It always gets more complicated when you get home

When we landed in Panama City’s Toucumen International airport the line at immigration was crawling along. The system that looks up each passport when it gets swiped through the reader seemed to be moving at some sort of sloth’s speed. When we finally got through immigration we headed for baggage claim.  Chris’ bag was sitting beside the carousal. My bag was nowhere to be found. I’ve called Copa AIrlines about a dozen times now trying to at least figure out if it left Lima or not. The last call the guy sent me a claim form over e-mail. It’s one of those easy forms that wants original sales receipts for all items over $100. Right. It is kind of a pisser because I had a number boat repair items that Meghan carried down from Seattle in the bag. I also had my apnea dental appliance. This thing makes for a lot better sleeping for me – and for Chris. The thing cost me something like 2 grand by the time the Seattle dentist was done billing me and the insurance company. Oh well, travels woes.
Next up was traveling to Portobello from the mooring at Panamarina so we could straighten out our boat paperwork. Whenever you move into or out of a port that has a Port Captain you are supposed to check-in and then check-out with him. We had checked into the San Blas in December, but have never checked out as the Port Captain was not around each time we left. We’d heard the Port Captain in Portobello was much more sympathetic to this than the one in Colon. The fine is something like $300. Portobello is the old Spanish primary harbor for moving pillaged gold and silver from South America back to the homeland. Today it is a pretty sleepy little town. Mainly run down buildings and the church with a Black Jesus statute that is famous across the country.
We headed into the Port Captains office to plead our case. I can tell we’ve been down in Central America a long time now, when the surroundings just don’t seem to stand out anymore. I’m sitting in the chair next to the Port Captains desk waiting for him to stamp some more paperwork. The building is clearly distressed. The ceiling has black water stains. The ceiling fan is slowly turning and wobbling with each turn. The immigration officer's desk is an old steel office desk that has large rust patterns on the front. Chris is sitting off to the side on what looks like an old church pew. The walls around the back courtyard that you see through the open double raw wood doors are falling down. The last paint job was probably for some major renovation many years ago. Any way, the place looks normal to me and I’m just working with the Port Captain to get our paperwork. He listens to my story and hands me a blank sheet of paper. “Write your reasons here” Chifundo, the Port Captain, tells me. I craft up a nice story, sort like a blog entry, just hand written in my illegible scribble. He takes and just sticks in my pile of paperwork without reading it. We are now lined up for the final stamp-stamp and stamp on the remaining papers and we are legal again.
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In the “You can’t make this sh*t up category”, Chris headed off to the airport yesterday for 3 weeks of work in Malawi, Africa. She gets to the airport in Panama City and can’t find here flight. She’s a subcontractor and she was sent her itinerary from a Seattle corporate travel agency. She needed to get to Atlanta so she could catch her 14 hour flight Johannesburg, SA. No flight to be found – “huh, it’s all written on the itinerary with confirmation numbers!” she casually tells the checkin agent. Turns out she was booked out of Panama City, Florida, not Panama City, Panama. Just a minor reschedule, an 8 hour delay and she was off to Sao Paulo, Brazil with an additional 12 hour layover in the international terminal, then off to Jo-berg.
Paul

Machu Picchu or I love stone steps

We left Ollantaytambo on the PeruRail train for Aguas Calientes, the staging city for Machu Picchu. The town’s only purpose is to deal with the tourists heading to the old site.  It doesn’t have a lot of charm, although it is nice that the only motorized vehicles are the busses that run up to the Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu is a place that Chris has always wanted to visit. She’s intrigued by the old, indigenous cultures. Me, I just wanted to get the damn thing off my bucket list.
We bought our tickets to Machu Picchu and Huayna (or Wayna) Picchu in Cuzco. They only let 2,500 people a day enter Machu Picchu. Huayna Picchu is the mountain peak that you see in the quintessential pictures, rising up behind Machu Picchu. One side is the Temple of the Sun and the other is the Temple of the Moon. The hike up to Huayna Picchu is limited to 200 people at a time (twice a day). The hike is pretty much straight up. At the top of the mountain is supposed to be the residence for the high priest and the local virgins. We only saw shear cliffs and tired hikers. The hike up was in the rain. It took us an hour and forty minutes to the top. We didn’t get a lot of pics going up because both our Canon and Meghan’s Canon succumbed to the rain washing. Tyler’s cell phone camera was the only one that made it fully functioning to the top.

Staring out along the Machu Picchu walls in the rain.

Meghan and Tyler trying to add some color to the photos with their rain gear.

Huayna in the clouds behind Machu Picchu. Trust me, it is lot taller than it looks, and you go down before proceeding up.

The view down onto Machu Picchu from the top of Huayna. It would be a long, straight trip down, if you slipped on the trails. The trails are mostly setup for personal responsibility mode, i.e. no hand rails or signs telling you should be careful.

Temple of the Sun, sans sun

Hiding from the rain while desecrating the temple.

Drying the cameras out after the hike back down from Huayna after the sun came out. A 1/2 hour in the sun and the trusty Canons came back to life.

Panoramic of Machu Picchu with Meghan and Chris gazing into the void (on the right- click to biggerate).

Looking at Huayna Picchu in the sun from the starting gate

The Andes are incredibly rugged mountains. Pics just don’t do them justice.

Looking a few thousand feet down to the river valley from Machu Picchu.

The well bonded hikers in a self-portrait: Paul, Chris, Meghan and Tyler

High altitude mountain flowers

A sleepy chinchilla

If you blow this pic up you will see the little, tiny people who are walking among the ruins.

We were all dragging a bit by the time we got to this spot. Then we saw the llamas at the very top, center – enough inspiration to carry on.

Llama making sure she is in the pic.

It is really hard work being a tourist. Its nice to be back on the boat with the normal list of things that need fixing.
Paul

Cuzco and the miracle drug

  Cuzco, Plaza Armanas, panoramic – courtesy of Tyler Baker
After a night in Lima we flew off to Cuzco to meet up with our daughter Meghan and her boyfriend Tyler. Found a great little hotel (Corihuasi) about 2 blocks off the main plaza in Cuzco. That would be uphill from the plaza. Cuzco sits at around 11,000 feet. There is a distinct lack of oxygen in the air. We all felt it, but Tyler and I got hit the hardest. I was down for the count for a whole day feeling like I needed to sleep 14 hours a day, could not get warm, had zero appetite and my head hurt. Other than that it was OK. Our hotel had a large bottle of oxygen in the lobby, just in case the guests needed it. Then along came the miracle drug, Diamox (Acetazolamide). This stuff changes your blood chemistry just enough so the brain thinks there’s too much CO2 in your system. It then subtlety decides to breath a little deeper and a little more often. The next 3 or 4 days using it I could actually walk uphill again. Without it, the trip would have sucked for me. It took me 6 or 7 days to acclimate.

We did a number of trips to towns and ruins near Cuzco. Most are Quechua names. The locals up here in the Andes mostly speak the Quechua that is derived from the Inca language; some 8 to 10 million people speak it. Except for the youngest rural kids, they all seem to know Spanish too. When you are tired, the place names seem to become somewhat of a cruel tongue twister, Ollantaytambo. I know at least one Quechua word, wasi. It means casa in Spanish, i.e. house. Pretty impressive, ah. OK, enough verbiage, here’s some Andean pics (click to biggerate them), not necessarily in anywhere near the order we took them.

Cuzco Plaza at night from the hotel room

Headed home after a hard days work

Celebration of comadritas, or god-mothers

Dying raw alpaca wool

The dye choices, all from natural ingredients

Meghan and Tyler dressed up in traditional matrimonial garb. They both looked a little scared when they found out it was matrimonial.

You have to click on this panoramic to see much. Here’s Meghan at the street corner with Chris and I trying to catch up on the right in, where else, but downtown Ollantaytambo.

One of the more stylish alpacas. The Andes have llama, alpaca, vicuna and guanaco. The llama are the large pack animals with long necks. The alpaca are for meat and fine wool. The vicuna and guanaco are smaller and not domesticated, they are rounded up annually for wool. And yes, I did try alpaca, inadvertently. It was in a nice sauce at a local buffet and they call it ‘beef’. Seemed kinda tricky to me.

Rasta alpaca

Chris and I hiking into the cave at the Pisac ruins.

While a hawk hunts overhead

And a hummingbird hums

Meghan trying to fit on with the little locals as Tyler gives up.

Dressed for the day

Even Mom was sneaking a smile

Condor in mid-flight at the condor rehab center.

This is the cover shot for the new book Tyler and the Tortoise, or How I beat the system without breaking a sweat.

Andean river valley filled with maize, or corn

Paul, Chris and Meghan filling in the stone wall panorama

The Incas made scale models of their building projects to determine how to cut the stones and what hardware needed to be ordered from Home Depot. The stones are cut precisely and put together without mortar. If you can believe everything you read on the web, then this is how they cut the monster blocks:

“The Incas cut the stones, by cracking it and introducing slim pieces of wood. Then, they pour water in the wood, the wood absorb the water and expand. When the crack in the stone gets bigger, they repeat the steps with bigger pieces of wood. The method was enough to crack the stones in large rectangular shapes.”

Andean flowers

Here is scientific proof that 3 out of 4 tourists smile when dressed up in local garb.

Next up is Machu Picchu (Old peak) and the singing of Pacha Mama (Andean goddess, Mother Earth).

Paul