Wanderings

I´ve got to say -- things are significantly less awesome now that Nic´s gone. I´m not going to deny that there´s advantages of traveling on your own... you end up meeting and talking with a lot more people, for one thing. Plus you don´t have to share the window seat on the bus. But still... things are different. The quoting of Princess Bride and Monty Python has dropped to almost zero, for example. And most of my photos are starting to be of a few familiar styles...

The awkward ¨I´m here too¨ shot, which many will recognize from our college days.

The set-the-timer-and-run shot... usually requires several attempts to look right.

The random-passerby shot. Involves handing your camera to whoever´s nearby and hoping they don´t run off with it. The resulting photo is of varying quality. For example, above is the second photo the lady took... the first didn´t have our heads in it. That´s an authentic 600-year-old Incan wall, by the way. It´s in such good shape they built that other building right on top of it.

Anyway... my first few days on my own I did a lot of wandering aimlessly around the Peruvian countryside. The first village I stopped at was Mazuko, in the middle of the Amazonian jungle. (That´s the ¨I´m here too shot¨ up above.) I honestly love the jungle. I think I´m going to move to a jungle somewhere when I retire. I spent the whole day exploring jungle trails, following monkey families, almost burying myself in honest-to-goodness jungle quicksand, and chatting with locals panning for gold. I also took lots of photos, mostly of bizarre bugs and big lizards and a dead rotting something. I couldn´t decide which pictures to upload, so I compromised and didn´t upload any. Fair is fair.

The next day I moved on to Ccatcca, much higher in the mountains. I chatted with more locals that day than I had the rest of the trip combined... llama herders, little shepherd boys with bugles, grain threshers, families weaving, schoolteachers, schoolkids...

Pretty much everybody I came across gave me an odd look and asked me where exactly I was going. My response usually consited of ¨up there,¨or ¨over that way,¨ or eventually just ¨everywhere,¨ waving my hand at the whole valley:

1. The spot where I ditched my pack in some bushes, to keep from carrying it around all day.
2. The highest I got. That´s where I took the ¨timer¨photo, with the mountains in the background.
3. Where I took the ¨threshing women¨ photo.

Eventually I looped way around to the left of the picture, where the little town of Ccatcca actually is. I hung out for an hour or two with some kids playing marbles...

Nice kids... they liked their town, they liked their school, they even liked chemistry. Top-notch little buggers. Easy to understand, too. And they really loved getting their picture taken...

Oh yeah... I also got cornered in the middle of a field by three angry dogs. You might wonder how one gets ¨cornered¨ in the middle of a field. Oh, it´s easy. There´s three of them and one of you.