Moving to a new blog

We are going to try a new blog platform for our travel (and other things) log on tumblr. You can follow us here: http://jack-debbie.tumblr.com/

We'll start updating that blog shortly

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Programming Note

Folks - It's been a while since we posted and it seems like some of our formatting things have changed. I probably don't have the time to fix things while on the road, but the blog should still be readable. If there are any issues please let me know so I can address them. Thanks.

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Day One in the Canadian Rockies

So far it's been a great day. There has been a lot of driving, and we are both a little tired, but the scenery has made up for it and we got to our destination early.


Earlier I was blogging away at the coffee shop, as fun as that was we are now in our hotel in Fairmont Hot Springs - just outside of Banff (actually Kootenay National Park in British Columbia)




After getting a caffeine fix, we walked downtown Banff. The national parks are different in this strange land of 'Canada' compared to the US; there are actual towns within the park boundaries, yet another interesting fact that we have picked up. Maybe we should do a documentary for National Geographic. Here we are with a typical Banff icon:

The people of Canada have a very interesting view of keeping the peace. They have a force of peace officers called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Pretty impressive, right? I'm not sure what the mounted part means, I thought it meant riding a horse but we keep seeing all of these moose references and we're not sure. Anyway, all we know is the mounted police ride around in Ford cars (shocking since the Canadian government doesn't own any portion of that car company). We'll keep the camera ready for police riding Moose.







Anyway, basck to our trip. We stopped at the continental divide which is also the border between the provinces (and the parks).
That's me with a foot in two different Canadian provinces. It took us about three hours (including stops) to make it to our hotel in Fairmont Hot Springs, but we saw some excellent scenery; here is one of the turnoffs:
As impressive as the views are, we had a violent thunderstorm roll through. Instead of separate thunderclaps, there were so many lightning strikes it was basically a constant rumble. The hail was pea-sized. It was actually nice since it helped cool things off. Here is the view outside our room:Check out the hail collecting on the windshield wipers. Tomorrow is going to be a relaxing day at one of the hot springs pools. We'll keep you posted.

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We Made It to Canadia

Mr. & Mrs. O'Brien arrived in Canadia with no issues and we grabbed a shuttle to the hotel where we took a dip in the pool and got an early night's sleep. The hotel pool had a two story fully enclosed corkscrew waterslide which we played on with the other 10 year olds.

We got up fairly early to get our car and start exploring this strange land. I must say the drive has been beautiful but we are still trying to adjust to the quirks of the culture; it's almost like a different country! They have this very strange thing called the metric system, I'll try to figure out how to explain it and tell you more in a later post.

Anyway we arrived in Banff shortly after 11am. Here's proof:


The first thing we did was find a nice coffee shop with internet access and put up a few pictures. Debbie had some organic chai tea (extra foam). The coffee shop is the Wild Flour Bakery. We are about to spend some time walking around town. Here's Deb outside the coffee shop with the Rockies in the background.

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Wedding Weekend

Thank you everybody for making the weekend so memorable. Here are a couple of photos snapped by friends, of course we had to show the cakes. Now that the party is over we are off to the Canadian Rockies.

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Filling in the Blanks

And there are lots of blanks to fill. During the trip we barely scratched the surface of our adventures, so the plan is to keep adding to the journal. Let's get started with our second day in Lima. Click here for the full web album for this stretch of the trip. We enjoyed the continental breakfast at the hotel and took a cab to Central Lima. Here is a partial shot of the Plaza de Armas:

















The governor's palace is also on the square.













We took a tour of the Cathedral (Jesus, not the famous one, was an excellent tour guide). Here is the facade and the bishop's balcony:











Check out the web album for the cool carvings of saints in the choir. There were also catacombs:











We had lunch at a place run by nuns who contribute profits to their charity work. I had Lomo Saltado (a common dish with steak, peppers, and fries); Deb had chicken. We walked over to another church where we had to sort of sneak in the door, but it was worth it. Here is the facade (check out the web album for good pictures of the saints).















After that we walked through the market. As you would expect they had everything from meat to fish to vegetables to you name it. Here is some of the awesome corn. Check out how plump the kernels are; they make excellent popcorn which we enjoyed on the Inca Trail hike.


















We walked around quite a bit, saw a couple of more churches, checked out Chinatown in Lima and walked to the pedestrian bridge. We also checked out the Inquisition museum, which was nothing to rave about, but it may have been better with a guide explaining things. We had a couple of great meals, stay tuned for more on that.

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We Made It!

As you can see we made it to Machu Picchu. We were confidenmt we´d get there we just were not sure how wet we would be when we arrived. It started raining at 1:30am and when the wakeup call came at 4am we packed up and had breakfast in a steady downpour. As we waited for the gate to the trail head to open the rain tapered off and there were only occasional drizzles after that. The weather broke long enough to get some great shots that we'll post soon. As for now it´s late and we still have to pack for the trip home tomorrow so see you soon.

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Putting the Adventure in Adventure Travel

As you can see from the picture, we did make the first stop on our Lake Titikaka tour, although it was planes, taxis, and boats to make it happen. We are in Puno now and on our way to Cusco in the am. We are behind on filling you in on Lima, and a lot has happened in the last couple of days, so the plan for this post is to tell the story of our journey to meet up with our Titikaka tour group and cover a bunch of ground with photos. Further elaboration to follow when we have more time. Internet access is easy to find, the time is not. Keep reading after the fold...


Things got started early Tuesday with our old buddy Eduardo the taxi driver. You may remember him from this photo (he is wearing the same shirt). He picked us up at 3:30am for the ride to Lima airport. At this hour traffic in Lima is actually sane and we made it with no problems. We were scheduled to connect thorough Cusco to Juliaca to start our tour of Lake Titikaka. We had known all along that we were scheduled to arive in Juliaca at 9am, which was an hour after our tour group's boat had departed the port of Puno for the Islands. So we had made arrangements ahead of time to join the group after the first leg of the tour. The first stop for the tour is the floating islands of the Uros tribe, which is relatively close to shore. After that they head to the island Amantani. Along the way they agreed to make a small detour to pick us up at the end of the penninsula, which was an excellent plan in theory.

We arrived in Cusco with no problems. Then our flight was delayed a half hour. Then longer. Then the flight one gate over was cancelled for "weather reasons". Apparently flights are cancelled with partly sunny skies in Peru. We called our tour operator and he said we could still figure out a way to make the connection. By the time we landed in Juliaca it was 11:30 and things looked grim. Our friend David from the tour operator gave us the option of driving out to the end of the penninsula and arranging for a private boat to take us to Amantani. (by the way this is a good point to mention that the key to this whole tour was getting to spend the night on Amantani housed by an indigenous family in their home, so needless to say we were looking forward to it.) We decide to roll the dice.

So with David in the passenger seat and our trusty driver Señor Puma (I love the fact that there is a key for ñ here) we were on our way down the road you see to the left. It was like that for an hour and a half and we received a good introduction to rural Peruvian life. By the way , we never actuall got Señor Puma's full name but it ended in puma.



Afer a teeth chattering ride down the penninsula we made it to a small dock. Here are David(R) and Señor Puma(L) as we get underway. This was just after what we learned what the captain (Simon) was going to charge us for this journey. And of course we had excellent instructions about what to do if we did not meet up with Angel (our tour group leader). Sorry about Señor Puma; trust me he drives like a puma even if he doesn't look like one. And if you are wondering about the annoying practice of telling you every random person's name along the trip, we are not tired of it yet.

We needed about an hour to find Angel once we got to the island. Simon put the screws to us to get paid, and we gave in, but to his credit he stuck it through until we found Angel and had a family to host us. See below for some pictures on the island.

The trip back to Puno was improvised as well. After actaully sticking with our group for a tour of the neighboring island of Taquile, we were dropped off on one of the floating islands so we could see the part of the tour that we missed. This was no problem, but we got dropped off at around 3:15 and were supposedly getting picked up by a boat Mr. Willy (the tour company operator) had scheduled to arrive at 5pm. The only problem was an island made of reeds about 50 yards in diamater doesn't take a lot of time to explore, even considering there were several tables of local crafts for Deb to peruse. Anyway to start getting through this quicker a random boat picked our island and their captain (Eduardo. Nope still not getting old) agreed to take us in for free. Then our real guy showed up and we jumped on there and made it into Puno. To be met by... David our buddy from the taxi ride. We negotiated the final balance payment as that was that. Believe me this could have been a much longer story. Anyway here are some highlights in pictures...

Our host family's home...






Is that a scarecrow or Debbie?







Our guestroom...














The cookhouse with our host mother. Everything was cooked here over an open flame. And it all tasted great. It was also a great place to stay warm and talk with the family. You can't really tell but the homes are made of clay and straw bricks, sometimes with a layer(s) of painted plaster on them.














Here are the two daughters, Dahlia (older) and Dolly (very cute). We're still not sure we have there names exactly right, but they answered when we used them.














Deb and Jack with youngest son Frank in full traditional dress about to head out to a fiesta for the touristas.

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Lima Time!

Hi everyone. After a fairly long flight we made it to Lima, Peru. Here is what greeted us when we landed. So far the weather has been great (better than usual supposedly) in the low 80s and sunny, with the air surprisingly clearer than we expected. Our taxi driver Eduardo took us to our very quaint hotel in Miraflores, an upscale outer district of Lima, on the coast. Click ´read more´for the rest.

So we went from this:

To this:
In about 14 hours. After we checked in, we walked arond the central Miraflores area checking out the main square and the various shops. Deb was able to hold off buying anyting for the first day. Not that she didn´t want to. Later that evening we walked down to the coast. Miraflores borders the ocean with very steep cliffs so there are very nice views over the ocean. There is actually a mall built into the cliffs. It´s a typically modern mall so thankfully they found a way to build it below the top level of the cliff so it does not obscure the view from the street. Otherwise we would have had too look past signs for Hooters and Tony Roma´s. Seroiusly. At one of the mall cafes we enjoyed our first Pisco Sour - the national drink of Peru.

As you can see, even SpongeBob likes it.

We then made our way back to a restaurant near our hotel and had a delicious dinner. We´ll have more to post on Lima soon, but we have a 3am wakeup call for our flight to Lake Titicaca so we are going to cut it short for now. We´re spending Tuesday night on an island in Lake Titicaca in a guest house of the indigenous people. Needless to say there is no internet access so don´t expect to hear from us until Wed evening at the earliest. Thanks for the great recommendation on the hotel Amy.

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Here's the Itinerary

View Larger Map
This should be an interactive map; so if you click on it you can play around a little. We head out on Saturday night April 5 (actually Sunday AM at 1:35am) from Oakland. The plan is to go to Zachary's Pizza for dinner Sat night in order to bribe Nancy & Bob to take us to the airport. Here's the full itinerary:

Sunday, April 6
Depart OAK @ 1:35am. Arrive San Salvador, El Salvador @ 8:00am
Depart San Salvador @ 9:00am. Arrive Lima, Peru @ 2:15pm
* Hang out in Lima *
Tuesday, April 8
Depart Lima @ 5:40am. Arrive Cuzco @ 7:05am
Depart Cuzco @8:10M. Arrive Jukiaca @ 9:00am
* Tour Lake Titicaka *
Thursday, April 10
Depart Juliaca @ 9:45am. Arrive Cuzco @ 9:45am
* Machu Picchu trek starts on Sat, April 12 *
Tuesday, April 15
* Reach Machu Picchu *
Wednesday, April 16
Depart Cuzco @ 7:55am. Arrive Lima @ 9:20am
Depart Lima @ 3:00pm. Arrive San Salvador @ 6:15pm
Depart San Salvador @ 7:10pm. Arrive SFO @ 12:25 am on Thursday, April 17

And then... vacation over :-(

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