#twohungry

[twohungrytourists]

This is from the emails I send out to friends and family, and I thought I’d publish it here too:

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It’s been many, many months since my last update about our adventures.  In my last one we had just left Bolivia and were heading north to Peru.

We spent two months in Peru, although we aimed to only spend five weeks.  A health scare that turned out to be easily treated meant we ended up staying longer.  What a relief everything was okay.

Peru has something for everyone but it’s also huge.  The gringo trail is actually a highway and you find yourself bumping into people you know all the time!  We drove along the Andes to the town of Cusco, where women dressed in traditional clothing hold baby llamas chase you for photos.  Sometimes you don’t see them coming and they just hand you the baby llama, and then ask for money for the privilege.   Savvy businesswomen!  Once you know the trick, you get to sit the plaza and watch other unsuspecting tourists be handed a baby llama.   It’s the best.  Anyway, enough about baby llamas.  Our stay in Cusco was for the big deal – Machu Picchu.  After a few days seeing the old town of Cusco, we packed up and drove in convoy with our new friends Penny, Dane and their dog Wyatt to Machu Picchu.

Most people who go to Machu Picchu get the train.  Those people are brilliant.  We are trying to make our money stretch as long as it can, so we opted to drive most of the way, leave our cars at the hydroelectric plant and walk the last 11kms up the train tracks.  If you think this sounds off the beaten track – it really isn’t!  Gringos everywhere.

Machu Picchu is worth the wait.  It’s beautiful.  Despite the altitude, which leaves you feeling eternally lightheaded, you wander around the ruins (with 2,000 other people) and marvel at what the Inca’s accomplished.  We walked up to the sungate and looked down at the ruins and then spent the next few hours wandering around, getting stuck behind huge tour groups and following llamas.  All in all, a pretty good day.

Other highlights of Peru included the food, a great surfing town where we didn’t surf, and camping in the desert as it fell into the ocean.  That last one was Paracas National Park where rolling sand dunes end abruptly at the ocean.  We camped on a cliff for a few nights and watched phosphorescent plankton at night forming an outline of the waves hitting the shore.  It was pretty magical.  Driving into Lima a few days later was to date the absolute worst driving we’ve experienced on this continent, reminding us both that Peru is a balancing act.

We entered Ecuador with little idea of what to expect.  We were immediately treated with excellent roads, beautiful scenery and no rubbish (a stark contrast to northern Peru).  Our first stop was Cuenca.  It’s cute little city with cobbled stone roads, old Spanish style buildings and excellent coffee. On our second day we met two girls from the US at a café who were commiserating Trump’s election who immediately offered their home for us to shower and use their laundry.  A dream for people travelling in their car!

We spent some in Cuenca reflecting on the life and impact of Luke’s wonderful Granny, who passed away while we were there.  It was hard being away from family and home felt so far away.  We lit a candle for Granny at the beautiful cathedral with high ceilings painted sky blue and sent our love home.

We continued north to Quito, stopping in at the volcano Cotopaxi for a few nights of camping with gorgeous uninterrupted views of the volcano. We later learnt that this was nothing short of a miracle and others have spent days hiking with not even a glimpse of it!  In Quito we finally met up with our friends Shannon and Danny, who we’d met back in Buenos Aires and had been training for the better part of four months.  We spent many evenings playing monopoly deal, sharing travel stories and even got invited to a BBQ hosted by their mechanic.

Soon enough it was time to part ways.  We were heading to something we had dreamed about for years – the Galapagos Islands.  We left Vinnie at a car park near the airport and boarded our first flight in nearly a year.  Our dreams of doing a week long scuba diving trip around the Galapagos were already lone gone after finding out that they were around $7000 Australian EACH and any idea of them being cheap or having last minute deals were but a mere fantasy.  We opted for two days of land based diving from San Cristobal and had a fantastic time.  We saw schools of hammerhead sharks, huge manta rays and even some Galapagos sharks.  Worth every cent.

The following week was spent aboard the yacht Encantada, sailing around the eastern islands of the Galapagos.  We had a small group of nine people aboard with our guide Juan and a few crew.  It was incredible!  Every day we went snorkelling, took the dingy to small islands to see the animals that endemic to that specific island.  During the course of the trip we could see the difference evolution had on the animals.  We saw blue footed boobies (beautiful birds with bright blue feet the use to attract mates), albatross and their chicks, and swam with sea lions.  On our last day we stopped at the giant tortoise sanctuary who were even bigger than I imagined.  Honestly, left the Galapagos mesmerised by the animals and beauty of the islands.  If you ever get the time and money to go, please go!

After returning to mainland Ecuador we spent our remaining days in Quito celebrating my birthday and Luke getting his first tattoo. We then hightailed it to the Colombian border, keen to make it to the city of Cali with a few days to spare to meet our flight to the USA in mid December.  We were meeting Luke’s mother Suzy, sister Micha and brother Akamu in New York City for Christmas and were so excited to see them after a year away.

I’ll leave this update here and talk about Colombia and our time in the USA for a future email.  Today we leave South America to fly to Panama after 14 months on this amazing continent.  We’ve only scraped the surface and there is so much more to see here, but we’ve had a fabulous time doing it.  We’ve put Vinnie in a shipping container to sail to Panama and we’ll meet him there in a few days.