Peru: Overview 2013

In June I went to Peru with a friend for 2 1/2 weeks! Such an incredible experience. It is almost hard to explain how incredible. I wanted to share my trip with you but in a little bit more detail (ha... as if I don't already probably share too much detail). Over the next few weeks I thought I would share about each of the main areas we visited while in Peru... here's a sneak peak of each of the stops:

Cuzco
Cuzco was our home base while in Peru. Boom Baby! It's where we started and ended our trip but it was also the place we came back to before "heading out" again. It's where we became the most familiar with the area and we referred to Cuzco as "home." We flew into Cuzco and spent a day touring, flew out to the Amazon, came back to tour some more and visit the ruins of the sacred valley, took a train to Machu Pichu, came back to Cuzco and took the best shower of my life, caught a bus down to Puno and eventually made our way back to Cuzco, finished our souvenir shopping, and then started the flying trip home.

Amazon
Sleeping in mosquito nets, fishing for piranhas, seeing the wild life (monkeys!), a fun tour group, hanging out in the jungle, and traveling on the beautiful river... this was such a great part of the trip... and we almost didn't do it!

We went swimming with the piranhas

Machu Pichu
This is why you go to Peru and it was in my top three highlights of this trip. We got up nice and early to enter Machu Pichu as one of the first people in. The majority of our pictures are tourist free... yes! The hiking was fun and hard but worth it, learning about an ancient civilization was fascinating, speculating about the history was hilarious and meeting people from all over the globe was great!

Puno & Lake Titicaca
Two places close to each other but yet they were complete opposites. Puno was like a Peruvian NYC and Lake Titicaca had yet to be modernized. Our experience on Lake Titicaca was very humbling as we got to spend the night with a family that lived on one of the stationary islands on this HUGE lake. I'm excited to tell you about that experience and about the floating islands on Lake Titicaca.

One of the floating Islands

Arequipa
Arequipa was beautiful! It was settled by Spain and so the city was very European looking. Since this was our last stop of the trip we were loosing our "get up and go" and so we would spend our mornings touring, white river rafting, exploring, etc and then we would spend our afternoons in the main plaza writing in our travel journals, eating ice cream and people watching. One of our days in the main plaza we had several Peruvians come up and ask if they could get a picture taken with us... we're still not sure why but we were very flattered and felt like famous people.

Other Fun Things About the Trip
On a daily basis we would meet someone new and fascinating. Our first day in Cuzco we met a guy from London who had been traveling the world for the past year. He quit his job, sold everything he owned, bought a motorcycle and worked his way across Europe into Asia, over to the Pacific Islands and then starting at the bottom of South America and working his way up. He was going to just keep going until he ran out of money. He was really cute too!

Right before we left on the trip my cousin, who served a mission in Argentina, told me that the thing he missed the most on his mission was Peanut Butter and that his friend who served in Peru felt the same way. Well, I decided to carry with me a jar of Peanut Butter to give to some missionaries when I saw them. For the entire trip, every time I saw some missionaries it would be while we were driving by in a tour bus... Nooooo! On one of our very last tours I decided not to bring the peanut butter with me because I didn't want to carry it and we were going to be in a national park so I assumed the missionaries wouldn't be there. Well! We ran into a group of Elders while we were there. It was so fun to talk with them but I felt TERRIBLE that I didn't have the peanut butter with me. So I got their addresses and sent it to them when I got home.

Probably the funniest moment I had when going into a restroom: I told our tour guide while we were at the ruins of Pissac that I had to run and use the restroom but I would hurry and meet the group at the bus. He "warned" me that the toilets were "natural," which I just politely nodded my head to, not really understanding but assuming they were something similar to port-a-potties. When I opened the door this is what I found. I laughed pretty hard.

Have you ever wondered where all of the old fashion Volkswagen Bugs have gone? Well they're in Arequipa! That city was swarming with those cars. Needless to say... we had a lot of "Slug Bug!"ing while we were there.