into the great wide open

Brendan, Parker, Vienna and I decided to go paragliding today. This is where we jumped off a cliff. Literally.


Vienna was wearing flip flops, which aren't great for paragliding. Luckily I was able to loan her some duct tape.


Contemplation...


Vienna, off into the wild blue yonder




Brendan


Parker


Me with Jose, my excellent pilot. He spent the better part of our ride telling me to "relax, baby". :-) I can't get my video to load...technologically challenged, I am. The video involves a lot of screaming...

When it was all said and done, we ended up spending about seven hours up on that mountain. The weather has to be exactly right for paragliding so we spent a lot of time twiddling our thumbs. We did meet two other American girls, one of whom was from Cleveland. Small world! Even though I am completely scared of heights, paragliding was very, very cool. Proper shit your pants material, you might say. The view was crazy! It was raining when Vienna and I went up, so we landed in Orquillos but the boys landed closer to the jump site. They also soared much higher than we did, but I was just fine with the level of height we achieved. Yikes. And, the boys took pictures up in the air. I had a white-knuckled grip on the straps for most of it, although Jose eventually convinced me to let go for a minute.

Afterwards, we had the cab driver drop us off in Urubamba where we stuffed ourselves with Pizzawasi. I ordered a family pizza for Vienna and myself and the waitress laughed at me. Once dinner was over we stocked up on wine and made our way home to Orquillos, where Maren was making homemade gnocchi. I didn't think I was still hungry but I managed to eat two plates. Paragliding makes me eat like a goat.

Best. Day. Ever.

oy

Claire mentioned that she felt like a stroke victim that had been hit by a bus this morning. Yeah. That's about right. I woke up at 8 am quite chipper and realized I was still a bit drunk. Maren was up too, so we raced to Jack's for breakfast, eager to get something to eat before the hangover officially kicked in. We ended up at a table with an American ex-pat who lived in St. John. Maren was able to carry on a nice conversation with him but I started feeling sick and could only nod and shovel grilled cheese into my mouth.

We walked the long, uphill road back to Pampawasi and found the rest of our crew peeking out of their rooms and looking a bit shabby. When the boys opened their door, the four of us girls almost yakked. One boy, who shall remain nameless, had gotten sick in the night and it was still all over the floor. It did not smell good. Another boy was wandering around in a towel, having realized he threw away his only clothes last night...everything else was at the laundromat. He had to walk to the Lavanderia wearing just the towel. I have photos of this but not sure they're appropriate for posting...

No one had the energy to move and the boys' room was too nasty to enter, so all of us save Ralph ended up napping in the girls' room like a pile of hamsters. After a while we finally made it out for a bit then came back to find that our 8th team member, Gillie, had arrived. I'm sure we were an impressive lot! Everyone was hungry so we set off looking for a snack and found ourselves in a dicey cafe called...Cafe Snack. The food wasn't great but we ate it anyway (Ralph drank three smoothies) and afterwards we went to El Molino, which is a huge black market shopping place. There were rows and rows of stuff, some of it counterfeit and some real. Most of us didn't buy anything (no one wants to haul stuff around in their luggage) so we just wandered and marveled over the sights.

Dinner that night was back at Indigo, which also happens to be a Thai restaurant. However, only Maren, Brendan, Claire, Vienna, Gillie and I went. Ralph and Parker were too hungover for curry. :-) I actually hadn't planned on drinking but somehow we decided to order Pisco Sours with dinner. Then we had a second round. Then a third. Each round was stronger than the last, and before I knew it, I was loopy. Everyone was feeling tired, but it was Saturday night and there was a band playing at Loki, so Richard, Brendan and I went to check things out. It was happy hour at Loki (happy hour is super late in Peru), so we double-fisted gin and tonics before heading back to the hotel.

Maren and Gillie (my roommates) had gone to bed and I spent a good 5-10 minutes haggling with the woman at the front desk to try and get my room key...

arriba, abajo, al centro, al dentro

With the excitement of the morning behind us, we ordered two cabs back to Cusco for a weekend of adventure. The cab drivers always have the same radio station playing, which is mostly American pop music, however the announcer always cuts in during the middle of the song and says something like "Rock and Pop" in a deep voice. Random.

The Loki hostel was full this weekend, so Richard sent us to Pampawasi, a small hotel over a chicken farm featuring bipolar showers but reasonable prices. For dinner, we walked to an Argentinian steakhouse where Ralph and I shared a platter of meat, meat, and more meat. Seriously. We had everything from blood sausage to kidneys to steak to alpaca to who knows what else. Mmm, mmm, good.


Nos gusta la carne (we like meat...)

Having laid a solid base, Richard then took us to Indigo where we enjoyed shots of mescal and a nice hookah. The mescal was a bit like tequila, so we shot it with salt and a lime. This was quite fun, as I gave up shooting tequila after New Year's Eve some 11 years ago. Richard taught us a toast in Spanish as well: arriba, abajo, al centro, al dentro.


Hits from the...hookah


Get down on it

We ended up drinking all the mescal in the bar and had to switch to tequila shots, then eventually stopped taking shots and just drank gin and tonic. Later we hit the dance clubs of Cusco, where we ended up getting separated. The final events of the evening are sketchy, but this is what we think happened:

- Boy #1 got sick at one of the clubs and ran outside, where he threw away his clothes, got chased by the police, and fell down a flight of stairs. No one knows how he made it back.

- Maren, Claire, Vienna and I, after several unsuccessful attempts at finding Brendan and Ralph, started walking home. Claire and Vienna ended up getting a cab but Maren and I kept walking.

- Boy #2 left with a friend...

- Boy #3 thought HE was going to get sick and left the bar as well. He was later found in his bed, sleeping peacefully in a pile of undigested assorted meats.

- Boy #4 walked to the outskirts of Cusco where he eventually got a cab back to Loki and found his way home from there.

In the words of the Hilltop Hoods, what a great night (thanks Parker for the introduction...wish I could download the song somewhere...)

new digs

Our first day at the new site! There were a bunch of bushes and trees that needed to be cleared out, so Gilberto thought it would be good to burn everything down vs. digging it out. Small problem though...there was a power line above the bushes (which I swear I pointed out), but no matter, we lit a giant blaze anyway. Five minutes later and we were all dumping our drinking water on the damn thing and racing down the block in search of shovels to throw dirt (and I didn't think I would get to run at all in Peru!) Luckily we contained the fire and resorted to...digging. Ha ha ha. Gilberto introduced a new tool today though. Machetes! These are strangely satisfying to use and I was in seventh heaven whacking away at the bushes (insert joke here). Actually, the boys looked happy too, between the fire and the fact that they got to chop down a tree. I think we are all just cave people inside, really.


Soon to be toilets


We didn't start the fire...


Timber!

don't wake me i plan on sleeping in

The locals are still working out the details for the new toilet/shower facility, so we got to sleep until 9:30 am today. Nice! We enjoyed a bit of a lazy morning sans digging and Yrene treated us to curry for lunch. Mmmmmm. Because we hadn't gotten quite enough sleep, we took naps after lunch, did a bit of laundry and laid around reading books, when suddenly, about 15 children appeared at our gate. One of them asked me if there would be English classes and I told them that class would start next week. However, the kids were ready to learn English NOW so we invited them in for what turned into Claire and me teaching an impromptu lesson for about an hour. Interacting with the kids is probably my favorite thing on this trip so far!


A few of our students, including our housemates Elizabeth and Carmen


Lessons were momentarily thwarted by donkeys

After "class", we sat around the dining table waiting for food and trying to play drinking games without alcohol (we didn't have a drop left). We later moved the festivities upstairs where we played a rather sad attempt at Mafia and an amusing attempt at Pictionary. Maren and I kept making "your mom" jokes, which was driving everyone else crazy so Brendan started making "your dad" jokes. We were laughing so hard we broke Vienna's bed. Ah, good times.


Maren, Parker and Vienna on what was left of Vienna's bed

ousted! pizza! swimming!

Maren, Parker, Richard and Vienna hide from the sun


Claire, Ralph and Brendan...digging

Today started off much like yesterday ended...the whole group was digging at Parker's and my work site in an attempt to get one toilet completed for the locals to see. This was good because seven of us were making more progress than two of us alone, but bad because we didn't have enough tools to go around and we kept bumping into each other. Richard noticed this and sent Maren, Brendan and me off to dig at another site.

The new site was a little cleaner than the last, and the woman who lived there had a fabulous idea: dumping buckets of water on the ground before we started digging. Brilliant! It is the dry season in Peru so the water helped soften the soil tremendously. The three of us had a solid rotation going so that no one tired out in the sun, and we were making excellent progress. We were planning to work until noon but Gilberto came by at 11:45 and told us to go home for lunch, which was odd because he is a workhorse. :-) We didn't argue though and headed home quite excited because we were supposed to go swimming and take a shower after lunch.


Hasta luego, hole!

At the house, Richard had everyone gathered in the courtyard and was looking somber. He asked if we wanted the bad news or the bad news first. Doh! The bad news was twofold:

1) The locals had gone on strike, which meant there was no public transportation running, which meant we couldn't go to the pool

2) The people of Orquillos had a town meeting that morning and decided that they wanted to run sewage lines up to the houses we had been digging at. A bit of background...we were digging squat toilets with septic tanks for these people because it was thought impossible to run sewage lines up the mountain. So while it is good that sewage lines were suddenly feasible, it meant we had dug a bunch of holes for kind of no reason.

Richard said that our new project would instead be to build toilets and showers at the local football (soccer for y'all Americans) field. There were some details to be worked out but at least we weren't being ousted from the village. And, flush toilets and showers would definitely be a nice amenity for Orquillos. Nevertheless, we were sad that we wouldn't get to work at people's houses anymore and equally sad that we wouldn't be going swimming. We consoled ourselves with Yrene's delicious fajitas and homemade salsa...

After lunch, Richard suggested we walk down to the main road "just in case" a transport happened to be running. We walked, and walked, and walked and finally arrived at a little store on the edge of town, where the shopkeeper confirmed there was no transport. #$@#*! While thinking about what to do next, we munched on some Choko Sodas (chocolate covered soda crackers...downright amazing), and drank Inca Kola, which tasted like Big Red soda. We also scored a bottle of moonshine for 3 soles! Richard asked if we wanted to walk to Urubama, which was about a half hour away AND had a swimming pool. We were getting ready to start trekking when a farm truck drove by. Yrene hailed the truck and the next thing we knew, we were hitching a ride. (don't read this Mom)


Goin' for a walk


La tienda


Life. Is. Good.

The guy charged us 12 soles and we were on our way, picking up and dropping off other hitchers and waving like mad at the people on the street. Fifteen minutes later we were at the public pool and having a swim. The water was about as warm as one of my post-17-miler ice baths, but we jumped in anyways to try and get at least one layer of dirt off of our skin. Afterwards we took cold showers. I just kept dumping Campsuds on my head until the water stopped turning black.


Some of us jumped off the high dive, aka a log someone had stuck through a hole in the fence

Once we were clean we walked to a bar called Muse, where several of us (including me) decided to try Long Island Iced Tea for the first time. What we ended up getting was a pint glass filled with eight kinds of alcohol and a splash of Coca Cola for color. Yowza. We got a little drunk sitting on a big comfy couch and watching MTV, until Richard pointed us out the door and in the direction of heaven, aka Pizzawasi.

Pizzawasi was the best pizza I have ever had. Ever. And I've eaten plenty of pizza. Maren and I split a family-sized Pizza Mixta, which had everything but the kitchen sink on it. I also shared a pitcher of Cuba Libre (rum and coke) with Richard and a few others. Needless to say, I was singing La Bamba and James Blunt by the end of the meal. Clearly we needed more to drink so we went to the shop next door and bought some wine before grabbing a cab back to Orquillos. We hung out in the boys' room, drinking wine and listening to music before crashing for the night.

plane jane

Part of the playlist I rocked on the plane ride down as well as on Claire's iPod speakers in the girls' dorm...good chillin' tunes...

Reckoner - Radiohead
Birds Flew Backwards - Doves
Start a War - The National
The Journey - The Rubber Knife Gang
American Girls - Counting Crows
Everyone's a VIP to Someone - The Go Team
The Only Moment We are Alone - Explosions in the Sky
Tenuousness - Andrew Bird
The Funeral - Band of Horses
Too Much Heaven - Bee Gees
Mess - Ben Folds Five
Reason to Mourn - Ben Harper
Kiss the Rain - Billy Myers
Heaven - Brett Dennen
Streets of Tomorrow - Carla Vallet
The Scientist - Coldplay
Beautiful World - Colin Hay
Anna Begins - Counting Crows
9 Crimes - Damien Rice
The Last High - The Dandy Warhols
This Year's Love - Dave Gray
Stolen Away on 55th and 3rd - Dave Matthews Band
Summer Skin - Death Cab for Cutie
Policy of Truth - Depeche Mode
The Unknown Solider - The Doors
Life in a Northern Town - The Dream Academy
Thousand Miles from Nowhere - Dwight Yoakam
Society - Eddie Vedder
Midnight Train to Georgia - Gladys Knight and the Pips