I made it to PERU!!

Well I never got to say that my old camera broke so I had to buy a new one in Santiago. The new camera is working great, but apparently computers in both Chile and Peru don´t like to talk with it. I will try at my next stop but it looks as if I may need to continue my blog when I get home to put pictures up... That should extend your reading/viewing pleasure.

Right now I am in Tacna Peru, I took 14 hrs of buses over night to get here, and now I am going to take a 10 hr overnight bus (with a full bed, my first try, I am excited). To give you a little background of what´s been happening yesterday morning I woke up at 3:30 am to catch a bus to see the geysers in Tatio (near San Pedro de Atacama) at sunrise. The geyesers where okay but the scenery was great. I saw Llama´s, (Skip loves that...) and a few Vicunas (an endangered deer type animal) and even ate some Llama. The day before I went sand boarding in the desert and then went to an astronomy observation type thing, I have never seen the sky like taht before in my entire life!! Also, most of you know I don´t mind the cold, but the desert, in winter, right before the dawn is colder than I think I have ever been!!! Something I never really understood until the other day was the term ¨the silence was deafening.¨ When you sit in the desert and no one is talking the silence is so overwhleming that you would think you had just gone deaf, I never knew waht that was like until I experienced it the other day (73rd street doesn´t really so that for you). So now on this trip I have experienced complete silence (awesome) and white out conditions so bad I got vertigo (not so awesome). I don´t think I mentioned it but when you ski in the Andes you are so high up that you are literally in the clouds. Most people don´t ski when it snows here, and someone had mentioned this to me and I thought it was stupid. Well I went skiing and it was so thick white pea soup out that it was the most disorienting thing I have ever experienced. You couldn´t see ANYTHING, even people about 10 feet away!! It was as if you were suspended in a completely white box, or perhaps about 20 feet deep in a pool full of milk, you can´t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins, or that there even is a sky or ground. My brain didn´t like this very much.... Anyway, tomorrow when I wake up I shold be in Puno Peru, right on Lake Titicaca, of Groundhog Day fame.... After that it´s on to Machu Picchu. I hope this finds you all doing well and I look foward to seeing you when I get home!! Oh, and Steve, best of luck this Saturday, though I have to do this as a friend, if you aren´t 110% sure don´t do it, blame it on me or whatever. If you´re sure best of luck and I will see you and Trevi when I get home....