North to Alaska!!!!

It has been a while since we’ve updated this blog, so we have a lot of catching up to do!

So I (Sarah) have been looking for a job since last March, and didn’t have much success finding anything in Las Vegas so I started applying out of state, and unbeknownst to Levi I applied for a job in Fairbanks Alaska. At the time I wasn’t even exactly sure where Fairbanks was in Alaska. Well anyhow this firm called me and I had a couple of phone interviews, and they offered to fly Levi and I us out so see the town and so I could have a formal interview and meet the firm. This came as quite the surprise to Levi.

So we flew out the end of September and we decided that I should take the job. While we were there Levi met with a few construction companies and we felt pretty good about him finding a job.

Then at the end of October we packed up a little Uhaul trailer with everything that would fit and began our 3000-mile journey to the “land of the midnight sun”. We drove from Vegas to Utah and spent about a week with our family and friends. We left for our Alaskan adventure about midnight because we were so excited and couldn’t sleep! Levi’s parents (James & Teena) came with us to help us move and help with the driving. It took us about 5 days to make the drive from Salt Lake City to Fairbanks. We only had one real set setback, we were about 30 minutes from Haines Junction in the Yukon Territory, and we got a flat tire on the Uhaul.

Since we didn’t have a spare (thanks to me talking Levi out of needing to get one…) we unhooked the trailer took of the obliterated tire and drove to Haines Junction to see if we could get a new one. So we got to HJ and found out that the town was pretty much closed for the winter, they told us our best bet was to drive back to Whitehorse, which was about 2 hours the opposite direction. So that set us back a little it, but other than that the drive was good. Here are a few more picks of the drive up...

Muncho Lake

So I started working at Richards, Johnson, & Granberry the middle of November and so far I am really liking my job. I am basically doing the same thing that I did in Vegas. It only took Levi about a week to find a job. He is working at Doyon Associated as a field engineer. We are pretty excited that he was able to find a job so quickly. Part of his job entails a couple stints (about 6 weeks each) up in Prudhoe Bay working on the pipeline. Prudhoe Bay is on the northern coast of AK and is prob about 7 or 8 hours from Fairbanks. I am not excited about being apart that long, but we’re grateful for this opportunity.

Peru Part III: Arequipa and Colca Canyon

Well I’ve decided I officially suck at writing blogs. Three months later I'll finish the peru blog:

Now it’s time my favorite part of our trip… Arequipa! If anyone wants to go to Peru I would recommend spending a few days in Cusco to see Machu Picchu, and then a week or so In Arequipa. There is so much to do and see – from museums to river rafting and everything in between. My only regret is that we didn’t know this when we planned the trip so we only spent about 4 days here.

After spending every night either in a hostel or riding on a bus we decided to get an actual hotel room. We got into town around 3:00PM and took a taxi to the main square. We found a great hotel called Sonesta Posada del Inca for about $70.00/night. If you feel like checking it out here is the link:

http://www.sonesta.com/arequipa/

In the last 3 days we hadn’t showered and had been on a bus for more than 24 hours so the first thing we did was clean up. Next we went out to dinner and had one of my favorite Peruvian dishes. I can’t remember the name but its layered mashed potatoes, avocadoes and chicken with some sort of sauce. We spent the rest of the night walking around the Plaza de Arms area.

Our hotel room in Arequipa.

The delicious potatoes/avocadoes/chicken dish.

The building our hotel was in.

The next day we visited the Santa Catalina Monestary (http://www.santacatalina.org.pe/ ). This place is a photographers paradise. I loved how old it was. It had been restored to what it was like in the 1600’s. Each of the nuns had their own rooms with a clay oven. They slept in nooks built in the walls. Here are some photos:

This is the bank of windows where the nuns had their only contact to the outside world.

Ironically there was a group of nuns on a tour. Notice the 69 backpack? I bet she has no idea.

The monastery..

The next day we left for Colca Canyon. Contrary to popular believe the Grand Canyon is not the biggest canyon in the world. There are actually two canyons in Peru that are deeper then the GC and Colca Canyon is one of them. We didn’t really have a way of getting there so we booked a trip with a tour agency… which is kind of lame but it turned out to be good. We left early Sunday and started making the drive. On the way we drove through a National Reserve for Alpaca’s.

Alpacas at the preserve.

A cholita woman selling goods at one of the bus stops.

We ate lunch and spent that night in a town called Chivay. We broke away from the tour group and ate lunch at this restaurant we found. During lunch, this dog walked in from the streets. The Owner shewed it out but it came back in and came right to our table and started begging for food. Although this was amusing it also made us lose our appetite. As we were packing up the dog walked back into the kitchen… let’s just hope the chicken was actually chicken.

The dog begging in the restaurant... and on the dinner menu.

After lunch we were walking around town and came across this cholita woman. She looked pretty authentic so we asked to take her picture if we gave her a couple of soles. She said okay so I took the photo below. After we took the photos we gave her 2 soles and she looked at us and demanded 1 more. We got a laugh out of it but gave it to her.

The highway robber...

The hotel we stayed at Hotel Pozo Del Cielo which is an old converted villa… the furnishing were very simple but it was clean and nice. They even stopped by at 9:00PM to give you hot water bottles to put in the bed. To top it off the hotel had a resident 4 month old Alpaca! Sarah and I got to feed it by hand. It was cute but was kind of nosey looking for food.

The hotel room in chivay...

The hotel grounds...

Sarah feeding the baby alpaca

The next day we actually drove to the canyon… it was definitely deeper than the Grand Canyon but was not as pretty. The elevation was around 13,000 ft at the top and there wasn’t many trees. We passed through small villages to get to Cruz del Condor… which is the point where Andean Condors frequently fly. We did see some and they were impressive. I got some photos but my hand held camera didn’t take that great of photos.

A condor in flight.. the wingspan is about 12 feet.

Sarah at the canyon...

The view on the drive to the canyon from Chivay.

More canyon views... the bottom of the canyon was a rare sight.

After an hour or two we started driving back to Arequipa. On the way we stopped in Chivay again for lunch. Rather than eat at the restaurant with the rest of the group Sarah and walked into town to the market. I LOVED THE MARKET. Straight up 3rd world. No touristy stuff either… just fruit, grains, and raw meat hanging in the open. We passed one lady who was eating lunch at her meat shop. Her plate was on the same counter with a bunch of animal organs… bah. We didn’t eat any of the meat but we did get some scones from one of the street venders… we could get them for about 10 cents a pop – that’s better than the $20 buffet the tour group went to.

The market...

We finally made it back to Arequipa that night and stayed at the same hotel we stayed in earlier. The next day we got up and had few hours to kill before our flight left back to the USA. We decided to visit a museum that holds ‘Juanita the Ice Maiden’. I have no photos but here is a link to Wikipedia.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_Juanita )

Juanita is a mummy who is approximately 500 years old. She was a young inca sacrificed at the top of a 20,000 foot volcano to appease the gods. I’ve never climbed a 20,000 foot mountain but it’s impressive to think a 12 year old girl would willingly go. The Inca’s believed she would essentially become a god herself. She was so well preserved that her fingernails are still intact and the scientist could see what her last meal was. If you go to Arequipa this is a must!
Well that’ basically it.. we left that day for Lima at 4PM… spent the night in the Lima Airport and left the next day to Las Vegas. The trip was awesome and we would both do it again!

Peru Part 2: Chile and the Immigration Officer

Sorry for the delay… I’m not used to blogging and I actually just forgot about it. Ha ha.

Before I go on to part 2 of our trip I need to show a picture or two of the central plaza in Cusco. It was the main section of town that had all the restaurants, hotels, churches etc. For being winter time it was surprisingly green:

After 4 days in Cusco we decided it was time to move on to another city. We heard of this nice little beach town, Arica, just over the border in Chile. We found out it was an 18 hour bus ride but this didn’t deter us (me). Even though Sarah is the world traveler this was my first trip out of the country so I wanted to get as many stamps on my passport as possible. We had some time to kill before we left so we did some last minute shopping. We ended up getting a cool hand painted plate by the guy below. He wanted 20 soles… I told him 15 soles… he came back with 18 soles… I agreed but told him we were going to take his photo… he agreed.

We also got a cool battle horn. It was a real horn but when someone blew into it a sound came out as if you were calling your buddies into battle. It looked something like this:

The bus left Cusco at 2:30PM and we started driving south. Overall the bus ride was uneventful. We passed through Puno, Peru which is on the shores of Lake Titicaca. However we didn’t get there until about 11PM though so we didn’t see anything. About an hour before we got to Puno the bus pulls over and the attendant announces that we have “no more than 10 minutes to go to the bathroom”. Obviously everything is in Spanish so the whole trip I was pretty clue less. I would just look at Sarah and wait for her to translate. Anyways, we get off the bus and we are at an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere. There was a shack looking building that had the women’s bathroom so Sarah went off to use it. I didn’t really have to go but thought I would make use of the time relieving myself anyways so I looked around for the Men’s Restroom. I couldn’t see one but noticed all the guys were just lined up facing this concrete wall taking a leak… so I did the same. When we got back to the bus Sarah informed me there was no toilet in the Women’s Restroom – only a hole in the ground. She wasn’t even sure if she aimed correctly because there were no lights. Needless to say the infrastructure in Peru is in need of a little help.

This was typical country side we drove through, at least what we saw until the sun went down:

We finally get to Tacna, Peru the next morning and took a cab across the border into Chile. On the way the cab driver had us fill out the typical immigration forms. We couldn’t bring in any artifacts, animal products (the picture showed eggs and cuts of meat), etc. So we thought we were fine. We passed our bag through the machine and the Immigration Officer asked me something in Spanish. I could tell he was angry but I didn't understand anything so I looked to Sarah with a “please help me” expression. ‘He wants to see what is in the top of your bag’ She told me.

He opened my pack and grabbed the battle horn (note the photo above), then held it up and said “Cuerno” and proceeded to talk to me even more excitedly. It still hadn’t dawned on Sarah or I that this was an ‘animal product’ so we were quite confused. Sarah talked to him a little more and he ran back and got the immigration form I filled out. He told us he was going to fine us $300 dollars US for giving false information. Sarah batted her big beautiful eyes at him and asked if we had to pay it… he gave us a new form and said, “Let’s pretend this never happened.” I can’t blame him.. I’ve fallen for those batting eyes of hers on more than one occasion. Just kidding.. well all that happened but the batting of Sarah's eyes. The officer ended up being nice to us but he took the horn and made me sign this form:

We get to the bus station in Arica and Sarah needed to use the bathroom. We go to the bathrooms and realize we don’t have any money to pay for it (most of the public bathrooms in Peru and Chile charged about 30 cents). Then it hits… we have no chilean pesos… we don’t know where we are staying.. and we have no guidebook. We decided to exchange some US dollars for Chileans. We had just enough to get a taxi. The taxi cab driver took us to the main shopping area and we walked around until we found a hostel. Sarah remembered one that was recommended on wiki travel so we went there… “The Hotel Plaza Colon”. The lobby looked pretty nice so I felt okay about it. When we got to the room it was a different story. Here is a photo.. I'll list the issues too:

We found a fingernail in the bed sheets
We found cracker crumbs in the bed sheets
There was make up on my pillow case
There was ample short curly hair on the tile floor
The shower was nasty A
The sewer line for the bathroom below us was vented through our bathroom floor

I think that’s it… We were both grossed out. When we slept that night we put our own sheets on the bed and just left them in the morning. The town itself wasn’t that great either. We were expecting a beach town but we got a port town. It’s a main naval base for Chile as well. Needless to say we were pretty excited to get out of town the next morning. We crossed the border back into Peru uneventfully and headed on our way to Arequipa, Peru. That’s it for now. I’ll finish up the last few days of the trip on the next round.

Peru Part 1 – Cusco and Machu Picchu

Sarah and I returned home from Peru a few days ago. It was my first time out of the country… as far as international travel goes I was definitely baptized by fire but it was incredibly awesome! I left with a deeper gratitude for having been born and raised in the United States.

We had to fit 12 days of gear into one carry on backpack each… needless to say we packed pretty light.


We left from Las Vegas on June 26 at 6AM. From there we flew to Miami and then to Lima. We got to Lima around midnight but our flight to Cusco didn’t leave Lima until 7AM so we made make shift beds out of the benches. Sarah has this great ability to sleep pretty much anywhere, I myself wasn’t as comfortable.

Flying into Cusco I got pretty excited because I could see the peaks of the Andes Mountains. I always thought the mountains in Utah were big but they look like ant hills compared to these suckers. The peaks are 20,000 to 23,000 feet.

We were picked up from the airport by our hostel. Our hostel in Cusco was nice and relatively cheap. For $30.00/night we got a private room with a private bath. Nothing fancy but it was clean… which is more than we can say about our experience in the next city (you will have to wait for that story). According to my GPS the hostel was at an elevation of 11,359 feet. That’s higher than a lot of mountain peaks in the lower 48. The elevation was hard to get used to. It took as about 2 days to climatize. We had a prescription to Diamox – a drug that helps climatization. It has a weird side effect that made it so we couldn’t taste carbonation. Any soda tasted as flat as could be even if it was straight from a freshly opened bottle.

This is the courtyard in our hostel...

After we got settled we decided to make our way to a neighboring town to check out the Sunday markets. The lady at the hostel told us we could get a private taxi for around 30 soles (the Peruvian Currency) or take a mini bus for just a few soles. We elected to do the cheaper so we had a taxi take us to the nearest bus station. The bus system in Cusco is interesting. There aren’t official buses only private ones that drive by and shout out where they are going. It’s up to the bus riders to flag them down. When we got to the bus stop we had just missed the most recent bus. There was a private taxi driver who came over to us and told us he would take us for 40 soles. The conversation went something like this (note that Sarah speaks Spanish but I don’t, so I would usually do the negotiating through Sarah):

Peruvian Taxi Driver: “I’ll take you to Pisac for 40 soles”.
Levi through Sarah: “How much would it cost for you to wait for an hour”?
Peruvian Taxi Driver: “80 soles”
Levi through Sarah: “Will you do it for 50 soles”?
Peruvian Taxi Driver: “I’ll do it for 70 but I’m not going to wait”.
Sarah: “How long till the next bus shows up”?
Peruvian Taxi Driver: “About an hour”.

At this point I was pretty angry that this guy had raised his price so I was pretty much done with him. Luckily right after he said ‘about an hour’ another bus showed up and the guy yelled “Pisac” which is where we were headed. We jumped on the bus and it cost 3 soles each. FYI… one US dollar is equal to about 3 soles. So it cost us 30 cents for a ride to a town about an hour away… not too shabby.

The bus was full of natives. There was no room so we had to stand. It smelled. Not necessarily a bad smell but Peru has an odor to itself. The driver drove crazy and jerky. The road went over a winding mountain pass that was around 15,000 feet. I should’ve known all this was a recipe for me to blow chunks (I have a history of doing so from car sickness). The ride takes about an hour and I made it 45 minutes into the trip. The bus started slowing down to stop so I turned around to Sarah who was sleeping (she had found a seat in the back - also refer to my comment about her ability to sleep anywhere), woke her up and said:

Levi : “We have to get off”.
Sarah: “Are we there”?
Levi: “No but we have to get off, I’m going to barf”.

I then turned around and started to hastily make my way to the front. I threw one quick glance behind me to make sure Sarah was coming and then got off. I spewed chunks and never felt better in my life. The down side was that we were in the middle of nowhere and didn’t know if or when another bus was coming. The up side is that we were at a spot with some amazing views.

We just waited another 20 minutes and flagged down another bus. After a little confusion of missing the town we were going to (we went too far and had to back track on a third bus) we ended up in the right town. The market there was impressive. It had a lot of tourist stuff but was also the main market at which locals buy there food for the day. There were also several places that baked ‘cuy’… a favorite local meal of grilled guinea pig. They even have mini hotels to raise the guinea pig in before they kill them.

a clay oven for baking cuy...

the final product...

Avocadoes and mini bananas were our favorite... they tasted much better than what we have in the US.

Sarah got to hold a local lady's 'bambino'...

The next day we spent around cusco eating and visiting the local churches and museums. We visited several cathedrals and a textile museum. The remaining Inca stone work is all over the city and incredibly impressive. The Inca didn’t use mortar. They precisely cut every piece of stone. When the Spaniards came to Peru to conquer the Inca, they destroyed all the buildings expect for the foundations and built their buildings (mostly churches) right on top of the existing foundations. I also tried cuy… twice. It tastes pretty much how you imagine a rodent would taste like. Not very good. But they did serve it to me with its full body intact. It even had a little tomato helmet.

My last attempt at eating cuy... still didn't taste very good. Sarah had some Alpaca (a cousin to the Llama) that tasted good though.

Some of the Inca stonework...

A photo of the traditional clothing...

A view of Cusco from a church.

Our last full day in Cusco we took the train to Aguas Caliente, which is the town just below Machu Picchu. The town is reachable by train only – it is at the bottom of a deep canyon and no roads go to it. Machu Picchu itself sits at the top of a mountain above the town. You can take a fifteen minute bus ride to the top or hike it. Sarah wanted to hike it so I went along. Big mistake… its 2 hours of hiking on nothing but huge stone stairs. By the time we got to the top we were exhausted. The ruins are amazing. The pictures I saw of it didn’t do it justice. The ruins are massively huge and intact. No one really knows what the city’s purpose was, but the most widely accepted theory is that it was a resort town for upper class Inca. The city had about 800 people living in it.

A photo of the river we followed from the train. The train started up in the Andes and descended into the jungle.

The view from Machu Picchu... we hiked up from the river bottom. :(

Sarah chilling with the Llamas.

Due to the length of this blog we will break up the trip into a few different sections.... stay tuned!