Saqsaywaman & Machupicchu
There is so much damn stuff to do in Peru, I'm not going to go into even half of the things I got up to - strictly some interesting highlights. One could easily spend a year in Peru alone and still come away feeling there were things they missed out on.
Saqsaywaman (yep, it's basically said sexy-waman) is a Inca site up on one of hills above Cusco. Its primary attractions are the massive three storied structures which, even though only 25% remains, are still incredibly impressive. Here, have some pics:
The white Jesus shown above is overlooking Cusco. It's huge but probably not as big as that famous one in Brazil.
Saqsaywaman marks the start of many other smaller Inca sites stretching out away from Cusco. It's great, you can pretty much hike for hours and you will come across amazing scenery and probably ruins...I just made sure I always knew in which direction the main road was so I could get picked up by a collectivo to return to Cusco hehe.
After doing other random stuff in Cusco it was MACHUPICCHU TIME. I declined the idea to do the Inca Trail or one of its alternatives to get to the site itself - I had done a lot of hiking and climbing recently and they're muy caro. So it was the touristy train for me and this Aussie I met. The train ends up in the commonly-regarded-as-terrible-and-rightly-so Aguas Calientes (literally hot waters). This town at the base of MP is basically a stupidly overpriced extended train stop. The key theme is: in and out as quickly as poss.
So we spent a night and got the first bus up the hill at 5:30 in the morning. Got to the top, couldn't see nada! It was all misty and cloudy. Rainy season, bleh.
It was definitely a cool experience though wandering through the ruins with bits and pieces being exposed as we went...
After a strenuous climb up Waynapicchu, the mountain at one end of the site, the cloud cover was still thick over Machupiccu. I decided to go and see some other areas of the greater site such as the temple of the moon and the great cave (in English). The cave is a temple made by extending a massive natural cave. After another few hours of hiking through the oddly NZ-like bush and then returning, the cloud was cleared and for the first time the whole site was revealed!
Even with the odd light shower, the site really did impress. It's one of those places that has an indescribable quality to it which takes your breath away. Positioned as it is on top of a wide ridge between soaring peaks, it is difficult to imagine a more idealistic location for an important city and its temples. Best ruin yet.
There are boat loads of more pictures in my Cusco set, the Pisac set and the Machupicchu set.
El Misti & Juanita the Ice Maiden
After indulging in Lima, I took a very comfortable overnight bus to Arequipa - about 10 hours south down the coast. Arequipa turned out to be a very cool Spanish colonial city with lots of interesting things to see and do. My first port of call however was to do some sort of serious trekking - use those bloody hiking boots that have been taking up precious space in my bag. I sure used them, infact overused them which I'll get to.
After some tour agency hopping and some thinking time over surprisingly good coffee in this awesome French crêpe place, I decided to climb El Misti starting early the following day. I had previously seen this 5820m peak looming over the parque central in town along with its brother mountains alongside.
Our group of 5 including the guide headed off in the morning after last minute gear checks and packing. The actual walking started at around 3500m above sea level, which was interesting as I was not particularly well acclimatized - this being my first proper trekking at this type of altitude. Walking uphill felt great, for the first 20 seconds or so! After that the heavy mouth-ajar breathing was necessary and the old ticker was already cranking.
We all had to take it quite slow though out of necessity and after 6-7 hours of walking uphill with regular breaks we made it to the base camp at around 4600m. Here we were to stay the night in tents. This is what the view was like...
After dinner from the gas cooker (amazing what our guide could whip up) we basically went to bed after the sun went down. This was necessary as the next day we had to get up at 1am to start our ascent in darkness. In near freezing conditions we trekked on. It was amazing to see the sun creep over the distant mountain ranges and we all needed its warming glow - my fingers felt like frostbite was setting in!
Thankfully the altitude didn't affect me too much beyond a minor headache, breathlessness and crazy heart beat. One guy in our group, who happened to be a very fit cross-country runner, had to turn back at 5000m with a killer headache. Altitude sickness is a weird one with many variances and complex interactions. I found it funny how the backpacking fraternity tended to talk it up with all sorts of remedies and heroic stories...when it reality it seems that the old "take it slow" approach is best with everything else being fairly random. One thing I did start to notice beyond 5000m, and I'm not sure if this was more physical exhaustion or not, was that I started to hallucinate mildly. For example, seeing colours more vividly in the rocks than were really there and easily seeing patterns and figures in stone formations. Although I can see weird patterns easily enough at sea level usually and maybe my mind was getting bored with the dry/arid volcanic landscape.
In all we climbed a further 1200m to reach the 5820m summit at around 10am. It felt good. I just wanted to lie up there and soak in the sun but in order to make it back to Cusco before dark we had to start our descent after 20 minutes or so.
Luckily for all of us there was a much quicker way down. Dangerously quicker as I was to find out. It involved surfing/sliding/skiing down volcanic gravel and black sand at about a 45 degree incline. After getting the technique sorted it was good fun and if one wanted to, one could get up some crazy speeds by running down. It was not however so good fun for my 7 year old hiking boots - they got shafted. I didn't realise properly until after the hour long sliding session but the tread had completely come off both boots - leaving only a thin sole layer! We had another 5 or so kilometres to walk along sharp gravel paths to the bottom which was tough going as I felt everything through my damaged boots. As if that wasn't bad enough, after a few kms of walking, almost simultaneously, both boots completely crapped out - the sole fully came off from the upper. So as no one else had any other shoes, I was left walking the final 2kms in socks only. By the end of it my feat were African-tough and a little bloody. We all had a laugh about it though 
After some beers and a massive sleep, the next day I went to check out the Juanita exhibition in a museum in town. She was a young girl sacrificed around the year 1440 on a volcano in the range of which El Misti belongs - yep, you guessed it, the usual please the Gods scenario. Seeing her in her temperature controlled glass case was really quite amazing though as she is so well preserved it's freaky. Especially considering I had just been to where other similar sacrifices were found and close to where she was found. For some macabre details, while she was already exhausted from the climb and the altitude, the priests served her a strong local brew before putting her in the foetal position in her grave and whacking her on the temple with a priestly club. You'll be happy to know the Gods were very pleased.
See some more shots from El Misti in my flickr set of the same name. Gracias.
The inside of a donkey
One sunny day in Lima, Peru while sitting in a trendy up-market cafe I commented to the locals I was with on the general greyness of the sky above coastal Lima. The reply I got was "yeah, we say it's like the inside of a donkey."
So yeah, Lima. The word on the backpacker circuit tends to be that it's rubbish - grey, expensive and sprawling without benefit. One would have to question the sway Lonely Planet's view has over this general consensus.
My experience wasn't rubbish at all. This is most probably because I was lucky enough through CS to be in the company of locals who took me to cool places and smoothed my journey through the massive city. It was 3 days of awesome food, drinks and city sight seeing.
One church I visited which is worthy of mention is a St Franciscan one which includes expansive catacombs lined with bones...lots and lots of bones...mainly femurs which due to their size have survived the centuries. Not to say the bones where just randomly placed. Oh no, they were neatly arranged - sometimes in tidy concentric circles with skulls in the centre. From what I could gather from the guide's limited English, the caretakers of the church got bored one week in the 1980s and decided to arrange the bones. As you do...
I don't think I want to write much more about Lima. It really isn't that bad though. The old centre especially has some damn impressive buildings around the plazas. Check some pics:
JURASSIC PARK…
...was set in Costa Rica and one of its islands. I didn't meet any dinosaurs sadly. Lot's of Americans though...some of which were rather large.
Also sadly, due to my extended stays in places like Guatemala, I had pretty much no time in Costa Rica. I spent most of it in the capital, San Jose. Primarily because I was meeting someone there and also because I was flying out of there to Peru. Missing flight = bad.
So I followed the tourist trail and went to things like museums, art galleries and other random things we stumbled upon. San Jose is actually very cool. The people have a (can't think of a better word) liveliness about them and the centre of the city has a large walking only strip through it. It reminded me a little of Wellington for those reasons. It was surprisingly cosmopolitan, which made more sense when I found out that significant literacy and other state-sponsored public improvement programmes have taken place over the years, making Costa Ricans some of the most educated and wealthy people in Central America.
A few interesting things which I have to comment on...
1. Turtle bread
2. We came across a concert on during the day, when this obviously important band was arriving. I'll repeat my flickr comment in saying: honestly, does a band need 8 armed guards, one with a full automatic assault rifle?
3. There was lots of random and also politically motivated graffiti around the city which was cool to see after being in places where such behaviour wouldn't be thought of. However, I can't see the relevance of a "HEIL HITLER" tag. I did not see one shaven head white supremacist in San Jose at all hehe. I guess they were just going for the shock-anti-establishment value...
One of the most interesting things I did in San Jose was to go to a contemporary dance performance at the Teatro Nacional. It was a line up of four choreographers each with distinct styles. Not really being much of a dance aficionado, only one really stood out for me. It was this piece by a young woman Andrea Catania called Supergallo (gallo is spanish for rooster, so I guess it's super rooster?). Supergallo was based on the preparation for and the first round of a boxing match. The best thing about it was that it was set to Aphex Twin music, which, if you know about that type of stuff you would understand how I appreciated it, especially when sitting in a posh theatre in Costa Rica! The dance was genuinely funny and entertaining as well. One of those things you've got to be there for...and I only could find one image online...
More pics in my San Jose set if you're interested. Cheers.
Groovy Granada
Lame title I know, sorry. Granada in Nicaragua does have kind of a funky feeling to it though. Especially when the gringo factor isn't so high.
Just getting into Nicaragua was a bit of a mission. The border is ridiculously formal compared to other Central American borders - they actually search your bags! Well, they perform a lame attempt at searching bags which is more annoying than a proper search for proper reasons. Then there was the madness of finding the right combination of microbus' (van) on the other side to get to Granada. All good fun.
My first port of call was wandering around the city which is meant to be one of Nica's most beautiful colonial cities. And mostly it is...
One of Granada's big selling points is its location beside the massive oceanic Lake Nicaragua. Unfortunately the lake front isn't exactly picturesque...
They tried painting the wall of the jetty blue but that still didn't make the water seem less yucky poo brown. The lake does have its redeeming features however - mainly the islands. Near Granada there are scattered bout 365 (apparently) small private islands which are owned by rich Nica's or foreigners (a lot of Americanos). I went on a kayak tour around these islands with a local guide which was quite interesting, especially seeing the crazy houses the wealthy have built on their private paradises. There are also large islands more towards the lake centre which I didn't find time to visit but I'm told they're very cool - volcanoes, interesting villages etc.
One my second night I teamed up with these Brits and headed out for a trek up an active volcano, Masaya, around Granada. We got there at sunset which afforded us amazing views across and into the craters with the setting sun igniting the horizon...
Once at the top we did a tour around some close-by caves and saw lots of bats and other cave stuff like crazy lava rock formations. When it was sufficiently dark we were able to go to a special point to peer down into the most active of the craters and see the glowing red/orange magma flowing and swirling. It wasn't difficult to see why a Spanish priest in the 1700s proclaimed the volcano the entry point to hell (think Dante's Inferno). As with a lot of things they didn't understand fully back then, they erected a massive cross at the summit to, I'm assuming, prevent the hordes of hell from spewing forth. It worked! The volcano did stop erupting for a period of time coincidently. Although of course scientists have since tracked its past and monitor its future and know that this period of inactivity was part of natural cyclic behaviour. Make up your own mind
See the Granada photo set, and the Masaya Volcano set.
Diving Utila
After Guatemala, due to my extended stay there, once crossing the border into Honduras I pretty much headed straight up north to the Bay Islands - Utila to be specific.
The Bay Islands are known as one of the world's best and cheapest dive spots. And from my experiences, Utila at least definitely lived up to that reputation. It was amazing. So many awesome dive spots, many based around beautiful reefs, are within a 30min tops boat ride from the island.
After being sweet talked by this charming American dive instructor who accosted me at the ferry dock, I decided to go ahead with the full-on PADI Advanced Scuba Diver course (I already have my 'open water' certification). The dive shop she worked for, Utila Dive Centre (UDC), is known as the largest and most lively dive shop on the island - something which I think must put off a lot of newbies. All the instructors are relatively young (not inexperienced though) and there's always a lot going on - it's a very cool atmosphere but I could see how it could make first timers anxious - there's enough to worry about when starting diving as it is. For me though, it was all good.
So after going over a quick refresh of diving lingo and safety signals etc. I was straight into the advanced course, with a night dive that night. Night diving is really something special. Although the moon was quite full that night, we were still able to have near pitch black conditions at sufficient (around 20m) depth. There are all sorts of different species which come alive at night - from eels to crays to strange fish which rush towards underwater flash lights. If diving is entering a 'whole new world'...night diving is another world again. I wouldn't recommend it for the claustrophobic - often the torch light is your only window to the world down there. I loved it though - some minor difficulties with equalising aside, it was one of the best experiences I've ever had.
I spent most of the next few days either on a dive boat or underwater. It was tiring but we did some really amazing dives from technical skill dives like drift and navigation to deep diving and underwater photography.
Deep diving is fairly intense. The limit for recreational divers is commonly agreed as 40m. That is real deep. We went down to 30m which is the point where the majority of people start to feel the effects of what is known as nitrogen narcosis - described by Jacques Cousteau as the "rapture of the deep" - and commonly referred to as being 'narked' in diving slang. Wikipedia goes into more detail, but it's basically thought to be caused by nitrogen dissolving and interrupting nerve transmissions in the brain. It is relatively safe and only a temporary condition which abates once depth/pressure is reduced. It feels like, for me anyway, being mildly drunk and not really caring about anything - a general malaise, although mixed with a bit of frustration at not being able to do things quickly. For example, as a test we were to point to the numbers 1 to 20 in order on a board with the numbers placed randomly. This took me 37 seconds at 30m but only about 15 seconds at sea level. Needless to say it's important to realise the effects of nitrogen narcosis on oneself personally so one allows more time, or just doesn't attempt, complex motor or cognitive tasks when narked at those depths and below!
The night before my last day of diving I must have eaten something a bit dodgy as I ended up with some moderate diarrhoea that night and in the morning. I was feeling a bit off so I was tossing up whether to postpone my dives. However I would have had to wait another two days for another instructor and group/course to become available and I wouldn't be able to finish up with my current instructor and group who were all awesome. So after some deliberation I thought "screw it" and dived anyway - taking the risk of some diarrhoea-related embarrassment. My instructor was kind enough to lend me his 'hood suit' which is just the top half of a wet suit, without the bottom/leg coverings but with a hood. This was so if I needed to, when in the water, I could just yank down my board shorts and let loose in the ocean. The ocean cleans all! 
Those dives, one in particular, turned out to be the best dives of my life so I was stoked I didn't chicken out. And I've discovered that the water pressure from diving seems to cure diarrhoea - I had no problems at all!
It was a bit of mad rush to finish up the administration for the PADI course and then catch the ferry back to the mainland. From there I pretty much headed straight back down Honduras towards the capital, spent a night, and then went onwards into Nicaragua...
More photos are in my Utila Set on my flickr site. Sadly they accidently gave me someone else's underwater camera pictures (SD card confusion). So I don't have the cool ones I took, but luckily the guy's I got aren't too shabby. I'll email them to try and get my actual ones.