Archive for February, 2007
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
Amantaní to Copacabana, Bolivia
Sandwiched between the styrofoam-stiff mattress and a press of woolen blankets, Mel and I awoke early and refreshed to the song of birds and the occasional bray of donkeys.
Gladys, our host, set an egg breakfast for us in preparation for our morning departure from the island. Thank yous all around, we scrambled between their adobe houses, along the rock walls, and down the recently-cemented path to the dock, hoping to grab the first boat directly to Puno. There are however, separate systems in place for tourists and locals—thankfully in this case tourists can and do include other peruvians—we were quickly herded away from the local boat that began to fill and fill and fill with locals headed to Puno, quite literally until the boat swarmed with people, hanging in places onto the gunnels.
No Comments » - Posted in Travel by Damon
Monday, February 26th, 2007
Amantaní
We stayed the night at the home of Gladys, a very youthful-looking quechua speaker in her early twenties, her son Franklin, 5, and her sister, Olga, and her sister’s daughter, Alison, 4.
The morning brought first birdsong, then sunrise, then Franklin to our door, shouting “a comer! a comer!” to us (to eat!), and later greeting us at the breakfast table with eggs and bread and nescafe in hot pots. I managed to stumble the bread on my fingers, and in trying to keep it from ending up on the floor, I knocked over my coffee, spilling the entire cup along the table and mostly onto the dirt floor of their tiny kitchen, chickens in one corner and fire in the other.
The lack of coffee laid me low, and even as Mel and I ventured out to explore the island, I could barely keep my eyes open. So, after a new cup of coffee on the central square, a quick run-into with Kyle and Audrey (Audrey offering us some of her Grapefruit seed extract, the exact same that Mel had been seeking unsuccessfully since day one of our trip), we headed up to the island’s peak, Pacha Tata, some 500 feet or so off the lake, and an hour struggle in the thin air to reach the top.
Once there, we met first Gareth (again climbing the mountain), and Solomon, a 36-year-old native of the island whose job it is to make sure the sheep farmers are not overgrazing on certain pastures. We passed rows of potatoes and corn, and other crops we could not identify, during the climb to the top.
No Comments » - Posted in Travel by Damon
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
Adventures on Titicaca
photo courtesy of Melanie Gordon
“Capitan Victoriano?”
“Yes.”
“How are we doing?”
“Fine.”
“Is the lake always like this?”
“No. Usually it’s very calm. Today the lake is a bit agitated.”
Agitated, as if some giant creature were making cocktails and happened to be stirring this enormous lake at one end, sending waves and wind our way. Or someone had set the high-altitude gargantuan washing machine on agitate. On cue, the boat tilted first to the left and then back into a wave, the spray crashing over the side and into our faces.
1 Comment » - Posted in Travel by Damon
Saturday, February 24th, 2007
Goodbye Cusco, Hello Titicaca
Ok, so it does deserve to be said once, and I think most aptly already said by Mel’s brother: “Have a good time, and don’t laugh too much about the lake’s name.”
Three weeks in Cusco at a family house was more than enough for the city to start feeling like home…when you start to know too well where things are, when you wear the baseball cap of the local soccer team, when you wheedle down the taxi drivers to reduce their US$1 fares to 66cents, when the local food tastes, well, normal, and when the street vendors who in the first few days had been nearly attacking you with queries stop hassling you because you haven’t bought anything from them in days…all signs of roots settling in.
No Comments » - Posted in Travel by Damon
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
Boot Windows XP on a USB External HDD – Dell Latitude X1
Here’s the scenario: three weeks into a multi-country tour of south america with my photographer girlfriend, the Dell Latitude X1 that we were happily carrying around both for writing and photo-editing purposes decided that its hard disk should start to buck and grind. The noises that came out of the otherwise silent computer (no fan on the Dell X1-very quiet) made my throat gorge with disgust.
I ordered a 2.5″ laptop drive as a replacement from a dealer in Cusco, Peru. (If you’re ever in dire need of computer repair in Cusco, head to the “Centro de Comercio del Carmen” a multi-level cement mall with more than three dozen independent computer parts dealers.)
