Thursday, May 25, 2006

nos vamos sailing

team pirate.

locky tending to the surfboards.

dad!

cartoon island, san blas, panama.back of a truck headed to portobelo, panama. lindsay, me, rob, dad.

um. right. once again, where to begin. made our way to a sixty foot sail boat headed to cartagena, colombia dressed in pirate and wench wear. team pirate: locky and rob (two aussie surfers), linsday (canadian), ross (south africa), me and dad. four fun filled days of swindling, villanry, drinking, swimming, dancing, laughing, joking and laughing some more. dodgy opp shops, "mushroom!", nos vamos sailing, each of each piece of each part, 5 mon, paradilic mate...paradilic.

in cartagena now. land of salsa, beautiful women and cocaine. so much to write. ill have to continue this later.

the adventure is almost over. only a week left and ill be back in the states.



Friday, May 19, 2006

¿como se dice ´hacker´?


it´s liv, not annie, guest-posting from cuzco, where mack and i are spending our last day in peru before bussing it back down south to bolivia.

while mei and annie have been tropicalizing hard-core and preparing for island-hopping with australian pirates, the two of us still on this side of the equator have been wearing our alpaca. the pictures up there are from the circuit that mackay and i just spent five days trekking, around a mountain called ausangate. like so many places we´ve been in south america, ausangate is saturated with bigness -- the terrain on the trail changes from glacial to boggish to desert to pastures, all of it spectacular. and the colors, lit up by the high-altitude sunshine -- opaque turquoise lakes against red-cliff walls, deep green moss-beds below white peaks -- are other-worldly. it was as if every part of it, the mountains and valleys, too broad and deep to fit in one shot, and the colors and light, too bright for our disposable kodak cameras, was conspiring to make us just stop and look. and when we did, what we saw was totally amazing. the only thing missing was annie.

and also, we did a lot of laughing. por supuesto.

mack heads back to the bay on tuesday, and three weeks later, i´ll do the same. i´m not sure when, but somewhere along the way, the beginning of the trip turned into the end. strange. sad. exciting. all of this chapter-ending and chapter-beginning.

anyway, it´s been wonderful, every last bit of it. and now mack and i are off to revisit the chapter called lunch at jack´s.

much much love

liv

* llamas, by the way, are like alpacas, but with longer ears. and alpacas, are like sheep, but with longer necks. and sheep here, are exactly like the sheep at home, but with tails. dude, we´ve learned, like, so much.

yo ho yo ho a prirate´s life for me


i´m in panama.
i left cusco. made it to lima. got a 20 hour delay leaving lima into bogota. stayed in one hotel in lima til i got kicked out and was put on a plane to bogota, had to spend a night in a hotel in bogota. finally made it to panama after serious taxi confusion. oof. miserable. but ms mei was waiting for me. and oh what a joyful reunion! spent our first day together on an island off the coast of panama then DAD came to town!! woohoo!

we´ve been staying at this hostel and met some hilarious aussie surfers, rob and locky, who were planning on jumping on a big sail boat and sailing to cartagena, colombia. soooo, dad and i decided to jump on a boat with them. (really just wanting to fulfill my lifelong dream of being a pirate in the caribbean. aarrrrr). we leave on sunday and very very sadly mei must leave us on saturday but she will be with us in spirit.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

hello dalai, farewell friends

cusco

never too far from home. ventura represent on the back of an old van in the streets of cusco. home sweet home.

morning on machu picchu. we hiked up to the top of wayna picchu (big mountain in the background).
i seriously love llamas.
the other lama, the dalai lama...whoa
team lawrence
fun with hats!

alright!! it has been quite awhile and sadly enough, we lost kieran to colombia this morning so i can no longer rely on his blog to do all the talking.
where to begin.
well. i guess i´ll start with what is on my mind and that is the parting of ways that happened only a few hours ago. kieran, who traveled with us for a month and who became an integral and beloved part of our team, jumped on a plane destined for colombia and i sadly surrendered liv and mack to a bus headed for some peruvian mountains. our chapter together in south america has closed and i haven´t entirely wrapped my head around it and probably won´t be able to for awhile so i´ll have to leave it at that. sewn together by experience.

but new chapters are opening for all of us. kieran continuing on his around the world adventure. mack and liv trekking in the peruvian mountains for a week and then back to bolivia. me in cuzco for a couple more days before flying up to panama to meet mei mei (!!!) and then dad (!!!). woohoo.

sheesh. so much has happened that i haven´t commented on (please refer to kieran´s blog). a week ago we had the great pleasure of joining forces with Team Lawrence: alexis and her sis stephanie. alexis spent all of april in quito doing a med program and steph decided to ditch school for a week to hang out in peru with us. being with them recharged our batteries. meeting up with friends is just plain awesome. we just couldn´t get over the "dude. we´re like in peru together. crazy" factor. (only a few days mei....)

machu picchu was incredible. people warned us that it is touristy, etc but it did not fail in completely blowing our minds. it is such a surreal place. it hit me far harder than i imagined it would.

other than that, well, obscene amounts of shopping. it might even be on the verge of reckless. getting everything home is going to be interesting. we did have a crazy experience the other day however whilst hunting for tapestries. we just so happened to be in the plaza where the dalai lama was scheduled arrive for a conference. sure enough we watched his car pull up and then out he came all smiles and waves. um, did that just happen? are you serious? it was like when we were in bolivia and the hostel owner told us to go stand on the balcony because the president was walking by in a parade.

oh yeah, parades. hmm. let me just say, south americans looooooove their parades....to a more-than-slightly irritating degree. there is no escape. at first you think, "oh. now isn´t that nice. what a lovely tradition. the music, the marching". you think that until you are awoken from the sound of a marching band outside your window at 3am playing the same song they have been playing for the last four days straight. or until you have suffered your third cardiac arrest from the unexpected and deafening explosion of fireworks. ah, parades. who doesn´t love a parade.