Where was Renae?

So I’ve been home for about 4 weeks now and regret to inform you that when I say home, I mean California. My trip has come to an end and saying that there has been a bit of a gap between now and my last blog would be an understatement, so I admit...it has been a while. From the time I last told you about my trip to Mendoza until now, a lot has happened. I have visited 5 countries (Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina), improved my spanish significantly, gotten quite good at dancing the tango, gained an appreciation for other languages and cultures, and even have a boyfriend. (I know I had joked around about that in my first blog, but I really wasn’t expecting to go to Argentina and come back with a boyfriend at all, let alone a Swiss guy who is half argentine.)

I have found out that internet in third world countries is horrible…ESPECIALLY in Bolivia and now have a high appreciation for things I never thought about before, like phone plans (which are really expensive in Argentina), free/complimentary water (nothing’s better than sitting down at a table and having a waiter pour me a FREE glass of water) and toilet paper (both because toilet paper is not provided in the few public bathrooms you can find and the fact that you can’t throw the toilet paper in the toilet, which took a while to get used to). I definitely have come back with a whole new perspective of the world and although I am grateful for the country I live in, I have realized there are some things that we really need to work on in the States (such as our education system, world knowledge/current events and health care). It really surprised me how much other countries know about the world yet how little we know about them and my goal now is to interest the people of our country in the world we live in outside of our own country. Arriving back to the states after travelling South America is a bittersweet feeling and I’ll let the next few posts show you why.

I put together a video with  trip. By the time you finish reading my next 7 posts about my months adventure...see you if you match up the video clips to the place they were taken at. Enjoy :) 

Punta del Este Beach House

First I begin with Uruguay, a small yet beautiful country that borders Brazil and Argentina. My boyfriend’s argentine uncle had rented a beach house for 3 weeks in Punta del Este and invited us to come spend the weekend with them. So of course, the weekend before finals (which I felt extremely prepared for), we took a one and a half hour ferry ride from Buenos Aires to a small, old town called Colonia where we ate some good Chivitos (an amazing sandwich-style national dish of Uruguay with filet mignon in it, which is way better than any American burger can try to accomplish), explored the city gate and wooden drawbridge and then set off by bus to Punta del Este, about 4-5 hours away. 

Although Punta del Este is completely different than what most people would imagine a South American city to be like, it was one of my favorites because it was so beautiful and relaxing. When you’re driving on the coast you can see water on all sides of you (left, right and front) as it is a city on a peninsula. There is also a really cool famous hand sculpture on the beach. In the summer a lot of movie stars go there for vacation or own houses there.

Below is a video of Gabriel and I dancing the Tango on the beach outside of the beach house we stayed in at Punta del Este. It was our first time actually dancing together and the music isn't actually tango music, but nonetheless it serves as good entertainment.

 

Cuzco, Peru and Machu Picchu

After school got out, the first week of November, we began our adventures in Cuzco, Peru. When I say we, I mean my friend John Barger who I studied in Buenos Aires with, Gabriel (my boyfriend who I met through John) and Trey, John’s friend from El Paso, Texas. We decided to go to Cuzco 3 days before our planned hike on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in order to acclimate to the altitude and avoid getting altitude sickness. I found a great direct-flight ticket price on studentuniverse (if you’re a student, that site will have the cheapest flights) yet waited until I received my new passport from the U.S. embassy to buy my ticket and found out that Gabriel had actually bought the last ticket for that flight. So while John and Gabriel’s flight was 6 hours, mine was 16 hours with a 12 hour layover in Lima. (Lima is definitely a horrible airport to have a layover in. When I arrived at 9pm there was nowhere to sit or a place to even think about sleeping as the airport was packed, in addition, I couldn’t check my bags in until 3am. So I went exploring for a place to take a nap until 3 and discovered a quiet chapel where I fell asleep on a pew with my head bowed, until a women woke me up saying it’s disrespectful to put your feet on the pew. I felt a bit guilty after that so I really didn’t get much sleep.)

 

Cuzco was a really old and cool city. It’s basically a ton of houses in between these huge and gorgeous mountains. I kind of felt like I was in one of the Bourne Legacy movies as I could envision myself running away from someone on the roof tops of these old houses in some foreign country where I stick like out red wine on a white shirt because I tower over everybody and am blonde. We found some GREAT food in Peru for great prices, where the locals would go. We also were able to rent hiking boots, sleeping bags and rainpants for our trek; I definitely learned how to bargain.

Our Inca Trail Group

 

I really don’t think I can explain Machu Picchu or the Inca Trail in words. Machu Picchu was my top thing to see in South America and was something that I never thought I would have the opportunity to do. The Inca Trail that we took was a 4 day hike and each night we would camp in sleeping bags and tents that our small, barely 5 ft Inca porters would carry up the mountains wherever we went. Our group consisted of a 60-something year old Norwegian couple who are cross country skiers, a girl from Boston who had just graduated and had just finished doing volunteer work in Panama, 2 young guys from Mexico, a guy from France and a middle aged women from Quebec, Canada who couldn’t speak Spanish, had horrible English and whose French could not be understood by the guy from France because it was so different from France's French. (I must add that the cross-country skiing Norwegians would always arrive first to the campsite everyday). We found out that if you don’t speak spanish (or if you go to the English websites) and book the trail in a non-spanish speaking country, the price for the Inca trail will be a lot higher than if you spoke spanish and booked it with an agency in a spanish speaking country.

 

The hike was a lot more strenuous than I thought it would be (I think because of the altitude) and John even got altitude sickness for 2 of the days and was throwing up all day/night. There are LOTS of really huge steps along the entire Inca Trail, which are really hard on your body but the cool Inca sites and beautiful scenery of the mountains inspire you to keep on moving and pursue your final destination, Machu Picchu. (I forgot to add that Gabriel did not book his trail soon enough so he was not able to go up with us on the Inca Trail and instead did another trail, to different Inca sites, that was even more strenuous with way more mosquitoes and in which he also got food poisoning/had diarrhea/was throwing up the whole time.) Yet no matter what happened, nothing could stop any of us from having a great experience. (Actually, the entire time we were in Peru and Bolivia, all of us were on diarrhea and therefore on Imodium as well, probably from all that really good food we ate…or maybe just the water. Yet when we arrived back in Argentina, everything went back to normal; just a heads up for those of you thinking about travelling here.) Machu Picchu looked so unreal; I felt like I was looking at a 3D picture on Google Images and not at real life. After spending about 5 hours at Machu Picchu, we hiked down to Aguas Calientes were we caught the 5 hr train ride back to Cuzco and then got on an overnight bus at 10pm to Copacabana until, where we arrived at 10am the next day. 

Copacabana, Lake Titicaca, Isla de Sol and La Paz

From Peru, we took a 9 hour overnight bus which dropped us off in the middle of nowhere, where we then got into a small van which took us to the Bolivian border, went through customs and then got into an even smaller van where we were all crunched in together which dropped us off in Copacabana. (And that's something that we found extremely common in Bolivia...everything was really small for us as seen below.)

Although we were really lucky with the weather as it was beautiful throughout our travels, we traveled throughout Peru and Bolivia during their rainy season (and therefore off season). Although we didn't have any specific travel plans but rather decided to go with the flow of things, upon arriving to Copacabana we had decided to take a ferry that afternoon over to Isla del Sol where we would then spend the next couple nights on the island, yet soon after finding out that the next day was the Bolivian Census (which happens once every 10 years…lucky us) and that no one is allowed to leave their house/hotel/hostel on Census day as they literally go to all off the houses and count everybody, we decided to just relax and stay on Copacabana, rather than be stuck on an island where we weren’t even sure if we could get water. So we found a really nice room for 4 people with a beautiful lakeside view on the mountain, in a resort-like hostile called Las Olas, which is run by a German man who gave us a discount for the rooms ($50 a night for all of us, so $12 each) since Gabriel spoke German to him as he is from a Swiss-German province. (In fact, the top picture of this blog entry is a panoramic shot of the view from outside our room.) This was a great place to finally relax after constantly being on the go for the last week in Peru. The weather was beautiful. We sat in the hammocks outside in the day (although because the altitude was soooo high…even higher than Cuzco, Machu Picchu and Peru, it is very important to put on sunscreen, as John soon found out after laying out for 30 minutes, the sun BURNS you quite fast here) and watched beautiful thunderstorms on the other side of the lake while drinking some excellent red wine by night.

 

The day after the census, we took the 8:30am ferry over to the northern part of Isla del Sol to hike 6.2 miles across the island to the southern part. The island was cool to see and the ferry ride was absolutely beautiful, but I’m really glad we stayed on Copacabana instead of Isla del Sol as our resort in Copacabana was awesome (and had a great restaurant where we ate for thanksgiving dinner), whereas Isla de Sol was really desert-like with not much on it and was something you can do/enjoy in a day. At 3:30pm we took the ferry from the Southern part of the island back to Copacabana where we then took a bus at 6:30pm to La Paz.

La Paz is a really cool city, especially to drive into as it is just a huge city placed randomly between a bunch of enormous mountains. Of all the cities I went to in South America, La Paz was definitely the craziest. It's packed with people, has small streets that 1 car can barely fit through, contains a bunch of low hanging wires that power the cable cars and there are people randomly dressed up in zebra costumes at all the traffic lights in attempt to force cars to respect traffic lights (because driving IS that bad down there). It is actually hilarious because as soon as the lights turn red, the zebra people jump in front of the buses to stop them and the government pays them to do this. Everything seemed so disorganized and random but even amongst that I really enjoyed La Paz and wish we had more time there. We were only going to be in La Paz for one day to catch a bus connection at 7pm to Uyuni where the Salt Flats are. My original Plan was to bike El Camino del Muerto (the Road of Death), yet because everyone was stuck due the census in Bolivia, all the 9pm cama buses to Uyuni filled up quickly, so we ended up being stuck with a semi-cama bus with no service that left at 7pm. Therefore, I couldn’t take the risk of missing it so I did not bike the road of death and instead roamed the city for the day. Other than the traffic zebras, the highlight of the day was watching Skyfall, the new James Bond movie at a mall in La Paz for $3. Can't get better than that.