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I know I haven’t been posting lately, but I am still taking photos and jumping. Here’s proof from a trip to the 1964 World’s Fair site in Flushing, Queens, New York. I’m in front of THE UNISPHERE.
There’s another at my Flickr.
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Link to Googlemap of photos from my trip!
Those first 80 posts covered a photo with story from each town I went to on my trip. I have plenty more to tell but I needed a break from the daily updates.
I put together this googlemap yesterday that shows my route and links to photosets from each place I went. It’s not perfect (I’d like linking to be one click rather than two, and I’d like to have more original icons for the map pins) but it does the job and I’m happy with how it’s coming along.
I wish tumblr would let me embed it here, but click the link to go check it out on Google proper.
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In Rio I met a couple of Englishmen who were taking their own trip around the world, going in the reverse direction that I was. We hit it off and ended up spending most of our nights in Rio on the back patio of the Hostel making Caipirinhas and playing guitar and drinking games.
Since Brazil was my last stop I didn’t have anywhere to go next but home, I stretched my trip out and tagged along with them to Salvador and then up to Lencois. We planned to take a bus from Salvador to Lencois, but to get to the bus station we took a cab. We went to the city center in Salvador and caught the cab at the front of the line of cabs. We asked to go to the bus station and he agreed.
We planned to take an overnight bus to Lencois and we knew the bus station was about 15 minutes from our hostel, but after 25 minutes of driving we still weren’t close, according to the cabbie. He took us along the coast and we got waved over at a police checkpoint where we were made to step out of the car and get patted down by guys with machine guns. I asked them if it’d be alright to take a picture of it, and they declined.
They eventually let us go, not having found any drugs on us or (luckily) the Belgian stranger we let share the cab with us. We were back on our way and noticed that the cabbie hadn’t stopped the meter while we were being frisked. We were really cutting it close and frustrated that such a short trip was taking so long and we might end up missing our bus. We arrived at the bus station, paid the cabbie and even if we gave a passive aggressive tip he surely made himself more in the extras he got by turning a 15 minute trip into an hour long one (Sure enough, when we looked at a map we realized he did a giant U along the coast instead of taking a straight line to the bus station, making the trip as long as possible without taking a boat).
In the bus station we found there was not a bus waiting for us and we were screwed. A man with a shaved head and two different colored eyes approached us at the counter. He asked if we were going to one place and we said no we were headed to Lencois. He replied that was where he was going and he had a car and could take us. We declined and were pretty proud of ourselves for turning down such an obvious attempt to kidnap/rob us, after already being swindled by the cabbie. At least we’d avoid one of the things that the tourbooks warn about.
We slept in the food court of the bus station, playing cards and hovering over our bags to keep from getting robbed. We slept in shifts and never well. The bus left at 7am and it was a comfy if uneventful ride in which we tried to sleep as best we could. I did manage to snap this photo as we went, seen above.
We got to Lencois and found a Hostel to stay in for a night before heading out on a hike the next day. We slept in a cave on the hike, and sharing the cave with us was the man from the bus station with the different colored eyes who had offered us a ride. He was on vacation and doing the same hike as us. It turns out not all creepy dudes in bus stations are creeps! We were embarrassed at our mistrust but all decided we wouldn’t have done it any differently. Especially when it turned out the driver loved to yell and sing all during our hike, putting a damper on the whole “enjoying nature” thing.
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Salvador, Brazil, is famous for street drumming groups and its rich African culture. One of my bigger memories of the place involved this store. The store touted itself as a place that sold junk. Situated, as it was, in the touristy olde-town, the junk they sold was not priced like junk.
It had some interesting things inside, but ultimately the most interesting thing was what happened there.
I picked up a couple of photographs I wanted to purchase and a woman asked me if I was ok and needed help finding anything. I told her I was OK but she kept following me around and showing me things in the store I could buy. She spoke to me in portugeuse but pantomimed that she had a baby by squeezing her breast to show me that milk was seeping through her dress.
Feeling uncomfortable, I decided to buy the photos I had picked up so I gave her the $2 they would cost but she told me they cost $3 more than that. I told her I didn’t want them for that price, but a friend I was with said” It’s ok, I owe you money anyhow” and paid the difference.
Wanting to just get away we left, but were followed out of the store by another woman, who asked why we hadn’t paid for the items we had in our hands. We informed her that we paid the other woman and the owner told us that woman didn’t work there. The woman who had taken the money exclaimed that I gave her the money and she would keep it. A few local men who were walking by came over to investigate and everything was explained. While this was happening the woman who had taken my money began talking quickly in Portugeuse and pulled out her bare breast and gave it a squeeze, spraying breast milk onto the sidewalk. The men told her they would call the police and she walked away nearly in slow-motion with my money in her hand.
The store-owner apologized and refused to accept my money for the pictures I had tried, and failed, to purchase.
Though they cost me double what I had intended to pay, I learned a lesson about not giving money to lactating women who don’t work in the stores I am shopping in.
When we told other locals this story they knew exactly the woman we were talking about and said it was an old trick.
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I walked down to the beaches in Rio de Janeiro on my own the first day I got there. I walked from Copacabana to Ipanema and got the famous songs for each stuck in my head as I went, slowly mixing from one to the next as I went. Later I asked a local guy if there were any other famous songs about Ipanema so I could try to get them stuck in my head instead. He said he couldn’t think of any, but at least there were so many recorded versions of the song that you could alternate between versions as you went.
The beaches were beautiful and the view was gorgeous, but the waves were crazy. They pounded the beaches relentlessly. As I walked along the stretch for a couple hours I saw 3 different instances of people being rescued from the undertow by lifeguard helicopters, lowering a net into the water to fish out the stranded swimmers.
Later, once I had made some friends, I went back to the beach and tried my hand at bodysurfing the waves. It was exhilerating and a whole lot of fun getting beat up by mother nature, but I still can’t quite bend my back as far as I could before I got flipped backwards and my head dragged along the sea-floor by a particularly nasty wave. I didn’t get a free helicopter ride out of it, but that’s probably for the best.
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In the hostel in Sao Paolo I met a couple from Australia. They were there on a long vacation, fresh out of high school and about to head to college. We were roommates in the hostel and since I got there the day before I was the resident expert.
We got to chatting and ended up going out on the town together a few times. One of those times we tried to meet some friends they knew but couldn’t find the club. The club we found was in a boxy-museum looking building and claimed to be playing “black music” that night, which turned out to be mid 90s hip-hop.
On a different night we did meet up with their friends and they took us to see a big market and church. After the sightseeing and dinner we followed them to the top of a skyscraper where there was a swanky lounge with amazing views of the city. Our party of 8 dispersed around the bar taking pictures out the window and admiring the view. A waiter came by and told us it would cost as much to sit down there as our room at the hostel, we decided to take a few last snapshots and head down to a cheaper, lower, bar.
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We got a lot of warnings about Lima before we got there. Most people advised us to land there and fly straight to Cuzco, not bothering with the Peruvian capital famous for crime and pollution.
We padded our trip with a couple days in Lima on either side of Cuzco, in case we had any flight delays so we wouldn’t miss our connection. We found Lima to be quiant where we stayed. Each morning we’d walk to the nunnery down the street and grab some delicious coffee and a pastry. Then we’d walk to another part of town and explore.
We saw the downtown historic area with it’s museums and shops. We went to Lima’s chinatown which was expansive and bustling. We also checked out the Mariposa area with its parks, scenic coastline, and quaint shops.
We got Pisco Sours in a grand old hotel and got ceviche just about anywhere we could. Most places had a mushroom ceviche, which was great. I got it with tofu (seen above) in a veg restaurant, but the winner for flavor was the famous Canta Rana (singing frog) cevicheria where the onion and lime was overwhelming in the best way possible.
We never encountered crime, and everyone we met was friendly. When we took a bus a woman warned Anna that she left the pocket of her bag open. Nothing was missing. We walked across a bridge downtown and a few people shook their heads at us, warning us we shouldn’t go that way. That felt weird, but we relented.
On one of our last nights, we had beers in the patio area of our hostel and chatted. As the night went on we could hear the rock band “The B-52s” playing a show at the stadium a block away. It was a nice way to cap off our trip. I would recommend Lima. Probably not as an ultimate destination, but as a place to spend a few days seeing Peruvian city-life before heading to the hiking tours.
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After we had our fill of getting rained on at Machu Picchu we took the bus down to Aguas Calientes, the closest town to Machu Picchu with all sorts of amenities. It’s where the train from Cuzco drops you off so you can catch a bus up to the Machu Picchu site, and it was obvious that the town was benefitting from the tourists to stopping in for food and trinkets in the thriving market.
We ate pizza at a Mexican restaurant because we wanted some comfort food after the long hike. While we ate we watched these guys with wheelbarrows taking piles of rock up the hill. We didn’t know where they came from or were going, but the 5 of them went back and forth, up and down, chatting all the way.
After we ate then took a walk around town. We ended up off the beaten path watching some local kids play soccer. There were a bunch of buildings behind them that seemed a bit thrown together, like the town population was growing with the tourist economy but housing hadn’t caught up yet so it was being built from what they could find.
At the time it didn’t seem that sad, since the kids had a huge soccer field and were laughing and having fun together, regardless of their living conditions. Since then, though, there was major flooding in the area and the train tracks to Cuzco were damaged halting tourism (and the money that accompanies it) to the area up until the beginning of this month.
I’m sure the improvised homes and buildings in Aguas Calientes were greatly damaged by the weather, and I hope the people were not. I hope the kids still have fun playing soccer and that these 5 wheelbarrow guys still enjoy working together as I imagine there’s plenty of work to be done.
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Three long days of hiking and we awoke early on the fourth to torrential rains. We packed up our stuff and said goodbye to the porters who would take the tents and other rented gear back to the beginning of the trail by train. Then we went through the check-in gate for our last couple hours of hiking to Machu Picchu proper.
The trails were slippery and the sky went from pitch black to pitch white once the sun was up and clouds blanketed the mountains. We arrived at the “Sun Gate”, the lookout which is supposed to be your big pay-off view reward for 3-4 days of hiking and we couldn’t see anything but clouds. We joked that it was the cloud gate. Anna was demoralized, but we powered through to Machu Picchu and were finally able to see the splendor of the multi-tiered castle-village that it is.
It was sortof interesting to see the ancient city shrouded in clouds with little rainbow wizards in multicolored raincoat robes walking around it. Every 10 seconds the view changed as mountains appeared and disappeared into the mists. Our guide gave us a tour and we walked around on our own once he left. It continued to rain up until we got on the bus to head to Aguas Calientes to catch the train home.
Our friend Michelle had taken the train from Cuzco to Machu Picchu because hiking was not her thing. She arrived minutes after we left and brought my good camera. She took plenty of amazing photos of rainbows and sunny skies. We ate a pizza at a mexican restaurant in town.
The photo above shows two windows at Machu Picchu, and how varied the terrain and weather was, showing two disparate scenes visible at the same time.
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The third day of the Machu Picchu Inca Trail hike was a mixed bag. It had more downhill than the previous day and lots of cool views, but we also got rained on. We hid in caves and tried to keep dry, but our toes turned to prunes because we couldn’t just sit and wait or we’d be stuck on a cliffside in the dark.
The morning was clear though, and we stopped for lunch in a clearing in a valley. While we were there the fog rolled in. You can see it coming in this 3-part animated photo.
I had learned to set up my point-n-shoot camera to take 3 photos in quick succession in order to catch my best jumps and not have to run to the camera over and over trying to get a decent shot. Usually I got a bunch of awkward shots of me crouched preparing to jump or landing but this series came out pretty good all around.
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