Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Day 81 on The Big Trip. Time for fun!
Cuenca: 5.5 ***. This town has a marketplace surrounded by hostels and comfortable streets lined with panaderías and little stores.
Walking around is comfortable, and I actually slept the best thus far at the Hostel Londres, which is tied for cheapest place on this trip.
Loja to Vilcabamba – taxi colectivo var.: 5.3***. Splurging for US$1.50 each on a taxi colectivo to Vilcabamba for a 45 minute-ride without extra stops or extra passengers, as opposed to a US$1 for a 1½-hour bus seat with lots of stops and lots of passengers earns its worth.
After perusing Vilcabamba’s quiet streets and waving inhabitants, we decided on Rendez-Vous, a US$11 hostel with US$4/dia WIFI service, nice beds, desayuno incluyo (breakfast included), and so on. We also get a hammock! Excitement! Relaxation! That’s the name of this town, actually: relaxation. We’re going online for a tad here and then back into town (since our hostel is 9 blocks from the main plaza square) for a bite to eat.
As it turns out, there is the Festival de Saint Vilcabamba going on tonight with la vaca loca (crazy cow). This involves huge speakers set up just outside the church at the main plaza in town blasting music you might recognize at times. It then turns into a boy running around with a cow that you could have designed and made in Tech-Ed in school except this cow is rigged with fireworks that trigger one another when finished! The boy wearing the cow suit runs all over the plaza and chases other kids and runs very close to innocent observers such as we are!
What a great surprise! We also make friends with two people who ate next to us while we wrote in our journals for lunch and we join teams to go for a walk and later for dinner. Then it’s back to Rendez-Vous for a good night’s sleep for me while Alisa uses the internet until the wee hours of 3am.
Vilcabamba
Posted by Unknown at 8:13 PM
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4 comments:
nice charlie-chaplin monkey moves on those unsuspecting inanimate objects you two!
thanks! we've been practicing! wait'll you see our---well, you'll just have to wait!
Hi Nate and Alisa,
So pleased to see you both happy and strong after the last illness. And I can now see Alisa's rawhide! Would her mom and dad like a piece sent to them?
Ok, here it i--the mom stuff:
you may want to be mindful of tone when things go wrong, both because I imagine you are trying to build bridges and because you want to be safe. Also, after seeing the beautiful beach, it occurred to me that I hope you always check to make sure you understand risks before you go places. In this case, what swims there and is there an undertow?
I wanted to swim out here, but don't now that I've learned all the little coves I like have had sharks.
Ok,mom tape off for now. Great job you two. Love, Mom/Terri
Hey Mom/Terri! haha
How's it going?! I can ask Alisa if her parents would like some rawhide...I have no idea right now! We're usually nice when things go wrong. It's when others' tones go bad that ours may turn a little sour---yikes! Hint taken!
When you say be mindful of what swims there, are you talking about the beach in Huanchaco? I didn't swim there because I didn't feel too "hot", but Alisa did, alongside hundreds of others. Given, more than half of them were wearing wetsuits for surfing, but usually for things like swimming or drinking water, you can take a note from the locals or others there. The water there was fine, I think. Ocean! The biggest danger were the crabs on the beach that hid in holes when you approached!
More to come! Watch out for sharks and we will too! -n8!
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