Latin America and you

It’s hard to part with a place that has become my home away from home for more than three months, but since I have already left it and I won’t be going back for a while, I think that part of the world deserves a few more words to sum up the time I spent there.

My trip to Latin America has made me see how little I know about other places. Whether I have read something in a book about Peru or seen a TV documentary about Bolivia, nothing prepared me for the actual experience. When you get onto an overcrowded “chicken bus” full of old ladies dressed in semi-traditional, semi-modern clothes, with deeply wrinkled sun-burned faces, carrying huge loads of god-knows-what and snotty children who look at you as if you were an alien from outer space, you may realize that although you and them are both humans, and as such, prone to the same feelings and reasoning, subtle cultural differences have pushed your worlds apart in a way that you are just beginning to grasp. From food and language to the understanding of time and personal space, from family relationships to the outlook on life, from money to economy and democracy, everything is just different enough to get you, the western traveler, to ask yourself a simple question: why?

I asked myself this question many times and I can’t say I always found answers. But at least I hope I have not gone through this trip across so many countries without learning some things. To begin with, there’s that quality that everybody has to develop in order to enjoy backpacking in foreign lands: an open, alert eye to see and absorb the unusual life scenes that unfold all around and to notice both the big picture and the details. But beyond that ineffable personal characteristic, there’s a host of practical learning that I’d be happy to share…

• Learn the language – even if it’s just a few words to use at a restaurant in order to understand the menu or ask for the restrooms, speaking Spanish (or Portuguese if Brazil is your destination) will make a difference. It’s not that difficult. Since language is the first and most difficult cultural barrier between people, every little effort made in order to overcome a communication problem is like a friendly handshake. It’s a step toward a better, less frustrating trip for you and, why not, toward a better world.
• Patience is the key – some tourists from “clockwork countries”, where most things related to business and facilities work as generally expected, would think that just because they paid their share, everything has to go exactly as they expect. It's not a wrong wish, but it will not work very well in Latin America. Buses are late and some roads are bad. People are late. Things break down often. Some things just won’t work today; you have to try again tomorrow… Businesses close and open unpredictably during siesta hours. Clerks in various offices, state-owned or private will take an insanely long time to solve a trivial task. Or they may completely ignore you while they talk with their friend who isn’t there to request a service, and just wants to have a chat instead. Most times the phrase “get me the manager” will get you a blank stare and a lie. Demanding that things be done now “or else”, American style, will just be met by the same incoherent explanations, embarrassed smiles and will antagonize people with little success. The solution? Explain (difficult, without knowing the language), talk, ask, smile, explain again using a different approach, explore the alternatives, keep calm and somehow, most difficult situations almost magically resolve themselves.
• People will lie to you – they may do it on purpose or they may just withhold information they think is irrelevant to you. Asking many questions is the key. Again, it helps if you know the language, but English will work to some extent when dealing with hotels, restaurants and tour agencies. After a few interesting experiences we’ve come to mistrust any hostel when it came to the availability of hot water. We even used to turn the tap on and wait for the hot water to flow before getting the room. And sometimes it helps asking if there's any water at all.
• It’s usually a safe place – although muggings and thefts will always happen in places where foreign travelers go, Latin America seems to take tourist protection seriously. In areas popular with the gringos there were policemen everywhere and most countries' police forces now have units that are dedicated to the protection of tourists. To us they were very helpful in Peru when $200 out of our money got stolen from the safe deposit box. Nowhere during my trip did I have the feeling that walking around with a huge SLR camera around my neck made me a target – although I didn’t provoke fate by walking around in shady areas or at night. I had my Leatherman and a pair of old sunglasses stolen from my backpack somewhere in Guatemala and I went through a theft attempt in Buenos Aires, but beyond this we were more afraid of germs and contaminated water than of thieves.
• Get used with the other tourists – if you’re like me, there’s nothing more annoying than sight of a crowd of boisterous 21-year-olds Nordic-European-looking Americans on the streets of “my” South-American town... But they chose to visit that place the same way I did, so I don’t have more of a right to be there than they do. You have to either get used to the thought that you’re a gringo among many or get off the beaten trail and explore some remote corners. I know for sure that if I ever go back to Peru – which I’d love to do – I’ll surely try to stay away from Cuzco.
• There’s a high chance that you will get sick – the longer you travel, the higher the chance. A healthy dose of paranoia is always needed when dealing with water-borne parasites, so don’t let your guard down and always purify the water or buy it at the store. Be especially wary of tea and coffee served in high-altitude places – the water needs to boil longer to kill all the germs and many times that doesn’t happen. But often you won’t have much of a choice, especially if you go on a hiking tour like the Inca trail. Then who gets sick is mostly a lottery, but nothing that Flagyl won’t fix…
• Everything is negotiable – well, almost. Give it a try and in many cases prices will go down as you’re about to leave, or discounts not mentioned previously will suddenly become available. You shouldn’t try to squeeze the last penny from them, but you equally shouldn’t feel that you must pay what they ask just because the initial price was lower than what you would have paid back home anyway.
• Learn some history – even if it’s just the condensed facts from the first chapter of your Lonely Planet guide, it will give you some context before you land in a place where great men unknown to you have given their names to streets and town squares.
• Don’t be more local than the locals – that’s my ranting against “Andean pants” – a type of llama-wool pants with vertical stripes of all colors that can be bought in many markets in South America. They may be the traditional men’s garb in the Andean regions, but I have never seen a local wearing them in Ecuador, Peru or Bolivia. The tourists however… all the time. They really don’t look good with your Columbia Sportswear gore-tex jacket…
• Money matters – although the dollar is still king in Latin America, we have used US cash in very few places (except for Ecuador which runs its economy in US dollars). Nowadays you can hardly find a town that’s worth visiting, without an ATM. And if you still have local money when crossing a border, there’s no problem exchanging the currency of the previous country with that of the next one. You can forget about traveler’s checks, they are a dying breed, and will usually get you a rate worse than cash or ATMs. We still have most of ours with us, and the ones we exchanged we did so only because we wanted to see if anyone takes them.
• You can’t control the strikes – if the miners decide to block the roads you can’t do anything about it. Wait where you are or risk the bus or train trip and see what happens. If you are flexible, don’t mind staying in a place more than you planned, and can deal with taking the occasional 8-hour detour, the trip will still be a success. You’ll be able to say back home that you got stuck on the Altiplano because the miners didn't allow you to leave…
• You can’t control the weather – everybody knows that, but in most Latin America you are in a weather conundrum: from tropic to tropic there are mostly two seasons: the wet one and the dry one. The wet season is not wet all the time but it may make for a really difficult experience if you plan to visit remote areas or do some hiking. And the mosquitoes are merciless. The dry season on the other hand is much better, but at high altitudes in Central America or the Andes, where most tourists go, it makes for very, very cold nights.
• Everything is going to be ready in 10 minutes – seriously!

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A last word about Buenos Aires

The Cabildo in Plaza de Mayo.
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A two-week stay in a city should give anybody a pretty good picture of what that city is. Although the tourist perspective of things can never equate the experience of living long term in a place, it can lead to some good guesses. Moreover, this perspective can be brought closer to the "real thing" by renting an apartment instead of staying at a hotel. Insofar, I guess our experience is close to what Argentines may do if they took some vacation days but were too lazy to travel anywhere: wake up late, have coffee and "medialunas" (delicious mini-croissants), wander the streets, do some unplanned shopping, go to the park, tell yourself you'll be going soon to that museum you always wanted to see (but procrastinate again), have lunch in a busy cafe, waste the afternoon on the Internet and have a gigantic steak with a bottle of wine for dinner... I'm not sure if they would take pictures of their own city though...

My steak!

Buenos Aires is not so much a city to visit, but one to live in. Except for a small section of the cabildo (the Spanish-era city hall) there is almost no colonial architecture left; the museums are of local interest; the streets have a very uniform look with their ranges of 10- to 15-story-high residential buildings with shops and restaurants on the ground floor. But Buenos Aires has that unmistakable feel of a place who lives and breathes and changes, comes over you and conquers you. It looks "Eurpean" some say, and it definitely doesn't look like any other city we've seen on this continent. If you're looking for an "authentic" South American experience, with colonial history and indigenous culture this is not your place. Is it good? Is it bad? The answer would depend on who you ask...

Lunch and entertainment in Palermo

Buenos Aires is safe for walking, even at night and even while parading a big SLR camera around your neck (by that I mean - using common sense; I didn't try my chances in the rough spots) although I got through a - luckily unsuccessful robbery attempt; transport is cheap and easily available, and the food is delicious - a two-week steak diet hasn't hurt anybody yet. For us Buenos Aires was just what we needed after the Andean and indigenous experience, after all that trekking and having to throw the used toilet paper in the bin instead of flushing it... no more llamas please, give me elephants instead!

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Still breathing the good air

Guardian angels. Too many.
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We spend most of our "tourist time" walking around town and breathing in the city's wonderful energy. There aren't many museums worth seeing in Buenos Aires and sadly, the most famous sight in the guide book is the Recoleta cemetery, which is indeed a landmark, but could hardly symbolize a city as alive and vibrant as our temporary hometown is. We didn't waste the evenings either, which were mostly put to use to sample the town's excellent culinary offerings. Just so we don't get disgusted with so much grilled meat we decided to alternate the foods at dinner - one day parilla ("grill" in Spanish) the next day something different: Indian, Thai, Italian, Chinese, you name it; there's something for every taste.

Ominous sky

The weather has been quite unfriendly to both tourists and locals, with temperatures hitting the lowest point in more than 80 years. The cold is annoying as it is - as if we hadn't had enough of it in Peru and Bolivia! - but the cloudy skies and the rain make it worse by taking away even that last pleasure which travelers can usually still enjoy when everything else goes wrong: taking pictures. That is, until today, when we were blessed with perfect blue skies and shirt-worthy temperatures; you know, the kind of winter weather that in Seattle makes a part of the population leave the house wearing shorts and T-shirts while the normal people still have their jackets on. I spent my daylight hours outside, clicking away at streets, parks and people.

On Sunday we changed apartments and moved from the downtown-shopping district to the upscale Recoleta neighborhood. The new apartment is a little different and that difference takes in both advantages and disadvantages. The studio we had for the first week was nice and modern, close to cafes and restaurants bursting with patrons all day long, had cable TV, central heating and a great view - but it was, well... a studio, quite small (more like a hotel room than an apartment,) lacked Internet access (I was able to catch a very weak, unencrypted wireless signal out on the balcony,) and the kitchen area was minuscule - there wasn't even enough space to dry the dishes.

The new place is larger and has a real bedroom, which makes it easier for us to do different things at the same time without annoying each other, like say, watching TV and sleeping. It has cable Internet and a larger kitchen, but it has no central heating - air conditioning instead, fine - the windows look to an inner shaft of the building so there's not much light, and the noisy elevator engine is right next door. On top of this, the TV set is a wreck and although there is cable available, the old Toshiba box is quite inept at scanning channels. It took me some time to figure out that by scanning multiple times, different channels populate the TV's 30 slots each time. There might even be a method to the madness, as if scanning once would get you the sports, scanning twice the music, and a third time would bring you the movies.

We reunited again with Michael and Mor, our friends from the Galapagos cruise, and we'll be spending some time together. It's the end of the trip for them and the end of a chapter for us. There are lions and elephants ahead...

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9 hours for 200km!

Hills around Tupiza
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Posting this from Salta, Argentina. We made it!

Trying to get out of Uyuni was as plagued by uncertainty as our trying to get there. Rumors of miners blocking the rail tracks and all the access roads into Tupiza kept flying around in town. You would get different flavors of rumors depending on whom you would ask; by now we didn't believe anything anybody said, after being lied to too many times: about hotels having hot water, about bus rides only taking three hours, about tours leaving exactly at 10AM...

The best solution was to take the Sunday morning bus to Tupiza, rather than wait for the train that was leaving Uyuni on Monday at 2:30AM. Better by day than by night, knowing the temperature extremes we could expect... The bus was supposed to take 7 hours and, of course, it didn't have a bathroom, but the driver assured me he will stop every now and then. The problem was, there was nowhere to stop - the bus goes for hours through the desert and there's not even a tree in sight. The only real bathroom is in Atocha, 4 hours away from Uyuni.

Amazing carvings

There is no paved highway in the southern Bolivian Altiplano, and the stretch from Uyuni to Tupiza is no exception. At first the road is a pair of barely-visible tracks in the barren, sandy plain south of Uyuni; later it turns into a dusty ribbon carved in the steep sides of hills and canyons. At times, you find yourself praying for good brakes and for the driver's ability to take a dangerous turn. It took almost nine hours to get to Tupiza, but the drive ended without incident. Occasionally, the driver stopped to pick up or drop off people in the middle of nowhere, or so it seemed to me: no houses, no animals, no water. What were they doing there? I asked myself what would happen if a car breaks down on this road. There weren't many vehicles crossing in the other direction, and cell phones certainly didn't work. You would have to wait and have many blankets, in case you had to spend the night...

Tupiza is a small town in the southern Altiplano, and at 2900 meters altitude it's the smallest elevation we've been at in Bolivia. The area around it looks more like Arizona than the typical Altiplano landscape, and it's no wonder that Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid chose it for their last evil deeds: it must have reminded them of home...

For us, it was just another stop on the way to Argentina and a place to relax, do some horseback riding and eat a lot of pizza - since there's not much else in the way of food here. Connections in Internet cafes were very slow - there's only one provider in town, everybody shared the same line, and people loved to video-chat; even writing email was an agonizing challenge. We stayed at a decent hotel - the "Mitru", took a nice horseback tour with "Tupiza tours" and moved on. Bye-bye Bolivia!

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Luxury in Bolivia?

Through the arch
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As I mentioned before, we made it to Bolivia and spent some time in Copacabana on the shores of lake Titicaca doing... nothing. We even skipped that overrated bunch of rocks called "Isla Del Sol". We wanted to see it but various factors prevented us from taking that day-trip: either the weather was bad, or we had to change rooms, or again, I had I slight cold and preferred the coziness of our room to the great outdoors.

Speaking of rooms, the suite we had at "La Cupula" was without a doubt the best hotel room we had so far; kudos to the German owner and the management team. The best way to describe it would be to say that we actually enjoyed spending time in our room, which I cannot say about any other rooms we've had in the last three months. It was that good, yes, and cost us only $32 per night, price that got even lower since the first day there has been a power outage and the owner felt it was worth a discount to make the clients happy, and for the rest of the days we had a 10% discount for being South American Explorers members.

Copacabana is a tricky place though - food is dirt-cheap: you can get your belly full to burst for $5 but other things don't come in conveniently: there is no ATM so you're stuck changing money with the local exchange offices which give you a dismal value for your dollar, and even less if you want to change traveller's checks. There's one small bank on Avenida 6. de Agosto that has the best rates (but still bad) and where one can get cash advances on the credit cards - assuming one doesn't mind the hefty interest rates our banks at home usually charge for this service... In adittion, internet is very expensive, 12B/hour (about 1.5 dollars) - I know it doesn't sound like much, but for somebody like me who has to blog and upload pictures, it quickly adds up, and it doubles, since Angela is usually online as well at the same time. Compare that with the La Paz internet prices of 3B/hour...

Honestly, there's nothing to see in Copacabana proper, it's just a small, dirty town which happens to be on the tourist route between Peru and Bolivia and offers great views (but not necessarily the best) of Lake Titicaca. I'll have to see the lake again, there's something eerie and fascinating about this immensity of water situated so high up in the mountains...

We're now in La Paz, discovering the city street by street and trying to find deals on side-trips and hotels (since we don't like ours that much). Food is cheap as well - the first night we got here we rewarded ourselves with a gigantic Argentinian steak for dinner, with wine and all the good stuff, all for 180B - about $22 - for both of us. I know It's pointless to compare this with the prices in the United States but we wouldn't have gotten away without paying $150 for an equivalent dinner in Seattle. Leaving the understandably-overpriced US restaurant business aside, after seeing the price and the quality of fruits and vegetables in South America, Angela and I are already feeling outraged at the fact that grocery stores in our country charge insane prices for the same products (and double for the so-called "organics",) prices which cannot be explained economically except in terms of a fool's tax for a high living standard. Any opinions on this controversial topic?

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The heart of darkness

Posting from Copacabana, Bolivia, where I'm catching up with the events of the past days, blogger-wise!

A bird on the lake
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Exploring the depths of the jungle was the last thing we wanted to do after the horrible ending of the Inca Trail, but we had already paid lots of money for it so we mustered all our energy, packed up and left for the airport at 7am only to find out that our flight has been changed to 12:30pm... we could have slept, at least...

But it all turned out all right, and our jungle trip was much more relaxing than expected. Of course, there was walking involved (but not up and down) there were mosquitoes and sand-flies, but a good concentration of deet on your skin would scare the hell out of any living bug. The jungle-style accommodations (rooms open to the forest, no doors - just curtains, etc) were more comfortable than we thought - great beds, clean bathrooms, and awesome food. The only thing I didn't like was that people who had nothing in common were seated at the same table and occasionally I had to listen to obnoxious conversations of the type "so what exactly do you do in the United States", and god forbid, answer such questions...

Without asking for such a privilege, we had a "personal" guide - Omar - just for the two of us, which made things much easier - we walked at our own pace, asked all the questions we needed and were right close to him when he spotted animals hidden between the branches. We had to wake up at 4am almost every morning (understandably, after all those early awakenings on the Inca trail we hated getting out of bed before the sun) but we went to bed at 8pm so it was OK.

A tapir coming out of the water

The rain forest is indeed like nothing I have seen so far. The tall green canopies, the abundance of strange-looking tree species, the thin trunks rising straight up to the sky, the monkeys jumping from branch to branch high above your head... it was worth the effort and the money. Seeing the macaws, parrots and parakeets feeding on clay by the hundreds early in the morning - allegedly to neutralize the toxins contained by some of the fruits they eat - was one of those experience one never quite forgets. As one of the ladies who was watching the clay lick with us said, "this experience has enhanced my whole being". I'm too cynical to make such a ridiculous statement, but it was beautiful nonetheless. Angela missed this event entirely, because she preferred to sleep late that morning, he he... no enhanced being for her!

One of the things I've learned was that it's really hard to get good pictures of wildlife in the jungle. On the forest floor there's never enough light and there are so many branches and leaves between you and the animals that taking shots of them is usually a futile endeavor. At the clay lick the birds were too far away, even for my 300mm lens. I tried though, and I even got some great shots of capibaras, a tapir, some birds, and even a piranha fished out of the water by Angela!

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Get me out of Cuzco!

The Sacsayhuaman fortress
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For any pleasure traveler to South America Cuzco is a mandatory stop. And therein lies the problem: everyone comes here…

Cuzco is a very pretty high-altitude town with an impressive old center, a mixture of colonial architecture and Inca walls. Often, the colonial houses are built on top of the Inca stonework. With every earthquake, the Spanish houses used to crumble down but their Inca foundations would remain in place, attesting to the far superior building technology of the Andeans. And their stone workmanship is unmatched: blocks of stone of all sizes, from finger-sized pebbles to 50-ton gigantic boulders fit together perfectly with no space in-between, and no mortar was used to hold them together. Seismic resistance is achieved by building at an 8 degree angle (not straight up like the Spanish), by putting the larger stones on top of the smaller, and linking those stone bricks together with bronze keys to make them move as one in case of earthquake. I hope the pictures I took speak more than my words.

Yes, Cuzco is beautiful, but if you are like me and you hate being surrounded by throngs of tourists you’re in the wrong place… Just to give you an idea of how “touristy” this place is, let me tell you that for the last two months, ever since we have started our trip, I’ve been looking for a 58mm polarizing filter for my camera all over Central and South America. I looked in tourist-only areas and in large towns like Quito and Lima, without success; most photography shop employees hadn’t even heard of polarizers. In Cuzco every other shop has them. Regular and circular. All sizes, pick yours…

The Inca reenacted at Inti Raymi
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On the street, one is always harassed by locals trying to sell you massages, postcards, artwork and tours or to get you into a restaurant, sometimes all of them at the same time. But that’s the least annoying of all… On the old town streets you have a higher chance of bumping into a group of loud 21-year-olds than into a local.

One thing that irritates me beyond sky and earth is the fact that in this town of billions of restaurants, most of them pretty, good and cheap, there’s a place, Jack’s café, which always has a line of white people outside. What the hell makes this restaurant so popular? The food must certainly be good, but it is so in other places as well, and it’s not like you can be a regular customer when you’re a tourist. Is it the fact that the owner is an American and most American tourists would consider an American-managed place safer than locally-owned restaurants – giving in to the unspoken preconceptions that locals are dirty and only a foreigner would know how to keep decent hygiene in the kitchen? Or is it the fact that it’s in the travel books and it’s located in a busy intersection? No idea… anyway, there’s no excuse for the waiting line!

View of Cuzco
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Of course, I’m being unfair and a hypocrite, because I, as a tourist, am part of the problem. But that doesn’t prevent me from wishing the other tourists the one thing I always wish them: “Stay home, yo!” (in the translated words of my friend Mihai M. who long ago uttered this memorable sentence as we were trying to get on a full bus to a remote village in the mountains of Romania.)

What about us?

Despite the crowds here, we had a good time. But make no mistake, it’s not easy to adapt to 3400 meters of altitude: not even thirty minutes after getting off the plane I have been hit with the worst headache in the history of man, and weak as I was, I was barely able to reach my hotel room and crawl in bed – all this, courtesy of altitude sickness. I woke up 4 hours later feeling worse, if worse had a meaning by then – at least Angela seemed to be better. And then we discovered the miracle cure – “mate de coca” – infusion of coca leaves. Not only it made me feel better, but it immediately took the headache away and poured some fuel in my lifeless legs, enough to make me able to get out of the hostel and explore the town which was happily and colorfully celebrating the ancient Inti Raymi festival of the sun. Coca leaves are a staple around here and it’s no wonder the ancient Incas considered it a sacred plant. I hope the US government, focused on its misguided war on drugs, will never succeed pressuring the government of Peru into outlaw this plant, as they did in Ecuador. But let’s not turn this travel blog into a political forum; I have my other blog for this, although it’s been quite dry over at livejournal since I started this trip...

We met again with Michael and Mor, our friends from the Galapagos, and spent some days together in Cuzco and visiting the Sacred Valley. It was good to see them again. They got fed up with Cuzco fast (for the same reasons as me) and decided to spend a few days in the village of Ollantaytambo, in the Urubamba valley. Hopefully, we’ll meet again in Bolivia and Buenos Aires.

A last bit of trivia about this place: Cuzco, and much of Peru, seems to have been invaded by an army of young Israeli backpackers. More than anywhere else, you hear Hebrew spoken on the street; there are plenty of restaurants with Hebrew-written menus and Israeli food, and the Spanish keyboard at the Internet-café where I’m writing this blog entry has Hebrew characters glued on the keys. We got the drill from Michael and Mor (themselves belonging to the chosen people as well) – apparently, traveling to South America, and more specifically to Peru, has become sort of a rite of passage for young Israelis. As soon as they get out of the army, many spend a few months traveling this continent. The funny thing is that even those who don’t want to or couldn’t care less about traveling do it because of peer pressure…

Well, I still have to meet any Romanians on this trip…

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Lima, Baby!

Lima colonial-style balcony.
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It's winter in the southern hemisphere and I'm savoring its crisp, foggy taste in Lima. The garua blots the sky, the light is flat and seems to come from nowhere and the city looks frozen in time because there's not much of a difference between morning and afternoon, or night and day. Although we are at tropical latitudes, jackets are needed most of the time.

However, I like it. I've heard stories of how horrible Lima is, how it's not worth wasting any time here or how dangerous it is to walk the streets, even in broad day light. All crap! For two days now we've been exploring the streets of this gigantic urban sprawl. It's no Paris, of course, to keep you fascinated for weeks, but it has an unmistakable big-city charm given by the combination of elaborate colonial architecture, proud neo-classic republican buildings, as-ugly-as-can-be contemporary high-rises, ultra-modern glass and steel headquarters of international corporations and hip nightlife-r-us neighborhoods. Of course Lima wouldn't be Lima without the endless downtrodden, run-down streets with crumbling houses, some of them decayed colonial gems, streets that best reflect the nature of this gigantic town, born by the will of the gold-hungry conquistadors as a showcase for the power of Spain, and built by the blood, sweat and tears of the indigenous, the poor and the desperate, who were looking for a home as well.

We walked everywhere in daylight and in the evening and took cabs for the endless rides between the interesting neighborhoods (indeed, we didn't walk those dirty streets with tottering houses, I still have some shreds of common sense left). We had cheap lunches and then blew $100 on dinner at an overpriced Italian restaurant which we selected just to make ourselves feel better and to forget all that chicken and rice we had swallowed in the last weeks.

We'll fly to Cuzco tomorrow and won't be back in Lima again, so my adventure of discovery of the misty, cold streets will have to stop prematurely. There will be more big towns later in our trip: Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Cairo, Barcelona. They may rank higher in sights and beauty, but I'm almost sure that Lima could easily win the award for the city with the most crazy cab-drivers. And speaking of cabs, a lot of them are Daewoo Tico, which were produced in Romania in the nineties. How did they get so popular here?

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Wet county

We are back in continental Ecuador, in Cuenca. It has been raining for 4 days straight and I can't help but think of drizzly Seattle...

Our goal here was to take language lessons at the "Simon Bolivar" Spanish school, but we had to drop out after three days because of some misunderstandings about the price - the lessons ended up being more expensive than we thought. Nonentheless, we got some good practice: I got to learn the various cases of the subjunctive and Angela learned shopping-Spanish. We stayed with a family and this provided even more opportunity for language practice.

It's very cold these days and no Ecuadorian house has any sort of heating system. The three blankets we have on the bed solve the problem for the night, but other than that it's back to thick socks, sweaters and rain coats.

Tomorrow we leave for Baños, which is a scenic village on the way between Cuenca and Quito, on the edge between the sierra and the oriental jungle lowlands. Hopping for better weather...

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