Peru - Lima

A little stroll through Lima and I got see: the arrival of the Peruvian President, Alan Garcia in the Government Palace, accompanied by the honor guard, army marching band, and a whole bunch of police with AK-47s and armored cars with machine guns on top surrounding the event; view the interestingly-changing architecture of the city as I walked through it; and, burn myself a little bit (having forgotten sunscreen ..of course)

38-hour Bus Trip (Quito - Lima)

It involved: an overnight ride from Quito to Huaquillas (border town); crossing the border between Ecuador and Peru on foot with the bus company guide (for direction and our safety ..I guess:)); and, another day/night ride on the bus-cama (sleeping bus) to Lima. The bus-cama was indeed comfortable; however, the night did not go by as nice as the comfort of the bus would suggest. There were 3 little kids within my vicinity and all of the cried the night away, taking turns (..I guess) every 15 minutes or so. My powerlessness in this situation was driving me NUTS!!! Nevertheless, Peruvian coast is quite interesting ..we've travelled about 1200km of it.

!!Special Thanks!!

This blog entry is completely committed to the recognition of the people who were especially nice and kind to us: Nuria and Eduardo Piotraszewski, and Suzana and Hugo Osorio. In their kindness they took us into their homes, cooked for us, and took us to different places showing us around their countries. I want to thank you very much for this! We are full of appreciation, and hope we can extend the same courtesy to you in the future.

Matt and Malte.

On my own now!

Malte is gone. He decided to end his travels and flew back to LA yesterday. It's only been a month out of 18, but we all have our reasons and so did he. I'm, nevertheless, going to continue this Great Trip. There is a lot of people on the move in the world, and maybe somebody will want to join me, but if not ..so be it.

Vulcan Cotopaxi

After a shaky school-bus-train and pick-up truck ride into the park, climbing 300 meters from the parking lot at the base of the mountain to the "Refugio" was quite refreshing ..with a tiny twist in that word, since there was a bit less oxygen at that altitude (4800m)

Banos Lesson #5: Fighting Class IV and V Rapids on the Pastaza River

Unfortunately, we only have two pictures of loading the rafts on the van, since taking the camera on the river was not an option; neither was puting it in the safety kayak, since one of these guys fell out of it, making it nearly sink (we managed to catch it in time)

Banos Lesson #4: Finding the best spot to watch the town getting annihilated by the volcano!

Yeah, well.. as you can see on the photos the volcano is only throwing out a column of water vapor ..so far! ;-)

Banos Lesson #3: Not falling from a Bridge

The waterfall is called Paylon del Diablo, and supposedly you can see the face of the devil just to the left of its upper section (of course, it takes a little bit of imagination, which apparently spaniards used widely to put fear in the minds of local people).

Banos Lesson #2: Falling from a bridge

Something I just had to do!! Malte, of course, was behind the camera taking those pictures :-))

Lesson #1: Flying

About buggs and trains - Alausi