Santiago and Easter Island

So my dad came down to visit me recently and we had a very nice time.  We unfortunately were only able to spend three days in Paraguay before heading out to Santiago, Chile and then on to Easter Island.  It was a great trip.  

This photo was taken right here in Paraguay at a hotel called Dona Ramonita's in a town here Ayolas called Coratei.  We just went there to eat some lunch and drive through the Paraguayan countryside so my Dad could see it all.  This particular hotel is often frequented by wealthy Brazilian patrons and has a light plane and a runway.  It is a surprise to see so far out in the middle of the country.    

This is the airplane that they have.  Pretty amazing to see out in the middle of nowhere.  

My dad took this photo of me with my host dad (pink shirt) and two people he works with.  He owns a sawmill and a charcoal making oven.  He works all the time and has done quite well for himself.

This is the national cathedral in Santiago Chile.

This is a cool art installation at the art museum in Santiago.  Those are all shirts tied together and hung from the ceiling.

Ok Just wanted to get some photos up.  will write more later.

It's been too long - Adventure on the High River Seas - Pantanal Paraguay

So I know it has been far too long since I last posted on this blog, and I apologize.  I have been very busy here and my internet connection has been not so good.  I just went on a really sweet trip from Ayolas, Paraguay all the way to the north of Bahia Negra, Paraguay.  All on boats.  For two weeks.  Here is a photographic chronicle of select parts of the journey.  Certain parts of the trip can only be known by the participants.  You know who you are and nice job.

Along those lines the photographs on this particular entry are not all mine.  I'm not going to give specific credits.  If someone is interested in browsing the library of photos from this trip with the interest of purchase or cited use please let me know.  I will put you in contact with the photographers if they are not me.  All photos used have been previously organized according to who took the shot. 

This is the boat we took to Bahia Negra, it's called the Aquidaban.  Going to the town of Bahia Negra it was 4 days in boat.  Coming back it was 2.  This is a for real working boat.  It delivers supplies to all the communities/camps/individual houses on the river that only have intermittent access to roads and supplies.  The boat goes once a week.  For the entire two days upstream a it delivers supplies ranging from fruit to gasoline to toothbrushes.  Whatever you order they will bring to you. 

This is the wheelhouse.  Notice all the things piled onto the deck.  There's bikes, gas containers(which yes I smoked while sitting on top of), coolers, motorcycles...everything that you can get on the boat they will put on the boat for a fee.  The crew was very professional.  Honestly it was one of the most professional Paraguayan businesses I have ever witnessed in over a year here.  Props and back pats Aquidaban crew. 

Some cool mountains near Fuerto Olimpo, Paraguay which broke the monotony of days and days of palm trees and river bank. 

The sunsets were consistently amazing. 

 

Long, hot, boring days on the boat were supplemented with drinking and talking.  This particular liquor was officially prohibited on the boat.  Didn't really stop us though.  When it's 110 F in the cabin you gotta sleep somehow.  

The galley.  Took awhile to make friends with one of the cooks.  But once we did he was a totally chill bro.  Made some fine grub too if I do say so.  

 

Another totally sweet sunset.  This one features a motorcycle and a man drinking terere.  Totally and beautifully Paraguayan.  

Ol' Teddo has been featured before.  Here he is watching a movie from his cramped bunk.  Teddo does not think that the weather is hot very often.  He thought it was hot for this trip.  

  

I liked to romantically wax and wane about this trip being a "Heart of Darkness" / "Apocalypse Now" river adventure.  This particular photo portrays that thought.  

Life Jackets!  We didn't have to use them.

 

Finally, after four hot days in a boat, we made it to Bahia Negra and began the middle phase of the trip into the Pantanal Paraguayo...

We ate lots of Piranha.  In soups.  Notice how in this shot a glove is being used to hold the fish.  By day 2 all gloves had been abandoned and we were using our bare hands.  Gotta love getting used to stuff.  

The view from the front door.  It's a nice place.  

A playful and curious giant river otter.  Neato!

An Amazonian Kingfisher.  Too cool.  This one's name was Melvin.  He enjoyed hunting in the heat of the day when all other animals, including the humans, were avoiding the sun.  

This is the back view of the lodge in which we stayed.   It was very comfortable. 

My buddy Alexi.  Coming back from a resupply trip into town.  Fun. 

This picture is not from the Pantanal and I didn't catch the fish.  But I like it anyway. 

This is the front part of the place in which we stayed.  Great place and even better staff. 

A rare swamp deer.  

A rare Piranha bite.  

A rare Carpincho foot that had been ripped off by a Jaguar!  We heard Jaguars and Pumas all night!  Didn't see any but it was obvious they were there.  

I'll probably post more in the future about this trip.  For now I'll finish with a motion detector video from Guyra Paraguay taken in the exact place we were staying.  It's a siamese cat.  Psych.  

Peru and Shut Up No I Didn't Go to Machu Picchu (Part 2)

Alright here's post two.  These photos are from Chepen, Guadalupe, and Ciudad de Dios.  As I mentioned before I will write more later.  For now I am just loading photos while I have a quick internet connection. 

This was a pretty neat part of the trip.  We went to visit the farm of Ol' Teddo's uncle.  His uncle specializes in a very strange plant that is pretty much only grown in Peru.  It is called the Tara tree.  The tara tree produces a bean of which the skin is processed to be used in the tanning of leather and the actual pea part of the bean is used as a coagulant in food products.  

This is the town right outside of  the orchard.  It is in the middle of the Peruvian desert pretty near to the ocean.  The town is called Nuevo Horizontes and I am not sure if you would be able to find it on a map.    

Here is the bean from the famous Tara tree

Peru and Shut Up No I Didn't Go to Machu Picchu (Part 1)

So for the next two or three posts I am going to be putting up photos from Peru.  I spent the last two weeks there with ol' Teddo.  I do not have time just now to caption each photo with a paragraph.  These photos are from Cajamarca in the north highlands of Peru.  The weather is kind of like the high planes in the Western United States, sunny and dry, warm during the day, cool at night.  Please enjoy the pics for now and I will write about the experience later.  It was a great trip.

Ok here is some writing about my awesome trip to Peru.  I went with my workmate O'le Teddo whose family on his mother's side is from Peru.  So for nearly the entire trip we stayed at his family's houses.  Cajamarca is a town at about 2,700 meters that is famous for being the place in which the Spanish conquistadors killed the last Inca king way back in the past.

As demonstrated by the photo below the town is nestled in a mountain valley and contains many houses built perched on a mountainside.  The town has steep roads, narrow streets, and lots of alleys.  There are a lot of taxis zipping around ready to take you anywhere.  I found the taxi drivers in all of Peru to be more honest and more affordable than the taxi drivers in Paraguay, even though gas in Peru is more expensive than gas in Paraguay.  I think it's because in Paraguay there are a lot of buses leaving all the time.  In Peru it is much more common for regular people to take taxis while in Paraguay taxis are for people with money.  For instance in Paraguay during the night and on the weekends taxis charge a 30% surcharge on top of the fare.  I used to think this was just the special gringo price, but after talking to many locals I determined this is normal practice in Paraguay. 

This is a neat cathedral alongside the central plaza in Cajamarca.  I only went in briefly.  When the doors were open there was a church service for a recently deceased youth and I did not think it appropriate to linger as a tourist.  To the side of this is the place where the last Inca king reputedly was killed by the Spaniards way back in history. 

This is Ole' Teddo enjoying a classic Cajamarca view from a church/museum.  Cajamarca is sunny most of the year and does not generally have snow.  The topography reminded me a lot of the high plains in the Western United States.

Morbid?  Maybe a little.  This is a mummified baby in a jar in a museum in Cajamarca.  I just had to take a picture, it's not often you see mummified babies. 

This is a photo from nearly 3,050 meters on the road from Cajamarca to Ciudad del Dios.  It was hard to breathe when we got up a little higher on the pass, but we descended quickly to sea level on the other side on narrow, steep, and curving roads.  If you know how South Americans drive you can understand this drive was quite an adventure. 

A shot from the drive.  If you look on the left side of the photo you can see the winding road.  It is not steep here just curvy.  Up higher it was equally curvy but on one side was a 1,000 meter drop.  The views were spectacular especially through the fog of a high dose of adrenaline.

The lake behind the dam at the end of the mountains.  The dam is called dam "Gallito", or little rooster.  From here on out it turned into hot flat desert.  This dam is used to irrigate land that was previously not arable.  In the last twenty years dams like this have changed Peru from a former third world nation into an emerging commercial agricultural power.    

I will update part two in a bit.  For now please enjoy.  I am going to spend a few days in the Paraguayan Chaco and then head down to Carapegua to visit some other workmates in their place of residence.  I'm sure seeing a lot of South America and loving every second.