Many cheerful greetings from Tena, in the Ecuadorian jungle!
Alas, still no llama-picture. I do have a nice shot of one
of the beasties that I took two weeks ago, but of course you 
can never find a scanner when you need one... Oh well, some 
other pictures of things that are not llama's may be found 
on my recently-constructed webpage though: 

http://maleb.scum.org/unleashed/peru

Interesting enough the Spanish word 'llama' is used for both the 
familiar member of the South-American camel-family we all know
and love, and for a 'blazing inferno'. Personally I fail to see 
the connection between the two, but maybe that's just me...

Anyway, for those of you whom I have just recently added to this 
mail-list, and are wondering what the hell I'm on about:
Hi! If you wish you can read the first part of this story on the 
internet page mentioned above. Then again, many of you won't 
need to as you were there (in Cusco) yourselves... :)


Since my last scribblings over a month ago quite a lot of things 
have happend. For one thing, the State of Emergency has been declared
in Peru (although I can assure you with reasonable certainty that I 
had nothing to do with that). And apparently my Spanish seems to have 
reached the 'intermediate' level. This basically means that I still
do not know much Spanish, it's just that now I do not know it slightly
more fluently.

On the culinary front I can inform you that I have finally managed 
to get my hands on a guinea-pig, or more precisely, half a guinea-pig!
And amazingly, it doesn't taste like chicken. What little meat there
is on the creature apparently tastes like guinea-pig. Furthermore, 
I can advice you not to go and try the back-end of a guinea-pig 
when in the company of anyone of the medical profession. Unless of
course you happen to enjoy the dinner-time view of small creatures 
being ripped to pieces and dissected just across the table. 

(Jeroen: Insert evil grin here)

After four weeks of staying in Cusco, learning Spanish and consuming
lots of potatoes, pizza and the occasional small furry pet, we decided
it was time for something different. So we signed up for the Inca-Trail,
the most famous hike in the world, which involves four days of carrying
a big, sweaty bag full of stuff uphill in the burning sun across an ancient 
Inca-highway, along with about 500 other people. And it was absolutely 
great! Granted, I could have done without the 500 other people, but some
of the views were absolutely magnificent! 
The trail winds over mountain-passes, through valleys, along ravines 
(where the ancient path was sometimes impossibly constructed against 
a sheer rock-face) and through bits of cloud-forest, complete with mossy 
trees, orchids and bright-green hummingbirds. 
The second day of the Trail was pretty tough though, hiking up 1400 m
to cross 'Dead Woman's Pass', and the last bit of the trail involved
going down lots and lots of stairs, getting up at 4:00 AM and walking
in the dark for a few hours before finally arriving at the Lost City
of Machu Picchu - which was indeed nowhere to be found because the
the entire area was covered in a thick mist and you couldn't see
shite. At 8:00 in the morning the mists cleared though, to suddenly
reveal a huge, fabulous Inca-city, built in some improbable location
on a remote mountainside somewhere high above the Urubamba river...

After recovering from the Inca-Trail with a *very* cold shower, 
we traveled south to Puno, most probably one of the ugliest cities
of Peru but magnificently located at the edge of the huge Lake Titicaca.
Lake Titicaca is often called the highest navigable lake in the world, 
but isn't. At nearly 4,000 m it's pretty damned high though, and at
about half the size of Northern Ireland (or roughly three times the size
of Luxemburg) it's pretty damn big as well. 
An interesting oddity is the presence of a couple of big steamliners 
on the lake, fabricated in England around 1915 and transported in pieces 
on donkey-back across the Andes. 
We took one of the smaller tourist-boats though for a tour across the 
Lake. It felt a bit like being on open sea, which was weird, being
at 11,000 ft. We spent the night on one of the Islands with a
local family, watching the sun go down over the Lake and having 
to eat many novel kinds of potato.

We fled Puno for the rather more agreable city of Arequipa, located
in the southern volcanic desert high-plain of the Peruvian Andes,
at the base of the great snow-covered El Misti volcano. 
There we visted the nearby Colca Canyon, which is often called 
the deepest canyon in the world, but isn't. With a depth of over 
3,000 m in some places it's pretty damn deep though. It is also 
one of the few places left in the world where the Andean Condor,
the biggest flying creature on earth, is still easily seen.
And indeed, we saw some Condors. About 17 of these magnificent 
and *huge* birds, gliding overhead, sometimes at a distance of
only 15-20 m (possibly in anticipation of one of the more elderly 
tourists dying, or alternatively of some well-fed small kid 
wandering off on its own). It was absolutely fantastic! 

After our brief Condor-encounter we actually hiked down into the 
Canyon, and unfortunatly had to hike back up again at around 3:00 AM 
the following morning. We returned to Arequipa in the Local Bus From 
Hell, bouncing across an unpaved road and stopping every few metres 
for passengers/sheep/cow/pigs/etc. I was crammed in for half of
the way between the window and a tiny old lady in traditional dress, 
with what looked like half a village strapped to her back. 
As a nice bonus the bus started developing serious engine-troubles 
in the middle of the desert, and owing to the last part of the 
way being downhill just barely managed to reach Arequipa without 
actually hitting anything.

The next leg of our journey took us to the North of Peru. There we
visited the friendly city of Huaraz (a name that, depending on the 
Quechua-dialect used, translates as either 'morningstar' or 'pair of
trousers') - gateway to the magnificent range of snowcapped peaks
of the Cordillera Blanca, and home of beer-flavoured ice-cream.
It is also home to a weird type of seagull that prefers to live
at altitudes above 4000 m - quite a strange sight I can tell you.

Here we wandered around the mountains for a few days, in the vicinity
of Peru's highest mountain Huarascarín. This is an absolutely beautiful
area, but its seems to me not the best place to build a city, as nearly
every town in the area keeps being wiped out every few decades or so 
by either earthquakes, a rather destructive type of avalanche known as 
alluviónes, or -more frequently- both... 

Our final stop en route to Ecuador was Trujillo, a quite 
interesting coastal city with an economy that seems to revolve 
mostly around shoes, taxis and chickens. They do wonderful 
fruit-salads there though (and of course chickens, if you like). 
Truhjillo is in the middle of Peru's big coastal desert,
complete with circling vultures and nearer to the sea large
numbers of Frigate Birds, strange creatures that most resemble
flocks of prehistoric Pterodactyls when casually flying past.

Also located in the desert is the huge and ancient city of 
Chan-Chan, built by an pre-Inca culture known as the Chimu. 
Sadly it currently consists of about 28 square kilometres of very 
interesting piles of sand, as the adobe bricks used by the Chimu
to build their enormous complex apparently weren't designed to 
withstand several centuries of heavy El Niño rainfall.

Crossing the border into Ecuador (or vice-versa) is not an
exercise I would recommend to anyone. But we made it and my 
first impression of Ecuador was one of bananas. Lots of bananas.

Now, more than a week later we are staying near the jungle-town
of Tena, in the eastern half of Ecuador. Although it does rain 
an awful lot this is not real rainforest, both because we are 
still some way from the actual Amazon basin and because most 
of the area has been cultivated and the bigger trees cut down. 
There are not many animals to bee seen here, although plenty
can be heard in the evening and I don't doubt we'll encounter
many more when we go farther into the Amazon forest in a week 
or three. Until then we'll have to make due with the little 
monkeys known as schoolchildren, as we're helping out each 
morning at a local jungle school. It's good fun, though trying
to teach kids who can hardly read or count can sometime be
quite tiring.

But enough said, and more tales of Ecuador when I re-appear
from the jungle in a month or so. Until then...

Adios, hasta luega, and best regards!
Levien