¿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.