La Paz

So Bolivia is really cool. Everything is half as expensive as Peru and it´s way less touristy and is just really cool. La Paz is a surprisingly cool city built into a mountain valley. Matt and I successfully survived a bike trip down the ´Most Dangerous Road in the World´, which was pretty sweet. Looking into some jungle trips while we´re in the area.

All´s good and going awesome! Pictures to come!

Tour Peru

Hey all, ready for a whirlwind what-I´ve-been-up-to tour?

Started off in Lima, which is huge and daunting and incredibly Spanish



Headed off to Arequipa for a few days and enjoyed sitting indoors and not hiking while it rained all the time.



Then bussed out to Cusco, which is an incredibly gorgeous european-esque city with tons of Incan ruins in the vicinity and some cool museums, pedestrian streets and great restaurants. All told, great place to stay a while.



But not too long, after only 2 days, we went on the Salkantay trek, which crosses an incredibly high mountain pass (4630m), then down into the incomparable Machu Picchu.





Heading to Bolivia tonight, should be cool, going to hang out on Lake Titticaca for a few days.

Cusco

Hey all, doing well. We got into Cusco a couple days ago, our ten hour overnight bus trip turned into a 20 hour slog when some snow blocked a mountain pass, but thankfully we were riding in style on the most comfortable buses you´ve ever seen.
Cusco is a beautiful city, very european with steep, narrow streets, ancient ruins and cool musuems make it a good place to hang out once you come to terms with the 3300m altitude.
We´re headed on a 5 (!) day trek to Machu Picchu tomorrow morning, wish us luck!

IMPORTANT NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT

Arequipa very pretty city STOP Cool colonial architecture and crazy maze-like monastery that is fun to wander around STOP Matthew fully recovered from illness and feeling fine STOP Meri is incredibly smart and awsome STOP Heading out to Colca Canyon tomorrow FULL STOP

Peru!

So despite a 4 hour delay in GP, we all arrived in Lima in time for the New Year. First thing I did was find my visa card, so parents PLEASE DON NOT CANCEL MY VISA! Spent a few days wandering around the big city and arrived in Arequipa this morning. Matthew´s dying of some polio-tubercuosis-rabies disease, but asides from that things are going great. I´ll try to put up a better post and some pics when I find somewhere with a better keyboard.

That´s all for now!