Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

Welcome to Peru

We took an overnight bus from Loja in southern Ecuador & arrived in Chiclayo around 7am this morning. I slept for most of the trip.

So far this is what I know of northern Peru (we're only about 4 hours south of Ecuador).
It's hot. Mostly desert. You can see the Andes in the distance when you look east, they're pretty. It kinda reminds me of Mexico, along the road through the desert there isn't much & the towns that we passed looked pretty poor (thatched rooves & adobe walls @ times), but the quality of things increases as population density does. Chiclayo's got grocery stores, mototaxis, lots of little taxis, internet cafes, & comfortable hotels all pretty cheap too, Peru seems to have the best exchange rate yet for us.

More later,

Kepfram

Things I learned in Ecuador:

• Being nice to people actually get you niceness in return. As Kepfram mentioned we got a free gondola ride across the river south of Baños because we´d helped move bricks for a few minutes. We also got a free ride back up the hill from Rio Verde to Baños with the bikes we´d rode down on - all because we´d tipped a guide a couple bucks for giving us a free tour....


• There is a marked similarity between the dress of indigenous people in the Andean region of Ecuador and those from Guatemala. The functionality is the very similar, and the shape. Women here ware heavy pleated skirts, cardigan sweaters with blouses underneath and dress shoes, many carry things on their backs supported by heavy strips of cloth (in fact if an indigenous women is not carrying something she´ll often have that same strip of cloth tied around here waist - just in case?). Men wear capri length pants and ponchos. Both men and women wear narrow brimmed hats. The biggest difference between the lose in Guatemala and those here are the colors - cloths here in Ecuador are much plainer, lots of primary colors, and only a few decorations. In Guatemala everything was woven with multiple colors. And then there´re the hats - some people wore scarves in Guatemala, but hats are definitely Ecuador.


• The uniforms that school children wear in Ecuador are not always the dress slacks and shirts we´ve seen in other countries. More often than not the children here are dressed in matching track suits with their schools emblems on them. What a great idea!!


• Chinese restaurants here are not "Restaurante Chino" like in Costa Rica, but "Chifa" - I have no idea why.


• Marbles is not only played by children in old movies. In Baños we saw children playing marbles in a vacant lot in town, carving a circle in the dirt with a stick.


• Ask a lot of questions before you take a tour. (This should go without saying, but sometimes it needs to be said again.)

And the following ode to 24 out of 32 hours on buses a couple days ago (as a result of not asking enough questions about our Jungle tour):

• Buses here vary from US style Greyhound like buses with many working features (including bathrooms), to old decrepit buses with seats that may once have been comfortable but are now falling apart, to regular city buses and San Francisco style electric trolley buses in the cities, to big trucks (the size of flat bed tow trucks) outfitted with bench seats and a roof in back, to big ol´ trucks with a frame and walls around the back where your can ride along with cargo - standing up, bouncing down the dirt roads (in the rain in our case).


• Long distance buses have no real preference for paved roads. (This seemed to be true even if there was another route with a paved road.)


• Some major highways change to unpaved roads for LONG stretches for no apparent reason. (But still, ALL the roads we´ve traveled on here are preferable to those we experienced in Costa Rica....)


• There are no "express" buses (no matter what the company name is). The buses stop wherever they can pick up and let off passengers, and seem to take on as many as they can stuff in.


• There are no real "bus stops" (with the exception of the bus terminals, of course). Otherwise, if you want to get on just wave at the bus as it passes (or nod at the attendant who´ll be shouting destinations from the open door as the bus roles by). When you want to get off call "Gracias" to the driver and he'll pull over for you.


• The soundtrack: Most of our hours on buses were accompanied by those slow romantic Spanish language ballads that everyone here seems to know the words too. The really cool this is, I can understand most of them!


• Many of the long distance buses have TVs too( but not all of them work. The movies they show are generally old action movies from either the US or Hong Kong dubbed into Spanish.


• Jackie Chan movies are pretty funny.


• Luggage generally goes under the bus, but when there´s no room underneath (a lot of passengers carry cargo) so after the space underneath is full the passengers just pile their stuff near the entrance of the bus as they get on (keep this in mind when you consider sitting in the front row).


• While this wasn´t quite like Guatemala, you can fit a lot of people and a lot of stuff on an Ecuadorian bus.


• Long distance buses have bathrooms but they are almost always locked. When you need the facilities you have to ask the bus attendant (the guy who takes the money, calls out the destination, handles the luggage, and very rarely takes over the wheel) for to unlock it for you. My personal theory is that they are locked not only to keep them clean, but to keep people from using the space to sit, store their stuff, etc. when the bus fills up....


• There are not many tourists in Ecuador. Generally we are the ONLY gringos on the buses we ride, and there aren´t a lot of tour vans carrying others around.


• The military men who search the buses don´t like it if you´re not carrying your original passport (we found this out when we were traveling home from the Jungle with only photocopies - they let us get away with it each of the 3 times we were searched, but not without telling us never to do it again).

2 Days of Pleasure: Our time @ the Madre Tierra Spa

We did nothing. There was no hiking, horesback riding, mountain biking, adventurous excursions, really long bus trips, or unpleasant mosquito experiences on our trip to or during our time there.
It was just relaxing.
We decided that we were just going to chill out, enjoy a couple days "off" & pamper ourselves a little.
The grounds there were really pretty, the food was really tasty, the owner was great too, & the spa was unforgettable. I'd never done the spa thing before, but really liked it & Ellie enjoyed herself as well. I also liked that all the spa treatments were 1/2 priced for hotel guests so our indulgent 2 days didn't break the bank.

The only thing that wasn't perfect about our experience was a brief lesson in arachnology. We learned
1.)scorpions live in Ecuador, &
2.)only the dark ones are poisonous.
Scorpions got into our room while we were there, we didn't get stung, just freaked out. I hope not to find myself asking "can that kill me?" (they can't by the way) when I notice something in the bathroom for the rest of this trip.

Kepfram

Ever meet someone casually @ a party, find yourself completely taken with them only to have to leave shortly thereafter never to see them again?
That was Cuenca.
It was pretty.
I don't know how old the city is, but it has many old colonial style buildings, some cobblestone streets & a river along it's south side.
We walked around a little, we visited the market, an impressive museum, a lookout above the city, but didn't stay long enough to do more. There were ruins in a nearby town we wanted to visit & other tours that we saw advertised that there just wasn't time for so Cuenca is "the one that got away" for us...

Que será será,

Kepfram

The most beautiful bus ride you´ll never see:

We would have taken pictures, but the batteries for the camera didn´t charge correctly in the few hours we had back in Baños after our jungle trip, and we didn´t have spares (we´ve fixed that now). The road from Riobamba (a couple hours south of Baños) to Cuenca (one of Ecuador´s 3 big cities), along the "Avenue of the Volcanoes" in central Ecuador is a long rural 2 lane highway that winds thorough some incredibly lush green fields of corn, pasture, and other crops I can´t identify, there are scattered cows, little black piggies, and fuzzy dirty sheep - everything feeding on the fertile volcanic soil. From time to time this landscape gives way to drier patches of scrub and pampas and pine, but the overall color is a brilliant green. The well ordered farm land doesn´t tend to be terraced - the crops just climb up the steep hillsides, and those that work them climb too. Now and then a red woolen poncho stands out like a lonely flower. The valleys are speckled here and there with little towns with cobbled streets and church steeples, buildings of brick and stone, of mud and cement - some brightly painted - a few grassy parks and white mausoleums.

Throughout the afternoon the light was magic. The sun shining through clouds of rain - once a rainbow - the valleys filling with clouds in this high country. Once we saw from below the clouds opening to reveal a green hilltop shining in the sun with bright blue sky behind. Then we worked our way up the next hill and we were on our own glowing platform, looking across at the neighboring with nothing but clouds below us.

As the day ended breathtaking views continued to break beneath us of the twilight lit valleys dotted with low hanging clouds and occasional twinkling towns. When sun set we were sorry to see the landscape fade away.

-ellie

Our Jungle Tour:

We decided to take a trip to the Ecuadorian Oriente, not so much because we wanted to, but because we couldn´t travel south due to continued roadblocks, we thought this opened up time for few days seeing something new and different. (Actually the day we left for the Jungle the government declared a state of emergency and stepped up their confrontation with the indigenous protesters, but the roads cleared pretty quickly.) The tour or Reserva Producción Faunística Cuyabena (Cuyabena Wildlife Reserve) was newly offered by our hostel (in fact, we found out later that we were the first tour - just me, Kepfram, and the owner of the hostel who wanted to see for himself). The hostel owners were so nice, that we trusted their enthusiasm for the trip and decided to go for it (at a bargain price).

This morning we got back from our "3 day" tour - which took 5 days because no one told us that it would take at least 15 hours to travel EACH way (and we somehow didn´t ask...). We actually had to turn down the extra night (no extra charge) for rest and relaxation before we returned - we just weren´t happy spending so much of the limited time we´d budgeted for Ecuador in this way.

The good:

• Animals: We saw quite a variety of insects and spiders and other bugs (Tarantulas, Tiger Spiders, Congo Ants, Centipedes, oh, and mosquitoes, horseflies, and wasps too....), a baby crocodile (thankfully no adults out hunting), monos micos, a snake (that dropped from a nearby tree into the water in front of me when I was walking along the shore), a variety of birds (although we heard many more than we actually SAW. We saw the dens of some wild pigs and of the giant rodent that´s similar to a guinea pig (but whose name escapes me). We fished for pirañas (we didn´t personally catch any, but our guide caught enough for dinner),


• Plants: There are orchids everywhere! It seemed that there was no spare patch of tree (live or dead) if orchids could carve out a home there, there they were. So many color of green and brown. So many different types of trees, and ferns, and shrubs.....


• Eating new and interesting foods: piraña, wild peanuts, some kind of local calabaza called zapallo, along with lots of (now familiar) green plantains.


• Guides with no apparent fear of this wild place.


• Learning all the things you can do with a machete.


• Seeing how a canoe can be carved from a fallen tree.


• Learning about all the things that can hurt a person in the jungle (stinging, biting, and otherwise poisonous bugs, biting animals, electric fish, anacondas, trees with sharp spines or thorns, toxic fungus, etc), and not getting hurt by anything.


• Sleeping in hammocks under the open air, or under a plastic tarp strung up to keep the rain off - and staying dry!


• Seeing all those stars.


• Really good rubber boots.


• Not too much rain (until the last day...).


• Spanish practice for 4 days straight with our guides and our host/companion.

The bad:

• Mosquitoes: although we used repellent, it seemed we just couldn´t keep all the the buggers at bay. Kepfram suffered worse than I did (being that he´s so much more tasty, I guess). When we got back he must have had 100 bites all over his back, not to mention those on his arms and the few on his face.


• Sleeping in hammocks. Did you know that mosquitoes can bite right through them? (Mind you, there were many more dangers on the ground, as far as we could tell.)


• Sitting in the canoe. Now this was not a modern canoe - it was a big piece of tree ("dug out") with NO built in seats. Although the canoe was solid, the guides preferred us to sit low, to keep the canoe stable while they stood up to row from time to time. They gave us little wooden stool to sit on, but they were too low, and too hard, and the canoe was too wet and muddy for us to really find comfortable places for out legs. The first 2 days we never sat for more than 2 hours at a stretch, but the last day - when we came back up the river - we sat for FIVE hours (most of them in the rain - we stayed relatively dry with our provided ponchos, but our stuff did not fare as well).


• Sitting in, not ROWING the canoe. It seemed that for our guides not asking us to help was their way of providing us a service (and maybe saving themselves the headache of incompetent assistants), but as far as we were concerned sitting in a canoe is really boring! We would have much preferred the work-out and the learning experience.


• Not seeing the variety of animals and plants we´d hoped to see.: No really colorful birds, only very distant monkeys.


• No binoculars! (If someone´d had these, maybe we would have seen more!)


• Not being properly warned of certain dangers: like mother crocodiles FOLLOWING their kidnapped babies, that biting Congo Ants can easily walk along the ropes our hammocks hung from,


• Not seeing any indigenous people. Everyone we met was a transplant of some other place in Ecuador, although the housing seemed to be traditional, we didn´t get any sense of the culture of the people is this incredibly remote place.


• Only speaking Spanish. While this wasn´t really a problem for basic communication, some of the finer points were lost, especially for Kepfram. This might also explain part of why we didn´t get all the information we would have liked before we decided to take the trip....


• The journey there and back. Not knowing Ecuador´s geography, and not asking enough clarifying questions we got a ride MUCH longer than we could have imagined (the kind of ride we´ve tried to avoid in the planning for our trip as a whole). It just didn´t seem conceivable that a tour offered FROM a place that was relatively close the central Amazon Basin, would be at the most extreme reaches of the northern Amazon Basin......


• Feeling compelled to "recommend" the tour when got back, just because the folks at our hotel were so damn nice!

Recapping our time in Baños...

Baños, like a lot of Ecuador, was relaxing, pretty, pleasant, & welcoming for us (except for the painful realization that the town sits beneath an active volcano, which of course we only learned on the bus into town as I snapped this picture).

We went horseback riding (perhaps for the last time this trip) up the volcano that overlooks the town, rode bikes through the mountain/volcano valley there & hiked around to look @ some waterfalls, & ended one of our days with a nice visit to the local hot springs which give the town it's name.

The horseback ride was nice on the way up, we followed the road up the mountain winding our way along. We took a few pictures of the scenery & the town, but we couldn't see the volcano, it was too cloudy.
Going down wasn't as nice. The trails were tiny & the hill was steep & when the horse doesn't seem to want to go down a path I'd have trouble with on foot it worries me. That was only my 3rd time horseback riding, I was looking for a easy ride, @ least till somebody gives me a lesson (everytime they've asked I say "I don't know how to ride" hoping to get some instruction, instead I just get the slow horse).

We really enjoyed our bike ride from Baños to Rio Verde. The scenery was nice, the weather was mild & we've both been missing riding since we left NYC last July.
We saw a couple of small waterfalls from the road on our way to the Pailón del Diablo waterfall in Rio Verde & stopped to ride a cable car across the valley & check out a trout fishery. Our cable car ride was free since we helped the people move some cinder blocks (they were prepping to move the bricks to the other side of the valley by cable car for a construction project on the other side & it seemed rude to just stand there, so we pitched in & they gave us a free ride across & tour).
So after a brief mountain tour & a tense donkey experience (they didn't seem to want to let us pass on the path down) we finished our ride to Pailón del Diablo, "the 8th wonder of the world" as the sign said. That sign was a bit of an overstatement. It was pretty, it was kinda big, but my big wonder was "who had the balls too put up that sign?"
Anyway, caught a truck back to Baños & enjoyed a nice soak in the town's multiple hot springs that night, it was a great way to end that day.

Other stuff we liked: The owners of our hostel, El Oro were SO nice, they were really welcoming, & helpfull. We also found another "dinner & a movie" spot, Casa Hood. The twist there was that they have many movies in Spanish or with spanish/latin themes. We watched most of The House of Spirits there. We were also tempted again to change our plans when we saw an wanted sign for an English teacher, but who wants to live on the side of an active volcano anyway?

Kepfram

Free Trade Agreement / Tratado de Libre Comercio:



After spending 9 months in Costa Rica were we witnessed protests and a ton of discourse for and against (but largely against) the TLC in Central America (DR-CAFTA in the US - Costa Rica is the only targeted country that hasn´t yet signed on, but I expect that will be changing soon). As a result of being in the middle of all this we (I?) sort of forgot to pay attention to all the other free trade agreements which are propagating around the region in an attempt by the US to increase it´s world markets. We just happened to arrive in Ecuador in the week leading up to the final negotiations for joining AFTA (the Andean Free Trade Agreement) or TLC (already signed by Peru & Columbia and which Bolivia, which is leaning much farther left these days, is not expected to sign). As a result there have been protests, blockades, and roadblocks all over the country while largely indigenous communities have been preventing internal shipment of goods, oil, and tourist in order to influence the very unpopular central government. We weren´t able to visit many of the sites we´d hoped to around Quito as a result - like the archaeological park of Cochisquí or the famous Otovalo craft market (which was actually cancelled last weekend - but we couldn´t have gotten there anyway, at least not without a lot of time, effort, and $).

We decided not to stick around in Quito until everything blew over (even though we´d wanted to see the Equinox Festival near Mitad del Mundo), because it looked like the way south was opening up (at least temporarily), and as we´ve only budgeted 2 weeks of our trip for Ecuador, we were afraid to say in any one place too long.

We made it to Baños yesterday - but the trip took an extra 2 hours (5 instead of 3, and no bathroom on the bus....) because we had to backtrack and find an alternate route after we encountered a road which had been opened was blockaded once again. Along our trip we saw many areas where the asphalt was scared where tires and other obstacles had been burned to make roadblocks.

Along the way we had other delays because of accidents - overturned vehicles blocking the road - the first was a beer truck & we were routed onto the other side of the freeway with the oncoming traffic (so sad, all that beer...). The next was a long distance bus (just like the one we were riding in - SCARY!). The traffic was blocked in both directions while we watched them right the bus, luggage falling out on the road... we didn´t see any injured people though, perhaps there weren´t any, or perhaps they´d already been evacuated.

-ellie

We spent a day at the equator - there are a few tourist attractions, museums, and a monument in the town. Although we played around taking photographs along the equatorial line along the ground, it is apparently not actually on the equator (the 19th century French expedition calculated it in error - it's off by 8 seconds of latitude). We were there a few days before the vernal equinox, and at noon as the sun was almost exactly overhead, we cast shadows that were only about 1 inch long.

We also took tours of the nearby Volcan Pululahua - gorgeous, fertile, lush volcanic crater that´s one of the world's 2 inhabited craters of ACTIVE volcanoes. We also toured the archeology site of Rumichucho, a pre-Incan ruin (built around 800 AD). It's adjacent to Kita Killa - the moon temple (built around the same time) which is actually situated EXACTLY on the equator by GPS. There are indigenous festivals there twice a year to celebrate the equinoxes (we considered going the the ceremony, but decided against it because we were anxious to head south). Both sites were only discovered in the late 20th century, and Rumichucho is still under active excavation. As a result we were able to meet the Archaeologist in charge who showed us (and even let us handle) a variety of fragments of Incan and pre-Incan pottery, a few bone needles and a bone flute, and some Incan stone weapons.

We went on these tours with Calima Tours (which we would recommend by the way), and we really liked out guide - he seemed genuinely interested in his ancestors history, traditions, and current way of life. He shared with us his very plausible theory that the reason the archaeological sites were not discovered until so recently seems to be because they were purposefully buried by the local residents prior to the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors in order to protect their sacred places from destruction.

All of this was in Spanish, by the way - Kepfram & I both did fine!!

-ellie

Impressions of Quito:
-Pretty
-Distinct. It's not a tourist town. There are tourist places, but there's more to the city than just that. Parks, an impressive public transit system, an "old town" section recognized as an UNESCO world heritage site & neighborhoods stretching up & down the valley all in the shadow of at least one volcano.
-You can't drink the water.
-You can get photocopies, laminated cards, & keys made on the sidewalk of Avenida Pichincha around the corner from our hostel.

Ellie wants me to make it clear that I was talking about "not returning to" certain businesses & restaurants not the whole city in my last post.

More later,

Kepfram

"We won´t come here again..."
This has been a recurring theme for our time in Quito & points nearby.
Don't get me wrong, we like Quito, it's pretty, relatively clean & cheap, but we've visited a couple places that we were less than pleased with in the last 3 days. Oh well, live & learn...

Anyway, Quito reminds me of Xela in Guatemala, but with "cleaner" air, fewer indiginas, & it´s bigger (taller buildings & more of them). There's also a black population here so I still look like a local even if Ellie speaks beter spanish than me.

More later,

Kepfram

Impressions of Panama:
I liked Panama City.
You can drink the water.
I'd been told that the Old City was a world apart from the New City, serious poverty, high crime, etc. vs. clean streets, beautiful people & buildings, but I didn't get that feeling. Panama City has a small population, about 700,000, but there´s no shortage of high rise buildings (I always thought tall buildings meant large numbers of people & high population density). I guess they don´t have many earthquakes or they just love their tall buildings or maybe their building codes anticipate earthquakes, or maybe economics is the deciding factor, there are a couple reasons for building high I'm told.
I didn't check any population data, but from what Ellie tells me Panama is the most diverse country that we will visit. At a minimum Panama City appeared to have more black people than San Jose (we saw black hair care products in pharmacies in Panama, but when we spent a day searching San Jose no one seemed to understand what we were looking for).
The place reminded me of Miami. & just like any city in the states there are nice neighborhoods & bad ones. What I saw wasn't very different from what I've seen in the US. Actually I think Pamama is more like the US than anyplace else we´ve been, the highways & roads in general were comparable, the drivers weren´t trying to hit me as I crossed the streets (unlike some countries we've been to), & the prices for goods & services weren't inflated to ridiculous levels by tarifs that I couldn't comprehend. Then again were weren't there for very long & didn't go out a great deal, we saw a mall, the waterfront, a bit of the old city, the Canal, & some restaurants before flying to Quito.
Also, there are almost no product commercials on Panamanian TV, & the only channel we found worth watching was Fox which seemed to have no end to commercials about itself.

I am fond of the fact that Copa served us empanadas as part of our in-flight meal for our hour & a half flight, which will make that sack of peanuts they give us back in the states less satisfying somehow...

Look for more photos in the coming weeks. I saw a bit of Quito as the plane was comming in & from the terrace of our hostel this afternoon before the clouds greyed the city, it's quite nice. Ellie & I have revised our itinerary recently & I'll update the details here shortly, no major changes though, we're still planning on doing the whole country in about 2 weeks before hitting Peru, but now we´ve got a better idea about where we´re going & for how long. More to come...

Later,

Kepfram

Woo Hoo - we´re in South America!!
Got here this afternoon, checked into our hotel, went and had some out-patient on my hand (amazing what a little skin infection will do after 3 days in the exceedingly hot tropical weather of Panama City....). I´m not sure if it´s the surgery, the antibiotics, or the pain killers, but I feel much better now... only it´s hard to type without the middle finger on my right hand (I´s K´s and commas are needed a lot, ya know?).
I´ll spare you the details, but suffice it so say: it was not pretty (and I´m not sure now why I wasted time on that manicure before we left San José, my hand is none too pretty with a bandaged up finger...... and I have to go back to the doctor tomorrow to see if I get to keep the nail..... oh, maybe I´ve said too much..... but since I have let me just add that Kepfram, iron-clad stomach & all, couldn´t watch the procedure through to the end - but at least he held my had during what I thought was the bad part: the anesthesia injection)
Anyway,
love to all,
Chao,
Ellie

La Ciudad de Panamá es muy bonito, particularmente el Casco Antiguo, el lugar colonial donde hay muchos edificios viejos que parecen como los de Nueva Orleans (¿porque había franceses en Panamá por muchos años antes de que los estadounidenses tomaran de poder el canal?), y de donde se puede ver las barcos esperando sus turnos de pasar por el canal.
Cuando estaba allá tenía ganas de buscar un apartamento......

El Viaje a Panamá y nuestro primer día aquí:

Kepfram me dijo que tuviera que escribir algo, entonces... estamos en Panamá ahora y hasta el miércoles.

Venimos en autobús de San José. El viaje duró 15 horas, al frontera era confusión porque era la una de la madrugada, no había mucha gente, y unas oficinas estaban cerradas (inclusivo de la oficina donde tenía que comprar nuestra visa para entrar el país). Después de espirar en una fila, nos dijeron que teníamos que ir a otro lugar para comprar visa, unos muchachos nos ayudaron encontrar ése lugar, mientras tanto nuestros compañeros del bus estaban con sus maletas y los agentes de aduana. Pero cuando estábamos esperando que la oficia abriera, terminaron con las maletas y los conductores las repusieron abajo del autobús. Para no perder nuestra bus, les pide que pusieran las nuestras también. Entonces las maletas entraron a Panamá sin inspección. Tenemos otro problema con la oficina de inmigración, porque no tuvimos suficiente efectivo (ellos quieren $500 por persona, y solo teníamos $600 en total) y no había un cajero automático cerca (nos dijeron que había uno en unas cuadras, pero no quisimos andar buscándolo en la madrugada...) pero después de una negociación nos permitieron pasar con el efectivo que teníamos.

Al final, llegamos en la ciudad de Panamá a las 5 y media de la mañana, y a nuestro hotel a las 6. Por suerte pudimos registrarnos a ése hora y dormimos por unas horas. Nos levantamos en la tarde y fuimos al canal. ¡Que impresionante! El museo es muy interesante y para ver cuando los barcos gigantes pasan y el agua mueve entre las compuertas de esclusa es increíble.

Después fuimos al restaurante con una vista del mar Pacífio "Mercado de los Mariscos" donde Kepfram comió langosta muy buena.

So it's been about a month since I wrote anything last.
I've been busy.
Ellie's been busy too.
Recapping since January in no particular order:

• My family came to visit in January. My Sister for a week & my Mom for close to a month. Much fun was had, we went to the beach, visited stuff around San Jose, visited a volcano, hot springs, rode horses, & ate a lot. This was our first family vacation in about 7 years, not so bad huh?


• Ellie & I had other guests last month as well. 2 of Ellie's good friends from NYC were here for a little bit. Taliegh stopped by for a couple days after a business trip & Randi was here for a week to study medical spanish. It was great to see some familiar faces even for a little while.


• Ellie & I visited the Baldi Spa in La Fortuna again with our friends Lea & Omar (I love me some hot springs).


• My afro became short locks.


• Our computer died. The power connector broke about 2 weeks ago & the price to replace it was ridiculous down here so it got sent home.


• I celebrated my birthday on Monday. Thanks for the cards everybody!


• We're leaving Costa Rica for good on Saturday. I've said goodbye to my friends & students, taught my last class, packed up our clothes, & cleared out most of our kitchen. It still looks like nobody wants to rent our apartment.


• Travel Plans:
  Sunday, arrive in Panama
  3 days later we fly to Quito, Ecuador. We'll make our way south to Peru hitting as many sites as we can, volcanoes, ruins, parks, etc. in about 2 weeks (we hope). We're gonna do the same in Peru(over 3 weeks), followed by Bolivia (<1 week), Chile (1 month), Argentina (1 month), & Uruguay (just a weekend visit from Buenos Aries).


• We had a great going away party, former-students, friends, & co-workers, a shame everyone couldn't make it. We should have had more parties here. I'm going to miss San Jose & Costa Rica. The people & places we've come to know & love over the last 9 months have been wonderful. I hope to keep in touch with everyone see them all again in time.


• Things I'll miss (I had this list originally in the dead iBook, so this is nowhere near complete):
  Guys selling fresh squeezed orange juice from shoping carts with attached juicers in the mornings
  Salas the artist who paints scenes of Costa Rica on Avenida Central
  Teaching
  My students
  Tin Jo
  Pan y Vino
  Crem Rica
  The VIP movie theater in Terra Mall
  & many more things I don't have time to write about...

Ok, I gotta go catch a bus. I'll write more from Panama...

Kepfram