Running From Earthquakes

After a mad dash last few weeks that followed the chilean earthquake, Cait and I have found ourself no farther from Chile geographically than we were months ago. It has really amazed us how much time it's taken to see the southern part of the continent. On a map it looked like we could just connect the dots and be up in Ecuador or Colombia by now. We never saw Brazil or a hundred other amazing things that would make for another helluva 3 month trip...la proxima vez...no?
Our time in Bolivia was a collection of some of my favorites from the whole trip. Cait covered many of these from our introduction to the crooked gringo taxing all the way to some of the most spectacular natural wonders on the planet. I still find myself wondering and fretting over the fact that Bolivia isn't a world power. I know there are plenty of political and economic arguments to be made here but the bottom line for me is that it is a culturally rich country that has very effectively found a way to coexist with three different cultural groups inside its borders. It also has some of the richest agriculture and mineral concentrations imaginable. What could possiblly hold them down.....
We finished up our time in Bolivia with some spectacularly hectic time in La Paz, a ride down the world famous road of death, and explorations of the birthplace of much of the native cultures of south america. Lake Titicaca, nearby Tiwanaku, and the Isla del Sol provided almost a week of time travel that found us standing on and next to ancient incan ruins that were arguably the most important of their civilization. Usage and preservation issues aside, the ability to happen upon the footprints, burned into rock, of the sun god and have the revelation that you're standing inside the ancient andean cross staring at the rock where the inca's were born out of was pretty powerful. So powerful for me that when the opportunity arose to camp inside of one of their impressive labrynth structures for the night with a view of the beach...I couldn't do it. It was serene and immensly powerful at the same time.
We crossed into Peru and a one or two night stay in Arequipa turned into a 5 day dry dock as Caitlin suffered through and recovered from a devastating double wammy of parisite and bacterial GI infection. She's better now and the time allowed us to take a second look at our travel planning. We had been planning on heading up the coast in sprint fashion to make it through all the original points on our map. We threw that idea and the budget out the window in favor of seeing machu pichu. We're too close to miss it. So we'll leave in about an hour to head to Cusco on an overnight bus that will put us on the trail for 5 days starting tomorrow trekking up to Machu Pichu. With this trip, we'll complete the Incan trifecta and I'm really excited to see how the build up of seeing the birthplace of their civilization will impact my appreciation of their holy city in the sky.

We've seen so many things in the last week that are truely amazing and I can't wait to get home in some regards....to see family and friends...to slow down(as terrible as that sounds)...but also to try and digest it all.

Sorry we can't get pictures up but just imagine us sitting on the edge of a canyon that is twice as deep as the grand canyon at its deepest part and looking at condors swoop over our heads and hang out on a ledge just 20 feet away. Crazy world.