When my bus pulled into Cali at 3am in the morning, I was a bit nervous because of the reputation Cali has as a dangerous place. After 3 days in the city, I found people to be very charming in Cali, even more so than Bogota and other Ecuador.My three days there were filled with nothing but Salsa. By chance, while looking for a school to take some classes in Colombian style salsa with their famous super fast footwork, I saw Fundacion Escuela Baile Swing Latino in the directory! Wait, aren’t they the 3x world salsa champions, whose videos I have seen many times in Youtube? Lalo from Tony’s class was the first person who told me about them. I called the phone number, but no answer. I went to their listed address, but they had moved. Fortunately their new address was listed on the door. When I finally got there, a few people were standing outside. I didn’t recognize the director Luis Hernandez, nicknamed El Mulato, at the time.

He invited me into the house. And guess what’s on TV? Salsa! Apparently I had just missed the World Salsa Festival in Cali by about two weeks. His family was watching the performances of the other teams. I felt the energy in the house. I could tell that they eat, breathe, live salsa. Trophies lie around the house; posters of past salsa performances are on the walls. Pick a random saturday afternoon, and you see salsa performances on TV. This is the environment you are
in when you want to get to the top of anything. I was nothing short of amazed.

One of the performances from the salsa festival can be seen here. The small kid in the show is only 6 years old. They have combined Charlie Chaplin-Michael Jackson footwork into Salsa shines.

I can´t believe the americas trip is coming to an end soon. On Oct 1st, I fly back to Taiwan to see my family and then to NYC on Oct 25th.  Having not been back in 16 years, I am so excited to see my family and the country.

I remember meeting three tourists from Taiwan in Peru and they said that my Mandarin has some sort of accent.  I always thought my Chinese pronunciation was spot on.  I now don’t speak any languages without an accent
Quito is another city great for language schools, so instead of traveling fast through the last few days, I decided to take some French classes here - getting ready for trip part II Europe next year.  But who knows? It´s still far away; obviously a lot of things can happen between now and then. I could start working in which case no more traveling or green card regulations could change.

Not that traveling fatigue has set in, but not being able to go to Bolivia and Argentina was quite a bummer, to say the least.  Regardless, my last week in South America will be filled a lot of salsa dancing, samba and french classes   And that makes me happy.

From 20080913_ecu_alausi

And they all sell the same thing at the same price!

There are twenty stalls. Between every other stall, the exact same ten or so offerings are listed with the exact same price. Each stall is individually owned.
The fact that each stall only has enough seating for four explains a bit of the homogeneity of the place. Still, I found the sameness of the Alausi market unbelievable.

The attraction at Alausi is something called Nariz del Diablo or Devil’s nose, name for part of a old train ride around the mountain range to see the nearby volcanoes. 

From 20080913_ecu_alausi

After seeing the candors and the deep Colca canyon in Peru, the train ride to see Nariz del Diablo was kind of sleepy although it was refreshing to ride on the top of the train.

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From 20080913_ecu_alausi

And I found another street drink - this time complete with fresh Alovera and twenty other herb concoctions made by this Peruvian-immigrant street doctor. Delicious!

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From 20080913_ecu_alausi

And this alfafa elixir

From 20080913_ecu_alausi

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

  Over the last few days, I have been traveling pretty fast up from Lima, Trujillo, Mancora and then Puerto Lopez in Ecuador.  Whenever I can, I travel long distances at night by bus.  Luckily for me, the bed buses, whose beds lie ALL THE WAY back, have been pretty luxuious. After watching a Jackie Chen and Jet Li flick in Spanish, I slept like a baby.

In just about every city in Peru where I visited, there were protests of some sort in the street.  But according to one of the locals I talked to, the protests never really get them anything.  

When I got to Trujillio, I found the public bus transport was not only on strike, they have blocked off the road to the Chimu ruins to all other public transport such as taxis. 

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

The blockade was pretty primitive as far as blockades go, but get this, the bus drivers with bricks in hand demand money from any car that tries to pass. Of course, the police stood by the side of the road; they didn´t want to deal with the bus drivers either.
Our taxis dropped us right before the blockade and we walked the last few km to the ruins. The Chimu ruins seem pale compared to Mayan temples or Machu Pichü

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

The only public transport available to was out of the city. So after finding my last Peruvian culinary experience Cuy, guinea pig, I headed up to Puerto Lopez to try to find some whales. Cuy, by the way, is fatty and tasty - imagine a mix of chicken and fatty pork round.

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Our boat went out in calm waters, but for the longest time all we saw was this.

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Occassionally, we caught little something in the distance but by the time the boat moved there, the whales were gone. We were just about to head back when we saw another two boats gathered around what looked like a dead whale upside down in the ocean. When we got closer, we saw this!

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

The whale was alive! Actually, by the size, the capitan said a baby whale has just been born probably only a few hours before. The mother whale was upside down to breast feed the baby whale. How cool! You can see the two whales in this picture.

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

I was in awe looking at them. The mother whale stayed very still in one place in the water unlike other fish. Occassionally, it blew mists of water into the air.

And then just like that, they were gone.

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Leaving a trail like this on the surface…

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From 20080911_ecu_puerto_lopez

From 20080907_peru_nazca

On the way up to Lima, I passed by Nazca to see the lines in the sand that reportedly have been there since BC. Before getting there, I was thinking how lines in the desert could remain so long without destroyed. When I got there, it was a very desolate place to say the least. Only a highway runs through it and not much else for as far as the eyes can see. Furthermore, there is also basically no wind and no moisture. There are different types of rocks above the sandy earth, each having different colors. When all the rocks in one area are pushed aside, the appearance of a line can be seen. When the highway was built in the 30’s, they didn’t know about the lines and built the highway right over one of the figures.
This is a figure of a hand seen from the observatory tower.

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This one is supposed to be a tree. Yes, it takes some imagination and better picture from higher above to see it.

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I decided not to take the rickety flight to see the rest of the figures, but they look something like this.

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The lines really weren’t too exciting, so I quickly moved to my favorite part, eating!So if you are into sushi, the yellow goo on top of the ceviche might look familiar to you.

From 20080907_peru_nazca

Yes! It’s UNI, or sea urchin. I couldn’t believe it when the waitress brought it out after I ordered a mixed ceviche. So I promptly order another plate of just eriso, sea urchin, like this.

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And then another plate like this.

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And one more like this to go.

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If it’s possible to OD on sea urchin, I was two times over.

My good luck with food continues in Lima. While walking around, I ran into this.

From 20080907_peru_nazca

Dim-Sum! Who knew Lima would have Dim-Sum! I ordered everything including pork buns, siu mei, pork dumplings, chicken clusters, egg tarts, except for the pretentious fried chicken wings and fried wonton that have been sitting there for ages. Within two seconds, I devoured it all and ordered another plate for later. After trying lots of strange Peruvian food, my stomach felt great to have some homely food.

So I went to the Argentinian consulate today and found out I basically have no way to enter that country. Usually I need to get the visa in my country of residence before departing for the trip. However, usually they have a restriciton which is that you need to enter the country within 90 days of getting the visa. As such, it would have been no use for me to get the visa before my trip because by the time I get down to south america, the 90 days would have expired.

So now I will make my way up to Ecuador and possibly a visit to Chavez. At least, these two countries are friendly to citizens of Taiwan.

From 20080905_peru_colca

Up til now, I have had no problems with entering countries.  Usually I show up at the border, get a tourist card, pay a few dollars, sesame-open and I walk in.

Bolivia and Chile are different types of animals.  Apparently, Bolivia put Taiwan in a special category with terrorist countries and at least from Peru, it´s almost impossible for a Taiwanese citizen to get a visa to Bolivia.  So the alternate route to get to Argentina is by land through Chile, however, I don´t hear back from the Chilean consuladore for another 10 to 15 days. 

So what to do.   I have now bussed up to Lima through Nazca to try to get an visa to Argentina. 

I can´t wait until I have an US passport - that would be another 4 and half years.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures from Colca canyon, said to be twice as deep as Grand Canyon, although I think Grand Canyon itself is more impressive.

From 20080905_peru_colca

From 20080905_peru_colca

This is a condor. They fly in the early morning over the canyon. Their wing span can be up to two meters in adults. They looked awesome flying overhead.

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From 20080905_peru_colca

From 20080905_peru_colca

Alpacas! They come in white and brown. Aren´t they cute??

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From 20080905_peru_colca

And .. alpacas in the market.

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Back to roaming in the wild.

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From 20080902_peru_chachani

Pictures here

So I tried to hike this 6075m mountain called Chachani.  After about 7 hours hiking and occasional rests, we got to 5800 meters.  The guide told me that at the pace I was going, it would take 10 hours to summit and back down to base camp.  There were 8 of us.  Two French didn’t quite make it out of base camp at 5300 meter because of altitude sickness.  Andre, a Brazilian, and I turned around at 5800 meters and the other four probably made it to the top.
One word describes the experience pretty well - painful.  It’s probably the most physically challenging activity I have ever done.  I took two aspirins for my headache, drank a triple coca mate before setting off at 1am.  The air at that altitude, as you can imagine, is very thin and makes walking or doing anything active difficult.  It was cold but not unbearable.  Even though we hiked slowly, my heart was racing at 100 mph. Even at rest, my heart pounded. We used crampons, metal spikes that attach to the bottom of the boots and ice picks to go through ice sheets.

From 20080902_peru_chachani

In other places, we used ropes to climb steep faces.  I really thought I was going to make it to the top, but as we got close to summit Fatima, the mountain next to Chachani, fatigue set in.  Andre and I fell behind, and the steepest part was still yet to come.

The mountain will always be there.  On the way down, we both thought it was a good decision to turn around.  As I write this, I still have a headache.  Time to sleep it off.