My entrance to Peru was pretty interesting. It was at night and I didn't feel like riding my bike so I was asking the bus drivers to let my take my bike on with them but nobody wanted to. I eventually got a ride on a taxi who took me to a small town north of Piura, from which I took another bus to Piura. The drive was interesting because there were cows all over the road for the first half hour or so of the ride, and they didn't want to get out of the way. I noticed right away from the dirt roads in the town and the dilapidated roads that Peru was less developed than Ecuador.

I went to Piura for no other reason than that it had a map in the Lonely Planet book. It had a nice big plaza with a big tower in the middle of it, but unfortunately it was closed to the public. I remember noticing a few furniture movers loading a truck and seeing how they just threw everything together instead of packing the stuff first like they do in the states.

After Piura I took the bus to Trujillo. The bus ride surprised me by how much of a desert the Peruvian countryside was. It was basically one big sand dune, with some very primitive wood stick huts lining the road every once in a while. I was excited to arrive in Trujillo because I had heard that it had the longest wave in the world 75 kilometers to the north of it, and that it was a good place to teach English. But it was much smaller than I expected it to be. It was just a small town in the middle of the dessert, but it was quaint and I liked it. It seemed like a happy oasis.

My first day there I rode my bike seven kilometers out of the city to the old ruins of Chan Chan. This place was fascinating because it was enormous. The original city covered 26 square kilometers and the ruins seemed to cover about that area also. The center of the ruins was a walled in city built in AD 1300 that contained 10,000 dwellings. Even though it was seven hundred years old, parts of the walls looked brand new. The inside of the city was like a giant labyrinth, and in the middle was a large area where the central garden was, which reminded me of what the garden of eden must have looked like. There were actually still plants growing in the old pit they dug for the garden, which was really interesting because there were no plants anywhere for kilometers around. There was a lookout built in the grounds were I could look out over the wall which was really tall and made that place look like a real fortress.

After I left Chan Chan I went rode around exploring and noticed that there were old dilapidated and ignored pyramids all over the place. I rode my bike to one of them, which by now didn't look much more than a mound of rocks, but was still clearly an old man made pyramid.

After Chan Chan I rode my bike through Trujillo and to the other side to some ruins of another temple at the base of a hill called Huaca de la Luna. This is a well preserved multi layered building that had some well preserved wall art.

400 meters from Huaca de la Luna was a very interesting old temple called Huaca del Sol. Even though it is ancient and the largest pre-columbian structure in Peru, it was just sitting next to a neighborhood unprotected by any fences. I rode my bike around it marveling at the giant structure that consisted of 140 million adobe bricks. It is fascinating to look at these old structures and see how they deteriorate with time. I think the Huacas del Sol and La Luna were from the civilization before Chan Chan, which lasted from 0-700 AD, so these structures were almost two thousand years old. I recommend anyone who comes to Peru to come to Trujillo and see these ruins because there are so many of them and you can see how there was once a huge city here.

The neighborhoods of Trujillo were interesting to me because the houses were so simple, being just adobe huts, and the neighborhood roads were just sand. I stayed in Trujillo one more day just walking around and surfing the web. I also saw Erin Brockovitch in the Cinema.

I though about riding my bike to my next place, Huaraz, which would have been a beautiful ride, but I wasn't very excited about riding through the dessert, so I took the bus.

I remember arriving in Huaraz was very exciting for me because I could see huge mountains around me in a beautiful mountain town. I could see Huarazcaran from the town, which is the highest mountain in Peru at 6700 M. I wanted to climb it but I heard later that it was too early in the year. I stayed in a hotel for one night until I found a better place where I met some cool people. But I was riding my bike on main street the next day and a Swiss guy on a bike rode up to me and started talking to me and showed me a better place to stay which was tucked away in an alley. I can't remember the Swiss guys name was, but he was really cool and I wish I had gotten his email. He was living in Huaraz making his money doing handy work for the Peruvians. He had a little cabin there that I never visited. He was there in Huaraz running every day training for a marathon that was coming up in a few months.
One day I rode out of town with him to one of his friends houses who was selling weed. The guy was interesting. He was an indian but was interested in Indian from India mythology and was vegetarian. I started talking to him about aliens and he believed that they were here on earth and also believed that they made the Nazca lines and the stones in and around Cuzco.

A lot of people in Peru seem to be alternative in one way or another. I met a few other vegetarians there, and there are a lot of fruit stands and vegetarian restaurants in Peru. I was a regular at one vegetarian restaurant that was in a meat market where there were dead animals hanging everywhere. The owners of the restaurant were Christians and liked to talk to me about the Bible.

One day my Swiss friend hooked me up with a huge bag of pretty strong weed for only six bucks, which broke my four month or so long break from smoking anything, and eventually led me into the biggest burnout of my life because the bag I bought would have killed me if I had tried to smoke all of it, so I made sixteen hundred super strong marijuana cookies in the hostel kitchen.

The hostel in Huaraz was the coolest hostel I have ever been to, and the coolest hostel you could ever have, because believe it or not, the owner of the hostel not only didn't live there, but was never there. So we had the whole place to ourselves, complete with the kitchen with all the appliances and a TV room upstairs which we never used because we had a big common area in a patio outside and a bar-like hang out room above the kitchen. The owner was really cool too, and never acted like she didn't trust us. She did have some caretakers there, but I never saw them and when they were there they just hung out with us like they were one of us.

One time I ate a bunch of my super cookies at the crack of dawn and my Swiss buddy came over and we took a bus to the outskirts of town and met with one of his Indian buddies who showed us to the trail that led to Mt Huaraz, which was the local 5,000 meter peak that we were going to climb. I remember in the wee hours of the morning I was so stoned off of those cookies that I couldn't even talk and didn't understand anything they were talking about and I thought his friend was coming with us. I was so stoned that I don't even remember much about the approach to the mountain, but I remember as we started to climb the steep part of it, for some reason I thought I was stronger than him and offered to take his back pack for him, but he turned out to be way stronger than me; which made sense because he had been training for a marathon for the last few months and I had been getting absolutely no exercise for the last few months apart from cruising my bike around the streets of the towns I had visited. So after a little bit he offered to take my bag for me and I took him up on that. We had to walk through some hard snow fields above sheer cliffs on the way up and down which sketched me out a little bit because the shoes I was using were loaners from him and were really old and had no tread on them. When we got to the summit we cooked up some soup and tea and enjoyed the incredible view of the Huaraz valley and the huge 6,000 meter mountains and their snowy ridges next to us.

We ran the whole way down through the pastures where the indians lived in their adobe huts with grassy roofs. The indians there seemed really content as they worked in the lush green countryside; and I felt like I had traveled back to the pre-columbian days.

I had some cool friends while I was in Huaraz. When I got there there was a cool Dutch couple but they left after a couple days. There were also two Germans from Munich there, Marcus and Philip. A little later two more cool Germans came, Marcos and oops I can't remember his buddies name. They were there the whole time I was there. There were also two English guys there for a while and two cool Swiss girls there, Melanie and I can't remember her friend name right now. There was also an English girl staying there for a while. And also my German friend who I met in Nicaragua and saw again in Panama and then again in Ecuador showed up and stayed there for a week or so. She was traveling with a cool Israeli girl who talked me into combing out my dreads with avocados. There was also a big Peruvian guy who was friends with Marcus who would come over and hang out with us. One time I have gave him three of my super cookies and he got totally stoned and could barely speak. There was also a big Israeli guy there who claimed to have never been drunk or stoned in his life. I gave him three of my super cookies once and he said he didn't feel anything.

My days there were filled with just hanging out in the patio with my buddies and roaming around the town, and at night we would have these Pisco sour parties. Huaraz was were I was first introduced to Pisco and Pisco sour. Ah, I had some good time there.

One day I paid a Swiss French kid twenty bucks to take me paragliding from 900 meters up the valley of Huaraz down into the town to the north of Huaraz. Paragliding is one of the coolest sports in the world because you can feel and hear and air cutting through the para glider and you can steer it really easily. We got up early in the morning and took a van down to the next town. In these vans they make all the passengers sign their names on a piece of paper. The French guy told me it was because every few weeks one of the vans drives into the river and they need to identify the bodies. After we got off at the town we hitch hiked up the valley to the place where he likes to take off. We went to a place at the top of a cliff and after he set up the para glider he told me to stand in front of him and when he said 'run' to run as fast as I could, so I did. But as I was running he tripped over me and instead of taking off we just fell down the three meter cliff and he fell on top of me and I cut my thumb wide open on a rock. After we bandaged up my thumb and covered my hand with a pair of his gloves we hiked up to a perfect spot and barely even had to walk to take off. He let me steer for a little bit which was surprisingly easy. Then he showed me his skill by pointing to a tree in the distance and telling me we were going to brush the top of it, and sure enough we did just that. As we were approaching the town I asked him where we were going to land and he pointed to a soccer field where a game was going on, at which point I reminded him about the game and he said it didn't matter. We approached in a circle the same way a plane does before it lands. At we were were about to land the people stopped playing and everybody watched us. We were approaching at about twenty miles an hour, and right before we were about to land he pulled back on the string and we lunged forward and slowed down enough to have a successful running landing. After we grabbed the para glider we walked off the field and packed it up with dozens of people standing around watching us.

For the six weeks I was in Huaraz I did some mountain biking, although not nearly as much as I wanted to because of the fact that I could never get up on time. One day I rode down to the town that is at the base of Mt Huarazcaran which is the highest mountain in Peru. And from there I rode up the mountain to go over the pass which was around 5,000 meters, but I turned around because the top part of it was covered in snow and I didn't want to get my feet cold trudging through it. The last part of that pass was awesome because there were like thirty consecutive switchbacks on the last part. I did that ride twice. I also did rides up both sides of the valley that Huaraz was in, but I never got to the end because I left too late one day and got an asthma attack the other.

While I was there all of my friends were going on treks but I never went on any because I just didn't feel like it. I wanted to go climb a 5400 meter mountain with the Germans once but I got really sick the day before they left from eating Crevice, which is raw fish that they sell from stands in the blazing sun. I had been eating it the whole time I was there because its delicious but that time it must have been rotten.

If there were ever a place that I would like to go back to it would be Huaraz peru. The mountain biking, mountain climbing and paragliding there are great, and the town is a nice quaint size. But after my the Germans came back from their successful summit trek I was still sick as a dog and felt like I needed to get out of Huaraz. (now I'm writing stoned) For some really weird reason which I can't explain because it has never happened anywhere else, but for the whole time I was there I thought that Lima was on the other side of the mountains, when in fact the mountains were on the east side of the town. I remember driving in the bus us the valley taking a right instead of a left and being surprised. The drive back was beautiful because we went over a tundra pass with a beautiful view of a lot the high mountain valleys. The drive down the road continued steadily until we got to the desert again.

I was excited about getting to Lima because I was thinking about maybe living here and teaching English for a little bit and learning how to para glide because there is a paragliding school there for three hundred and fifty bucks were they take you out to the san dunes outside of Lima and you can learn all day long paragliding and being driven back up. Plus I imagined the surfing being really nice there because it was warm and on the Pacific ocean. I arrived at night and rode down to the center of town two blocks from the Plaza near the river to the hostel I wanted to go to. Although the ride through the center was congested, I felt like I was riding in a town instead of a huge city because the roads are narrow. The hostel I went to was really cool. It's on the roof of a tall building in the center, and has plants all over the place and two large land turtles walking around, so it's really quiet and peaceful. The people weren't really sociable there through and I was really sick when I got there and was chowing down on my cookies every day and was in kind of a stoned out haze, so I didn't talk to anyone besides a couple of English girls who were there when I first got there who gave me a Bolivia Lonely Planet book and talked about La Paz and made it sound really trippy.

My first day in Lima I rode my bike down the bike path in the middle of the main avenue to the beach eight miles away. The coast was unlike anything I had ever seen before because it was cliffs for the whole thing, which made the view of the ocean awesome and allowed people to para glide. where the bike bath hit the cliff there was a nice park that led up to a cliff that people were paragliding off of. I watched one guy jog off the cliff and soar to the north along the cliffs for like five or ten minutes until he landed a few kilometers down the road on a big parking lot. I could see all of the beautiful, perfect surfing waves all along the coast. Unfortunately people don't surf there because the water is polluted with human waste.

I found a place where I could walk down and checked out the beach. To my disappointment although the beaches were large and sandy, there was nobody there. There were, however, a half dozen kids out surfing in the waves even though the white sea foam that comes in wasn't white but brown and stinking. Then I rode back to the plaza and walked the peaceful pedestrian mall down to the other plaza on the other side, which is unique.

I did a tour of the Catholic church there which was interesting because it had long catacombs in the basement where they organized the bones of 70,000 people into mosaics in the pits where they dump them. It had a large central plaza also. I like that style of architecture with the plaza in the middle surrounded by the various balconies. My high school like that. Then I got a taxi up to the top of the hill that overlooks the city that is just across the river in the center. I took a taxi up there because someone told me that people attack tourists on the way up, but in retrospect I would have been fine to ride up there. The view was fascinating because I could barely see the plaza even though it was only like a kilometer away. I could see that there were slums of houses built of of adobe brick and tin roofs just to the south of the center which drove home just how poor Peruvians actually are.

After Lima I took the bus to Ica where the sand boarding dunes are. Ica was in the middle of the desert and had a peaceful feel to it like all of the towns and cities in Peru. While I was there I was walking across a restaurant in front of the plaza and a Peruvian girl from Lima who I was dancing in the disco with three weeks beforehand in Huaraz recognized me and we dun hunged out. She was there on business selling stuff to the pharmacies.

Ica is the place where the Alien skulls were found, and I remember talking about that with a guy who was standing on the plaza with all kinds of alien literature spread out in front of him. I don't even think he was selling anything, he was just evangelizing the coming of the aliens.

My first day there I rode out to a lake called Huacachina that is surrounded by sand dunes which makes it look like the ultimate oasis. Huacachina is famous for sand boarding but there were only a couple people up there doing it. I rented a board and hiked up where I could see Ica and the surrounding villages in the middle of sand. That was one of my coolest days traveling. I was stoned off my ass on the cookies and listening my my walkman all day long sand boarding. There were two sides of the dune for boarding. The steep side facing the lake and the flatter side facing Ica. I started our on the side that faces Ica so I could get the hang of it. Sand boarding is different than snow boarding because there is much less control in sand boarding because the feet just loosely fit into two straps. I had a couple cool runs where I went down a little bowl and went up the side of it and did a 180 and went down it. After I got warmed up I went to the steep side. The steep side was at first a little intimidating because you can't turn and you can go really fast. There is only one way to surf the steep side because you have to put the grease on the board to go and it won't go even on the steep side if you don't put the grease on. I got pretty good where I got up to about 30 miles an hour and about half way down the slope until I would crash because the board would shimmer too much from bumping from the speed. There was a dilapidated old lift for the sand boarders of yesteryear. I was a really small sled with a cable that led to the top where there must have been an old motor of some sort. That would have been cool to be able to surf that dune all day long by way of a lift. I think if someone does that they could get a really good business going if they manage to get the word out to the tourists who come there, or convince the Peruvians that its a fun thing to do. On the side of the dune on the way that people go up I boarded down the entire part of the slope and rode it all out until it leveled off halfway down the dune. Right at the end of the day my walkman broke because it got too much sand in it and never worked again.

The next day I rode my bike to Nazca. This was the first stretch or road that I bike toured in Peru and it was all desert. I little before I got to the plateau where the Nazca lines are there was a river that I had to climb out of. I rode past the platform where they look at the lines but it was closed off so I couldn't climb it, not like I would have seen anything anyway because it was night. It took me later than I thought because I was having flat problems.

Nazca is a nice small town with the foothills to the mountains that lead to Cuzco on the western side and the plains that have the Nazca lines that point to the sea on the eastern side. There is a little river that runs through the town where the indians made an intricate system of aqueducts that went through tunnels and had pools that fed the terraces crops that led to them. The day that I spent there I saw a parade for children. There are a lot of parades in South America I have noticed. I got the plane ride over the Nazca lines which was an awesome experience because I got to ride in a small plane taking steep turns to check out the lines. I saw hundreds of designs on the flat plains and on the hill sides, but the most amazing thing I saw was the perfectly straight lines that criss crossed all over the place and above all one line that was about as wide as a road and pointed perfectly straight to the east literally as far as I could see even from the plane! At the museum across the street from the airport was an interesting museum where they had a mummy in a glass box and they showed a video about the lines. The video was mainly about an old American woman who had lived in Nazca for like thirty years studying the lines and came up with some kind of theory about what they were made of. When I saw my friend ? who was one of the Chimborozo climbers in La Paz she told me she had spent a couple weeks there hanging out with a guy who had been studying the lines and had decided that the lines were made by dousing lines following underwater water ways. That makes sense to me, but I would like to know why they criss cross all over the place.

That afternoon I got a bus to Cuzco. Almost immediately the road. The drive went up and up and up an up and over a pass and then down down down a river valley in a bumpy dirt road on a bus that was decked out to drive over anything. It's so high there's probably people who could do the limbo under it. After going down the river we went way up and over the mountains and down again into cuzco at 3326 meters. It's actually quiet a pity that I didn't do that ride, it would have been awesome, but I was so anxious to just get there. Cuzco is half the size of Trujillo with 326,000 people but to me it seemed bigger. It is in a nice sloping valley surrounded by rolling hills. From the bus station I rode up the valley to the central plaza and through the narrow pedestrian alley where all the tourist restaurants are and took and left and went in the hotel on the end on the left. This hotel was cool because they played movies every night on a large movie screen upstairs. My room was in a little courtyard in the back. When I was about to go in a movie there I saw Dan, the Israeli kid I saw in the hostel in Quito and then again in Huaraz. He was going on the same Inca trail tour the next day with a German girl I happened to be going on.

We left from a small bus the next morning with our tour group and one other who was kind of like our sister tour group. The bus ride to the trail head of the Inca trail was over lush green rolling hills for a couple hours until we got to a town where we had a meal. Then we drove a little more to the trail head. We started the trail next to a big river and hiked up it along a big trail. From the beginning I was hanging out with Dan who was a really interesting Israeli. Actually Dan is the ultimate Israeli. He literally never stops talking, he's like a talk radio station, just talking and talking and talking about stories and stuff. But none of it's negative so he's never a pain to listen to. He's like the radio show I like to listen to when I work on my computer, the Laura Lee show. I don't actually listen to 95% of what I hear because I am busy concentrating on my work, but the background music of people happily talking away is relaxing. At the end of the Inca trail the mother in an English mother daughter couple likened me to Kenny in South park. I had never watched South Park, but later in Cuzco I rented it and saw that Kenny is the kid with the hood over his head. She must have said that because I was the silent friend of the ever talking Israeli kid. Once in the train he was telling a story and the daughter in the mother daughter pair actually tried to physically cover his mouth to stop him from talking in a sort of joking fashion, to show how he just talked and talked and talked. I remember one story he told. He said when he was in the Israeli army he sprained his ankle or something and so the other soldiers had to carry him on a stretcher for some kind of thirty mile death march. And he was saying how he was just sitting on top of the stretcher just cracking jokes all day long.

The first night we spent was near the rive on the right side of the photo to the right which looks down the river towards the beginning of the trail. The photo is taken from the beginning of the pass that we had to climb to go the round about way to Machu Pichu. Only the nobility could take the direct route along the river. The next day we hiked up the river again and had to take a left up into another canyon to the side. The pass was at 4200 meters, but we camped at the base of it. The third day was the pass day, where a few groups who started at the same camp sight busted up and over the pass to camp that night at the bottom of the next valley. Our groups was always one of the late risers, but that was cool because after the group broke up at the beginning of the pass I actually enjoyed passing people all day long. I think I counted that I passed like 132 people on my way to the pass. The hike was cool because for the first part of it we were in the jungle hiking along a trail that was very well paved with large rocks. The second part we were hiking up the treeless tundra part until we got the the summit of a pass that had a saddle of about 20 meters. The view was nice with some snow-capped mountains in the distance and the river way down there. One of the most fascinating parts of the whole trip was the view of the descent off of the pass into the next valley, because It was a perfectly paved stone road about ten feet wide down from the pass into where the trail follows along the side of the valley leading to the main valley. While I was waiting for my group at the top of the pass I was chewing on my couple bags trying to see how much of a buzz I could get off of those illegal coco leaves. My mouth did turn numb, which was a cool experience in itself, but I do remember getting kind of high off of it. I wasn't drowsy when I ate the two bags of leaves so I don't know if it would have kept me awake which is what the Indians supposedly eat it for. I wish I could buy those leaves, chewing leave is a cool savagely natural way to get a pick me up.

The camp at the end of the canyon was cool because we had a little river running through the terraced camp site. Because this canyon was smaller than the last one, all of the groups had to cuddle up on the same terraced hill, which made apparent how many people were in fact hiking this Inca trail. The next day we hiked up the side of yet another canyon even though the trail could have taken a right and gone the river to the main river to Macho Pichu, but no, we had to go up another ridge. Half way up this ridge we encountered a ruin which was built on a steep enough part of the mountain side that the lookout of the building had a front wall that was about three meters high. About 45 minutes after that ruin we got to the summit of the ridge. But instead of descending back into another valley we went steadily along a small steep valley until we got to the coolest ruin on the whole trail. It was a kind of a mini Machu Pichu because it was a developed little town, or rather sophisticated mansion on a steep ridge. On the end of the ridge there was a nicely sized little patio area overlooking the alpine jungle view. At the upper end we saw the carved aqueduct lead from the mountain above and over the doorway to the ruin. About a half hours hike we camped in a little field.

The next day was the most magnificent. It began almost immediately with an emergence onto a new ridge where the trail suddenly became very well paved. We walked along this ridge offering views and began to descend a little until we had lunch at a tree less area where we could see the main river again and aguas calientes, the town that supports Machu Pichu and the hydroelectric plant that was right below us. About a half hours walk down the trail from there we got to the second coolest ruin on the Inca trail, another mansion that had the best view platform whose face was like five meters high because the ruin is built on a 30 degree hillside. There were some interesting aqueducts in a line down the mountainside that filled with the cascading water. The coolest thing about this ruin was how the thick fog would roll in and out very quickly. I took a photo of when the fog was in, and another one five minutes later when It was perfectly clear again.

From this ruin the trail was descending down the steep hillside, so we started walking down 500 year old stairs. Because we were descending, the trail started going through a thick jungle which totally blocked out the sun. A couple hours later we to a huge terraced farm built up on the steep mountainside that supported Machu Pichu. A little down the hill all of the groups camped together in a big terraced camp site. We all had dinner together in a building and the energy was really high. One guy got up on a table and made a toast to everybody in the building although I didn't understand anything he said. The next morning the days wave of Machu Pichu tourists began their final trek to Machu Pichu a couple hours later. Our group was one of the last ones yet again and I took off kind and was passing people in the super crowded trail, but I stopped passing people because I didn't want to be rude, but then came Dan who was just plowing through people, so I got behind him and we passed people until we got to climb up a stair section where I dropped him and hiked up to a ridge that offered the first view of Machu Pichu below us. This had a little ruin built there and I was listening to the explanation of the area to another tour group. This was known to the Incans as the 'keyhole' or something, where they would have a ceremony to 'behold' the city or something like that. Then someone else from my group showed up, and we ran down the trail to the ruins and were the first ones there for the day. I sat up at the farm terraces above Machu Pichu for a few minutes next to a hut where they kept three Llamas. I walked to the left part of the terraces and saw how they were built until the huge sheer cliff started. The fog is amazing in Machu Pichu. It is just like in the mountains in Costa Rica. One second it is totally clear, and they the fog just rolls in at like ten miles an hour as if the place is flying through the clouds. But after the people came and the sun got higher the fog dissipated and our tour started. We had a special Machu Pichu tour guide who was kind of a character. At first he was angrily collecting and gathering all of our attention before he would get started. At first I though we was kind of an angry person, but after he got started on the tour I realized he just took his job very seriously.

He took us around showing us the impressive cascading aqueduct system and stonework. There is a patio on top of the ridge that the city sits on that had a sheer cliff on one side that looked like it went all the way down to the river. He said they were still finishing it when they had to abandon it so the Spanish couldn't find it, and he showed us a large stone sitting in the middle that they were working on dragging across to be placed upright as a pillar. He showed us a large rock field next to us and said that was where they got all their rocks to built the city. On the other side of the plaza there was a cliff that led to the impressively large central plaza which had a big farm patch next to it. Behind the farm patch was the beginning of the trail that led to the top of the steep hill that you see in the photos. I had no idea there was a trail up there because it was so steep, but they made stairs up it! I don't think I would have been able to climb that hill without the stairs put there for me. When I got near the top I saw a staircase that went up to the left very steeply, almost too steeply for me, to a building that had a view of the river almost straight down below. From there I climbed a little way to the top where there were some large rocks that we sat on. The view of Machu Pichu from the top made the city itself looked very small and I noticed most of the terrain was terraced farms.

Another interesting part of the tour was the condor, which was a condor head made in a little plaza next to the neighborhood part of the ruin that had two naturally looking wings raising from it. He said the Incans were good about using natural formations to build their structures, and showed us how the buildings were build up on existing rocks. Next to the condor was a little cave that we walked through and came out the other side.

The energy in Machu Pichu was very powerful in a similar was as Tikal, where I could feel myself get really energized to the point that I felt fidgidy, so I walked down to the entrance area where the buses are with Dan and his girl friend and we sat down and waited for our group which didn't all show up for like a half hour. And then we decided to walk to Aguas Calientes instead of take the bus, I can't remember why. The hike was cool though, and the town or Aguas calientes was interesting. It was small, about the size of Machu Pichu. After having lunch with my group in a restaurant we got on the three hour train and rode the valley down the big river that only the Incan nobility used to get to Machu Pichu back to Cuzco.

My next day in Cuzco I rode up the valley that was right next to the plaza about ten minutes to the ruins of Sachsayhuaman, which is the most impressive ruin I have ever seen because of the huge rocks there. This place is a three level high terraces wall built in zig zags to emulate the jaw of a Jaguar. It is made with granite stones that weigh 300 tons and stand twelve feet high, and are fit together perfectly. When the spanish came there they tried to take it apart because it was a religious temple and could only dismantle four fifths of it. Next to the wall there is a large plaza were they have festivals. On the other side of the plaza there is another peculiarly unexplained thing. Carved perfectly straight into the granite rock there is a type of award platform or something. This was amazing because of the precision that it was cut. After Sexy Woman, as people call it because nobody can pronounce it like it is supposed to be, I went to a couple more ruins nearby, one of which had an impressive 500 year old man made waterfall that was still working.

Smartly I didn't bring my super cookies with me on the Incan trail because I wanted to be able to communicate with the people in my group, but I began eating them again when I got back to Cuzco, and was starting to get burt out. I remember the day I did the tour of the city I left my bike sitting in the flower garden in the central plaza for about nine hours in the middle of the day completely unlocked, and nobody stole it! However my camera was pick pocketed that had all the best photos form Machu Pichu in it.

The city of Cuzco has some very cool sights as well. The original incan walls were all over the city, built into the modern buildings just like they are in Rome. It was amusing to see the stark difference between the vastly superior stonework of the Incans to the impressive attempt at duplication by the Spanish. There is one famous giant rock near the center that has nine sides to it and is fit perfectly with the other stones surrounding it. The catholic church next to the plaza is impressively large and intricate, but I was most impressed with the other church down the road a little bit. It was originally an Incan temple, but the Spanish dismantled it and put their own church on top of it, but they didn't completely take apart the walls, so I could see them inside the church. The difference in stone work was so amazing, because the Spanish needed to use mortar to fit their stones together, but I could see that the outer wall of the Incan temple didn't have any! It stayed together because the stones were cut together perfectly. There were some parts where the stones had separated from each other a bit from earthquakes, but the wall was still safely intact. I walked up the tower and got a nice few of the skyline, which is something I try to do at every city I go to. Cuzco had no modern looking sky scrapers which added to its charm. All the buildings were the same brown color.

I hung out in Cuzco for like five days after the Incan trail. For a couple days I tried to leave but I was so stoned on the cookies I couldn't get up on time and I don't like leaving late. There was an interesting thing there that I hadn't seen since Korea, the video rental houses. I went there once and rented South Park.

I rode south towards Lake Titicaca from Cuzco. The road followed up a river at a nice mellow grade. I stayed at a roadhouse hotel one night, and the next day I took a right turn and up into the barren hills towards Arequipa. While I was riding up the steep grade I passed a kid who was walking, and he ran beside me for about ten minutes. Then I saw an old Indian woman running with her blanket pack on, which was very impressive. I rode up to a quaint town and got a room. I was well off the beaten path now so most the indians I was riding past will have only seen a white person a few times in their lives, if ever, so the stares started to come. I spent the next day there because I was getting my walkman fixed at a shop in front of the plaza, which was the only business I remember seeing surrounding it. A lot of guys who apparently didn't anything else to do went with me to watch me do business with the guy. Seemed to me excited to be talking to me and was acting macho by interrupting me and telling me how he was going to fix it and that I would have to wait. It would be cool to live in a tiny super primitive town in a beautiful setting for a little bit. I would bring a few computers and open computer using school and then sell the computers to them on consignment.

The next day I rode up and over a pass in the treeless hills and down into another town. I got a flat in this town and had to fix it. This town must have never seen a gringo because while I was fixing the flat in a market area on the main street a crowd of about thirty people came up and completely surrounded me and stared at me. The first row were of small children who kept trying to offer me their ice creams. When I left I waved and all of them waved back together. That was one of the weirdest traveling experiences I have had. I was a little behind schedule because the the flat problems so I had to descent from the next pass in complete darkness because I didn't have a light. But it was cool because my walkman worked again and I was stoned out of my head enjoying my music. This town was in a fair sized valley and I think it was the capital of the between Cuzco and Arequipa wasteland. I spent three days there because I couldn't get up in the morning because I was too stoned because I continued to eat my cookies. I went to the internet one day, and walked around the market and got some meals at various restaurants. I was the only non Peruvian there the whole time I was there. From looking at the market I saw how much these people live off the land because they were selling every bit of the all of the animals that they had around and even some weird much room like growth from the land. I didn't talk to anyone there and felt like I was in another world. The roads were dirt and their were no cars. After the third day I gave up in trying to get up on time and just took the bus to Arequipa. The approach to the mountains was impressive. I got to Arequipa at night and rode to a hotel in front of the plaza which is what I try to do every time I go to a latin town.

Arequipa is in one of the coolest settings of all the cities I have been to because it is a big city literally right at the base of a huge perfect cone volcano. Arequipa has a million people and sits at 2324m. The whole city is on a slope because it is next to Volcan Misti which is 5800m. My hotel was cool because it had a nice patio on the roof with a nice view of the mountains and the plaza which was one of the most beautiful because it had a lot of big trees in it, and the church was pretty with the two tall spires.

The first day I was there I did the tour of the convent that was built in 1580 and used to house 450 nuns who lived completely secluded. Now just a few live in the northern part. It was fascinating because it was like a walled in city. It had a lot of plazas inside and a main steet-hallway, and a lot of tiny residences, a few large dining halls, a huge kitchen, a garden, and a few small apartments sized residences. The hallways zig zagged in a kind of laberinthy way to make it difficult to remember the layout. I remember one fountain near some huge rooms that are now colonial art display rooms.

I liked Arequipa a lot because the view of 5822m Misti and 6075 mt snowcapped Chanchani. It has peaceful cobbled roads and not too much traffic. There was a good pizza restaurant I went to.

The next morning I left really early to climb Mt Misti, but I rode up the wrong road and found myself at the entrance to a military installation on the wrong side of the river that runs through Arequipa. The next day I left at midnight to go up the more direct route. I rode through a up and up and over a slum neighborhood until it ended. After I stashed my bike in a little dry river valley behind a dump yard where they burn their trash I started hiking and realized I forgot my flashlight, and it was completely black. I didn't manage to find the road that leads right up to the base of the mountain and was still a long ways from the base so I hiked all night through the blackness until I got to a part where I was at the edge of a little canyon. I shimmied down and couldn't feel the bottom so I slid off thinking it wasn't very deep, but I was about fifteen feet deep and I landed on my side luckily in a sand pit. I remember seeing stars all over the place. After I landed I just laid there for like five seconds and then tried to breath and noticed that my wind was knocked out of me. Luckily I wasn't hurt any because I was so stoned when I stashed my bike that I forgot to take my helmet off. I tried to get out of the little canyon I was in but it just kept slithering along sheer cliffs and I couldn't climb out because of the pitch blackness. So I went back to the sand patch I landed in because that was the only place I could sleep in the rock strewn canyon and went to sleep. When I got up the next morning after the sun rose I found a place where I could climb out and started hiking up the face of the mountain which started right after the canyon. This mountain was huge because it started at about 2400 meters and went up to 5800 meters, but being that it is a perfect cone shaped mountain the hike up it was really straight forward which was cool. I had the unfortunate experience of not having any water to drink the whole day because I made the mistake of filling my camel back water bladder with carbonated water which burst the seems and let all the water run out and over me while I slept. I had a bunch of super cookies for breakfast and I got dry mouth but had no water to moisten my mouth up. I hiked as high I could but I had a raging headache and had no energy and it was getting lake so I had to turn around, but I was almost at the top. I figured I was about 100 meters from the top, but I just didn't have the energy. The view of the city from up there made it look like I was looking down on the city from a place because I could see all of the roads and suburbs with the lights. The hike down wasn't very painful because Mt Misti is just a pile of rocks and sand and it wasn't difficult to find some sand shoots to run down. As I was descending I saw the canyon I fell into and noticed that there was a road that led right up to the base of the mountain, so I got on the road and ran down it until it got pitch black again. I had to start walking through the blackness feeling my way with my feet again, only this time totally paranoid about falling in another hole. I blamed the debacle of the weed cookies, so I threw the bag as far as I could into the blackness, vowing to never smoke again on my trip. I managed to find my bike because of the glow of the burning trash dump it was next to.

The next day I decided I would try to climb the other mountain next to Misti, which was 6075 meters high. This mountain was on the other side of the river and farther away from Misti, so I talked to a taxi driver and paid him half of the fair in advance to meet me in front of my hotel at midnight. He took me up to the base of the mountain where I stashed my bike and started to hike. The view was beautiful because there was a little bit more of a moon and I could see the reflection of the snow on the mountain top, but my brain was so saturated by the weed, or maybe I was just unmotivated for other reasons, but I didn't have the motivation to hike anymore. It was just too quiet and I felt lonely, so I turned around after about a half hour of hiking and rode my bike back. This was the second time I had done this ride in the darkness. It was interesting because it was a huge neighborhood build up on the side of the mountain, and was very steep, so the descent was very fast and very long. On my descent I had one of my strangest traveling experiences. As I was approaching the outskirts of the hilled neighborhood, I approached a giant roadside building that I guessed was a slaughter house that was making more noise than I have ever heard from animals. I stopped and stood there listening to hundreds of animals screaming and wailing as loud as they could as if they were in hell. I was trying to understand why they were screaming like that because is was in the darkness before the sun rose. They kind of sounded like people screaming. I got back to my hotel way before dawn and slept in.

At this point I was kind of having a motivation crises but wasn't too stressed out about it. That night I bumped into a French guy who I had seen in Quito and again in Huaraz, and he told me about a big concert at the university that was happening that I went to, but didn't stay very long because I wasn't into the music.

The next day I was in the internet and suddenly the murmer of an earthquake started to happen and everyone just sat there looking at each other. After a few seconds when it didn't stop everyone ran outside and the streets filled with people standing in the middle of the road in case the buildings collapsed on us. All of the women and children were sobbing and I was even a little scared for a little bit because the ground was moving a lot and I could hear a loud rumble, and if it had been a little stronger I could imagine the buildings crumbling around us. I saw a a few thirty pound stones break and fall off the roofs of the buildings around me and land on the cars parked there. The whole thing lasted for maybe a minute, during which time I could see a plume of dust rise up from the ground and engulf the city until I could barely see Mt Misti. When it all ended I went straight back to the plaza because I remembered that the church there had two exceptionally tall towers and I wanted to see if they were still standing, and sure enough one had collapsed into the plaza, spilling bricks all over the road. I went to the roof of my hotel and retook photos of the mountain through the dusk and the collapsed tower so I could have the before and after photos. (I showed those photos to he and she in Santiago and after they moved out those photos were stolen, so one of them stole them, I think it was Jo because my Harry Potter book was missing also and she had read that). That was the biggest earthquake in Peru for like a hundred and fifty years and killed a bunch of people on a coastal town near the epicenter in the ocean. That night I decided to treat myself to a Peruvian delicacy, the groundhog. Why it is a delicacy I have no idea because it has barely any meat on it and it is expensive, about 20 bucks. But the meat that I did manage to eat was good.

The next morning I left on my bike towards the desert where I would loop around and climb up to lake Titicaca. The ride that day to the town of Moquegua was cool because I had the road all to myself again because they were closed from the rubble of the earthquake. Most of the day was on a flat desert highway, and at the end I turned west again and climbed up a little to the town. I think I spent two nights there because I couldn't get up the first day, the second day I got up at like eleven but left anyway. The ride was awesome because it just went up and up and up switchbacks. It got black pretty quick into my ride because I left so late and I rode up until it got so cold I decided to stay the night in a dirt floored restaurant. I was hanging out with some Bolivian truck drivers there and one of them offered to drive me to the lake. The next morning before the crack of dawn I managed to get up before he left and got a ride with him. The view was amazing as we were driving along the high antiplano surrounded by huge snowcapped volcanoes. The guy dropped me off at a boarder town on the south west corner of the lake.