Day five pictures; jungle!

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Slow and steady!

Pictures, day 4.

We travel from Cusco to PM to the Amazon:

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Pictures, day 3.

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Macchu Pichu!  Cut down from 640 to something completely reasonable (I assert)!  

(This was very difficult for me to do, btw.)

Pictures, day 2.

More pared down pictures!  Day 2, Maras, Moray, Ollantaytambo:

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Pictures, day 1.

The Drama of Online Photo Hosting continues. flickr: unlimited space, terrible everything else!  Picasa: totally limited space, wonderful everything else!  So I thought, why not try facebook?

Day 1 pictures, pared down (I SWEAR) and posted, with a little color commentary, for your amusement: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100486125881631.2510936.2621&type=3&l=bfc66a9691 Encompasses a little bit of Cusco, the Pisac market, and the Pisac ruins.

(permissions should be set to public, so everyone should be able to see them; if not, comment and I'll fix it).

Quick Cusco update.

Somewhere in all the posting, we lost a day and forgot to talk about our LAST DAY WITH RAUL, which is sad.  Because we have a long day ahead of us (flight out is at like, 11 pm ish?) we're taking it a little easy this morning, and I can post a couple of pictures.  I wish we could have spent more time in Cusco!  We'll have to come back...

We got a bit hailed on at the big Inca site above Cusco, so we headed down to the market early.  It's divided into sections.  This is the "innards section:

Note the partial horse faces?  Yeah, this may be cultural insensitivity, but I'm going to officially declare that a little bizarre.  Even Raul was like "not for me, thanks."  I wish I remember what word he actually used, because it wasn't "morbid," it was much funnier.

Less morbid: chocolate with Macchu Picchu imprinted on it:

We were sad to leave Raul!  He declared that we had excellent energy and we should not think of ourselves as tourists with a guide but rather friends with a friend and we were to come back and meet his wife.  I have a picture of the three of us at the Inca fortress (pre-hail) that I will dig up eventually; he said "two flowers, one cactus!" as we posed.

He continued to be hilarious, in other words.  I gave him an excellent review.

Dinner overlooked the Plaza de Armas in Cusco, with views of the lights of the city rising over the mountains.  The restaurant had live music, which clashed pleasantly with the marching band that was inexplicably playing in the plaza below and may or may not have been associated with the wedding that was happening near the fountain.  Fortunately, the tourists who were holding hands in a circle around the fountain and chanting (?!) that afternoon (while we were eating the chocolate) had dissipated.

I ate alpaca (finally!).  It was tasty.  In fact, the one food we've missed out on on this trip is guinea pig.  You know, if they would just BEHEAD THE DAMNED THINGS I would have considered it more seriously, but I just don't think I could have enjoyed it as they are typically presented.  I also finally had a pisco sour:

Which tasted more or less like a margarita, but don't tell them I said that.

A Lima day.

Lima is unexpectedly delightful.  I will show you with pictures!
This is a large Party Causa, which is a traditional peruvian dish involving cold mashed potatoes layered with..lots of other stuff:

This is us with our vegetarian causa, which coincidentally is the one that's shown in the Lonely Planet guidebook.  The manager suggested the picture.  I doubt we were the first tourists ever to strike this pose, but whatever, we look hot:

We went for a random meander after lunch to try to work off the potato-based food coma, and stumbled upon a dog-themed street market.  There was a dog sweater stall, a dog bootie stall, a dog grooming stall, etc, etc.  Also many people flying kites. Also parks with wifi. Also elipticals and other exercise machines installed in the middle of playgrounds.  But foremost, a dog-themed street market:

WARNING!  The following photos are explicit, though not *nearly* as explicit as the VAST majority of the pottery in the exhibit in question.  I'M JUST ILLUSTRATING FOR YOUR KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING AND APPRECIATION, FOLKS.  Warning issued, I give you penis-themed pots:

 And an anthropomorphized penis holding his nose.  The best part is, there was a whole case of them.

Before dinner, per the suggestion of our cab driver leaving the museo de larco, we headed to the Parque de la Reserva to check out their numerous fountains (it's called something like "the magical water route" or something in Spanish, I don't have the map in front of me) and the nightly light-and-music show.  This is going to sound a little strange, but it was truly remarkable.  I mean, we've seen a lot of really remarkable things over the course of our Peru trip, remarkable animals, remarkable scenery, remarkable man-made citadels...but this whole park really lived up to the rest.  We were giddy and stupid with delight after the show.  I'm serious.  This is me in a tunnel of water:

This is another set of pools and light of which I was fond (there were about 20 of them, so I just picked one randomly off my camera, and no, Adam, I didn't subject your camera to the water, these are with the point-and-shoot. :-P):

And the show...I took video, but it's frankly easier to link to someone else's, so here's someone else's youtube of part of the show (the video is 4 minutes, the show is about 30).  It captures at least part of the coolness:

Finally, we succeeded in our quest for ceviche:

 I ate the octopus, but with some trepidation:

It was delicious.

No more technical difficulties?

Uh, so the computer just booted, for no obvious reason.  I'm pretty sure that that's impossible, given that I was being given a blinking folder with a question mark and then being kicked to a wifi connection screen when I tried to select a hard drive to boot from, suggesting totally HD discontinuity, but, uh, whatever?

Anyway we're off to dinner, I just wanted to broadcast my confusion to the world.

Thoughts from Lima.

Oh I'm going out of order but whatever.

There's a restaurant called "beer chicken." I wonder what they serve.

Lima is freaking huge. Huuuuuuuuge. We are dealing with this by taking cabs everywhere because it's easier than trying to navigate the totally incomprehensible bus system (one needs to only trust the markings on the front of the bus, NEVER THE SIDE). Related: the cab drivers here are enormously chatty, it's hilarious. Like running conversation from pickup to drop off.

Lima is totally overcast three months a year, one of which is august. By extension, we're both a bit...sleepy, mostly because this is totally nap weather. Adding to this problem was our lunch of causas, a mashed-potato-based dish that is a Peruvian specialty. FOOD COMA NOM. The one challenge with finding the restaurant in question is that the name has been changed since Lonely Planet came through, so now the staff is constantly on guard for confused-looking tourists. This worked to our advantage.

We spent the afternoon at the Museo Larco, which displays artifacts mostly from pre-columbian Peruvian societies. There are a lot of ceramics involved. My two favorite parts were first, the museum store rooms, where they have all the stuff not officially on display on big shelves behind glass, organized by type, so big shelves all of pots with two monkeys on top, several of lomos birds all making the same sort of alarmed face, one of ceramics of guys playing the panpipes, etc. Second, the erotic gallery, since apparently the pre-colombians made A LOT of EXTREMELY SEXUALLY EXPLICIT pottery, some of which the Museo Larco has on tasteful display. Well, as tasteful as the circumstances allow.

I mostly kept it together. Except for the particularly comical mistranslations of the verb "to masturbate."

Tonight, we plan to go to a water and light show in central Lima and the return to miraflores in a quest for ceviche. Until then, nappy time...

Moar jungle-posting en route to a cloudy Lima

Whew! Paolo, Raul's son, is in charge of all tour-based Internet stuff as well as general coordination and logistics, which typically includes airport transfers. His English is good and he's cute, too. Unfortunately, he's not particularly punctual, which has been a little stressful in terms of making our flights. This morning was no exception, but he stayed with us up to security to make sure we made it. All is well, in other words, and we are en route to Lima.

I'm not sure whether it's better to catch us up on previous adventures or to write about recent things...oh well. Let's return to The Jungle.

Emily has given you an idea about what our jungle days were like. Animals are SMART and thus less active in the heat of the day, so we would arise EXTREMELY EARLY for the more intense daily activity, relax during the hottest part of the day, and then venture out again in the afternoon/evening. Day 1, our whole group napped after lunch; we were all wiped from our 5-hour trip to the lake.

We actually started that morning by climbing an observation tower that rose about to the top of most of the trees, from which we could see toucans flying around, among several other birds. I wish I remembered exactly how tall it was, besides "extremely"; one of our group bailed halfway up. I'm *really* glad we did that first, before it really heated up, because the top was in full glare of the sun and it would have been pretty brutal.

Anyway, you've seen pictures of some of what we saw over the course of the day. Tarantulas are actually nocturnal; Pedro teased a couple out of their dens with a long piece of grass. Side note: once you notice the tarantula dens, you also start noticing all sorts of other holes in the ground/trees/whatever. WTF KIND OF HORRIBLE THING LIVES IN THEM?

I also enjoyed learning about some of the palm trees, like the "walking palm" so-called because it sprouts roots that grow down towards the ground and can actually move several feet over the course of its lifetime (seeking the sun through the canopy), and the "bisexual palm" which has a big hump in the middle when it's mature (like a pregnant woman) but whose growing roots look EXACTLY LIKE PENISES when it's young.

Somehow, penises came up a lot.

Pedro also covered medicinal uses of various plants, which really means he covered various horrible tropical diseases, like a form of mosquito-borne leprosy (dhshsbfnedjsblaargh). One exception was a plant that the local shamans use to treat impotence, which involved a leaf-based demonstration that I captured on video, that I will post in the states. It's worth the wait, I promise.

Speaking of horrible diseases: my faith in the future of humanity was strongly buttressed by two extremely adorable British children (maybe 8 and 10?) who had stayed (with their parents obvs) at the Tambopata Research Center farther up the river for some time before stopping at our lodge on the way back. They were dutifully journaling their stay, including and especially all the different animals they saw, and introduced themselves to our group by enthusiastically and thoroughly describing to the British woman in our group (the one who was Not Really Into the jungle) all the different and horrible parasites one can contract in the Amazon.

They were very cute.

In the afternoon of day 1, we took a quick trip across the Tambopata river (stopping for a well-deserved swim. The heat was tolerable, but I definitely sweat my sensor clear off over the course of our stay) to a local fruit farm, where Emily figured out the tomato thing and Pedro tricked various members of our party into consuming chiles of increasing hotness. I demurred, mostly because while in Pisac I *licked* a garnish that looked for all the world like a benign red pepper and which numbed my lips for like a half-hour. We did *not* try a chile called "monkey's penis", which is hotter than the ones at the farm, but which I bring up because it includes the word "penis." The most interesting fruit we encountered was something that smelled *exactly* like very very very frankly unpleasantly smelly French cheese.

That evening, while Emily went to bed early, I went on a caiman-spotting expedition with my group (you find them by shining a flashlight from a boat and looking for their red eyes reflecting back). I learned that THE AMAZON AT NIGHT IS TERRIFYING. Example horrible nighttime animals include: scorpions, at least three types of which WE SAW; spiders of varying degrees of toxicity, at least three types of which WE SAW, some of which were CARRYING BABY SPIDERS ON THEIR BACKS; and ants, the lethality of which was never specified explicitly but which includes at least one variety (THAT WE SAW) that we were ABSOLUTELY not to step on despite being much much larger than they. We saw similar ants the next day (that we had to jump over) but as they were smaller than the nighttime ants and present during the day this can only mean that there are at least two types of horrible swarming death-inducing ants in the jungle, and likely many more. I did like the leaf-carrying ants, which were busy carrying leaves in a long line across and then along the walking path and up a vine over the hill, with another line just to the right returning for more.

In addition to several caimans (the ostensible purpose of our nighttime journey) we also saw a deer, which was by far the most benign creature we've encountered in Peru so far. Additionally, and pleasantly, while we were busy examining a horrible spider, Pedro noticed some droppings, and looked up with his flashlight to reveal two very fat and colorful birds, orange and blue maybe, asleep not 8 feet above us, who seemed a bit grumpy at the disturbance of the light. Seemed legitimate to me.

The only creatures missing after day one were macaws (which we only saw flying at a distance overhead), monkeys, and snakes. We never saw any snakes, which is good, given how Em feels about them, but the next day was full of macaws and monkeys. We got up early to trek to a macaw clay lick, as shown in the pictures we posted yesterday. That was possibly the highlight of our stay for me. The monkeys were spotted while on the way to various other places; I was delighted. I spent the free time in the afternoon trying to catch the oropendulas in flight; they make these funny hanging nests, and had colonized the trees in front of the lodge. They're pretty when they fly because you can see the yellow under feathers, or whatever they're called. Brady would know. I'm not sure I succeeded with the action shots, being a somewhat spastic photographer. I did get to see them quite close, however, and watch the males tip over when they make their funny calls, which sound like water dropping into a bucket.

(they are also noisy in the morning, like the parrots and HOLY HELL THE HOWLER MONKEY which sounds like a low-grade jet engine, roughly.)

We didn't see much at the mammal clay lick besides a bit of a scuffle between a raptor and several wild turkeys (the turkeys won. They should give tips to the macaws), except that all of a sudden Pedro ran into the blind from where he had been scanning the jungle below, grabbed the telescope, and took off like a shot, whispering with some urgency "everyone come quietly now!" He had spotted a harpy eagle, the second largest eagle in the world, which is apparently a less common sight in that part of the jungle than a jaguar. Harpies have giant claws that they use to snatch large prey (caimans, monkeys), carry them to great heights, and then DROP them. They then fly down to eat them. Very morbid. Anyway Pedro was delighted, geeked out super hard, and expressed hope that this was a nesting female, meaning he might see her again in the future. On the way back into the lodge he definitely received props from other guides for his sighting, which he described to us as "very very lucky and special and beautiful."

The next day we hopped back on the boat to go back to Puerto Maldonado, promising to share pictures with the rest of the group, and headed back to the airport. It was overcast and thus comfy for boat travel, with a slight pause in the middle to rescue a hat that blew off a passenger's head into the river (we applauded our boat driver's skill). The ride back is much quicker anyway, since it goes downstream instead of up. We were sad to leave and I'd love to go back and stay longer. Next year, maybe? :-)

See, one short internal flight and I'm almost caught up, short of pictures/video! Sorry for the length, mostly I've just been killing time on the flight...

A random selection of ideas I have successfully expressed in Spanish so far.

"Our flight is at 8, what time do you think we should go to the airport?"

"Which of the alpaca preparations do you recommend?"

"I will have a pisco sour please, as I've been in Peru 8 days and have yet to have one."

"I'm in room 301 and I can't open the door...yes I have turned the handle, it doesn't open."

"I'm so sorry that our clothes are so disgusting, thank you for washing them."

Technical difficulties in Peruvian Casa de Emily and Claire

So, uh, it's totally possible that the old Air has finally and definitively kicked it. It froze when I came back from dinner and it's symptoms suggest catastrophic hard drive failure. Huh. Weird timing. At least it's towards the end of the trip and not the beginning, and at least I got some pictures up first, no? Anyway the blogger mobile app isn't terrible, we'll just be picture-free until we return to NY. Honestly, we probably would have been anyway, depending on what the wifi is like at the Lima hotel...

Beware the wild tomatoes....

We have made it back from the Jungle!  It was amazing and I could have stayed much longer, especially after I figured out that the fruit juice they were serving (that had a kechwa name that sounded like coconut) was in fact a yellow, wild tomato!  Those of you who know me know that I am allergic to tomatoes, but since I had no idea they were tomatos, I had been drinking the juice for half a day before I started throwing up!  No worries- they mystery was quickly solved, and I am doing much better!

Our jungle days were glorious.  We would arise much too early and head out for a very long (5-6ish hours) nature-watching excursion in the morning.  We would return to the lodge at about 11 to shower and rest a bit.  Lunch was at 1, and then siesta was from 2-3:30...ahhhh, I love to siesta in a hammock!  In the afternoon we would go on a briefer, less intense adventure, and then dinner was at 7.  After dinner, you could go out to do creepy night time things (which Claire will tell you lots about).  I did not do creepy night time things, because the night claire went out, I was throwing up and sleeping!

Despite all the noises, I slept soooo well in the jungle, tucked into my mosquito netting.  It was so incredibly dark, that if I woke in the middle of the night, I could figure out which way I was facing in my bed!  The stars were unbelievable, and the milky way was clearly visible.

Our guide, Pedro, clearly loves nature a little more than he loves tourists (tourists are sometimes loud and scare the nature), but he loves tourists plenty, and we saw many AMAZING things, including macaws, monkeys, giant rodents, tarantulas, toucans, etc.  Other highlights included swimming in the Tambopata river, getting our passports stamped at the river checkpoint, visiting a fruit farm, and many lovely boat rides.

Our tour group was fantastic.  The british couple were hysterical, because the woman wanted NOTHING to do with the jungle, and the man wanted lots to do with jungle.  The American couple were lovely, and the Danes were way tougher than us!  While in the Jungle, we realized how incredibly gross our clothes were.  We had them washed (by hand using biodegradable soap) at the lodge, and let me tell you, the woman who hand washed our pants should be Sainted for her work.

Now we are back in Cusco, where we were greeted heartily by our old fried Raul!  He took us briefly to another Inca site this afternoon, but it started HAILING (HAILING!!! HAILING!!!) while we were there, so we left quickly.  As Raul said, in Cusco, you can have 4 seasons in 1 hour.  So, we rushed back to the hotel for dry clothes and headed to a local market, where we bought and ate much deliciousness.  Now, we are resting a bit before heading out for dinner in Cusco.  We are determined tonight to not fall asleep before we eat dinner!

~Emily

Macchu-Picchu picture-spam.

A few MP-themed pictures, just to illustrate our previous posts.  I promise to post a proper selection once I get back home, to more free time and a computer with both more hard drive space and processing power.  

Our first sighting of Macchu Picchu.  Emily is amazed.

Classic view part 1; MP in the mist.

The gatekeeper's hut, which they've rethatched, ostensibly authentically.

MP from below.

Terraces, though these were probably used for retaining walls more than for agriculture.

ENORMOUS SQUIRREL THAT IS NOT A RABBIT.

Llamas/alpacas (I can never tell the difference) chilling out on the terraces.

From the sungate.

At the sungate.  Note my handy water-bottle carrier.

From the sungate, classic view part 2, after the mist had lifted.

Amazon picture-spam

This constitutes small-scale jungle picture-spam for severa reasons.  First, I took at least 1500 pictures in the jungle.  Second, I can't actually download all of them to this computer to check them out at the same time, because there literally isn't enough hard drive space.  Thus, the limits of time and space preclude me from properly sorting through them all and posting them prettily.  You will have to wait until we return for that.

HOWEVER!  I grabbed a few whose thumbnails looked particularly promising for your viewing pleasure, now that we're back at the Hotel of Ultimate Upload Speeds in Cusco.

I don't think I know the names of all of the animals off the top of my head, but I will do my best. 

A baby spectacled caiman, from the boat on the way to the lodge.

A family of capybaras, also seens from the boat on the way to the lodge.  The birds seemed to annoy the capybaras a bit (one capybara adorably rolled over to dislodge his rider), but the birds apparently pick parasites out of the capybaras' fur, so really they should be grateful.

I believe this is called a hoatzin.  They are very bizarre and are born with claws on their wings, pterodactyl-style.  They make strange wheezing noises and smell very bad (by all accounts; we weren't that close), and thus have few predators. 

More hoatzin.  There was a little family living by the oxbow lake we visited.  I don't know what an oxbow lake is or how it differs from a regular lake, which is what this one looked like.

These are bats, asleep under a log.  I forget which type of bat, but they are unique in their ability/willingness to sleep under logs instead of in caves/holes/whatever.

I fail to climb a vine.

Inside that giant tree behind me in the picture in which I fail to climb the vine.

Boat-based-artistic-photographer photo number one: creepy spider edition.

Boat-based-artistic-photographer photo number two: hiding butterfly edition.

Aries' relatives!  Also known as: green or Amazon parrots (according to Brady).

Termites, in the tunnel they build up to their nest.  Pedro ate one.  Although they eat dead trees, they don't kill the tree they live in, which seems sensible.

Horrible tarantula part 1.

Horrible tarantula part 2.

Out-of-focus monkeys part 1.  Emily spotted these guys.  I'm fairly confident I have better pictures of all the monkeys we sighted, to be posted later.  We also saw the kind of monkey Ross had on friends, but not until after I'd grabbed these off my camera, so you'll have to wait for that, too.  :-)

Out-of-focus monkey part 2.  A different type, obviously.

If I caption the macaws my pretty layout goes all haywire, so instead:

Top left photo: the one brave (or possibly stupid?) macaw who went down to the clay lick, taken using profound camera-fu on my part (telescope + macro lens + manual focus, oh yes).  Top right photo: the tree right above the clay lick.  Other trees contained other macaws as well, but this one had the most at once.  Bottom photo: more camera-fu.  Macaws mate for life, so you only ever see them in groups of two or three (three would be baby, which reaches full-size very quickly). 

The reason the clay lick macaw is possibly stupid is that there was a raptor presiding over the whole area, looking a bit menacing.  Personally I didn't see why they were so afraid of him, as they were each at least twice as big as him and easily could have taken him, especially if they ganged up.

In the river below the clay lick, another caiman, looking lazy.

Rio Tambopata at sunset, after we returned from the fruit farm.  

Longer jungle update, part 1 of ??

Previously, on Claire and Emily in Peru, we were in Cusco, having visited the Sacred Valley and Macchu Picchu.  And now, in Claire and Emily in Peru…

Sadly the wifi at the lodge (which we leave in the morning, deep sigh) isn't good enough for pictures, which is really too bad because they should ILLUSTRATE THE POST sigh.  Oh well, tomorrow.  Anyway: while I initially wanted to come to Peru for Macchu Picchu, I think our visit to the rainforest has handily been the highlight of our trip.

We started (on 8/15) by flying out of Cusco to Puerto Maldonado.  It's a fascinating flight: it starts by flying over the Andes and related highlands that surround Cusco, which look much as they do all the way from Lima.  And then, you blink, and below you is flat forest with brown muddy rivers swirling through it.  Compared to the mountains, it looks *so* far away, even though the plane's altitude hasn't changed.

Case in point: we landed in Puerto Maldonado, I pulled my plastic water bottle out of my bag, and it had crushed partially flat, like they sometimes do when you open them at cruising altitude and close them again before landing.

(Fun Fact: airplanes are pressurized to between 6,000 and 8,000 feet (not sea level); Cusco is somewhere around 11,000 feet).

In Puerto Maldonado, we were met by representatives from Rainforest Expeditions, the company that runs our (and a couple other) lodge(s).  After a quick bus ride with other tourists to their offices, we repacked the necessaries from our backpacks into a big duffel (ensuring that we can no longer find anything), and hopped back on the bus for the 45 (bumpy bumpy bumpy) minutes to the port along the River Tambopata.  Well, 45 + 4 or so, as a piglet ran into the middle of the road, necessitating a stop while a guide ran out and shooed it away.

We then got on a boat, benches on each side, canopy overhead, motor in the back, and started the 3-hour ride to the lodge.  The ride was quite pleasant, so long as the boat was moving, as it generated a comfy breeze against the heat and humidity (and sun, in the middle of the river).  Along the way, we saw several Creatures of Interest: a family of capybaras was my favorite part, along with the birds that hang out on their backs and clean them.  Also on view: a caiman, sunning itself.

It's winter down here, so by the time we arrived (6-6:30 ish) it was already fairly dark.  We of course had forgotten to pull out our flashlights from the duffles, so we were a bit lost until they were delivered to our rooms - which are electricity-free.  They have three walls, and the forth opened to the jungle.  This means it is Loud at night, but also relatively breezy.  The rooms do have hot water, however.  The kerosene lamps in the walls mean that I'm unlikely to kill myself at any given time, though headlamps certainly help.

(Instead, I bit it on the afternoon of the next day, in broad daylight, descending the steps to the river.  I think it's actually a mild sprain, of the "worry about it in the off-season/walk it off" variety, because short of using a hilarious toucan-themed walking stick this morning, I have not been slowed down by the injury.  Except that subsequently Pedro started saying things like "please be careful, it's slippery here…Claire.")

We were grouped with several other families and assigned a guide for our stay: Pedro, the Amazing.  I don't know if one can request guides when booking, but if you decide to come here and have that power, ask for him.  He's super-passionate; able to see things in the bush/trees/whatever I never would; knows an impressive amount about, well, everything; and geeks out hard-core when he spots something rare or exciting (see: the harpy eagle, coming in a later installment).  Yes, I am intending to friend him on Facebook.

The rest of our cast of characters consists of: a couple from Seattle, about my age; a couple from England, mid-30's, the guy worked on the Olympics, the woman is definitely only here to humor him; and a perfectly Danish family, very tall, with a pair of brothers, 17 and 21, who are handily beating us in the most-hilarious-siblings competition.

We were too tired to caiman hunt on night 1 (though I did go night 2; see a later installment about Horrible Things in the Amazon at Night) and instead went to bed early, for a 5:00 am wakeup, 5:30 am breakfast and our first adventure, involving a canopy tower and a visit to an Oxbow lake.

This morning, the day that follows the events described in this post, was the first and possibly last time in my ENTIRE LIFE that I have been excited to be allowed to sleep in until 6.

I SAW A TOUCAN.

So there's outrageously slow but functional wifi in the Amazon twice a day, when they turn on the electricity to let us Charge the Things (like camera batteries).  Aforementioned slowness (as well as a surplus of Other Awesomeness that takes up our time) will probably preclude me from uploading pictures, but I thought a quick note was in order, mostly BECAUSE I CAN.

I'm *so* glad I decided to have us stay here (at Refugios Amazonas) an extra day.  Originally I'd planned only 2 nights, but bumped up to 3 when my first lodge choice, which is much closer to Puerto Maldonado, was booked, and the company offered us this lodge instead (a 3 hour boat ride).  This is possibly the coolest thing I've ever done.

It is quite humid and warm, but frankly compared to this summer in Charlottesville it's practically comfortable.  It's cooler than VA, but more humid.

So far,  here is an incomplete list of things we have seen in the less than 24 hours we've been here: a turtle that can't retract its head into its shell; capybaras; a caiman; TOUCANS; macaws (at a distance); green parrots (look just like Aries, but green); pirahnas; a deer (at a distance); A HUGE TARANTULA (OMFG); other birds whose names I don't remember, including yellow birds that make these funny hanging nests and these oversized chickens that look sort of like turkeys but all colorful-like; and bats, asleep under a log.  We have also heard at least two types of monkeys, including the howler monkey, which is *incredibly* loud.  And it turns out that parrots are incredibly noisy in the morning in the wild, too.

Photos may have to wait until improved internet in Cusco, but this is a start at least, right? *grin*  I'm off to hydrate.

Bonus picture-spam: Maras, Moray, and Ollantaytamba

Quality internet has led to both the ability to download Chrome as well as civilized upload speeds, so I'm catching us up a little bit with photos from yesterday.  Macchu Picchu will have to wait, however, as I haven't looked at them yet.  Anyway this is basically photo-spam to add some pictures to the stories...

Salineras at Maras.  This picture lacks the real panoramic view  and kind of fails to demonstrate how many salt pans there are (...it goes on forever), but it gives you the idea at least.

Mis-named amphitheaters, used for agricultural experimentation.

The stairs are stones inlaid in the walls.  They feel a bit treacherous, even though they're not.  Also, stairs are an unexpectedly critical component of this adventure.

Guinea pigs, called cuy, in a traditional Inca-style home in Ollantaytambo.  No, we haven't eaten any (yet?).   Yes, they were very cute.  Note shown: the totally blase dog.

Ruins at Ollantaytambo, from below.

A frankly embarrassing proportion of my photographs are of Raul ahead of us, booking it up the stairs.

Raul in action.  The primary portion of the sun temple is constructed without mortar, and you can't even fit a piece of paper between the stones.

Part of the Ollantaytamba ruins, the terraces in particular, and a portion of the town itself, viewed from above (basically turning 90 degrees left from the photo of Raul above).