Saludos a todos a Arequipa,

I have now been in Peru for almost nine days, It feels like a month or more.
I met up with Huntington, Ben and Cody in Lima last Sunday night. The next day we reluctantly boarded a bus for Cusco that would take 22 hours. A day later we arrived, eager to ease the atrophy by hitting the Inca trail. To our dismay, the train was expensive and they have made guides obligatory, throwing backpackers at the mercy of the travel agency`s prices. We managed to get a list of phone numbers of cheap, freelance guides from one travel agent and started down the list. One out of the ten answered his phone, his name was Juan and he met us in the center plaza ten minutes later.

Juan claimed he new the hidden location of Incan ruins that lay at 16,000 ft in a some distant valley three hours out of Cusco. We took a gamble, picked up his scumbag friend Omar, and chartered a couple cabs South, up into los pueblitos. The drivers took us as far as the road went, to a village where the people only speak Qechyua, the old Incan language, instead of spanish. We were clearly the first white boys they had seen in a long time, if ever. After shaking every hand in the village and taking a group photo, we were off up the mountain. We also had an addition to the group, a little mountain farmer named Patricio who spoke Qechyua and spanish. Patricio quickly emerged as the gangster of the bunch.

We made camp a couple hours later on this ridge overlooking some spectacular Andean scenery. None of us could believe the weather, it was warm, clear and calm. Joke´s on us. 45 min later, the wind was howling and our tents were getting pelted with torrential rain and marble sized hale. By morning we were dumping small lakes out of the insides of our tents, but the weather had cleared. We kept climbing in altitute and by lunch we had reached a foggy lake at 16,400 ft, that had a 30+ heard of wild horses chilling on the other side. Since we had just come from sea level in Lima a day earlier, the altitude was tough, but we pressed on. Coming over the next ridge, you could see down a green valley, hundred foot waterfalls, and at the end, right before the land plunged off into a valley hundreds of feet deeper, there were Incan ruins built around two towering rock spires. "We will camp there" Juan said pointing to the top of the ruins--a basketball court-sized, even plain, in between the spires. He smiled, knowing he had delivered.

It was the most amazing camping spot I´ve ever seen, worthy of the cover of the North Face catalogue. Ancient rock walls held up the earth holding our camp site, hundreds of feet down on either side with a finely crafted staircase to the top. That night we hiked down and around the walls, out to the nose of the second rock. It was beautiful and clear, and you could literally see mountains a hundred miles away. It was like two grand canyons covered in lush green plants and waterfalls, one of the most spectacular things I´ve ever seen in my entire life. We sat in silence and felt tiny, we were the only people in the entire valley.
That night, we tied down the tents with additional rocks and it stormed hard again. It was snowing by the time we rose at 5, to start the long day out of the valley. We sang happy b-day to ben, his 23rd. I was hurting bad from the altitude but it was hard to bitch about anything, joking in spanish with Patricio, who bore his four-tooth smile and his sandles in the sub-freezing temps. We traversed out of the valley on a hairy little path over and under cliffs that dwarfed those in the last scene of "The Last of the Mohikans". It was a long day of slippery rock inclines and crossing raging rivers. That night late, we returned to Cusco by bus, we were exhausted to say the very least.

After a rest day, we managed to find cheap alternative routes to Aguas Calientes, which is the staging pueblo for Machu Picchu. The river running next to the town was the most terrifying body of water I´ve ever layed eyes on. Ferocious and violent. It looked as though, if they got a little too much rain, it would leap over the walls and wash the town away in a matter of minutes. Apparently that´s what happened during el nino. Machu Picchu was everything I had imagined and more, truely spectacular. We hiked around the ruins all morning and then did an ascent of a mountain adjacent to it in the same valley. The incline of this mountain was so steep that they had to build ladders to climb up the sheer cliff sides at some parts. One of the laddres was about ninety feet tall, a truely hair raising experience. Some steps were broken, we went slowly and were careful to make no mistakes. When we reached the top, the clouds around Machu Picchu had lifted and there was a rainbow for sunset, again, absolutely spectacular. There are pictures, but they will do it no justice.

Today we arrived in Arequipa after another long bus ride. We met up with my boy, Doug Hill, a welcome addition to the group. Tomorrow we will rise at five to get a cab out to the base of Vulcan Misti, a volcano that towers over Arequipa at more than 19,000 feet. It looks a lot like Kilimanjaro. It will take two days to climb. After that, we found this guy today who is willing to take us river rafting in some class 5-6 river that I pray looks nothing like the one in Aguas Calientes. Supposedly it is big time huge. Yes folks, it is non-stop. La pura adventura.