, and visited the museum and the site there. This site is about 1,000 years old, and the big difference is that you can tell that the museum isn’t as well-funded as the one in Lambayeque (although, as they mention several times, the museum was started by funding from Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon Tiki fame). It’s much smaller, all open-air, and uses sky-lights to light the displays. There are a few very cool dioramas of the site and how it might have looked when it was in use, like this one:

The site itself is also really interesting, as it is all built around a large hill (probably the source of their construction materials – mud and clay, primarily). There is a walk that goes from the museum outside the site up to the top of one of the hills; it’s a great place for photos. Check out more of them below!

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After we left Vilcabamba, we headed north to Loja briefly (we spent an hour hanging out at the bus station) before getting on the bus to go to Piura, Peru. Our bus left Loja at 11pm, and there were a whole set of security checks as we got on board (we were patted down by the security guard, and she got on board and videotaped all of our faces so that they had a record of who was on the bus. We slept pretty poorly, and were woken up at 3:30am at the border. Besides being the middle of the night, with an unfamiliar language in unfamiliar surroundings, having to cross a bridge on foot between the two countries, and not knowing that we had to go to the National Police Office on the Peruvian side (Stef caught that detail after we had both re-boarded the bus. Thankfully we still had enough time to run out and get registered), it was pretty uneventful and easy.

Piura is called a “transportation hub” according to Lonely Planet, so we figured that we would only spend a day or so there. When we got into town at 7am, we were not at all excited to spend much time there. We found a bus company, paid in dollars, and were back on the road from Piura to Chiclayo by 8am. On our first Peruvian bus ride, they showed the Mel Gibson movie “Apocalypto”. It’s very violent, but a pretty interesting depiction of Inca society at it’s height – the film ends with a fleet of Spanish ships arriving in a bay. A good way to enter Peru – learning a little about the civilization that dominated its history (and most of its tourism).

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We´ve just left Vilcabamba Ecuador (which was beautiful, amazing, and so much fun to hike in!) and are arriving in Piura Peru today. This post is our first try at letting you know where we are, and where we are headed. Since our travel ideas have changed so frequently since we began traveling, we don´t have a full itinerary to lay out for you. Instead, we have good plans for the next two weeks, and rough ones after that.
Here´s our plan as it stands now:

• Monday, October 5th – Sunday, October 11th: Peru: Piura, Chiclayo, Trujillo
• Monday, October 12th – Sunday, October 18th: Peru: Huaraz
• The rest of October: Peru: Huaraz and Lima
• November: Argentina: Buenos Aires (maybe Uruguay?) and Ushuaia
• (After the end of November we´re guessing) December: Argentina: Ushuaia (and maybe Bariloche or Buenos Aires?)
• January: Argentina: Bariloche and Mendoza
• February: Chile: Santiago, and the Lake District
• March: Chile: Atacama and Argentina: Iguazu and Salta
• April: Peru: Arequipa and Lake Titicaca (maybe Bolivia?)
• May: Peru: Cuzco and Macchiu Picchu and US: Boston (returning home)

Please keep in mind, we´re still working on getting the blog up-to-date. So you´ll be reading about Ecuador (it´s a really cool place, and we´ve had some great adventures!) for about two weeks more. But in a couple of weeks, everything should be synced up.

Please keep the comments and emails coming – especially if you any recommendations about what to do on the northern Peruvian Coast!

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