Saltañas, Empanadas & Real Sugar
I gained a lot of weight in Cochabamba, Bolivia. So much that I hope I don’t find a scale in the near future or else I’ll probably cry. The food there is out of control, with street vendors on every corner and between. When my friend Nathan found the restaurant that only made empanadas, he went every single day, at least once, until we left. They fill these little pockets with potatoes, meat, vegetables, olives, eggs, whatever, all mixed up into heavenly deliciousness for you to cradle in your palm and savor each bite with a little ‘o this sauce, a little ‘o that. And the lack of high fructose corn syrup is just fabulous; not only are all the coca-colas made with real sugar, but so is every-other soda, and the Pringles even have half the amount of ingredients!! I’m going to miss eating 5 meals a day, but I look forward to seeing my ribs again.
Lake Titicaca
At 12,000 feet above sea level on the border of Peru and Bolivia, Lake Titicaca is the highest and largest lake in South America. On the Bolivian side of the lake, the Isla del Sol was the first island our group visited, and is one of the largest islands in the lake. There are over 180 Incan ruins there, and according to the Incas, it is the island where the Sun God was born. Amoung the 30+ natural islands, there are about 40 artificial islands (Uros) that were man-made from Totora reeds that we got to visit for a whole 30-or-so minutes while the sun was setting. Supposedly it’s a pretty popular tourist destination, and I was a tiny-bit disappointed that we didn’t get to ride in a reed-canoe taxi.
Little Cholitas
If needed, please take a moment to laugh at me in this picture, and then read on. On our way to the island of Amantaní the winds picked up and our boat was riding waves that were a tinsie-wiensie bit too big for a safe sun-set journey. Entonces, we had to park our boat in some reeds on an unknown peninsula and find families who would put 17 students up for the night. 5 of us girls ended up staying with one large family (8 daughters and a son), and after dinner they shoowed us off to our rooms to “get ready for a party”. There were big skirts on our beds and immediately the oldest daughters began to dress us. 3 skirts, 1 wool jacket, and a mini-bowler-cap later, I was giggling hysterically with the rest of my room-mates. We hoped we were the only ones dressed up for the surprise party, but when we got there our entire group was wearing traditional outfits. So, the party started at about 8:30 and then they made us dance until 11:00 [in our wool!!] until we were finally allowed to go back to our beds and giggle ourselves to sleep. It was a night of a lifetime.
Machu Picchu
We didn’t hike the Inca Trail, and maybe if we did I would have actually cried when I finally got to see the ruins, but I did not. Our trip was amazing, and after lugging my tubby belly around the country all month, up mountains and through the jungle, I’m glad we didn’t have to backpack our last few days up and down the vertical Incan trails. When our bus made its way up to the national park of Machu Picchu, my heart was racing and I thought I might explode from the anticipation of the spiritual enlightenment I was about to experience… but, alas, when we finally made it through the line [of eternity] at the gate, I wanted to lie down in the middle of the stone path– any stone path. There were 32987 stone paths!! The ancient city was huge!! I had no idea how impossible it had been for any photographer in the history of Earth to capture the immense size of Machu Picchu. Our tour guide was a native to the lands surrounding the ruins (he claimed to be able to run the Incan Trail in 4 hours, 10 minutes), and had some crazy facts/theories about the ancient culture. One of my favorite ideas that he shared with us was the fact that the Incans only had 4 ages in a person’s lifetime, and the transformation from one age to the next was based on psychological stages instead of physical. The sad thing was that our guide spoke entirely in Spanish, so I missed 63% of what he was saying. After our tour a little group of us strayed away from the 50-year-old-tourist-infested ruins of Machu and hiked up to Wayna Picchu where we found all the twenty-something world-travelers, and looked out over the tiny world below.
