Into the Andes and the Amazon

Incredible. The ride to Cajamarca was the best. The desert of trujillo melted away, and was replaced by beuatiful mountains, lakes and rivers jutting up in all directions. We drove through what seemed to be some sort of mango paradise. Everywhere mangoes of all colors dangled from limbs. I wanted to stop and climb the trees and be coated in sweet mango slime! However, we were on a bus, so it was only a fantasy. As we approached Cajamarca the city was tucked into a grandmotherly pathworked blanket of green farmed mountainsides.  A raincloud hovered over the valley, and a brief rainbow welcomed me into the city.
     The change to all this greenery, and moisture, and cool air had sarah and i feeling quite all right.  We met up with our couchsurfing host Hans Pedro.  He introduced us to his lovely german pals Clara and Philip.  Then Hans showed us to our place....what...our place? Yes that´s right,we wouldn´t be sharing his house, his family owns an apartment complex, and one is empty. We were given the keys to our own mostly furnished beautiful two bedroom apartment, for free for four days. Thank you couchsurfing, and thank you Hans!  Then Hans was kind enough to take us the plaza de armas, with lovely trees and flanked on either side by ornately faced churches.  He showed us up circularly shaped steps to a look out over the entire city. I huffed and puffed my way up...altitude, wow.  Glad i´m not a smoker!  The view was spectacular, and worth the climb.  We walked through the city streets and waited for Han´s friend in a park.  I watched children playing on a giant trampoline filled with huge bouncy balls. Others squealed down a big inflatable slide. While we waited a carnavale band came to practice and it was fun to watch and listen.  Han´s friend Carlos arrived, he was a lovely bracket toothed individual. We all taxi´d out to Clara and philips volunteer house, where we met Christopher. He flies in for carnavale, every year from Germany!  We sat playing a drinking game called chispe, that involves rolling dice, and bluffing.  I drank water however, as i was still a bit sick and didn´t want to rush things before the big carnavale!  It was fun listening to the mix of Spanish, English and German.  Also, the spanish in the mountains is loads easier to understand and the boys are cuter, says Sarah.
       The next day Sarah and I headed back to the plaza de armas past stalls of beatiful weavings, and campesinos begging, back up the huffy puffy stairs. At the top you pay one sol to wind your way through cobblestoned teraced gardens, in a big spiral to reach the real lookout over the city, and wow!Sarah and i waxed philosophical at the sight of such splendiferous beauty...This is why we travel we decide. Because if you don´t you don´t get to see things like this. Wow. Wow. Wow.   Back down we take in lunch at Don Paco´s New Cajamarqueno Cuisine. So good, Sarah had the best veggie burger i´ve ever had, and i had mushroom ravioli in a saffron cream sauce topped with balsamic reduction, mmmmmm. Life is fine!  We meet up with Sarah´s british friends for a drink at ¨"our house". Then down to the Plaza for the beginning of Carnavale festivites. There are bands playing in the street everywhere. They follow us around playing, and singing. Everyone is driking and passing drinks. It´s just a big fun friendly party. We run into more friends from the beach town of huanchaco. I remeet Sam that i met in huanchaco, hes from austrailia, and traveling with Camille from France. They will be staying with us at "our house" for the rest of carnavale! Great, it´s a late night of dancing and goofing off. Everything smells like pee. The air is full of laughter and music and drums. They make this drink for carnaval that is cane liquor and maracuya (passion fruit) juice heated in big tea kettles and poured into plastic bottles, and sold for 3 soles.  I think its disgusting, but everyone seems to love it.  We head back to the house after some questionable street food.... at 5am?  Is this how you party in South America I guess so!
       Damn tummy has me up at 8am though!  So yoga and meditation for breakfast!  Then  Hans comes by with sam and Camille, they´ve been attacked with paint already. It´s Saturday, the day for the big Pintura (paint).  It´s supposedly an all out war of being attacked with paint.  We all go have some Pan con huevo in a nearby cafe and they are playing this song over and over, and it´s our first recollection of the music of carnavale...it´s not the same song, the words are different but the tune is always the same. I think after 4 days of it i will be able to sing this tune for the rest of my life.  We are full and amped up for the war to come. We take a cab over to a fellow couchsurfers house. Upon exiting the cab a band of women and children come to attack the too clean gringos, i get a shot of green paint right in my mouth, it tastes awful, if you want to know.  The parking lot attendent invites us over for a shot of pisco...so this is how carnavale goes eh? well...when in peru!  Then we head to Herberts the other couchsurfer and meet lots of wonderful people. We all start painting each others faces, and passing some drinks as well. We head to the neighborhood barrio party and the mayhem begins! So much painting and so friendly really too! So many coats, the red, then the blue, then green, and all the fluorescents!  Learning to dance like shakira, and Sarah and i having to pause for moments to just enjoy that this is all actually happening.  It starts to rain, and we run away to wash our hands in a down spout a campesino woman sees this and is giggling her head off. Her name is Victoria.  Campesinos are perus farmer peasants. You´d know them if you saw them, tall straw hats, big skirts with pointed colorful petticoats and usually a bright woven shall that´s strapping a child, or a large amount of vegetables to their back.  Back to the party we end up splitting off with a bunch of people and partying and playing music into the streets.  We meet up with other revelers and just keep dancing and celebrating. A lovely time!  Sarah and i head back to don paco´s in our drunken painted revelry, honestly we had no business being in a nice restaraunt in this state, but they let us in and fed us more wonderful cuisine.  Then back to clean off and head out again. But Sarah´s tired, so i grab sunshine and head back to the plaza. I play for some kids and folks. I make lots of peruvian friends that night, and spent hours speaking my broken spanish, which felt great.    After hours of conversations with this fellow on topics from astral projecton to US politics (in Spanish), i decide to step out of the bar, where i see sarah running down the street toward me, we run and leap into each others arms, epic!  Camille had just been swept off her feet and onto the back of a motorbike, and we found sam, still painted and so drunk we had to walk him around and take care of him all night.  It was such a fun day and ended with Camille and Sarah and i hand feeding poor drunk Sam!
         The next day was the big parade, and i was excited for it but quickly remembered that i dont really like parades, not even big fancy peruvian carnavale ones.  So we all wandered and Camille and I bought bus tickes to Tingo Viejo.  Carlos invited us to a barbeque, and we headed over there. Where we sat in a circle drinking beer Peruvian style.  You open a beer (beers are big here) pour a glass full and hand the bottle to the person next to you, you enjoy the glass of beer, and then when you{re finished, you fling out the remainder, and pass the glass to the beer holder, who repeatst the process. It{s interesting. I had sunshine with me and i was quickly prodded into performing, again, and again and again. One of the fellas in the circle proposed marriage to me, ha ha ha. There was a guitar too, and so i played a bit. Then this fella picks up the guitar and lays down amazing lyrics to excellent guitar playing His voice was so good, as well as his playing, and it was a classic memorable moment.  Afterwards they told me he was in a famous peruvian band in the 60s called fragile.  Cool!  He was a nice fellow and complimented me on my voice , thank you!  It was a mellow day, we went home and found Sarah and went out for some Chifa, >Peruvian chinese food.  We wandered the plaza looking for fun, but didnt compare to the day before. We met some jewelry making rastas and they hung out with us for a while, but i became tired and annoyed and so the gals took me home.
      The next day we had a lovely breakfast, since my sickness i{ve only been eating bread and cheese it seems, as i have a new found fear of fruits and vegetables. So Pan con queso it is!  Sarah heads off to get her bus ticket and Camille and i take off on an adventure.  We grab a combi to los Banos del Inca, hot springs outside of town where the inca warrior Atahualpa once took residence(before losing to the spanish unfortunately).  But what a Combi ride it was, it took us through a market, out on crazy wet muddy country roads, waaaaaay out of the way. We were a bit confused until they explained that they had to go that way because of the road closures due to the parade. We were a little nervous for a moment, it took forever but we got there.  We got our own private room and soaked while chatting for 2 hours.  Our partied out bones were grateful. Afterwards we wanted to find the Ventanillas de Otuzco. They are hundreds of square "windows" carved into a cliff side, used for the enterment of human bodies.  We got directions, and started walking, and got lost, and got directions again, and again. We were walking and i say " wouldn{t it be great if we got picked up by some dudes on motorcycles to take us there?"  Just then a big pickup drives by and we get waterbombed by a bunch of girls in the back, they then pull over, and wave to us to come jump on board. What a trip!  We weave through the gorgeous countryside, its all so very green. Campesino women milk cows and farms with fat pigs roll on by.  And we are in an all out boys versus girls water fight. We are just a bundle of giggles, attacking everyone as we pass by. The boys are equipped on the roadside with huge buckets of water and we are absolutely drenched by them.  After about 15 minutes and hundreds of gallons of water, they drop us right off at the entrance to las Ventanillas.  Everyone there is laughing at the wet gringas, and we laugh at ourselves. What a great journey, and the Ventanillas were cool too, but just getting there was the best part.  We listen to a bit of the history, but we are too cold to sit around in the fading sunlight and start our walk back. We were hoping for a taxi but there werent any. So we start to walk and after a few minutes a Combi stops and we ask where they are heading..Cajamarca, we hop in and just after we pass a huge group of boys with massive buckets of water who would have destroyed us!  What luck! And the combi ride is beautiful, and we are safe from the water attacks. The combi drops us nearly at our door, a perfect day for sure.  We run in to tell sara of our perfect day!  We were so high from all the beauty and fun.  Then we take sarah out for her last meal before she heads west to Mancora.  Oh yah, its tradition to turn off the towns electricity until 6 pm on the monday of carnaval. So we eat a huge plate of chips and Chicha morada in a darkened restaurant! Buen viaje Sarah!  She heads to the bus station and we go back to the plaza to say goodbye to Hans and all his friends! Thanks so much Hans!
      The next day we are up at 3am for our 4am bus to Tingo Viejo.  I{d read a lot about the crazy trip, it takes 11 hours and is not very many kilometers, but it is hairpin turns and switchbacks through cloud forests and Andean peaks. Its unbelievable, i am so tired, but do not want to sleep because to miss this amount of beauty would be acrime.   I have about a thousand pics on my camera now of stunning mountain vistas, but they were so damn good°!  We arrive in Tingo Viejo and find a room at Hospedaje Leon, right next to the tingo river, with a balcony overlooking it.  I write in my journal on the balcony and enjoy being in such a peaceful quiet place for a while. nothing but the sound of the river. So wonderful.  We meet Alexandra from Germany who is also staying there. Shes been traveling through Chile and Argentina on a bike for months, such a badass. I am a baby traveler in comparison.  The next morning we are up at five to start the 10 km hike up to Kuelap, the ancient Chachapoyas village, built out of an incalcuable amount of stone. Some say almost as much as the great pyramids. The hike takes about 4 hours up, we rise over 1,000 meters in elevation. If i thought i was huffing and puffing up the stairs in Cajamarca, whew! What a hike, i am grateful that my body can do these things!   And more pictures of stunning mountain vistas! Amazing flowers the whole way, and crazy amounts of orchids.  We pass through a village where men and children are busily making adobe bricks. We are so close to the top!  We are greeted at Kuelap by the grounds keeper who seems amazed that we have arrived so early! when did you wake up? did you even eat breakfast?  he informs us we need to buy tickets, another 2km away, so we walk there and on the way i spy a rare Marvelous Spatulae tailed hummingbird! There{s only like a thousand mating pairs left in peru an I saw one! Oh and I found a four leaf clover tooo....no big deal.  We hike the 2km back up the mountain to the entrance and are entranced for the next hour in the circular stone ruins of kuelap. We meet up with alexandra and make the descent together.  10km back down in about half the time, and i don{t think i had any feet left upon my return.
     We pack quickly and hop a combi into chachapoyas where i buy an early bus ticket to Tarapoto.   We eat some "italian" food, well there were noodles. I sleep in my little shabby hotel room and head out on my own early the next day.  Its a combi stylebus, not a proper bus, and its again, a beautiful mountain road of twists and turns, and lo sientos as i bump into my busmates as we round the corners.  Slowyly over the 7 hour ride things get increasingly more tropical, giant ferns, and vines and tree canopies appear. And then the heat....wooooweeeeeee its hot, i mean i{m not comlaining, to those of you who are in missouri, where its freezing right now but....damn sweltering missouri in august heat. im sweating just typing on this keyboard.  So i find suitable accomodations and internet and book a tour of a local waterfall.  That was yesterday, I wake up this morning and it is a torrential downpour...but i arrive for my waterfall trip anyway!  Its me and a family of 4 from Chiclayo, Peru.  We head through the rain, me wiping the condenstaion from the inside of the window so the driver can see.  rocks are tumbling down the mountains into the road. At a roadblock, our driver speeds around, and tells the guy to let us pass....ummmm....is this a good idea?  So we pass, and make it to the waterfall. We tumble out and put on ponchos, The little girl with the family is only five, and such a trooper.we walk the pathways to the falls but one section is completely overtaken by the river,  a guy wades out and leads me across to the rest of the stairs up to the falls.  The family doesnt follow, and our crazy driver Leo, leads me up to the falls.  Its thunderous an forceful mist is flying everywhere, holy cow, so much for my idea of a peaceful swim in the waterfall.  A girl and her boyfriend are there though, and shes wearing a bikini! Not swimming though, just for a good photo.  It was crazy, beautiful and intense.  When we return the rain has stopped, but they have closed the waterfall, so we drive back home....weird, wonderful day in Peru.  I know this was a long post, so thanks to those who stuck with me!  Where am i off to next?... I{ll get back to you.....Love to you all!