Mi Vida Cusqueña

Plaza de Armas in Cusco.

Bibi and I stayed in Juan's adorable, whimsical house for almost two weeks. My room, caught during a messy moment.

Lots of plants in this house, as well enormous, pointy hanging decorations.

Yarn for making the multi-colored tail of traditional bachelor hats. The lovely green hummingbird painting is the work of the house's resident artist, commissioned by Juan to paint birds for his restaurant/bar and home.

Onwards to Machu Picchu! My companions on the budget route: 6-hour bus, 1-hr in the back of a pickup truck through bumpy mountain roads, 22km walking in the night with our backpacks, including 10km on train tracks in the rain with few flashlights. We reached Aguas Calientes at 4am utterly exhausted.

Giddy the next day.

Llamas contemplating mist-enshrouded Machu Picchu.

The salt mines of Maras looking something like a candy factory.

The gorgeous terraces of Moray where the Incas attempted to adapt plants from the jungle to the Andes.

Juan shows off a self-made Cusqueño hat.

Selecting our trout from the farm.

Juan, taxi driver, me, Bibi, and a Jamaican-Australian friend dining on our catch.

Guinea pigs are a delicacy.

Dinner at Fallen Angels, a fancy restaurant with bathtub-fishbowl tables.

Salar de Uyuni

The most highly anticipated destination for me in South America: the world's largest salt flat, 10,000 square kilometers in area and up to one kilometer deep, containing 10 billion tons of salt. Pictures from the fulfilling three-day jeep tour courtesy of Kylie.

Llama crossing.

During the rainy season the salt flats are covered with water more than 30cm deep.

Clouds in the mirror.

This salt sells for less than one dollar per 50 kilograms.

Bolivia claims Fish Island.

A thriving colony.

Reflection.

Wild flamingoes.

A fox looking on for our scraps from lunch.

Laguna Verde.

Laguna Colorado.

Arbol de Piedra.

Lone vicuña in front of the red-dusted mountains.

Vizcacha, the chinchilla's slightly less adorable cousin.

Quinoa! A delicious and healthy Andean staple.

The Road to Panama City

Sometimes runs northward to Nicaragua first. Unsure of what to do after Costa Rica, I boarded a northbound international bus with the intention of going diving in the Bay Islands of Honduras. What I actually wanted to do was go to Bolivia, but this did not hit me until I was finally reading the Bolivia section of my guidebook during that bus ride. Realizing my error, I alighted in Granada, Nicaragua and desperately searched for airfare to La Paz.

The cheapest ticket by far was from Panama City, but that was now two days' travel by bus. Still, it was worth the saving of several hundred dollars, so I decided to take the first bus from Managua to San Jose the next morning. Unfortunately, I was too one-track-minded to get to enjoy Granada's colonial architecture before dark. Here are some pictures borrowed from the web:



I caught a microbus into Managua, an hour away, and got to observe firsthand the phenomenon of busses not really stopping for passengers. They tended to slow down instead, and those alighting had to jump off and run a few steps while those boarding had to run to catch up, sometimes after throwing their luggage to the handler riding on top of the bus. It was all a bit comical and proved true the next day as well. Fortunately, I was always riding the full length of the route.

The Nicaraguans I met during my brief stay were very friendly, but everyone tried to warn me about this and that danger. I found a decent hostel near the Ticabus station and the proprietors insisted on walking me to and back from the local diner which was just a block and a half away.

The next morning I discovered that all long-distance busses were full. Determined to get to Panama City in one day, I took a local bus to Peñas Blancas, walked across the border, taxied to Liberia, taxied again to San Jose (the cabbie booked a domestic flight for me enroute, reading off my passport and credit card info while driving as fast as possible, and definitely overtaking over 100 vehicles on the curvy, one-laned, three-hour speed ride), flew to Golfito (where I got take-out from a nice Chinese family-run restaurant), bussed to Paso Canoas, walked across the border again, waited for two hours, and caught an overnight bus to Panama City.

Excellent displays at the Panama Canal museum.

Including a small aquarium section.

Miraflores Locks.

A cruise ship enters, guided by little vehicles called mules on the sides. This particular ship is paying $78,000 to pass through the canal.

Gates open and the ship is lowered to that level.

Successful passage! One more lock to go before they're at sea level with the Pacific.

My favorite thing about Panama City was the city busses, decommissioned former U.S. school busses, all decked out with loud stereos systems and even louder paint jobs. I was mesmerized for half an hour on this pedestrian walkway over Via España.

Beach Redux

Our three days in the beach town of Manzanilla (Spanish for chamomile) were spent swimming, getting sunburned, eating at a very reggae restaurant, hanging out with a young Russian couple from Boston, and spotting howler monkeys in the trees, sometimes more than ten at a time. Lovely, pristine beaches though no good snorkeling or diving to be had due to the season.

Maxi's, the most happening restaurant in Manzanilla.

Beautiful beaches, warm water.

Then we headed down to Panama. After an uneventful border crossing at Sixaola and taxi-boat combo, we found ourselves on the sunbaked Bocas del Toro archipelago. There we stayed at our best hotel yet, a good-valued inn with hardwood floors, nice bathroom, and almost-warm water. The first day of snorkeling on our own was a bit of a disappointment, but our snorkeling boat trip the next day was a winner. We saw dolphins from the boat, and much more underwater life, including a series of seven arrow squid-looking creatures lined up horizontally in a row from smallest to biggest, bubbling a bit and hanging out in place. The icing on the cake was meeting some very cool Americans, including a brother and sister pair (he being an actor and she having spent the year before college traveling around New Zealand, studying at a martial arts school in Xian, China, and working in Shanghai) and a marine biology girl who had graduated from my high school the year before I did.

We left Bocas by plane to David the next day, and crossed back into Costa Rica at Paso Canoas, a large, chaotic place. The bus ride up and boat trip down to Drake Bay left us exhausted, and the subsequent backpack-laden walk around to find affordable lodging in the very expensive area felt torturous. Finally we located an acceptably dingy room at a reasonable price. Drake Bay had been talked up by several people but didn't end up seeming special to me, though my impressions are colored by being caught on a hiking trail for an hour after dark and getting stung by jellyfish while snorkeling off Caño Island.

For our flight back into San Jose, our taxi pulled up to some benches under a covering, like a large busstop. There was an airline representative sitting with a clipboard and swinging his legs. He checked us in by listing our passport information on a piece of paper and we were ready to go. The 12-seater plane landed on an airstrip resembling a wide dirt road, turned around, we boarded, and took off.

Tortuguero

After a sequence of three long, dusty bus rides originating at 6am in Monteverde, we reached Parismina in the mid-afternoon, a little village on the Tortuguero canal system. We were the only disturbance as far as the eye could see on the still, luscious green-fringed, mirror-perfect water. The air turned from mist to rain to mist as our boatman blasted Bob Marley songs (singing along, though he probably didn't understand a word) on our one-hour atmospheric ride up to Tortuguero.


We stayed at Cabinas Tortuguero, run by a friendly family with an amusing menu for their attached restaurant. Using an automatic translator on Spanish menus seems to be popular around here, and theirs included such gems as "coffee or you" for "café o te," "everything turned into charcoal" for "carbonara," and "fragmentation hand grenade" for "piña" (maybe because the small, spiky explosives were shaped like so?). We really cracked up the day we discovered this and I think our service was slower as a result.

The prime window for wildlife-spotting was 6-9am, and both mornings we went out in canoes to try our luck. The first time we went with a spunky Afro-Caribbean guide who pointed out a river otter, howler monkeys, lizards and iguanas, toucans, and many other birds. The next day we rowed out on our own and saw white-faced squirrel monkeys and toucans. I was very pleased, as this was more than we had seen in Costa Rica thus far.




It was difficult to do much else around Tortuguero as we experienced short downpours seemingly every 15 minutes. The trails were flooded and the canoe tours didn't really go out after the 6-9am prime window for spotting wildlife. So we napped, read, played cards, and waded in the Caribbean a bit. We also had our best meal in Costa Rica at a place called Miss Miriam's. The Caribbean chicken was tasty but the real standouts were the spread of side dishes that we didn't expect (rices, salads) and the prawns, which were more the size of crawfish, fried in garlic butter.

I wish I had more pictures of my favorite place in Costa Rica, with its reggae music, kids playing soccer in the rain, and being able to walk down the one street in town and see our boatman sitting at the friendly outdoor bar, guide hanging out on the front stoop, and guy from the cabinas picking groceries at the store. It was really some kind of magical.