Peru/Cusco/Lots of bracelets....

Peru

Wednesday April 17- April 19

April 17th: Peru! Yay, we're so close, we've practically made it!! That's what I was thinking as our plane landed in Arica, Chile right on the border to Peru. Little did I know of the journey we had ahead of us... :)

We started out Wednesday morning with a flight from Santiago, Chile to Arica, Chile. Luckily 2 days before we had figured out a cheap way to fly to the border of Peru and it saved us a horrendous 30 hour bus ride! We were feeling pretty proud of ourselves for that when the plane landed in Arica. As we collected our bags, double checking to make sure nothing else had been stolen, we walked out and were surround by the usual crowd of taxi drivers all making their case for why they should be the one to take us wherever we were going despite the extremely steep fare they think is ok to hit the gringos with. We finally found a guy who agreed to drive us across the border in to Tacna, Peru for $30, but not after questioning every word he said like we thought he was some kind of hardened criminal who was not to be trusted. Everything went smoothly and 45 minutes later we were in Tacna. Cusco was our final destination, unfortunately from Tacna there are no direct buses to Cusco, so after grabbing a deliciously cheap lunch we caught an 8 hour bus to Arrequipa for about $7. We thought we were being real smart and took the front two seats on the top level of the double decker bus, we may have had 2 inches of extra leg room, but I think the blazing sun shining directly on us with no AC canceled that out and then some! Not to mention all the buses have speed limiters on them and if the drivers go faster than they're supposed to (which all of them do), this crazy loud screeching noise comes blaring in at you from all angles, I think we had the prime time seats for that concert as well! We finally made it to Arrequipa around 7 at night and from there found a night bus that would get us to Cusco in the morning. Luckily this was only another 12 hours on a bus, so the fun was just starting.... :) Another bonus, because it was night we didn't have to worry about the heat, we did have to worry about the cold though! I thought I was going to lose a couple toes it was so freezing! McKay had been really smart and brought his sleeping bag on the bus, I was really grateful for that because even when he moved to a different row to stretch out, I somehow finagled my way in to keeping it with me and he froze in his tshirt and shorts..... If that doesn't put him up for best husband of the year, I just don't know what will!

At the airport waiting for our flight, look at that sweet innocent smile on my face... Clearly I have no idea about the horrendous hours of traveling we're about to experience!

I'm pretty sure this Peruvian desert is where they filmed all that fake footage of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon....

Goodbye Chile and your ridiculously high priced lunches!

Peru! Never looked so good, especially through the windshield of a Chilean taxi!

In a 24 hour period, we went from spending $110 for lunch to $5 total for a two course meal and a drink each, tip included! I love this place!

Yay for cheap big (gl)ass bottles of Coke that help me look like I have a drinking problem!

April 18th-19th Thursday and Friday

We finally made it in to Cusco Thursday morning after almost 27 hours of straight traveling. We both wanted to die, but only in the proverbial pop culture slang kind of way of course! It was so great to be back in Cusco and see so many familiar things, I was definitely feeling nostalgic! We took a taxi up to a hostel near the Plaza San Blas and took a little nap. After that we went out on the town and I showed McKay my old home turf. We visited my old school and I was so surprised and felt awesome that the two head teachers remembered me! They were so sweet and kept asking if I still liked soccer and I was really glad McKay was there, because they don't speak English and in case anyone has forgotten, my Spanish is definitely sub par! :) It was fun to show him the school and where I spent so much time and I'm so sad we forgot to take any pictures. We spent Thursday and Friday exploring the city and eating at as many of the delicious places I'd been craving as we could. We even popped in to see my old host mom and she was so sweet and invited to come stay with her when we got back from Machu Picchu. She just kept saying this is your home you come here whenever you want, it was really good to see her!  

I was doing my happy dance when we saw this sign, and not just because we had been on a bus for 12 hours and I needed a bathroom break!

The Plaza De Armas, translated Plaza of Arms and as in weapons or guns... Clearly they did not think about the political repercussions that could come from using a name like that.

No worries this is just Pachaqutec the famous Inca king behind us, he's kind of a BD around these parts and I used to walk past him everyday on my way to school.

This is my host Mom Isabelle, she is the sweetest! I had lost her address and didn't have any way to contact her, but she happened to be outside getting the mail as we were walking by and was so excited to see us (naturally) and invited us in for tea and delicious Peruvian bread!

Picarones! This was one of my favorite things in Peru, they're a mix between a donut and a scone and they put this honey like mix on them, mmmmm delicious! McKay was so excited about eating these he couldn't even keep his mouth shut!

We ran in to the missionaries while walking around and took them out for some pizza! It never ceases to amaze me how much the missionaries can eat! :)

Legit delicious fruit smoothies, another one of my favorite things, ever, period, end of story. There are about 30 of these stands lined up next to each other in this market and they all go crazy trying to get your attention as you walk by so you'll buy from them. Clearly she is stoked to be in our picture...

I don't know why I think these ladies are so funny, but their job is to sit around wearing a bright neon green vest and they carry a bunch of cell phones on them that people walk up and use and then pay them for the minutes they use. It's like a human telephone booth without Clark Kent being able to dash inside and turn himself in to Superman.

Looking over Cusco and representing those Aggies!

This is the Cristo Blanco overlooking the city.

Awww yeeeeah!


My favorite view of Cusco from the Cristo Blanco! Just looking at this picture gets me pumped! :)


These are the ruins of Saqsaywaman, they were built by the Inca's and are part of the Sacred Valley tour that takes you to a bunch of different ancient Inca sites. We were too cheap to pay for the whole tour so we had to take this pic from afar.... while traveling in a moving vehicle....

Chee-Lay!

Chile
April 13-17

After the boat docked in Valparaiso, Chile and we took one last run at the all you can eat breakfast buffet with the oldies, we reluctantly stepped off our floating meal ticket. While on the ship we ended up hanging out with this guy John, who was on the cruise with his Mom. John is a retired cop from Arizona and had just moved down to Chile for his wife's job. They've only been living there since January and he's still working on learning his Spanish, so between not being able to communicate with anyone in the country and only having the walking dead (too far?) to chat with on the ship he really liked hanging out with us and we really liked hanging out with him too! We had a lot of fun with him and his mom playing all kinds of card games and McKay and John played a a wicked game of Ping Pong! John was so incredibly nice and ended up inviting us to stay at his house while we were in Santiago. So, when we got off the ship John's wife was waiting with a truck she had borrowed from a coworker to haul all of us and our luggage home!

First we zipped through town! Valparaiso is supposedly the biggest port in South America and it is a really cute little town. Even though it's right on the coast it's still in the mountains and the streets and houses are all built on crazy hills. Luckily we had John's mom as an excuse to not hike our way up and down the streets and just ended up touring it in the truck with McKay making up the history as we went.

We ended up spending the next 3 days hanging out with them in their amazing right on the golf course condo with sweet real big high def TV's, we were in heaven! They were so amazingly sweet and took the best care of us, they fed us and showed us around gave us the royal treatment and it was so nice to be taken care of for a few days. Not to mention the fact that Chile is way more expensive than even the US, so they saved us a lot of money! It was really sad to say goodbye but before we could go we made them promise to come visit us in Utah someday so we can try to return the favor. :)

Valparaiso swap meet! All those clothes you sent to the DI are now being recirculated through Chile! Unfortunately this is the only picture we took there, so you'll just have to use this pic, my vastly detailed description and your imagination to to piece the rest of it together.... :)

On our way back to Santiago we stopped at Vina Indomita. Chile is really known for its wine and they have vineyards all over so it was fun to stop and check one of them out.

 Lookin out over the vineyard!

 This is John and his mom Twila in the elevator at their condo, yep there's an elevator at their condo!

Do you wish you had this view of an awesome golf course outside your living room? Me too!

John let us take his golf cart for a spin around the course, we were shouting out pointers (for free I might add) to everyone we passed along the way, but for some reason no one seemed to appreciate it... Weird right? :)

Wouldn't that be a rough view to wake up to? :)

Out to lunch! Don't worry it was only $110 for the 4 of us to eat, no appetizers, no desserts... Ouch! Chile was ridiculously pricey!

Taadaa! It's Jaime!! I love Jaime so much, we played soccer together back in the day and she visited us last summer in ATL on a road trip! She just moved down to Santiago for work a couple months earlier and it was so great to see her! She made us a delicious lunch at her new apartment and then gave us a tour around the city!

Huesillos, the official drink of Chile, it means little bones! It's made of barley on the bottom and is topped off with peaches and lots of canned peach juice and it didn't even taste like bones! :)

This is the view from one of the two big main hills that people climb up to check out the city from. Luckily we found a free elevator that helped us cheat and took us halfway up the mountain or I probably wouldn't have made it!

I don't know why this was such a revelation to me, but this is an outdoor roller rink, how awesome is that?! Right? Right?

This is Stacey, she dropped us off at the metro on her way to work so we didn't have to take a $50 taxi! We love her and we were so sad to say goodbye!

The Cruise

The Cruise

March 31- April 13

After reluctantly checking out of our 5 star dream of a hotel we found a taxi and headed over to the cruise terminal to start the two weeks of bliss we’d been anticipating since the day the idea popped in to our heads! This cruise was going to have it all and help us see the southernmost part of the continent we otherwise would have had to miss…. Or so we thought! :)

The cruise started out amazing, we were on the Holland America ship Veendam sailing for 13 nights from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Valparaiso, Chile. Holland is an awesome cruise line, but they're kind of geared toward a slightly different crowd than what you might see for example on a typical Carnival caribbean cruise.... Let's just say we probably brought the average age on the cruise down a good 10 years just by being there and we stuck out like sore thumbs, really cool fashionable sore thumbs but sore thumbs none the less. Despite spending the next two weeks on this floating old folks home (oh come on, it was too good to pass up) we were pumped to be there! We got to our room and found out we had somehow scored a handicap ready room. I'm not sure if they saw our ages and thought there must be something wrong with them to choose to come on this cruise alone, but we weren't going to complain because that meant in addition to having more space in the room, including a couch (a couch! Can you imagine having that kind of space on a cruise ship?), we also didn’t have to suffer through a bathroom the size of a shoebox. Talk about having high standards!

We were too cheap to buy any actual cruise pictures, but McKay was sneaky enough to snap this great shot of us as we were getting on the boat! :)

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention in addition to the couch, it had a whole separate side chair as well! :)

The MS Veendam!

We got on the ship on Easter morning and despite the lack of Easter egg hunts on board, the food was awesome! We had both been starving ourselves in anticipation of gorging ourselves for *free (I added the asterisk, because as anyone who's taken Econ 1500 knows, there's no such thing as a "Free Meal") and the food did not disappoint. They only had the Lido bar buffet set up at certain hours for each meal, so it seemed like they were able to put a little more thought and preparation in to everything they served. And as a bonus they always offered a 4th full meal buffet at 11:00 pm for those night owls on the ship who hadn't already fallen asleep while sitting in front of a tv.... After discovering this magical 4th meal, we didn't miss it once. Just to make you all jealous I'm going to go ahead and highlight a few of our favorite foods from the ship. The Chocolate Chip Cookies, I don't know what's wrong with other cruises but Holland had these down pat, the perfect combination of cooked but still soft and gooey. We grabbed a few of these every time we passed the dessert bar and found that the best way to wash down our 4th meal was with a plate of these and a big glass of milk! Incidentally during one such of these wash downs I introduced McKay to the beauty of adding a little half and half to the skim milk that was available to make it taste better. Sounds great until he started drinking the half and half straight up! :) The Hamburger grill, this place was legit! All the delicious fresh grilled cheeseburgers, hot dogs, or bratwurst you could eat plus fresh thick fries on the side. Let's just say we were regulars there! The Taco Bell bar, was it officially sponsored by Taco Bell? No, but did that mean it didn't taste just as good to our Taco Bell deprived bellies? Absolutely not, I had as many beefy 5 layer burritos as my every growing tummy could handle!

I finally got my Lobster and Filet! I love formal night! 

I know what you're probably thinking, ok, enough about the food let's get down to the ports. Surely they must have been more interesting than that 10 minute rundown of your complete dietary intake over the course of the cruise. Well, that's where you might be a little disappointed... We got to our first port in Montevideo, Uruguay on Day 2 (April 1), it was nice. Reminded us a little bit of Buenos Aires but not quite as cute and quaint. We walked around for what felt like a sufficient amount of time before heading back to the boat talking about nothing other than the food we were going to devour!

Welcome to Montevideo, Uruguay please keep your hands and arms inside your pockets at all times...

Looking at MV from the beach front walkway.

Ride 'em cowboy! This is the Plaza De Armas in MV, stylish isn't it?

Oh ya know, just one of your average run of the mill guards, standing watch over the tomb of someone important in Uruguayan history... They have to sit there day after day ignoring anything or anyone around them. This guy was good too, I don't think I could have let the jelly beans up my nose go... 

What more can I say, this was the highlight of the city for us!

Ahoy matey, I've spotted the flag of Uruguay arghh!

On Day 4 we had another stop in Puerto Madryn, Argentina. It's about halfway down the Argentine coast and the fall cold weather was slowly starting to creep in on us. There wasn't much to see here but we did have fun walking around town admiring all the fancy graffiti...

Puerto Madryn... And there you have it!

If Harry Potter spray painted on a wall doesn't get you excited, well then I just don't know what will!

For those of you who have spent countless sleepless nights worrying, there's no need to worry anymore... Rollerblading is alive and well in the great country of Argentina! This was at least the 6th person we had seen wandering down the streets in Argentina on wheels. 

Just your typical romantic beach picture with the cruise ship in the back ground, sorry if you're jealous.

These were the cutest sea lions hanging out on the docks by the ship, we didn't even have to pay for the $160 excursion to see them!

After that we were supposed to have stops in Ushuaia, Argentina (the southernmost official city in the world) and Punta Arenas (the southernmost city in Chile) as well as pass through the Strait of Magellan and what is referred to as glacier alley. Those 3 things are the real reason you do this cruise so we were beyond stoked to check them out. Unfortunately at about 5:00 in the morning on Day 7 just as we were supposed to be pulling in to Punta Arenas, the captain came over the intercom and informed us that he had to make the hard decision to skip both ports and the straight of Magellan due to impending weather with swells up to 80 feet. We definitely understand the safety aspect, but of course we couldn't help but be disappointed especially because that then meant we were going to have 6 straight days at seas! The good news was that since we had so much time on the ship we found the gym and decided to workout for the first time in 4 months, the bad news was being stuck on a ship for that long with unlimited supplies of cookies and taco bell tacos it didn't matter how many times we went to the gym! :) It turned in to a long 6 days and the ship didn't stop rocking the whole time, multiple times at dinner had people throw up at the table and have to excuse themselves while running to the bathroom. Unfortunately this hit us the hardest on my birthday and we both ended up being so sick throughout the day we could barely get out of bed, ughh. At least it was a birthday I'll never forget. :)

Passing through our alternate route to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it was so beautiful! 

 Who state? U State!... Yep just made that one up on my own...

This is the amazing glacier we passed, I bet it was even prettier in real life, we wouldn't know cause we might have slept through it... In our defense, this got pushed up a day early because of the skipped ports and somebody forgot to let us know.... Also it was super early in the morning, like 8:30... Luckily we had friends who were willing to share their pics with us!

They did end up giving us one extra stop on Wednesday April 10 at a place called Puerto Chacabucco, population 1200, there were more of us on the ship than in the whole town. As we were waiting in line to get off the ship there were already people coming back on that were shaking their heads mumbling, "not worth it" over and over. We should have taken the hint, but we decided to check it out anyway despite all the rain and cold! Once we got in to Chacabucco, we realized there really was nothing to see and decided to take a bus in to the slightly larger town of Puerto Aysen, where they boasted of having a whole grocery store and one bar with wifi. Unfortunately the wifi was out and the grocery store wouldn't take any of our dollars. :)

You've now seen as much of Chacabuco as you ever need to see. 

And this is the tourism sector of the port... All of it... No really...

Puerto Aysen! Now that we've taken this picture we can head back... :)

Our last port of the trip was on Thursdsay April 11 in Puerto Montt, Chile. This place had a bit more to offer and we had an awesome day! Ok, that might have been mostly due to the fact that we had been deprived of internet so long and we were finally able to log in to facebook and see what we had missed in the last week!

Here we are at Puerto Montt, you can tell by the big sign behind McKay.

As we were walking the 3km from the port in to town minding our own business, we suddenly notice a cop motorcycle pulling up on the sidewalk right in front of us and another cop on a motorcycle rushing in behind him. They both walk up to this kid and pin his arms behind his back and throw him to the ground. In the meantime we hear some sirens and see another cop car zooming towards us, it flips a U turn and comes skidding to a halt right next to the other officers. The officers haul the kid to his feet, rip off his backpack and literally throw him in to the back of the police car and all 3 vehicles drive away like nothing happened. This all happened within a matter of a minute and then it was gone! They didn't say anything to the kid and I can still see the scared panic'd "Oh crap my parents are going to kill me" look on his face. Later we saw all these cops in the main square and it was filled with kids getting in their faces. Apparently the kids were protesting something to do with the school system and we picked the wrong day to be there.

View of Puerto Montt from the ship!

We ended up having an amazing time on board, not because of the places we stopped but because of the people we met! Seriously being the youngest ones on a ship like that made us stand out and by the end of the trip it felt like we couldn't go anywhere without having to stop and chat with someone we had met somewhere on the trip... I guess what I'm trying to say is, we really were big deals! :)

He's smiling so big because he's so good at growing such a big man beard, and because he knows he's about to look like this....

Yes, I let my husband shave a disgusting molestache, I still have nightmares about it...

These were a couple ladies that we met at dinner one night. The one on the far side of me likes to travel to Mexico so obviously McKay had to tell her all about Chiapas and the big waterfall there called "Chiflon". I don't think she ever remembered our names but would always say "Chiflon" as she walked past us to say hi.

We may or may not have smuggled out an entire bag of those delicious cruise cookies to take with us on the road. It took us a day and a half to sneak those out of the kitchen without drawing too much attention to ourselves. :)