worldtour

Tips (Part III) - RTW Tickets & Visas

Planning the trip was quite insane, in terms of plane tickets, train tickets, lodging, visas and health insurance.

In order to know enough about the places we were visiting, we chose to stick with Lonely Planet guides - we tried a few others such as Frommers, Rough Guide and Fodors but found Lonely Planet to be the best one.  Also, Lonely Planet guides turned out to be available almost everywhere in the world.  The negative of doing this is that almost everybody used Lonely Planet and you are liable to be doing the same thing everybody else is doing - you'll have to make any active effort to break out of this wherever you are! Chances are that if you are on a RTW trip, you'll need many many travel guides - this creates a quandary - do you buy all these in advance (to help in planning) and then carry these with you around the world OR do you buy these along the way.  We also used VirtualTourist.com to check out traveler blogs on specific places in the world - the great thing about this site is that it allows you to post questions about specific places and have them answered in a day or two!  Also, many cities have VirtualTourst teams (VT teams) that meet every couple of months - you can connect with VT members in each city if you don't know anybody else!

Even better than written guides and online sources, we connected with friends and family in different parts of the world... there's nothing better than a local to get you on the right track!  And it was wonderful to have so many people willing to help us!

Getting our round-the-world ticket turned out to be quite difficult!  Most travel agents are not incented to provide RTW tickets - my guess is that this is because there is a ton of research/work involved in putting together a ticket (which eats up a lot of time) and the profit margins are very low.  There is an agency called Airtreks to whom you can specify all your locations and they then put together an itinerary - but they do not do Round-the-world tickets - rather, they string together a bunch of one-way tickets which turns out to be much more expensive.  We also looked at online world travel sites such as Boots 'N All, LonelyPlanet and EthicalTraveller. 

The best way to travel is to get a round-the-world ticket, available with most airlines.  In fact, most airlines stitch together a round-the-world ticket on an alliance of airlines (such as Star Alliance or OneWorld). Don't forget to take all your frequent flyer numbers with you!!  The cheapest round-the-world tickets can be purchased from Australia, New Zealand or England - seems to be that people from these countries do the most RTW travelling - you ca n get tickets for between $1500 and $3000 per person!  What you can do is to call an agency in that country, book the ticket and then fly to that country to commence your travelling.  Most RTW tickets come in one of two formats:

1. You get a maximum limit of miles flown and can book as many flights as you like upto this limit. You can fly through one region (such as Western US) only once. Changes can be made to dates & times very easily.
2. You get a maximum of 3 stops per region. You can fly through one city/region only once.  You have to keep flying around the world in the same direction (i.e. East all the way or West all the way).  Changes can be made to dates, times & places very easily.

Note that the travel does not all have be connected i.e. you may take a flight to London and then travel by train to Spain and then take the next flight out from Madrid.  Also note, that some parts of the world don't have any airlines that belong to a RTW airline alliance so be ready to buy individual one-way tickets sometimes as well!  Also, RTW tickets usually require you to finish your travel with 12 months.

Visa-wise, I had to get 16 visas and Smruti 6.  Instead of trudging around each of the consulates & embassies and/or fedexing our applications around the US, we decided to use a visa agency (named Visa Network, in San Francisco) to handle all the work.  For a little bit of extra money, they procured more visas for us in a shorter amount of time than we would have been able to do ourselves.  If we had had more time, we might have done it ourselves.  On the other hand, many of the consulates required plane tickets and hotel reservations prior to giving us a visa and since we didn't have this till shortly before we left, we had to scramble at the last minute anyway.  Unfortunately, we didn't get all our visas done before we left on the trip, so we had to get a bunch along the way - if at all possible, don't do this as many countries do not allow visas to be given outside of your home country.  For example, the Brazilians and the US have some tit-for-tat going on in terms of visas, so we had to jump through many hoops to get Smruti a Brazilian visa from the Brazilian embassy in New Delhi, India.  (As an aside, it is pretty funny when Americans are asked to fill out some of the onerous forms that Americans ask others to fill out... questions such as "Are you a terrorist?" or "Are you a prostitute?"...and they're also fingerprinted!)  Also, some countries have separate procedures you have to go through if you want to visit a "sensitive" area, so plan for this in advance.

Health insurance was easy enough.  All the travel books suggested the same thing - get basic domestic US insurance to cover emergencies.  And then get international travel insurance to cover medical evacuations from the other country to the US.  No international insurance will cover doctor's visits or prescriptions abroad.  So take several months supply of prescription medicine along with you.

One other practical thing to do is to scan your passport, health insurance and travellers cheque forms and email them to your own Internet-based email account (Yahoo! or Hotmail or Gmail or the like).  This will come in extremely handy if you happen to loose your papers and need to get them redone.

- Dev

Tips (Part II) - Internet Access & Blogging

Internet Access

In terms of email and Internet access, each and every country we went to had a lot of Internet cafes (in most of the world, "Internet cafe" is the wrong phrase these days,.. most people call it "Cyber Shop" or "Internet Shop").  I was pleasantly surprised as most cyber shops had Windows XP which made it much easier to manipulate photos and connect the Archos device and Inland multi-card reader through USB ports.  Prices around the world for internet access are pretty uniform, ranging from $0.50 per hour to $2 per hour.  Beware of cybershops that advertise as LAN houses and Games houses - these cybershops usually have gazillions of 10-year old boys playing Doom against each other and shouting very very loudly all the time!  Check out an interesting article on multi-player gaming by Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley at http://www.abovethecrowd.com/atc/2004/10/the_revolutiona.html.

Blogging

In order to keep our families and friends current with what we were doing on our trip, we decided to keep a blog (i.e. what you are reading right now).  At first, we knew nothing about blogging.  But slowly, we travelled up the learning curve.  Our options roughly split into three categories:

1. Register our own website, have it hosted somewhere and then update it remotely.  Could utilize licensed software such as Movable Type or use one's own HTML skills. Sounded like too much work and too much potential for things to go wrong.
2. Use an all-purpose online blogging service such as Typepad (powered by Movable Type software), Blogger (run by Google) or LiveJournal.  I found these to have very professional publishing features plus reasonable pricing ($5 per month).  I would have chosen Blogger but for the fact that it didn't seem to have a simple way to upload photos.
3. Use a travel-specific blogging service such as TravelPod, LonelyPlanet, VirtualTourist or MyTripJournal.com.  I found these lacking professional look & feel and any real travel-specific features.  But these sites did have a huge number of people visiting to check up about travel.

I chose option#2 and signed up with Typepad.  After setting up the basic framework, it was pretty easy to add new blogs and photos.  Two other thing also greatly added to the usefulness of this blog - first, I found a free Internet service called Bloglet which enabled me to have a subscription feature - people could automatically get emails whenever we updated the blog - I had to insert some HTML code from Bloglet into our blog. Second, I found another free Internet service called StatCounter which tracked how many people had visited the site and displayed it on the blog.

We also found a great resource to link to repeatedly - Wikipedia - which is a blogged encylopedia, believe it or not.  Blogging has grown exponentially in the past year, so I'm sure there are many other options now.

Email Access

If you haven't already done so, please create an email account on Yahoo! or Hotmail or Gmail or the like that you can access from anywhere.  People have a reason to contact you for many reasons and this is the best way to interact with travel agents, hotels, friends etc. in distant countries.

-Dev

Tips (Part I) - Electronic Devices & Communications

Having lived in Silicon Valley these past few years, we had collected lots of gadgets.  So figuring out what to take with us was a challenge. We ended up taking the following:

• Canon Powershot S500 - digital camera with 5 megapixels, video capability and compact-flash memory.  Excellent value-for-money.  We've seens tons of other people carrying the same camera all over the world.  We added a 512MB Compact Flash (CF) card.

• Archos Video AV320 - combination MP3 player, photo storage (40 Gigs) and MPEG4 video player.  Excellent for storing all the thousands of photos and videos we've taken and also music we've collected along the way.  A surprise was how we could view all the photos taken on the camera on this device - unfortunately, we could not view the videos taken on the camera on this device. Comes with universal charger and USB cord to connect to any PC. 

• Inland Multi-Plus USB2.0 card reader - One can plug this into any computer, plug any Compact Flash/ MD/ SD/ MMC/ SM card into this and upload all photos and videos onto the computer. In any internet cafe that I went to, I´d plug in the Archos device and the USB card reader (with the CD card from the camera plugged into this) and transfer all photos/videos to the Archos device, thus freeing up the CF card for more photos. We saw a lot of other travelers constantly having their photos burnt onto a CD.  This took up a lot of space and gets to be very expensive.  Of course, a copy on CD that is shipped home is a lot less likely to be stolen so there is an advantage to doing it this way.

• HP Pocket PC 4155 - I took this along, thinking this would help us keep up with everybody´s birthdays, wedding anniversaries etc and also keep everybody´s phone numbers.  The device is fantastic but, on the road, it is a disaster in terms of recharging, updating etc.  Unfortunately, I forgot to recharge for a few days and all of its data got wiped out!  So that was that.  I´ve managed to get along fine without it.
• Nokia 6820 mobile phone - This has been the surprise of the lot.  SMS has been great - direct calls are very expensive from around the world ($5 per minute in Russia!) but SMS is cheap. The folding keyboard on this device is ideal for SMS.  Also, a very blaaah feature such as the alarm on this device was very useful - we couldn´t have done without it - when travelling, there are numerous time when one has to wake up early to catch flights, get on tours, etc.  And finally, this does have a calendar feature which was very useful.  In some countries, we bought a local SIM card and plugged that into this phone.  Also, in any country, you can get local calling cards that you can use from any payphone.

Music & MP3's

On thing that we did for music was that we would create MP3´s from the music CDs we bought and load them onto the Archos MP3 player.  We would do this by downloading Apple´s iTunes client onto the cybershop computer and then using this to rip all the songs off of the CDs.  Very convenient for travelling as we could now listen to the music at will and also ship home the bulky CDs.

Electricity Issues

A word on chargers, adapters and transformers: As you know, the voltage and amperage of local electricity supplies varies around the world.  The best thing to do is to buy devices that have chargers/power supplies that can work with all voltages/amperages without requiring a separate transformer.  This greatly reduces the potential for anything to go wrong.  All you have to do is buy an adapter kit that allows your power supply plug to fit into the correct shape of the plugs in the country you are in.

We´ll have a few more blogs on packing insights and more!

- Dev

Peru - Little Windows and Volcanic Formations

It´s hard to believe, but we are in the home stretch with our final stop of Cajamarca, before we head to the US!   For this final stop in Peru, we decided to get off the usual gringo trail and head to the northern highlands of Peru.  It´s supposed to be more laid-back, less touristy, and have excellent Andean food. We hopped on an all-nighter bus heading to Cajamarca from Lima and after a relatively comfortable night (we got to see trailers for the next Star Wars movie, a cooking show in the spirit of Naked Chef,  and a dubbed version of About a Boy- it´s not the same without Hugh Grant´s distinctive voice.) we reached Cajamarca.

Cajamarca is best known to be the city where Pizarro (the Spanish conquistador aka murderer) killed the Inca king Atahualpa after kidnapping him, demanding ransom, and faking a promise to release him after the ransom was paid. In fact, what happened is that even though the ransom was paid in full (estimates by our guide were about 6000 kg of gold and about 12,000 kg in silver), the conquistadores ended up killing Atahualpa and setting up a puppet ruler so they could march into Cuzco as ´liberators´. 

(On the flip side, I am currently reading a book called ´What If? 2´ which has essays speculating how the world would be different if key historical events had been different.  And wouldn´t you know it, there´s an essay on what would have happened if Pizarro hadn´t found potatoes in Peru.  Ireland might never have used the potato as a main subsistence crop! )

My first impression of the town was that it was green and wet!  In the rainy season, the countryside blooms with tons of different wildflowers, some of which look like they would be home in the Alps.  Some of these flowers have adapted to the terrain - for example, the yellow flower on the left now has no stem to protect it from the wind.  However, there are no snow-capped mountains- Cajamarca is a mere 2655 meters above sea level. 

Like most other colonial cities, the Plaza de Armas has a large park in the center with a fountain, topiaried trees and bushes and lots of locals strolling around at all times. Not as crazy in terms of trying to get us to buy handicrafts like it was in Cuzco or Lima.  But maybe because it´s low season.  In fact, in our three days in Cajamarca, we only saw a few other non-local tourists!

Deciding to skip the churches and focus on more earthly matters, we made our first stop at Los Banos del Inca- a natural hot springs site where Atahualpa was camped when the conquistadores came- hence the name.   They have a public pool as well as private cabins where the thermal waters (70C or 158F) are piped in and you can enjoy a lovely spa experience (allowing for the sulpherous smell!) We ended our experience here with a great massage.  (By the way, it doesn´t always look like this..I think the artist was going for some ´artsy´photo!)

The next day, we went to Cumbemayo, a large valley area at 3,390 meters dotted with carved water canals that archaeologists trace to a water cult about 2000 years ago.  As we drove up and saw the ´rock forests´or what locals call ´frailones´(because the geologic formations resembles pious friars in prayer), my jaw dropped.  They towered to a height of 20 meters (65 feet) above us and were marked with petroglyphs and many carvings sacred to the people who once worshipped here. To get through to the water canals, we actually climbed through the rock through a 12 meter pitch black first uphill then downhill tunnel.   It was disconcerting, to say the least!! Thoughts of being swallowed up in the rock (ala Picnic at Hanging Rock) kept coming to mind!

But once we were safely out, the scenery dramtically changed.  The path we walked upon become grassy-spongy due to the high water table amount. Rock formations seemed to be recognizable as a face (can you find it in the picture above?) , a witch´s hat, or a gigantic conch shell.  We could see little caves dotted all through the higher reaches of the formations.   According to our guide, these formations came about through tectonic and volcanic movement and rock and lava being pushed up from the earth´s center. And it might sound hokey to say so, but you can definitely feel some vibrations or energies swirling around in the air (let me stress that I felt them. Dev....not so much) .

The channels themselves are well made.  The builders created some 90 degree angles and varied the width of the channel to regulate the water flow.  Pretty modern of these Pre-Inca peoples! 

There´s a huge sacrifical stone carved through with zig-zags - thought to be the place where llamas were sacrificed.   Our guide noted that the blood would be carried down the water channels to the crops...good for planting!

On our way back, we noticed some modern-day graffiti by locals that had almost eclipsed the original petroglyphs.  Very sad to see that some people can be so ignorant and disrespectful of these amazing archaoelogical finds. (There was no real control of the site, either- which could be good as there were no people trying to drown you in souvenirs) On the other hand, we could see some people going beyond set boundaries and chipping off bits of rock to take with them.   

Our final visit around Cajamarca was to the Ventanillas del Combayo (Little Windows of Combayo).  It´s about 20 km away from Cajamarca through some amazing winding unpaved roads that provide vistas of the valley and the Chonto River.  The ventanillas is a necropolis from 500 years before Christ to 100 years after Christ where those of high social status or rich buried the bones of the dead along with ceramic pots and textiles (representing what would be needed in the afterlife). This site was chosen due to the volcanic rock and the ease of carving out the windows or niches.  Of the 500 plus windows, most have been looted unfortunately, but luckily they have not been destroyed.  It´s quite eerie looking...all the windows face towards the sun in accordance to the religious beliefs of the pre-Inca civilizations. There is a much closer site at Otuzco (about 8 km away) but the site at Combayo is much better preserved, and there is (as we found out) the added thrill of climbing up 300 meters on a wet and often unmarked slippery hillside!

Some of the tombs are so high up, you wonder how the creators got up there!  Our guide took us through a sheep pasture, over grassy tussocks, through mud puddles and over large sheer rocks (luckily, we found footholds and handholds easily).  He had told us when we booked this tour that not many people come to Combayo, and now I understood why.  Defintely not a Sunday stroll!  Oh, and on the way down, it started POURING with rain. 

Well, that´s it for Peru....and our trip! We´ll be posting some more stuff soon, including our travel tips on RTW travel and also stuff about our favorite places and more.  Stay tuned!

-Smruti

Peru - The White City

Arequipa is based at the foot of El Misti, a snow-clad volcanic mountain at a height of 5822 meters. Nearby is also the deepest canyon in the world (Canyon del Colca) - we didn´t have the time to go to this canyon unfortunately. Arequipa has been known as the white city as most of its colonial buildings are made from sillar, a whitish-colored volcanic rock.

We visited the Monasterio Santa Catalina which is a old monastery with about 30 nuns living there. It´s as big as a city. In the colonial days, rich Spanish colonialists would send their 2nd oldest daughter here to be nuns. Each nun would come with a huge dowry which would be used to build a house within the walls of the monastery and also used to fund a servant, living expenses and any creature comforts that they required. In 1822, Peru became independent from Spain and in the late nineteenth century, a law was put into place that prevented the monastery from accepting only rich nuns. As a result, a there was a huge influx of poorer Indian nuns (upto 400) . The monastery thus stopped receiving funding - as a result, the active monastery has been scaled down and the rest has been opened up for tourists. The most interesting part of the monastery was the brilliant blue walls contrasting with the rich red walls.

In Arequipa, we also learned about the history of Inca sacrifices. We visited the Museo Santuarios Andinos which houses the bodies of humans sacrificed by the Incas to appease the gods. Juanita is the name of the most famous mummy. It´s quite fascinating how the bodies were found - a nearby volcano started erupting in 1995 - the ash from this volcano settled on Mt. Ampato, leading to the melting of the glacier on top of this mountain. The melting exposed several mummies which had been buried about 500 years ago. Apparently, about 25 such mummies have been recovered in western South America, all from Inca times. The story of Juanita is also interesting though somewhat morbid - she was chosen from birth as one whom would be sacrified - for the occasion, she was starved for a couple of weeks and then made to walk all the way from Cusco to Arequipa and then up the 5800 meter high mountain, clad in light woold and grass slippers. There, already near death, she was made to drink a glass of chicha (local alcohol) and then the chief priest hit her on the left temple with a cudgel which instantly led to her death.   There´s a good National Geographic magazine article on this here.

On this round-the-world trip, we have seen many mummies! - at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, we saw mummies of various Pharoahs (over 4000 years old).  In Goa, India, we saw the mummy of St. Xavier (about 500 years old).  And now, we have seen Inca mummies (about 500 years old).

We also went to the Sol de Mayo restaurant, as we were told that it had good local live music (folklorica). Unfortunately, the local music ended just as we entered and the band started on really bad renditions of Frank Sinatra songs in a Spanish accent. Quite bad.

On to the Northern Highlands of Peru now!

- Dev

Peru - Rock of the Puma

Lake Titicaca - yes, we all used to snicker at the name as kids.   But even the tour guides here get into the act!   It actually means 'rock of the puma' and is pronounced ´titi-kha-kha´ which gives it a much different meaning than the other choice!  The lake lies at 12,500 feet (3,810 m) above sea level in the Andes Mountains of South America, astride the border between Peru to the west and Bolivia to the east. Titicaca is the second largest lake of South America (after Maracaibo) and is considered the highest navigable lake in the world.  It covers some 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) and extends in a northwest-to-southeast direction for a distance of 120 miles (190 km)! It is 50 miles (80 km) across at its widest point. A narrow strait, Tiquina, separates the lake into two bodies of water.   The photo above is of the waves as our boat went forward on the lake.

We flew into Juliaca and then took a collectivo mini-bus down to Puno.  Puno is known to be divided into three parts - the Aymara speaking, the Quecha speaking and Spanish.   These days, most of the Aymara have intermarried with the Uros and now the people on the floating islands speak mostly Spanish (also because Spanish is spoken throughout most of Peru).

The city of Puno itself doesn't have much beyond its main drag, Calle Lima, which has several good restaurants and bars.  But the real highlight was the visit to the Floating Islands and the Sillustani funerary towers. The floating islands are all made from reeds or totoras that grow all through Lake Titicaca.  The people that live on the islands are known as the Uros.  The islands are abuot 2-3 meters thick with a spongy surface...all the houses and structures on the islands are made from these reeds.    The reeds are used for all sorts of additional things, including food (the center of the reed is a good source of iodine), thatching for huts, building material for boats, building material for shoes & clothes and more!  Smruti immediately got down to housekeeping duties, as you can see from the photo!

These days, the islanders use solar panels to get their power, so on another on of the islands, there was a small post office, a hospital and school.  The boats look like Viking ships with their fierce looking figureheads.  The Uros had moved to the floating islands during the Inca period to to isolate themselves from the Inca invasion and to avoid paying any taxes.  But now many leave after school to go to the mainland.  We also visited the primary school which had a solar-powered computer! 

The same afternoon, we took a tour of the funerary towers at Sillustani.  Apparently, the towers are built in the shape of an uterus based on the pre-Inca belief of pacha mama (earth mother) and that people were buried in fetal position in order to be prepared for re-birth.  The largest of these towers is 12 meters high--the only way in is a small passageway that faces east.  It's a wild, bleak place.  you can see the towers from miles away. 

We would have stayed and explored further but got caught in a sudden lightening and hail storm-- thought it would be safer to be away from high exposed places!  We did see the rain approaching from miles away.  Apart from Brazil, this is the only place I´ve seen the streams of rain from far away (as opposed to seeing it fall on myself).  From Puno, we took a bus down to Arequipa.  On the way, we saw some fantastic landscapes consisting of lakes and snow-clad mountains.  We even caught a rainbow on our camera! 

- Smruti

Peru - Ucan sutipa'h Machu Pichu

Peru is our last stop on our round-the-world trip!  Our plan is to do part of the "gringo trail", going to Cusco/Machu Pichu, Arequipa and Puno/Lake Titicaca before heading to the Northern Highlands (Cajamarca).  This is the rainy season so we could not do the 4-day Inca Trail hike to Machu Pichu... can't say whether I'm happy or sad about this!

We stayed in Lima just one night - everybody we'd spoken to, prior to travelling to Peru, told us to minimize our stay in Lima.  So other than seeing parts of Lima (such as the rich suburb & beaches of Miraflores and the Plaza del Armas), we did just that.  Flights in Peru are very easy to get - several competing airlines keep the prices low as well - the opposite of what we saw in Brazil.  The only memorable thing about Lima was the heightened warning in our guide book about crime in Lima.  We were warned not to take any valuables with us.  We followed orders.

We immediately took a flight to Cusco or Qusqo, the legendary capital of the Inca civilization.  The Inca empire was divided into 4 zones (N, S, E, W) and Cusco was the center of this empire - Cusco means 'navel' in Quechua, the Inca language.  Quechua is alive and well today as a language, as is Aymara which was spoken by the Pre-Inca civilizations.  Castillian Spanish is the uniting language in Peru.

Cusco is built on hills and has several beautiful historic sites, mostly dating from the Spanish conquest, as opposed to Inca or Pre-Inca times.  We saw the Cathedral, various Inca walls (which is all that's left of the Inca structures - see photo to the left), the Inca Museum, Coricancha Museum and various other museums.  Needless to say, we were quite museumed-out by the end of this day!  We were also accosted at every corner by vendors selling sweaters, finger puppets, woolen hats and other handicrafts-quite cheap compared to what you see being sold int he tourist shops.  And finally, we slowly got acclimatized to the altitude - Cusco is at a height of 3800 meters - this is the height at which we spent two nights on Mt. Kilimanjaro as we were all getting severe headaches. 

We also went to see a dance program put on by the cultural institure of Cusco.  Several traditional folk-dances were performed, with colorful costumes, including the beautifully embroidered skirts & hats worn by the women.  It was still a bit odd to see the women wearing what looked like bowler hats...  Several dances involved sticks...hmm Inca dandia, anyone?

We also went to see four Inca sites just outside Cusco - Sacsayhuaman (pronounced "sexy woman"), Qenko, Puca Pucara and Tambo Machay.  Sacsayhuaman is an Inca fort which was the site of the last stand of the last Inca (Manco Inca) against Pizarro's conquistadores.  Puca Pucara is an interesting rock, with caves and sacrificial altars.  It has zigzag channels leading away from the sacrificial altars, presumably to carry away the blood (see photo on the left)!

The highlight of our visit to Cusco was the trip to Machu Pichu, of course.  We took a 4-hour train to Aguas Calientes (30 minutes from Machu Pichu).  The magnificent Uribamba river (which empties into the Amazon) was raging along beside us - the rainy season had increased its water volume greatly. The Peruvian national railway has a monopoly on the train to Machu Pichu (there are no roads whatsoever) and therefore charges monstrous prices.  Our train broke down along the way - the Peruvians have a separate 'tren local' or local train for the non-tourists where the price is much much lower.   Our carriage had a huge bunch of Japanese tourists plus various other South Americans and North Americans.  On our RTW trip, other than Paris, this is the one place where we've seen US tourists.  Many of the tourists had come to Peru just to see Machu Pichu - they were not visiting any other place in Peru!

It was raining but the mist cleared up enough for us to see the site and the two mountains bracketing the site.  It´s quite a spectacular sight - various temples (Sun, Moon, Condor etc.), houses, terraced fields and more.  Nobody quite knows what the purpose of Machu Pichu was as the Incas did not have any written records.  The site itself was discovered in the early 1900´s by a professor from Yale University - he carted off all the valuables back to the US.

Our guide at Machu Pichu insisted on telling us that Machu Pichu is becoming a very important stop for people interested in mysticism.  Apparently, the center of mystical energy on earth is moving from the Himalayas to Machu Pichu this decade - he followed this up with a resounding "Om."  He made us put our heads inside the alcoves/niches of the walls of Machu Pichu and say whatever came into our heads in order to hear the echoes and reverberations.  He also gave us a mini-lecture on the seven chakras of the human body.  I´m quite impressed that this idea from India has travelled all the way to Machu Pichu!

The guide also showed us the site where women were sacrificed to appease the gods.  Apparently, the most beautiful women were chosen, starved for a couple of weeks, drugged with chicha (local alcoholic brew) and then sacrified with a blow to the left temple.  80% of the skeletons found buried ceremonially in Machu Pichu are of women.  The photo to the far left is of the Temple of the Condor (the beak is at the front and the two rock formations in the back are supposed to represent the wings).  The photo on the right is the hilltop where they did their sacrifices.

We saw several llamas grazing on the terraces of Machu Pichu.  No need to let the grassy terraces go to waste, I guess!  We also took a 30 minute walk to an Inca drawbridge that seemed to go nowhere!  I almost got vertigo just looking at the precarious location of the drawbridge.  The drawbridge is the black & white photo to the left.

Moving on from Machu Pichu, our experience with food here in Peru has been pretty good.  The photo is of our time at a great restaurant called Witch´s Garden in Cusco.  For Smruti, there has been fresh juices  and vegetarian adapted Peruvian food (including lomo saltado made with soy, etc. and of course she got the recipe).  As for me, I´ve had alpaca steak (alpaca is a cameloid just like the llama) and ceviche (raw octopus, clams, fish, etc. served with lime and onions).  There is much more (cuy or guinea pig, etc.).  I am a bit leery of going beyond this though, especially after one Japanese tourist whom we met insisted on telling us that he was on a six-month gastronomic trip around the world where he had eaten fried tarantula legs (in Vietnam), dog, camel, snake, frog and finally, in Nairobi, elephant, zebra, crocodile, lion, and peacock!  I typed "fried tarantula" into google and actually got a bunch of listings, including a treatise on the vitamins and minerals in tarantula.  Too much information!  In case you are interested, here are some of those links on tarantula: passport, weird foods and treatise.    Yuck!

And if you´re still wondering what the title of this blog (Ucan sutipa'h Machu Pichu) means, it is an Aymara phrase for ´It is called Machu Pichu.´

- Dev

Brazil - Booooooooooooooo...

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We spent 5 days in Buzios, a beach resort town about 3 hours north of Rio.  According to the marketeers, Buzios became famous when Brigitte Bardot spent a summer there with her Brazilian boyfriend.  Previously, we had planned on going to Foz de Iguacu (waterfalls) and the Pantanal (marshland with lots of wildlife) but a timing mistake prevented us from getting the Brazil airpass which one can buy only outside of Brazil.  We had no problem getting to Buzios - Brazil has a great network of comfortable buses which run on time (quite unexpectedly!) to all corners of Brazil. 

Our goal in Buzios was to get certified for open water diving, something that we had wanted to do in Thailand but did not do because of the tsunami. Bernd and his brother, Jan, were very helpful in this respect and referred us to a well-reputed dive-shop in Buzios named Casa Mar (pronouced 'kashamah') run by Marcos Dias (known as Kupeu around town).  Kupeu turned out to be great instructor and we would highly recommend him if you happen to need open water certification.

Our lessons were conducted in the ocean near a beach in about 7-8 meters of water. We had the usual problems of learning how to equalize our internal pressure with the ambient water pressure (through the valsalve movement) - without this, our eardrums would collapse - how nice!  We also got to know how to put on all the equipment (wetsuit, tank, buoyancy compenstor jacket, regulator, timer, pressure gauge, flippers, mask...).  One of the keys is to breathe regularly in the water with a normal inhalatation and then a long exhalation (sounds like 'Booooooooooooo'). 

On our last day, we took the boat out to Ilha A___ (can't remember the name!) for our big dive!  We spent about 4 hours there.  We dove to about 23 meters depth.  The water was warm on top and ice cold further near the bottom!  We had a bunch of other divers with us also.  We saw moray eels, turtles (I swam along with it and touched the shell!), twenty types of fish, octopuses (octupii??) and crabs!  On the way back, we sighted several dolphins which swam along with the boat for several minutes!

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Well, after five days of theory lessons and diving classes in the sea, we are now certified to dive in open water up to a depth of 25 meters!  We got the PDIC certification (Professional Diving Instructors Corporation) which is equivalent to the PADI certification and is accepted around the world.  Our only regret is that we hadn't gotten our diving certification earlier - we could have gone diving in some of the best places in the world on our RTW trip - Red Sea (Egypt), New Zealand, South Africa, India, Spain, France etc.  Anyway...

We spent the days on the beach and in training and the evenings going around the restaurants and bars of Buzios, listening to bossanova and noisy crowds (and me with Brigitte Bardot! - see photo to the left).  Huge crowds there with music and dancing going on until 6am!  Quite insane! Also, too many speedos around here!  Time to move back to Rio and then on to Peru!

- Dev

Brazil - Carnaval!

Wow!  Carnaval in Rio - something I've been dreaming about for a long time!  Even as we were taking the bus to Ipanema right after landing in Rio, we could see the partying along the beaches in Copacabana and Ipanema.  The sea-front hotels were gleaming and the whole city looked quite nice.

Next morning, Bernd, my classmate from business school, called us as he had come down to Rio from Sao Paolo along with his wife, Valeria, and their two kids Steffen and Thomas.  Throughout our stay in Rio, Bernd and Valeria were very hospitable and took a lot of time out of their stay in Rio to show us around and make us feel very comfortable in Brazil.  Thanks to them for doing this!

Bernd took us around to Corcovado which was completely jam-packed and then also to a street party (banda) along the beach in Ipanema.  Along the way, we stopped at Chaika's for a quick lunch - Brazil has a ton of great desserts, supposedly because it used to have a lot of sugar plantations.  The banda was LOUD and RAUCOUS. A truck was moving along with three or four singers on it singing at the top of their voices, completely off-key.  There was also a little tiny guitar that sounded like a banjo.  There was a guy dressed as spiderman on the roof of the truck.  A huge crowd was streaming along behind and in front of the truck and everybody was generally having a good time.  The beach was packed at the same time with tons of vendors selling cold beer and soft-drinks moving along with the crowd.

That evening, Smruti and I took the metro from Copacabana to Prinze right next to the sambadrome in Rio Centro.  The metro was packed with performers who were going to be part of the samba school parades.  There was a pack fo 20 Canadians who had flown down to Rio to practice and then take part in the Unidos de Tijuca samba school.  We have been told that this requires USD1000!  The Canadians had mostly given up trying to memorize the lyrics of the Unidos de Tijuca song and were just focused on dancing around and having a good time.

Near the sambadrome, we scouted around for tickets and got them from a scalper for a grand price of USD10 per person.  Our seats were near the end of the sambadrome (which is just a mile-long straight road with bleachers on each side).  We were there from 1am to 5am and the crowd was getting even bigger when we left at 5am!  We saw two samba schools go by (Unidos de Tijuca and Manguera).  Each samba school had over 1000 performers and 4 or 5 big floats - a huge production!  The floats included vampire cakes (with vamp ires appearing through doors every few seconds), bird floats (with 200 performers dressed as birds), a Planet of the Apes float (with many performers dressed in nothing) etc.  Every few minutes one of the dancers walking along with the floats would break into samba - we tried to follow along but gave up after some time.  Each samba school has a song written and produced specifically for each carnaval... they are sung by everybody in the crowd at the top of everybody's voices - the 2005 samba lyrics are at: Unidos de Tijuca and Mangueira.

Next day, Bernd and Valeria invited us to Bernd's parents place - we had a very nice lunch there.  They then took us to nice beach which was a bit further away from the tourist crowds and therefore quieter.  It was surrounded on three sides by a mountain range which made the setting very beautiful! 

That evening, we met up with Selma, Bianca and Bruno to party the night away.  After downing a huge amount of beer in a bar, we went over to Barronetti's in Ipanema for a few hours of crazy dancing.

Needless to say, this schedule of going to sleep at 5am and getting up at 12 noon got to be a bit too crazy!  We now needed a break from all the madness... Solution: Buzios, a resort town about 3 hours north of Rio.

- Dev

Brazil - Heeo dge Jhaneiho

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I bet you can't guess what that says in the title - in fact, the Brazilian-Portugese accent is such that many letters are pronounced differently than in English - ´r´ is pronounced as ´h´, ´j´ is pronounced as the ´g´ in beige, ´d´is pronounced as the ´dge´in bridge and so on... So the title is how Cariocas (residents of Rio) say Rio de Janeiro.  Anyway, ....

We finally made it to Rio after a marathon 52-hour trip from Christchurch - check out our flights - Christchurch-Auckland-Los Angeles-Chicago-Sao Paulo- Rio de Janerio.  Due to the nature of our round-the-world ticket, they could not find any other way from New Zealand to Brazil... shameful!  As you can imagine, we arrived in Rio pretty shattered... thankfully, we had a confirmed booking at the Ipanema Inn in Rio so we had a place to stay.  Our carnaval experience and also meeting friends in Rio is described in the other blog on Rio.

Before describing what we did in Rio, let me just say a word about the culture of Rio.  It is very laid back and a very beachie type of culture.  Everybody is wearing the least amount of clothing possible.  Everybody seems to be extraordinarily fit and trim.  And they all speak a sing-song type of Portugese which sounds very nice!

The city of Rio de Janeiro is beautiful!  It has huge mountains in the middle, similar to Cape Town, has lots of beautiful beaches (Ipanema, Copacabana, Barra de Tijuca, etc.) and lots of beautiful people!  We had to do the tourist thing here so we visited various Sugarloaf mountain, the Botanical Gardens and Corcovado (with the statue of Jesus Christ).  In the evening, we went for a relaxed walk around La Goa which is a lagoon right behind Ipanema & Leblon.

On our last evening there, I went off to a football game at Maracana stadium, the largest soccer stadium in the world (100,000 person capacity).  The game was between Botafogo and Volta Redondo.  Botafogo (the home team) won 2-1 so this was a relief.  The crowd was pretty raucous - black & white are the Botafogo color and the fans too are very extreme - reminds me of the Oakland Raiders and their extreme fans and stadium.

After Buzios, we returned back to Rio for a day before heading off to Peru.  Bernd´s brother, Jan, was very kind in taking us around Rio for a while, including visiting the Benedictine monastery and the Cathedral.   We had lunch with him at  Delight, which is a great idea -  buffet style and charged by weight, rather than item by item.  We also decided to splurge a little bit and went for dinner to the Copacabana Palace Hotel - wow, quite a place!  Now, we have to go on an extremely low budget to make up for this splurge...

-Dev