• Are pocket-sized, like a point-and-shoot (they fit in a jacket pocket)
• Use professional-grade interchangeable lenses, like an SLR
• Perform almost as well as a DSLR on the key aspects:
  • Focus speed
  • Low-light performance
  • Full-manual control
  • Offer sophisticated RAW file formats

So what does this all mean? This is the “Decisive Moment Digital” (as Luminous Landscape likes to say) or, a “camera for the rest of us”. Some people will still need and use DSLRs, but they will be people who already have a lot invested in canon or nikon glass, or pros who switch between the larger formats and their full-frame 35mm digitals.

Can you tell yet that I’m excited about this? I sold all my other camera gear and bought a Panasonic GF1 in December. I have two lenses with me (a 20mm F1.7 prime, and a 45-200mm F4.0-5.6 telephoto zoom). So, what has changed? Let’s review the old criteria:

• Big pixels. Better! These cameras (using the Micro Four-Thirds mount specification) have a sensor that’s 8-10 times larger than any of my previous cameras.
• Wide-angle lens. Worse. My new camera has a normal lens – it’s effective angle-of-view is 40mm (anything between 30 and 70 or so is considered normal).
• Fits in a pocket. A little worse. This camera is still small, just not as small as my prior cameras.

So why’d I do it?
There are a couple of reasons:

• Flexibility. Interchangeable lenses allow me to take advantage of different featuresets with only one camera. My GF1 fits in my pocket with its tiny 20mm pancake prime lens, but I can switch lenses and get amazing long-range bird and wildlife photos (yay! Antarctica!) with my 90-400mm effective telephoto.
• RAW+JPEG mode. Makes it easy to get uploadable photos while traveling, and large printable ones for when we return.
• Great movies. This camera shoots great 720p HD video.
• Lots of scene modes along with 4 programmable custom modes.
• Full manual mode for extended-exposure night shots.
• Auto-bracketing – this is great for making HDR photos – pictures that have way more colors than any camera (or even our eyes) can process at one time.

This makes the fourth (and hopefully final) camera for our trip. Watch for photos of Argentina (and beyond!) coming out of it!

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, March 15th – Sunday, March 21st: Argentina: El Calafate, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and El Chalten; Chile: Puerto Natales and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• Monday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 28th: Argentina: El Calafate and Bariloche
• April: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba Iguazu, Salta, Jujuy Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about some of our thoughts on travel and our time in Puerto Madryn.

Hope you enjoy!

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Once we arrived, we took the public bus into the city and walked to our hostel (which was not great – unclean and generally pretty noisy. Thankfully it was the only really tough part of days in Uruguay). This experience helped highlight a couple of things we experienced in Uruguay (click on any of the photos to see more):

• People are super-nice here. As in, the older man whom we asked for directions actually got off the bus with us, found our street, told us which direction to go, and made sure we were all set before he got back on a bus to continue on his way.
• Everyone drinks mate. And they have this special way of carrying the mate stuff (cup, thermos, metal straw/spoon, and ground mate):



• They have a really cool monument to one of their great generals, Jose Artigas. It’s underground in the central plaza, so during the intense summer heat (temps here were in the high 80s every day), it’s a great place to cool off for a few minutes.



• They do parilla al legno (barbeque on a wood fire) here; in Buenos Aires it’s all parilla al carbon (barbeque on charcoal). I like al legno better.

Oh, check out the photos above to find the following:

• An ice-skating pengiun
• Some amazing ocean-side sunsets
• The Teatro Solis, one of the most accoustically-perfect theaters in the world

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• The Paris of South America
• Capital of a country full of faded glory
• The birthplace of Tango
• Home to a great culinary history

We were lucky enough to visit B.A. twice – once in November at the end of the first part of our trip (before we went back to the States for a couple of months), and when we returned to South America in early February.

The first time around, we didn’t get much of a sense of the city. We arrived on a Saturday morning after having traveled about 3300 miles in two days (2300 miles from Easter Island to Santiago, and 1000 miles from Santiago to Buenos Aires) – the equivalent of flying from San Francisco to Chicago, then taking a bus to Boston. Since our plane left on Monday night, we spent two days getting reservations made for our return to the city, and then walked around on Monday. We did see one or two kind of funny things along the way, though (click the photo to see the photos of the fully-decked out Christmas tree – in a mall in early November):

Yes, it says “You are going to feel like you robbed us!”

When we came back, we were a little more rested than we had been, we were excited to travel, and we had more time in Buenos Aires. So, the second time around we were able to (Click each photo to see the rest of the photos from that area):

• Tour La Boca, the famed neighborhood of colors (and poverty)



• Walk through El Caminito – the only touristy part of La Boca



• See the stadium and fan club of the legendary Argentinian futbol team, Boca Juniors



• See an incredible Tango show, which had 12 dancers and a live band with 14 amazing performers



• Visit La Recoleta Cemetary, the famed mausoleum that houses the ancestors of many of the city’s most important families, including Evita – Eva Peron



• Experience a real pro-league Futbol game – we saw River Plate play Rosario Central at River Plate

We had a great time the second time around in Buenos Aires, and we even found had some good food karma while we were there!

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We each have:

• Sleeping bag in compression sack
• Travel towel
• Silk sleep sheet
• Money belt
• Journal
• Wedding ring
• Digital watch
• Spanish language notebook

For the both of us, we carry (some in Stef’s bag, and some in Matt’s):

• Finance notebook
• Continent guidebook (South America on a Shoestring)
• Antarctica guidebook
• Argentina guidebook
• Spanish-English dictionary

Matt brought:

• Sunglasses (with sunglasses case)

Stef brought:

• 1 biteplate
• 1 pair earrings
• 2 pairs prescription glasses
• 1 sunglasses add-on for glasses
• Sarong
• Eye mask
• 1 set of sleep socks
• 1 bag personal supplies

We each have 3 drybags, and Matt carries two more (one for the spare medicines, and one for the camera).

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, March 8th – Sunday, March 14th: Antarctica: South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia and El Calafate
• Monday, March 15th – Sunday, March 21st: Argentina: El Calafate, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and El Chalten; Chile: Puerto Natales and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• Monday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 28th: Argentina: El Calafate and Bariloche
• April: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba Iguazu, Salta, Jujuy Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about our time in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Hope you enjoy!

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This year, we headed up to the Pocono mountains, since we were in Northern Pennsylvania anyway. We stayed at a great B&B called The Eagles Mere Inn, and really enjoyed it. We walked around town (see the photo album below), drove around a bit, and even went to the movies (we saw avatar – in 3D – and it was better than either of us thought it would be!)
Our meals were incredible – the inn includes both breakfast and a five-course dinner – and everything was amazing – some of the best food that either of us have had.

Check out the rest of the Eagles Mere photos by clicking on the one below!

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This border crossing wasn’t filled with nearly as much pretense as our crossing into Chile (everyone said it would be super-easy), but it wasn’t all smooth sailing:

• We spent three hours of the eight-hour bus ride waiting at the border (where it was cold, a pretty high altitude (so I got a bit of a headache), and there was NOTHING to do but wait.
• One of the women on our bus had about 46 pairs of shoes and 12 sweaters with her, and we waited an hour for her to get finished with customs. Eventually, our bus just left without her – we heard through the grapevine that she had to pay taxes and some fines for all of the import duties she had tried to evade.

So that was our border crossing. Everyone said it would be easy, but it turned out a little more painful than we expected. After we got to Mendoza, we hopped on our 18-hour bus bound for Buenos Aires….

Click on the below photo to see the rest of them from around Los Horcones:

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Stef and I just wanted to let you know that we left for our Antarctica cruise yesterday, so we’re not going to have email or web access for a couple of weeks. There are still a few blog posts that will be going up, but we won’t be able to see, read, or respond to comments or email until the week of March 15th at the earliest. Enjoy what we’ve got coming in the meantime!

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• Doxycycline – best long-term malaria prophylaxis (we brought enough for a year)
• Dex – altitude sickness prevention medicine (prescription)
• First-aid kit:
  • Bandaids (multiple sizes)
  • Neosporin
  • Rubber gloves
  • Tweezers
  • Ace Bandage
  • Second Skin (burn/sunburn healing)
  • Moleskin
  • Medical tape
• Standard toiletries (most travel size as we buy full-size ones after we leave the US):
  • Shampoo
  • Toothpaste
  • Razor and razor blades
  • Skin cream
  • Suntan lotion
  • Aloe
  • Insect repellent
  • Deodorant
• Ibuprofen
• Migraine medicine
• Water purification tablets
• Immodium AD
• Benadryl
• Icy hot cream
• Muscle relaxants (actually, we picked these up in Ecuador and Peru – much cheaper, and you don’t need a prescription!)
• Sanitizer sprays

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, March 1st – Sunday, March 7th: Britain: South Georgia and Antarctica: South Shetland Islands
• Monday, March 8th – Sunday, March 14th: Antarctica: South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia and El Calafate
• Monday, March 15th – Sunday, March 21st: Argentina: El Calafate, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and El Chalten; Chile: Puerto Natales and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• Monday, March 22nd – Sunday, March 28th: Argentina: El Calafate and Bariloche
• April: Argentina: Mendoza, Cordoba Iguazu, Salta, Jujuy Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read about our first Argentinian border crossing and our anniversary trip to the Poconos.

Hope you enjoy!

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Once we arrived home, and made it through the surgery and the two weeks in the ICU, we found out that my family was going to Vail, Colorado for Christmas.

Keep in mind that the only skiers in my family are my two brothers and me.

The family wasn’t going to ski, they were going because my sister was having hip surgery there in mid-December. Everyone would be there, so stef and I decided to surprise them with a visit. We had a good time, and I caught up with seasons of Bones and Castle.

I shot a few pics of the city around vail; check them out by clicking on the one below!

Nick, Dan, and I also spent an afternoon on the mountain – Nick took some of his first tele runs ever – and we had a great time. Here’s what the skiing looked like (there are more behind this one, just click on it!):

Enjoy!

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• The Atacama desert (in San Pedro de Atacama)
• Santiago (the capital city)
• Easter island

We may end up spending a few more days in Chilean Patagonia later on, but for now, here’s what helped us most:

• Rain shells. It rained while we were on Easter island, a lot, every day (there was a tropical depression that settled on the island for exactly the days we were there). Our shells (mine is a marmut and stef’s is from the north face, in case you’re curious) really pulled their weight to keep us dry. In fact, I had been planning to dump my shell when we came back to the states, but my Easter island experience convinced me otherwise.
• Unlocked cell phone. This was a huge time-saver in Santiago, because we made a few day trips outside of the city, and the cellphone let us coordinate travel and sights without a guidebook or problems.
• Travel towels. Yes! Easter island was so wet and rainy that we had to trade off between our quick-dry towels and the towels in our hostel.
• Travel Clothesline. I don’t normally pick four things, but the clothesline really came in handy when drying out our wet gear on Easter island. Props to it!

It’s unusual to post about four things, but these really worked out for us, even in the short period of time we were in Chile…

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• Days spent in-country: 15
• Number of 20+ hour bus rides: 2
• Number of flights: 2
• Total distance traveled in-country: ~6000 miles
• Total number of bus rides: 6
• Hours lost waiting on broken-down buses: 1
• Days in the desert: 3
• Days in the city: 5
• Days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: 4
• Number of check-ins at hostels: 9
• Number of hostels stayed at: 4
• Most expensive meal: fish and chicken on Easter Island…
• Hours spent driving: 5
• Hours spent driving off-road: 4
• Number of ahu seen: 17
• Number of moai seen: 186
• Number of moai photographs: 56

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What specifically did we bring?

• Digital Camera. Panasonic GF1 pocket camera, with a 20mm lens.
  • Included battery and charger with International plug
  • Telephoto lens: 45-200mm Panasonic zoom lens
  • 2 extra batteries (for Antarctica)
  • 28 (yes, twenty-eight) SD memory cards to capture photos and movies, and as backup
  • Waterproof case to carry the memory cards in
  • SD memory card reader in case the netbook has a problem
  • Joby Gorillapod tripod with level
  • Additional lens cleaners and cases to protect everything
• Netbook: Lenovo s10-2 running MacOS X 10.6.2.
  • Included 6-cell, 5-hour battery and AC Adapter with US plug
  • Logitech trackball for photo edits
  • Neoprene traveling case
  • 2 SDHC memory cards with backups of the Windows and MacOS installs – not perfect, but a way to get it running again if something fails…
• 2 iPhones as backup web and email (and financial services) access
  • 2 iPod charging cables
  • 1 iPod AC adapter
• 1 Casio digital camera (backup and for underwater)
  • Included battery and charger
  • Dicapac waterproof submersible case

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, February 22nd – Sunday, February 28th: Argentina: Ushuaia, Britain: Falkland Islands and South Georgia
• Monday, March 1st – Sunday, March 7th: Britain: South Georgia and Antarctica: South Shetland Islands
• Monday, March 8th – Sunday, March 14th: Antarctica: South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia
• Second half of March: Argentina: El Calafate, El Chalten, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and Chile: Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• April: Argentina: Esquel, Bariloche, Mendoza, Iguazu, Salta, Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read a couple of summaries of our Chilean travels, and about our trip to Vail!

Hope you enjoy!

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The place with the huge stone statues!

We were really excited when we bought our tickets to go to the “most remote location on earth“, and even more excited when we boarded the plane early one Sunday morning in Santiago. (Of course, flying first class was really nice, too We spent Sunday afternoon through Thursday morning there, and were really surprised by some of the things we learned about the island, like:

• The island itself is very green, with lots of grass and a few forests – there’s very little volcanic surface
• The landing strip is huge – our 767 had twice as much room as it needed to land – because the US Government helped upgrade it so it could be an alternate landing strip for the Space Shuttle
• The moai (statues) were created to honor great leaders of the island’s different clans, not gods of some pagan religion



• After the civilization suffered a tremendous population loss, a new religion (based on sea-birds, fertility, and the “bird-men”) grew powerful in the south-western corner of the island (Orongo)
• The island suffered from strong depopulation from the 1700’s to the mid-1900’s due to several factors (for more on this, read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse):
  • Inter-tribal conflict
  • European visits introducing previously-unknown illnesses to the islanders
  • European pilfering of islanders for slavery (Peru), and other purposes (Chile)
  • Chilean use of the island as a sheep-farming colony in the early 1900’s (Reminiscent of Galapageran history during the 1800’s)
• Kevin Costner made a movie called Rapa Nui that purports to document  the lives of native Easter Islanders
  • It failed in the box office
  • They managed to damage one of the infamous stone statues during filming
  • A bar in the town shows the film three nights a week (it costs US$6 per person to watch), but we showed up twice, each time about 10 minutes late, and they refused to play it for us. Kind of funny, since we were the only people in town remotely interested in seeing it!

We spent most of our time on the island doing our own thing:

• Walking around the village Sunday afternoon
• Hiking the island’s northern coast on Monday (during a torrential rainstorm that soaked us clear through in the first hour, andlasted for 5 hours)
• Rented a Suzuki jeep on Tuesday and drove all over the island, seeing Orongo, several of the Ahus, and two of the three volcanoes that make up the island
• Checking out different restaurants for dinner
• Two guided tours on Wednesday, which were alright, but nothing special

While we were on Easter Island, so was a tropical depression. It met us twice more during our travels (yes, the same tropical storm):

1. In Miami during our layover
2. In Philadelphia while we were at the hospital with Joe

Check out the rest of our photos – click each one below to see more!

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So we were really surprised when everything came together for 24 hours straight when we were in Santiago. Here’s what happened:

1. On our last full day in Santiago, we decided to try to visit Pablo Neruda’s house (now a museum).
   • A. You should know that all the guidebook says is to go to Isla Negra by bus, so we figured it wasn’t too hard.)
   • B. We had to wait in line to buy our tickets – it was a really busy Saturday at the bus station.
2. When we called them (on the cellphone) to make sure we were taking the correct bus, we found out you needed a reservation to visit, and made the last available English-language reservation (our Spanish is ok, but sometimes we opt for English tours, especially when we don’t know much about a place).
3. When we got to Isla Negra, we found out that return buses (to Santiago) came every hour. We finished our tour and walked back to the bus station just as a Santiago-bound bus was arriving.
4. The ticket assistant even got the ticket for us – we had to pay, but we didn’t need to go into the office at all!
5. The next morning, when we checked into the airport, we were issued exit-row seats for our 5-hour flight to Easter Island!
6. When we boarded the plane, there was another couple who had the same seat assignments as we did. Convinced we were going to be bumped (standard practice in the US), I went to the front as recommended, ready to fight to stay on the plane. Instead, I was told “You have an upgrade”, and Stef and I flew first-class to Easter Island!

What a great 24-hours – they were really enjoyable. We took a couple of photos of first-class – you can get to them by clicking on the above pic.

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1. Wake up in the morning
2. Shower, Get dressed
3. Order breakfast, Wait for breakfast, Eat breakfast
4. Pack our bags
5. Check out of the hostel
6. Leave our bags in the luggage storage room
7. Walk around Santiago, check out sites, do a short day trip
8. Return to the hostel
9. Check in to our new room, pay, and pick up the room key
   • we stayed in 5 different rooms in the 5 consecutive nights we were there!
10. Collect our bags from the luggage storage room
11. Go to our new room and drop off our bags
12. Go to dinner
13. Return to sleep

During that period of time, we became very good friends with the reception staff, as we spent an hour or more every day at the front desk, checking in, checking out, and chatting. Keep in mind, when you’re traveling, you want to minimize steps 4,5,6,8,9,10, and 11. We got to do them every day, so we were a little more limited in what we saw in Santiago. We did, however:

• Eat at the BEST steakhouse we’ve ever been to, Las Vacas Gordas
• See the public library
• Climb the Monastery and Military hill



• Shop at a few interesting stores (and I got a plug converter! Ours was lost 4 months before, in Costa Rica)



• Go into the bus stations – all three of them (Local, Inter-provincial, and International – Argentina and Bolivia)
• Visit Vina del Mar – a little ocean/beach vacation town where we:
  • Had our first completo – a hot dog with ketchup, mayonnaise, and guacamole (BTW – you can skip it, not really worth it other than for the novelty factor)
  • Visited the Easter Island Museum – saw a great explanation of some of the archaeological sites



• See Valpairiso, about an hour outside of Santiago, where we:
  • Walked around the town
  • Checked out the port, with all of its crazy taxi-boats



• Toured one of Pablo Neruda’s houses (the one in Isla Negra), with:
  • All of the ship’s mastheads
  • The cigar collection
  • Other collections
  • The beautiful view of the sea

I’ve given you a preview of some of the photos here; below are links to a few of the photo sets that didn’t get full coverage. Check them out!

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• Enough underwear and socks to last at least a week
• 3 layers when outdoors:
  • Wicking – closest to the body (keeps the sweat out)
  • Warming – insulation layer (keeps the cold out)
  • Weather – outside layer of weatherproof gear (keeps the rain and snow out)
• All clothing should match everything else for ease of use
• Button-downs for travel (look presentable!)
• Might need to borrow or buy in certain extremes

Here’s what we packed:
Matt:

• Pants:
  • 1 pair travel pants (quick-dry, synthetic)
  • 1 pair blue jeans
  • 1 pair travel shorts (quick-dry, synthetic, double as a bathing suit)
• Shirts:
  • 2 long-sleeve button-down travel shirts (different colors)
  • 1 short-sleeve button-down travel shirt
  • 1 long-sleeve synthetic t-shirt
  • 1 short-sleeve synthetic t-shirt
• Outerwear:
  • 1 rain shell (3-ply goretex if you’re wondering)
  • 1 pair rain pants (3-ply goretex)
  • 1 poly-fill warming jacket
• Winter Clothing:
  • 2 pairs long thermal pants
  • 2 thick turtlenecks
  • 2 pairs wool socks
  • 3 pairs gloves
  • 2 winter hats
  • 1 balaclava
  • 1 neck-warmer/insulated headband
• Footwear:
  • 1 pair GoreTex running shoes
  • 1 pair hiking sandals
• Other:
  • 7 pairs underwear
  • 5 pairs synthetic socks
  • 1 travel hat

Stef:

• Pants:
  • 2 pairs shorts
  • 1 pair capris
  • 1 pair travel pants
  • 1 pair jeans
• Shirts:
  • 2 long-sleeve t-shirts
  • 2 short sleeve
  • 1 long sleeve blouse
  • 1 3/4 sleeve blouse
• Outerwear:
  • 1 rain jacket
  • 1 pair rain pants
  • 1 fleece jacket
• Winter Clothing:
  • 1 ski hat
  • 1 balaclava
  • 1 pair light gloves
  • 1 pair heavy mittens
  • 1 thermal turtleneck
  • 1 pair thermal tights
  • 1 pair silk long underwear bottoms
  • 1 down jacket
• Footwear:
  • 1 pair flip-flops
  • 1 pair water sandals
  • 1 pair hiking shoes
• Other:
  • 1 dress
  • 2 bras
  • 2 tank tops
  • 7 pairs underwear
  • 1 bathing suit
  • 3 pairs light/summer socks
  • 6 pairs wool socks
  • 1 pair sock liners
  • 1 baseball cap
  • 1 bandana
  • 1 travel cap

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Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, February 15th – Sunday, February 21st: Argentina: Puerto Madryn, Rio Gallegos, and Ushuaia
• Monday, February 22nd – Sunday, February 28th: Argentina: Ushuaia, Britain: Falkland Islands and South Georgia
• March: Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia, El Calafate, El Chalten, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and Chile: Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• April: Argentina: Esquel, Bariloche, Mendoza, Iguazu, Salta, Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read the posts about earlier in our trip when we:

• Spent 5 days in Santiago, checking in and out of our hostel every day
• Spent 3 days hanging around the moai of Easter Island

Hope you enjoy!

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Once it was repaired, we finished our trip to San Pedro.

What a touristy place!
San Pedro is super-touristy – the food and the hotels were more expensive than any place we had visited yet. And we only found one really decent restaurant in the whole town (granted, there are maybe 10-15 restaurants there). But we did have some fun:

• Toured the Valley of the Moon (Valle de la Luna) with a great tour group, and saw some really cool landscapes!



• I rode a mountain bike across 5 rivers to an amazing canyon, rode up the side, and saw some of the desert:
• A really incredible tour of the night sky. Our tour guide was a crazy French astronomer, who explained how every culture has always believed that it is at the top of the world (and how France is at the middle of the world), and what we perceive in the night sky. He showed us all of the constellations of the southern hemisphere, and over the course of the night we saw how their positions in the sky changed. And he helped me get this great shot of the moon!

It was really hot during the day, and really cold at night. And of course, it’s the desert, so it’s always really dry – there wasn’t any rain while we were there.

Check out the rest of our photos around of the Valle de la Luna below:

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1. Tacna, Peru
   • Takes about 5-6 hours by bus
2. Arica, Chile (includes the border crossing)
   • Takes 1-2 hours by bus
   • Takes 1.5 hours by train
   • Takes 45 minutes by collectivo Taxi

So we made reservations at a hostel in Arica (via Skype, great for cross-border phone calls), bought our bus tickets to Tacna, and got ready to head out.
If you remember, our previous border crossing was pretty uneventful, even though it happened at 3a.m. on a bridge over a river. While we really enjoy easy, simple border crossings, I was beginning to worry that I would miss out on the full Latin America experience if all we had were easy border crossings. Thankfully for me , this one turned out to be pretty interesting.

Paro – Chilean border strikes!
Our morning trip to Tacna was pretty straightforward; the bus had lots of music, a movie, but unfortunately no food. We stopped in a bus terminal restaurant for an almuerzo. That worked out well, and we walked from the intra-provincial bus terminal to the international bus terminal. Along the way, we spoke with three or four people who all explained that the border crossing was really difficult, because there was a strike in Chile. It took a while to sort through the language and cultural obstacles, but after the third conversation I began to get the point:

• The Chilean customs workers were striking, but their office could not “close”.
• Instead, they took a 20 minute break between letting each visitor pass through the border
• This effectively changed everyone’s border crossing from a 20-minute affair to a 2-3 hour affair.

The paro, or strike, made it much more expensive to cross the border. Why? The delay caused the buses and taxis from Tacna to only travel to the border, then you needed a Chilean taxi/bus to get to Arica. Normally one taxi or bus goes from Tacna to Arica.
Everyone recommended the train, but the line was very long. So after investigating our options, we changed some money, and took a collectivo taxi to the border. It was the craziest taxi we had seen yet – a 1970’s Buick with an automatic transmission that had been converted to manual, and a radio that used a pen for the controls (Click to see the rest of the photos from our border crossing)

Check out the video of our taxi ride!

Border Surprise
When we arrived, there was no one waiting at the border. We arrived at Customs, and walked through the entire process in about 15 minutes, found a Chilean collectivo taxi, and went to Arica. It turns out that the Chilean customs officials were only striking between 8am and 5pm Chile time. We had arrived at 6pm Chile time (4pm Peruvian time), so we missed all of the strike activity.

Skip to the end!
When we arrived in Arica, we thought we were feeling ok, so we decided to push through to our real destination, San Pedro de Atacama. We bought bus tickets and got on a night bus headed to San Pedro…

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• Matt carries the larger packs (he is physically bigger, after all), especially since he carries the electronics and all of the spare toiletries. His packs are:
  • a 2009 Osprey Atmos 65 (liter) backpack, in grey, and
  • a 2009 Lowe Alpine Houdini 16 (liter) daypack, in black and lime green

  

• Stef carries a smaller backpack. We actually found her daypack in Quito, Ecuador – it was the first pack we bought that folds up into itself. She has:
  • a 1997 Dana Design Bomb Pack XS (about 50 liters), in black and purple, and
  • a 2009 Altus Drop 17 daypack, in black and lime green (yes, our packs match!)

  

We use them for different purposes obviously:

• The backpacks are for traveling between cities; they carry all of our extra clothing and gear, and serve as “dressers” when we stay in hostels.
• The daypacks are dual-purpose:
  • We carry them on our daytrips and dayhikes in cities and outside, when we plan on returning to our hostel at night. We carry water, food, cameras, and guidebooks in them (and sometimes a jacket when we fear rain or cold!)
  • We also bring them on the bus when we travel between cities, then they carry our guidebooks, other reading, some food and water, and anything that we can’t afford to lose in a bus (you can always buy new clothes, but a replacement passport takes a lot more time!)

So that’s what we use to carry our stuff…

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We are back to traveling!

We fly back from the US to Buenos Aires, Argentina on Tuesday, arriving Wednesday morning. We’ll be checking out the city, trying to find some good restaurants, and we hope to see a tango show and a futbol (world, not American) game.

Here is how our plan is shaping up for the next couple of months:

• Monday, February 8th – Sunday, February 14th: Uruguay: Montevideo, and Argentina: Puerto Madryn
• Monday, February 15th – Sunday, February 21st: Argentina: Puerto Madryn, Rio Gallegos, and Ushuaia
• Monday, February 22nd – Sunday, February 28th: Argentina: Ushuaia, Britain: Falkland Islands and South Georgia
• March: Antarctic Peninsula, Argentina: Ushuaia, El Calafate, El Chalten, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and Chile: Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, and Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• April: Argentina: Esquel, Bariloche, Mendoza, Iguazu, Salta, Bolivia: La Paz, and Peru: Cuzco, Puno, and Lima
• May: Peru: Lima, Colombia: Bogota, Cartagena, United States: Boston

This week, you’ll read the posts about earlier in our trip when we:

• Crossed the Peruvian-Chilean border (it was a classic South American border crossing)
• Got a tour of the sky in the Atacama desert
• Travel through South American on buses, and the kinds of buses we ride in

Hope you enjoy!

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• A real international group, including 4 Italians, 2 Dutch, 2 Germans, 2 Americans, and an Israeli. Our guide was Peruvian, and so was our driver. Everyone on the trek spoke English; the Dutch also spoke German, and our driver spoke Japanese (yes, our bus driver! Very impressive). Besides the Peruvians, we were the best Spanish speakers though
• Trips around the back of several mountains near Arequipa, and a visit to strange rock formations (where we saw a halo around the sun!)
• A stop at the high pass across the mountains, at 4910 meters (where I got a peruvian wool hat!)
• A couple of great buffet lunches
• Hiking along the canyon ridge until and through sunset – we saw some great light!
• Night in a first-class hotel
• Party in Cabanaconde where we celebrated the 412th anniversary of the town’s founding with the locals (lots of fire, drinking, and dancing)
• AM hike (3 hours or so) down the canyon wall from Cabanaconde
• Afternoon hanging out at the Oasis on the canyon floor, and enjoying the pool!
• Two great professionally-cooked meals, with wine!
• Hike to the bridge over the river, and to see some of the medicinal cactuses
• Camping in tents (yes, this was luxury camping, as the weather was great, everything was set up for us, and we didn’t even have to carry our own gear!)
• 4 A.M. wakeup for a 5 A.M. start to return to the canyon ridge. We expected about a 3-4 hour return hike; we needed 2 hours 20 minutes to get back up. One person in our group made it in 90 minutes!
• An hour searching and finding condors cruising the thermals

We really enjoyed our trek, especially meeting all of our new friends. It was truly a great way to spend three days; check out the rest of the photos below!

Click on each photo to see the full set of pictures…

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We had high expectations for this place – after all, we spent about 2-3 months building it up in our minds!

Our arrival, though, was a different story. We got to the bus terminal alright, made reservations (gotta love the cell phone!), and confirmed taxi costs to the center of town. Then we walked outside to find a taxi. Of course one picked us up quickly and agreed to take us to our hotel. As soon as we left the parking lot, he asked us if we really wanted to stay at that hotel.

And that’s where the frustration started. We went to our hotel, found it underwhelming, and then discovered that he had waited outside the hotel for us – probably assuming that we wouldn’t like it (which, unfortunately, we did not). So he took us to 2 or 3 other hotels – all of which were too expensive for us. After a few unsuccessful stops (and gradually tiring with each), we settled on one hotel. We brought our bags in, and out of courtesy, I offered our driver a small extra tip.

Here’s the kicker – he actually made me give him MORE money! The nerve! Not wanting to hurt our travel karma, I paid up.

With the exception of our frustrating arrival, we had some fun in Arequipa. A couple of things that we did:

• Visited a city-block-sized convent built from the 1500’s to the 1800’s. It was really well-financed – every nun basically had their own 4-5 room house! Some great colors there; see all the pics by clicking through here:
• Saw the “Juanita” mummy – a 500-year-old mummy preserved in the ice and snow of Mount Ampato, one of the highest Andean mountains. Really interesting explanation of their culture and of the mummy’s discovery – only made possible by the eruption of nearby Sabancaya (which both caused the archaeologists to climb, wanting to see Sabancaya from above, and enabled them to find her, as the associated earthquakes unearthed the mummy). There is a great National Geographic video about this expedition, too.
• Walked around the Plaza de Armas, and caught a few good sunsets
• Planned and went on a 3-day hike with Colca Trek in the Colca Canyon. Great trip! We’ll post separately about it.

Enjoy the rest of the photos of Arequipa!

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But anyone who knows Joe knows that he is unstoppable. So after weeks of inpatient rehabilitation, he is back at home and going to outpatient rehab (he prefers to call it his “workout time”) three times a week. He is getting stronger every day and shows no signs of stopping.

Needless to say, it has been a challenging time, but also one in which we have realized how fortunate we are to have such wonderful family and friends. Many thanks to all the people who housed and fed us while Joe was in the hospital, and called or sent letters, cards, packages and emails to Joe and to my mother, Matt and me. It meant the world to us and definitely helped Joe stay positive in facing another difficult medical situation.

So here’s the latest on our travel plans. We are scheduled to fly back to Buenos Aires, Argentina on Tuesday, February 2nd. We will spend a couple of days there, eating steak and drinking red wine (I think it is worth a red wine headache in this case). Then we will continue with our travels through Argentina and any other adventures (or misadventures) that await us.

Over the next few days, Matt will be posting updates on our trip from October and November to bring the blog up to date (and to share pictures from the the canyon region of Peru, the deserts of Chile, Easter Island, Santiago de Chile and more). Thanks again to everyone for following our journey and wishing us well- it is a great gift that you give us.

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• Visiting the catacombs in the monastery of San Francisco (and seeing all of the skulls)
• Enjoying a CRAZY collectivo ride from central Lima all the way back to our hotel in miraflores (45 minutes to go about 6 miles, and I’ve never been so close to the other traffic on the toad as we were in that bus)
• Hanging out at the South American Explorers clubhouse – good atmosphere, fun people!
• Walking down to the pacific ocean, which was only about 25 minutes from our hotel
• Food – great food all over town!
• Paragliding: we hung out at the paragliding field (about 50m above sea level – you know because the ocean is right there for an afternoon. Stef had a flight , but the wind was so light that no one else could get airborne (in the tandem parachutes)

Funny Marketing Story: I had mistakenly not told the paragliding company exactly which pilot we wanted to fly with, so when the pilot I had spoken with realized that we arrived, he wanted “credit” for us (commission). But I had written down that I first heard about it through a guidebook. So they had a marketing channel attribution problem – they couldn’t tell if I found out about it from him or the guidebook. I had a long chat with Jose, and even tried to put on my consulting hat (since I’ve been helping companies to figure out how to attribute marketing spend and value for the past 8 years or so). However, Jose wasn’t really into it – and our language barrier (primarily my limited Spanish; his English was pretty good) also got in the way. oh well!

Enjoy the rest of our photos from Lima below!

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Between rides, Stef and I hiked up to the Lazy Dog Inn from El Pinar – about a 90-minute hike. It’s not so much long as it is steep – you gain about 500 meters (1600 feet) of altitude during the hike.

We really enjoyed Huaraz – even though we didn’t spend much time there. There are a lot of opportunities for multi-day hikes, and if we come back, we might try one come 2010. In the meantime, there is some really impressive scenery throughout Huaraz, and some of the highest mountains in all of South America. You can see more of it below (and click for more photos):

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It has been a whirlwind of travel lately. After weeks of bus travel through Peru and into Chile- an amazing way to see the continent- we arrived in Santiago de Chile. It is a beautiful city, surrounded by mountains and filled with fantastic colonial buildings.

From Santiago we flew to Easter Island, a place unlike any we have seen before. It was phenomenal and we will write more about it (with Matt’s great pics posted as well) and other places we’ve seen over the past month. But first we wanted to let everyone know about some serious news we’ve had from home.

My brother has a number of medical problems, one of which has gotten worse since we’ve been gone. The situation now requires surgery, so Matt and I are coming home for a few weeks, to be there for the surgery and to help out any way that we can.

Please send any prayers and good thoughts that you can to my brother, Joe. He has a difficult way to go and keeps a fantastic positive attitude in the face of it all. He charms everyone he meets, so I have no doubt that he will make a million new friends at the hospital while he is there!

In the meantime, we will post pics from our travels to date- and any new news that comes our way. Thanks again for your thoughts and prayers.

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• Days in-country: 45
• Cities visited: 10
• Hotels: 8
• Number of original VW Beetles seen: 76
• Hours traveling by bus: 44
• Hours traveling by bus-train: 4
• Hours traveling by airplane: 0
• Times we were guessed to be Italian: 2
• Times we were guessed to be German: 8
• Times we were guessed to be American: 0 (Is it wrong to be proud of that?)
• Times we received help from random Ecuadorians: 5
• City we most enjoyed: Cuenca
• Place we most enjoyed: Vilcabamba
• Cheapest taxi: $1 from La Mariscal to Teleferiqo
• Most expensive taxi: $50 from La Mariscal to bus station Quitumbe (the fare was $7.50, the extra $42.50 was to cover the spoiler that broke when I touched it)
• Political conversations with Ecuadorians: 7

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• Days on the islands: 30
• Days at the volunteer station: 17
• Days with cold showers: 19
• Days with hot showers: 10
• German words learned: 5
• Trees felled: 23
• Blackberry bushes cut: 627
• Mosquito bites received: 134
• Blackberry bushes cut per bite received: 4.7
• Rats seen: 5
• Mice seen: 2
• Wild pigs heard: 3
• Spiders seen: 10
• Endemic trees planted: 15
• Books read: 8
• Days spent in Wellington rubber boots: 17
• Islands seen: 9
• Sea lions seen: 312
• Crabs seen: 72
• Penguins seen: 3
• Birds seen: 27
• Iguanas seen: 78
• Dolphins seen: 4
• Tortoises seen: 267
• Times we caught a “runaway” tortoise: 1
• How long he had been running: 4 months
• How far he got: 20 kilometers

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• Days in-country: 30
• Number of hostels/hotels: 5
• Miles traveled by bus: 250
• Miles traveled by plane: 60
• Cities visited: 4
• Beaches visited: 10
• Times we heard the phrase “pura vida”: 6,174
• Drinks Stef had before Matt spun fire: 3
• Times Matt hit himself practicing poi: 265
• Times Matt set himself on fire with poi: 0
• Hours spent on ATVs: 5 (Stef), 5.5 (Matt)
• Top speed on ATVs: 79kph
• Injuries: 3 (all Matt)
• Nights with hot showers: 3
• Types of fruit juices tried: 12
• Offered “food for your brain”: 17

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1. We went to Huaca de la Luna in the morning, and saw an amazing site of the Chimu people. It was a huge temple (a bit larger than a football field), built out of mud and clay over the course of a few hundred years. Every time there was an El Nino storm (about every 50 years), the temple would fall apart. Instead of rebuilding it, they would build a new temple, almost twice as big as the old one, on top of the old one. After 5 rounds, they basically got assimilated by the Incas (I think). The designs are pretty intricate; and you can see some of the patterns in the photoset…



2. In the afternoon, we visited Chan Chan, a huge (like the geographic size of Philadelphia) site just outside of Trujillo. Again, mud and clay construction, but the interesting thing is that the palaces and temples were combined here (this group came after the chimu, I think). Chan chan sprawls all over the place (the Peruvian Panamerican highway actually runs THROUGH it), and we saw the third-SMALLEST of the palaces there. Pretty impressive – designs representing the different forces in the people’s lives (fishing nets, waves, lizards, cats, etc), and really interesting to visit. There was a museum too – and I have a few photos from there as well…

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We learned two interesting things about Trujillo:

1. There are a lot of street performers. When we were walking around town the first night, we ran into one performing a musical-robot-mime act. It was pretty funny, and some of the crowd got into the act, too!
2. Trujillo has a lot of banks, and a lot of casinos. I don’t know why, but there are three huge casinos on one city block, and throughout the center of the city there are more casinos! It seems like most of the businesses in Trujillo are set up either to loan money to people, or to take it from them…

Check out the rest of the pictures in the set below…

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Chiclayo was a good place to rest for a few days, get our bearings for Peru (getting money, cell phone SIM card, checking out the local situation, etc), and to visit a few places. It was a little crazy though – Chiclayo has about 500,000 people, and in all of our walking around the city, we only saw three stoplights. Traffic was busy here – almost every intersection has a few cars arriving simultaneously, slowing down, and basically playing slow chicken with each other to see who gets to cross first. It’s one thing to watch this, and another to figure out how to cross while it’s happening!

We also saw a few really interesting pre-Inca historical sites. We went to the museum of Tumbas Reales in Lambayeque, and saw the collected excavations from a site that’s estimated to be about 1400 years old. It’s really impressive because the main graves had all been untouched by grave robbers, and it was found in the last 30 years. You can read more about the culture and museum on wikipedia. They are still working on the site; in face, in the past few months, they found another tomb, bringing the total to 14. The museum is modern (constructed about 5 or 6 years ago), well-lit inside with air-conditioning, and apparently cost about $4 million to build (according to the Peruvians we met there). The museum was really interesting, and all in spanish (so it took some effort to understand); they don’t allow cameras so the only photo we have is:

In the afternoon, we took a collectivo bus to Tucume, which is about 20km north of Lambayeque, and visited the museum and the site there. This site is about 1,000 years old, and the big difference is that you can tell that the museum isn’t as well-funded as the one in Lambayeque (although, as they mention several times, the museum was started by funding from Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon Tiki fame). It’s much smaller, all open-air, and uses sky-lights to light the displays. There are a few very cool dioramas of the site and how it might have looked when it was in use, like this one:

The site itself is also really interesting, as it is all built around a large hill (probably the source of their construction materials – mud and clay, primarily). There is a walk that goes from the museum outside the site up to the top of one of the hills; it’s a great place for photos. Check out more of them below!

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• Laptop computer. They’re big, heavy, and expensive. Which means that they’re easy to see (making us thief targets), hard to carry, and EXTREMELY painful if lost or stolen. While they would make certain things easier (for us, uploading photos), it’s not worth the expense, heft, and effort. I have been intrigued by the netbooks recently, but have yet to take the plunge.

• Digital video camera. They’re very similar to laptops. I already get decent HD video from my digital camera, but I’m personally not interested in editing video while we travel (not my thing).

• Kindle (or any books, for that matter). We have a decent guidebook (Lonely Planet, the most popular one we´ve seen), but we left every other book at home. How does that help us? We’ve encountered some very good books on the road that we wouldn’t have read otherwise (since we would have been focused on the books we knew). Reading what we encounter on the road broadens our experience.

Not bringing these three things actually worked really well for us. It might not have worked as well for others, but we´re happy to discuss it!

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1. We are going to see Easter Island!!! In a couple of weeks (see the itinerary below)
2. We are trying to get to Ushuaia in mid-late November, so we’re in a bit more of a rush than we were. We’ll slow down again soon.

See our travel plans below. Anything more than two weeks out is pretty tentative….

Also, the posts you’ll see this coming week are from earlier in our trip – we are documenting the places we’ve seen for the next couple of weeks. I’ll let you know when things are caught up.

• Monday, October 19th – Sunday, October 25th: Peru: Arequipa, Tacna and Chile: Arica, San Pedro de Atacama
• Monday, October 26th – Sunday, November 1st: Chile: Calama, San Pedro de Atacama, Santiago, Easter Island
• Monday, November 2nd – Sunday, November 8th: Chile: Easter Island, Santiago
• The rest of November (still guessing): Chile: Valpairiso and Argentina: Mendoza, Buenos Aires, Ushuaia
• December: Argentina: Patagonia
• January: Chile: Tierra del Fuego
• February: Argentina: Bariloche, Mendoza, Iguazu
• March: Argentina: Salta and Peru: Arequipa
• April: Peru: Arequipa, Cuzco,Lake Titicaca (maybe Bolivia?)
• May: Peru: Cuzco and Macchiu Picchu and US: Boston (returning home)

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Piura is called a “transportation hub” according to Lonely Planet, so we figured that we would only spend a day or so there. When we got into town at 7am, we were not at all excited to spend much time there. We found a bus company, paid in dollars, and were back on the road from Piura to Chiclayo by 8am. On our first Peruvian bus ride, they showed the Mel Gibson movie “Apocalypto”. It’s very violent, but a pretty interesting depiction of Inca society at it’s height – the film ends with a fleet of Spanish ships arriving in a bay. A good way to enter Peru – learning a little about the civilization that dominated its history (and most of its tourism).

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• One hour scrambling up the side of a hill from 1500m in the valley to 1930m at the top of the hill. This takes you to the first cross.
• About 15 minutes traversing a ridgeline to the next hilltop, including a steep (10 meter) scramble which is vertical – more rock climbing than hiking. This brings you to the second cross. It’s also the turnaround-point, if you feel the hike is too tough.
• About 90 minutes walking along a ridgeline. It’s between 2 feet and 5 feet wide, and during the afternoon is buffeted by winds. The sides of the ridgeline are pretty steep – very close to vertical – so about 20 feet from the center of the ridgeline, the ground is about 1000 feet below the ridgeline.



• About an hour (give or take) descending from the ridgeline through a farm, some cows, donkeys, and a riverbed. This brings you to a rock quarry, where you rejoin the paved road.

So that’s the hike – it’s strenuous, beautiful, and really interesting.

Did you know that I’m terrified of heights? Like a 10 foot drop next to me puts my hands in a cold sweat. So I had some trouble with this hike, but since I knew nothing about it before we started it, it was a lot easier for me – I was just surprised. And Stef helped me through it, too.
I survived it (obviously I’m still here), but I still get a little woozy just thinking about it.

We had a lot of fun hiking and resting and meeting people in Vilcabamba before we headed to the Peruvian border.

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I can’t explain why they built it, but it looks pretty cool – it reminds me of the Disney castle that they use in their film logo. I alps can’t explain why they built the gateway in the middle of the city…

We also learned two other things about Loja:

1. It has the WORST street layout ever. Basically, every sidewalk is wide enough for one person only. This was great when we arrived on Sunday afternoon, when basically everything in the city was closed and no one was around. But Monday morning the streets filled with people, and we had to step into traffic every 5 minutes just to walk down the street (not fun).
2. It hosts the Ecuadorian National Waiter Championships (or at least one of the qualifiers). On Sunday night when we were there, in addition to the standard Sunday night concert, they held a waiter’s race – a race between table servers. It was a big deal – the winner received $100, which is a lot in a country where most people make about $5/day. There were also a lot of rules:
   • Waiters had to be dressed in full serving outfits, including dress shoes.
   • They had to carry a silver tray with a full cup of either rasberry juice or chica, the national liquor (not sure which, but they had todrink their glass at the end!).
   • They had to keep one hand behind their back at all times, so only one hand balanced the tray with it’s precious cargo.
   • The waiter who completed two circuits of the main city square (approximately 1/3 to 1/2 mile) first with the most liquid remaining (as determined by a completely arbitrary panel of judges I think) was declared the winner.

As it turns out, this was almost too much – after the first race was deemed inconclusive, the waiters raced AGAIN. The oldest one (in his early 40s) won on the second go-around. Don’t believe me? Here are a couple of race photos.

Loja was a trip, but we were glad to move on (to Vilcabamba) after a day and a half…

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• The park extends from the paramor at 3600 meters down to the beginning of the jungle at 1000 meters above sea level.
• There are five different ecosystems contained within the park, including paramor, forest, and lakes.
• The park contains over 240 lakes.

That’s the good, interesting, front of the sign information.During the day, I also learned a couple of other facts about the park:

1. Most of the primary forest (original forest) is gone. It has burned down at various times and places. Native vegetation ha been replaced by evergreen pine trees, which are a good cash crop for Ecuador in December (can you guess why?)
2. All of the sea life in the 240+lakes is gone. About 30 years ago trout were introduced to the park as a food source and a way to create some sport for the park. Within about 10 or 15 years, they had eliminated every other kind of fish in the park. They are still a huge attraction, of course, and ecuadorians come to cajas all the time to catch trout, cook it, and eat it at the 30+ restaurants that are in and around the park.

The trout we had at the restaurant was really good – and I don’t even like fish! But the park is pretty picturesque – supposed to be verysimilar to Scotland (Braveheart, anyone?)… Definitely check out some of the views below!

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• More than 95% of Cuencanos are catholic, the highest percentage in Ecuador
• There are more than 50 catholic churches in the city of Cuenca (it might be more than 250; we are asking for an instant re-translation on that one)
• Cuenca is the most beautiful city in Ecuador (we agree with this – it’s also the most European)
• Cuenca adjoins Cajas National Park, the most diverse park in Ecuador (which, according to Cuencanos, is the most biologically diverse country in the world)
• Cuenca has the best ciclipaseo in Ecuador (because it’s an organized ride with a planned route)

We loved Cuenca – beautiful town, very comfortable, easy to get around, and a pretty friendly local population. Stef spent the week at Simon Bolivar spanish school with Miguel, a great teacher. We saw some local ruins, the museum and the process for making panama hats, and took a few salsa lessons. We even ran into a few friends from our volunteering program in the galapagos, and met up with a few new friends from Seattle (Hi Katie and Garrett)! The second weekend we were there was National Tourism Weekend in Ecuador, so they had a cool festival in the streets. We saw a ton of fireworks, some great music, and some interesting local dancing. There are a few of my favorite photos in this set (the churches and the old men in the park); be sure to check them out!

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• Digital Camera. I’ve been really lucky to be in such great places with a camera – we’ve seen some amazing sights and been able to capture our adventures in a way we wouldn’t have without the camera (see our page of photos from our Latin America trip for examples). Like most of what we’re carrying, the camera serves at least three purposes:
  • Digital Still Camera
  • Digital Camcorder
  • Spare Flashlight (and yes, I have used it as such – on the beach in Costa Rica and at the volunteer station in the Galapagos)

  This was a Ricoh GX-200 first; now it’s a casio ZX-100V. The model doesn’t matter as much as what it produces, an that’s been great so far!

• iPhone. Yes, we brought our iPhones – but we use them primarily as mini-netbooks. They really help us out with:
  • Making stateside calls (for insurance and other administrative things)
  • Managing our finances (ensuring that we can keep traveling!)
  • Keeping up with friends and family (through Facebook and our blog)

  Oh, and for each of these and more, you guessed it – there’s an app for that!

  

• GSM Cellphone. Stef and I debated about this one for a few weeks. We had heard that they can be useful, but they are expensive. We ended up getting one, and it has saved us a few times as a:
  • Local Cellphone. this has been surprisingly helpful! After our first experience reserving a hotel over email, we switched to the cellphone. Reservations now take 5 minutes, instead of an hour, and we don’t have to plan three days ahead (since the call is real-time – all web reservations we’ve seen so far actually happen over email, and response times are an issue). Plus, if we know people in the area, we have an easy way to stay in touch if we’d like to meet up, change plans, or anything else. Thankfully, we haven’t needed to use it in an emergency yet!
  • Substitute Digital Camera. Our cellphone has a 2MP digital camera on it which came in handy – I used it as a primary camera after my Ricoh died. Also, if we go out without the camera, I can use the phone to capture quick shots of interesting or funny moments.
  • Backup Internet Connection.We are trying balance our Internet usage. But sometimes, we are waiting for an important email, or it’s just much simpler and a much smaller hassle to check on the phone. (Its more expensive than wifi or an Internet cafe, because with our pay-as-you-go card, data is expensive, but it’s occasionally worth it.)

  We have a Sony-Ericsson Walkman phone – it’s a slider model (the W580i if you need to know).

  

Next week, more on what we didn’t bring with us…

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• Monday, October 12th – Sunday, October 18th: Peru: Huaraz, Lima, Huacachina, Arequipa
• Monday, October 19th – Sunday, October 25th: Peru: Arequipa, Tacna and Chile: Arica
• Monday, October 26th – Sunday, November 1st: Chile: Calama, San Pedro de Atacama, Santiago
• (After the end of October we´re guessing) November: Chile: Santiago, Valpairiso and Argentina: Mendoza, Buenos Aires, Ushuaia
• December: Argentina: Patagonia
• January: Chile: Tierra del Fuego
• February: Argentina: Bariloche, Mendoza, Iguazu
• March: Argentina: Salta and Peru: Arequipa
• April: Peru: Arequipa, Cuzco,Lake Titicaca (maybe Bolivia?)
• May: Peru: Cuzco and Macchiu Picchu and US: Boston (returning home)

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• Banos is really touristy
• It will be too loud, expensive, and fake for us to stay for a long time
• I will just want to mountain bike down to the waterfalls
• Stef will just want to visit the hot baths
• Therefore, we’ll only stay about two days

We were wrong about everything but the first point (Yes, Banos is really touristy):

• It´s touristy for everyone – Ecuadorians AND foreigners, which makes the foreigners feel a lot less conspicuous…
• We went whitewater rafting our first day there, and loved it. We rafted for half the day, on rapids up to Class IV (out of VI), and even got to rescue everyone in the other raft when their boat capsized!
• We spent four and a half days there
• I didn’t go mountain biking (all the bikes were in poor condition)
• We rented a dune buggy for an afternoon and drove to see all the waterfalls
• We hiked for two days around the mountains outside of town, and only saw three of the 30+ trails that exist
• We spent two mornings at the baths, which weren’t nearly as bad as I anticipated!
• I even had a discussion about President Obama and world politics with an Ecuadorian from Ambato (a nearby city), which culminated in his question: If Ecuador and Colombia went to war, would the US intervene on Ecuador’s side?(A year ago, the Colombian army invaded Ecuador and killed 20 ecuadorians in the process. They haven’t resolved it yet.) I didn’t feel right telling him that most Americans don’t know that there is a country called Ecuador, that it uses the dollar, and that it’s in South America. So instead this was my response:We tried that a few years ago, in a place called Iraq. It didn’t work out so well for us, so I’m not sure if we would do it again.

You have to see the pictures, which include:

• A 50-foot waterfall
• Our dune buggy
• Some amazing sunsets
• The Rhino-train that every tourist in town (besides us) rode around in
• The town from the mountaintops

Check them out below:

One set from around Banos:

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Another set from our dune buggy ride to a huge waterfall…

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• Two Mummies The catholic bishop was buried inside his church 400 years ago, and sealed in tight. When they pulled the old church down 20 years ago, they found him inside, completely mummified.
  Oh, and a rat was stuck in with him too – you can see it in the photo set.
• Fake Stone Statues Thirty years ago, the town hired an artist – I don’t know why. But his idea was to emphasize Guano’s timelessness and historical side. So he cut several statues (a fish, a human face, and a few others that weren’t discussion- or photo-worthy) out of thousand-year-old lava stone (scheise lavastein for the Germans out there).
• Strange Bushes I´m not sure how to explain this:
  
  

What’s even better about all this is that it was explained to us (in Spanish) by one of the most unwilling tour guides we’ve ever met! He just so happens to work for the official government tourist agency, and opened up the town museum (all 250 square feet of it) just for us. Check out the rest of the pictures below!

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• Dry bags. These were AWESOME! Even though we were in the super-humid cloud forest for a month, the dry bags kept mold and mildew from piling up on our clothing and gear. If you spend more than a week in a rainforest, bring dry bags to store all your stuff.
  We each brought two dry bags with us on the trip (GraniteGear AirVent Reduction DryBlocs that we bought at REI), and picked up one more each in Quito. They held our winter clothes, our summer clothes that we weren’t wearing at Jatun Sacha, and our reserve meds and toiletries.
• Travel hats (by Tilley and Columbia). We used these every day in the cloudforest. They were great to keep the bugs and the rain off of our heads, and to provide a support for our facenets when we wore them (which was almost every day for the final two weeks). When we weren’t at the station, they were great protection from the sun!
• Bugspray.We cannot say enough about this. We put it on 5 or 6 times per day:
  1. In the morning before we got dressed
  2. Right before the morning work started (8am)
  3. At our juice break (10am)
  4. On our way to lunch (12pm)
  5. Right before afternoon work (2pm)
  6. After showering (afternoon, when work was done) (4:30pm)

  If we missed an area, it was really bad (e.g., on Monday of the last week, stef didn’t cover her wrists, and got about 15 bites in the morning work session). Needless to say, everyone at Jatun Sacha loved OFF and DEET.

So that’s what helped us most in the galapagos. We were a bit surprised, but it worked out really well!

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• Monday, October 5th – Sunday, October 11th: Peru: Piura, Chiclayo, Trujillo
• Monday, October 12th – Sunday, October 18th: Peru: Huaraz
• The rest of October: Peru: Huaraz and Lima
• November: Argentina: Buenos Aires (maybe Uruguay?) and Ushuaia
• (After the end of November we´re guessing) December: Argentina: Ushuaia (and maybe Bariloche or Buenos Aires?)
• January: Argentina: Bariloche and Mendoza
• February: Chile: Santiago, and the Lake District
• March: Chile: Atacama and Argentina: Iguazu and Salta
• April: Peru: Arequipa and Lake Titicaca (maybe Bolivia?)
• May: Peru: Cuzco and Macchiu Picchu and US: Boston (returning home)

Please keep in mind, we´re still working on getting the blog up-to-date. So you´ll be reading about Ecuador (it´s a really cool place, and we´ve had some great adventures!) for about two weeks more. But in a couple of weeks, everything should be synced up.

Please keep the comments and emails coming – especially if you any recommendations about what to do on the northern Peruvian Coast!

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Stef explained this dichotomy really well in her post Galapagos: Beauty and the Beasts (note that I´m riffing on her use of Beauty and Beasts…)

We spent four weeks (four- and five-day weeks) working on a farm in the San Cristobal highlands. While there, we:

• cut down blackberry bushes and small trees (with machetes), large trees (with a chainsaw)
• built a 50-foot wooden walking path
• built a set of stairs
• cleaned 40 pairs of rubber “Wellington” walking boots
• dug a bunch of deep post holes (without a post-hole digger)
• pulled a couple of hundred oranges off of trees
• squeezed those oranges to make juice
• were bitten by several thousand mosquitos
• spent all of our time walking around in hideously uncomfortable rubber Wellington boots, covered in bugspray

We learned a lot, had some real fun, met some really cool people (Ceasar, Hernan, and the Socken family for starters), and walked around in a LOT of mud. These photos are of that side of the Galapagos. If you want to see the pure beauty of the Galapagos, check out our posts on the islands and on the animals. You’ll see roasting pigs, bonfires, crazy showers and sinks. Of course there is lots of mud! And you’ll see the Huntsman spider (the size of your hand) who adopted us and guarded our bedpost every night – at least, that’s what we chose to believe…

See what I mean by the pictures…

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1. Big Pixels. This is NOT the number of megapixels a camera has. It is how physically big each pixel is. The bigger the pixel, the richer the colors (and the less noise/graininess) your images will have. It’s calculated using the number of pixels per square centimeter of sensor size, and a LOWER number is better. DPReview has a great index number (called “Pixel Density”) that they use to compare cameras. Compare a typical SLR and point and shoot camera, for example. You’ll notice that the SLR has a much lower pixel density than the P&S. That doesn’t mean that the SLR will make better photos than the P&S, but it does give the SLR a much better chance!
2. Wide-angle lens. The wider the lens (at it’s “wide” position), the more peripheral vision the camera has. If it´s true that a picture is worth 1,000 words, then here are 2,015 words on lens angle:
   Normal Bartolome view (Galapagos)

   Wide Bartolome view (also the cover page on most Galapagos calendars)

   

   
   Wide lenses are considered to be anything smaller than about 28mm. The smaller the number, the wider the lens (Lenses are typically measured in millimeters, and have “effective” measurements that make the numbers comparable to a 35mm full-frame camera – basically an older film camera or a full-frame DSLR). Wide-angle lenses are great for photos of landscapes, mountains, large monuments (there are many more large monuments than small ones, btw), and large groups of people. While it’s true that wide-angle lenses slightly distort close-up portraits, and that you could shoot “stitch assist” pictures (two or three pictures with overlap that a computer program combines into one image), these miss the point – when you’re traveling, you don’t usually have the time to compose and shoot several images, and then stitch them together in software later. What about waterfalls, skylines, the ocean, pools with people playing – all of these have moving parts of the image, and you can’t stitch together two pictures from different times and expect the moving parts to match up!

3. Fits in a Pocket. you’re going to be traveling – moving from place to place, right? The camera should easily fit in your front pants pocket. If it’s dangling around your neck or you need a separate bag to carry it in, walking around the city (or hiking a footpath) all day is going to be tiring (and you’ll probably end up annoyed by your camera at some point). If it fits in the pocket, you can easily palm it when you need it out for fast shots. A small camera in your hand also doesn’t scream out “STEAL ME – I HAVE TOO MUCH MONEY HANGING ON A STRING AROUND MY NECK!!” like an SLR does.

There are a few other nice-to-have’s that I’ve noticed in my elusive search for the best travel camera:

• Waterproof and/or shock resistant. Face it, the camera is going to be more exposed to the elements when you travel (assuming you use it. If you don’t use your travel camera much, well, I guess we’re both wasting our time!), so the more protected it is (from water, dust, drops, rocks, cold, etc), the fewer times you’ll have to buy a replacement.
• RAW+JPEG Mode. With this mode, the camera records two files every time you take a picture – a super-high-res RAW image and a JPEG of your choice of sizes. Why is this good? If you’re traveling for a while, you can set the JPEG to the smallest size and upload only the jpeg – saving you a lot of upload time while you’re on the road. But, you still have the high-res RAW file for printing or adjustments when you go home.
• Decent Movie Mode. Why carry both a camcorder and a digicam? And do you actually need 1080i video (which you can’t even burn to a DVD) of whatever it is you’re recording? Remember that you don’t have the controlled conditions, studio lighting, or steadicam help that even a wedding pro has. Save your hassle and just carry one device!

So that’s what I think. I’m going to follow this up in the next couple of weeks with a set of tips (almost a workflow) for traveling with a digicam. Stay tuned!

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• North Face fleece-lined jackets. Did you know that Quito is at 2900 meters (about 9400 feet)? And it sits in a valley between two sets of mountains, making the weather pretty predictable. Daytime temps range from 60-85 Fahrenheit, and at night it drops to about 40 or so. The TeleferiQo (a gondola that goes up one of the mountains) takes you up to about 4100 meters (~13,300 feet). At that altitude, it gets pretty cold pretty fast, and since you’re at the ridgeline, there is no mountain range to protect you from the winds. So we have been wearing our windproof, fleece-lined jackets a lot (stef every day).
• Stef and Matt business cards. With our picture, website, and email address, these have made it really easy to stay in touch with the people we’ve met. They are standard-sized white business cards with a picture of us, our first names, our website address and our email address. They are so easy to use! Every time we meet someone, we can just hand them a card, instead of writing down our contact info. It has also made Facebook connections a lot easier.
• Daypacks. These have been huge for us in Ecuador. We have two: an REI Lookout 30-liter pack and an ALTUS Drop 17 collapsible daypack. We picked up the ALTUS in Quito at one of the many outdoors shops. What do we use them for?
  • REI Lookout: Serves as our storage daypack; whenever we travel from town to town, we keep our primary clothing and bathroom stuff in here. It makes it really easy to unpack when we get to a new hotel! This is also the pack we bring if we make a large grocery run or generally know that we need to pick up somethig bulky.
  • ALTUS 17: this is our all-around daypack. It goes with us almost every day and carries sunscreen, books, water, and extra clothing (like hats or jackets). Stef loves this bag because it has it’s own built-in carrying case and folds up into something about the size of a fist.

Those have been the most useful things so far in Ecuador.

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• Ricoh GX-200 Camera. The beach is a great place to capture the light of the sun, and not only did we find great colors in costa rica, we also sawsome really cool events, like some fire poi masters, a beautiful moonlit sky, and a storm off the coast. The camera was able to capture it all, as well as our more mundane self-portaits, and a few videos.
  
• Sunscreen. it gets really sunny on the beach, and we both needed SPF 70 to make it through. I missed a few times when I went surfing, and even zinc wasn’t always strog enough to save me.
• Bathing suits. We spent a month at the beach. Of course we needed bathing suits!

So that’s what we were most happy for having brought when we were in costa rica. Stay tuned for more…

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• The dollar IS the currency. Ecuador’s infrastructure (economic as well as living) is very similar to those of develops countries. It has adopted the dollar as it’s currency (as of 2000), it uses plugs that are compatible with north American plugs, and it’s pretty close to the States. All of these make the little things (like in-your-head currency conversions) MUCH EASIER to handle.
• It’s easy to get around this diverse country. The mainland is pretty small (about 22 hours by bus north to south and probably about 15 east to west). The bus system here is great, and we’ve yet to be on a bus that leaves more than 10 minutes after it’s scheduled. So everything is really accessible. Even the galapagos are only a 4-hour flight from Quito. It is SO DIVERSE – it has the galapagos, the beaches of the coast, the Andes mountains, and the Amazonian jungle all within that little space. So you really can experience every type of South American landscape here.
• The Spanish is very clear and easy to understand. the Ecuadorians have the closest accent to “textbook” Spanish of any of the Latin American countries. It makes it much easier to both communicate in the native language (essential when asking directions or confirming a reservation) and to learn it. (When I was talking with someone about this, they mentioned that, especially in the Andes, Spanish could be a second language (to Quichua or other Incan/Mayan/indigenous language), so the people generally learn it academically – which would explain why it is so easy to understand for those of us for whom it is also a second language!

These are the main reasons we have found it really easy to adapt to travel in Ecuador.

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Here are the top 3 myths of buying a travel camera:

1. Megapixels are the best measure of image quality. This has been around for several years, and the myth is just as bad for all types of cameras (not just travel cameras). The truth is that anything over 4 megapixels is great, and I have printed amazing 11x 14 images from an 8-megapixel camera. If you need to (and do) regularly print wall posters (20 x 30 inches or larger), maybe you need 16 megapixels. If you don’t print a poster every week, anything over 10 megapixels is wasted (and actually hurts your images, as I’ll explain next week).
2. A big zoom is necessary for a travel camera. Juat like the “megapixel myth”, this one is rooted in lazy marketing: marketing teams think that following the Texan maxim of “Bigger is better” will convince prospects to buy. While it may do that occasionally, it won’t produce high-quality photos – once you get past 130mm of effective lens length (which is the outer limit of most 4x and some 3x zoom lenses), camera shake hurts image quality (while some anti-shake mechanisms are out there, most of the ones available in point-and-shoot cameras aren’t very good). So, buying a camera with an 8x or greater zoom means that you probably just paid for a feature that you won’t be able to use very often.
3. Face-detection (and Smile-detection) are really helpful features. This means that you can’t recognize faces or smiles, and know when the camera is focused on them. WHAT? If you can’t recognize a face, a smile, or when the camera is focused, you should just go home. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. This is technology, remember, so it’s probably going to miss sometimes. Which means that paintings of people, wall clocks, and yes, streetlights will all be identified as faces without smiles (I’ve seen this happen).

So those are the top three myths that everyone was pushing while I was camera shopping. Here are the others that I heard:

• A video camera takes just as good stills as a point and shoot.
• A camera that looks like an SLR is better because, well, it is shaped like an SLR.
• A camera can automatically tell what kind of picture you want to take and adjust it settings automatically (sometimes called “Best Shot”).

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played with sea lions, watched penguins, and broke the camera yesterday . Need to find a new digital point & shoot! #travel #rtw #photo #

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Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for what we should visit? Let us know with comments or emails!

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We´ve also seen giant spiders (the size of dessert plates), black rats, fire ants and mosquitos that will swarm you if you aren´t doused in DEET. Ah yes, there are two sides to the Galapagos- the gorgeous beaches, snorkeling and wildlife that you see when you do the tours and the more challenging conditions and work of conservation and returning the islands to their original state.

I never knew that so many invasive species of plants and animals had been introduced to the Galapagos- but the impact is unmistakable. Jatun Sacha, the volunteer station where we are working, is located on an old farm that has been taken over by mora (blackberry bushes) and maracuya (passion fruit trees). These plants choke out the endemic plants on the island, eliminating food sources for many of the animals. Since the Galapagos is a tiny system in which the impact of changes to the plants and animals are easily seen, it is very clear what a strong and negative impact these invasive species have on the plants and animals here.

In addition, the animals and insects that have been introduced to the islands through human contact (black rats and fire ants to n ame two) are predators of the animals. They also make life on the volunteer station interesting- nothing like chasing off rats at night to keep you alert! And Matt has learned a lot about moving giant spiders out of our room without hurting them (blowing on them works quite well).

• Matt adds: Check out Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams to learn more about the fragility of island ecology and how difficult it is to conserve island-based species. (Yes, he wrote The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and Last Chance to See is pretty humorous, but he wrote it with an accomplished zoologist – it does explain these dynamics really well)

We´ve felt very fortunate to see so much more of the islands and the work that goes into conserving these beautiful places- and to have a very personal sense of the commitment and work that it entails. Nothing like cutting down mora bushes with a machete (a large portion of the work that is needed here) to remind you of how hard reforestation is!

Matt has pictures to post of both our tours (a day trip around San Cristobal, and a 4 day cruise of the four inhabited islands- San Cristobal, Isabela, Floreana, and Santa Cruz ) and our work on the volunteer station. So keep an eye out for sea lions and giant spiders!

In terms of travel plans, we are shifting things around a bit to allow for more time to travel in mainland Ecuador before our visa runs out. So we will be in the Galapagos for another 2 weeks, then head back to Quito, Ecuador and begin traveling south to Riobamba and Cuenca before landing in Arequipa, Peru. There is so much to see and it just seems like more and more places appeal to us as we travel! All in all, a good problem to have.

Thanks to everyone for your comments and emails- we love hearing from you! Keep them coming- and just remember, we´d love to have visitors!!

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By now we will have landed on the galapagos for our volunteer program. We´re really excited about it – we´ll be working on the Jatun Sacha foundation station on san cristobal island for all of August and September.

This was coordinated by GVI.

Our internet access will be really limited, so if you don´t hear from us before October, that´s why. Please keep reading and commenting though – we´ll update you when we can!

Thanks
-Stef & Matt

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A dead giveaway was the fact that I read maps for fun. I found it fascinating to find all those names of exotic places and see where they were in reference to me. To pick out a place and imagine what it was like there.

So the Equator was a good friend to me in those days, telling me thingsI thought I needed to know about the places I imagined.

When we came to Quito, Ecuador, we were told by many people (including South American Explorers, South American Explorers , a group that our friend Cliff recommended and has been fantastic) that we had to visit La Mitad Del Mundo. Translated as “the middle of the world”, it is a monument erected on the site of the equator, about a 15km outside of Quito. It has since been questioned as being the “real” site, since GPS put the actual equator at about 200 mts north of the site, but more on that later.

Rather than spend money on a tour, Matt and I decided to take the local bus to Mitad Del Mundo. After much research (thank you, Matt and Lonely Planet!) and 60 cents, we found ourselves at the gates of the monument.

Say what you will about touristy sites, it was still pretty cool. The geeky kid inside of me was turning flips when we went to the top of the tower and could look down on the line between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Don’t you wish life was as clear as the big orange line indicating which side of the world you are on?

Here’s what we saw there: (click the picture to see the set)

Now, we had also heard about the controversy about the GPS verification, so we hoofed it down the road to El Museo De Solar Inti nan, which bills itself as the actual site of the equator. Again, my inner geek gleefully watched water drain without a vortex from a sink while on the equator- it drained with a vortex when the sink was moved to the Southern hemisphere. If there is another reason for this happening, please don’t tell me (at least not yet- I’m enjoying the mystery of the equator far too much right now).

No-vortex draining:

Southern-vortex draining:

We also tried to balance an egg on the head of a nail- an amusing Englishman was the only person in our group to succeed. Our guide was lovely and very engaging- well worth the extra trip to see this GPS verified site.

And here are the pics! (click the picture to see the set)

After many hours of hemisphere hopping, Matt and I trundled back on the bus, dirty and tired. But also kind of awed. We can try to understand the world through mathematical equations, longitude and latitude, and other tools- and we get a pretty good picture of it. But standing there, amid mountains and sky so big Montana would be jealous, it was very clear that there is magic and mystery to a place that cannot be captured with numbers or charts. And isn’t that the coolest thing?

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Video:

Images (click to view the whole set):

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We had a great time at the lodge! We hiked around the grounds and down to the waterfall (see the photos for what we saw). The rooms were good and the meals were great! We also saw lake arenal (see photos) and the clouds parted enough for us to see steam rising from the lava rivers coming down the volcano (and you guessed it, there is a photo of that too)!

Click on the photo below to see the rest…

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We had a great time relaxing in the pools and checking out the sights. The meal was good, too!

Check out the photo set below – and look out for the surprise photo!

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There is a bit of a hike involved though – 40 minutes each way, across 5 beaches and 4 dirt paths to get from hotel la cascada to playa grande where we surf. It’s an interesting walk, so I thought I would share some pics- click on the photo below to view all the pictures…

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We also saw Guille create our pizzas!

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Watch as Stef lands on one of the zipline platforms:

And our friend Taurean from La Escuela does the same:

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