The adventure so far!

To all of Paulie´s devoted readers, her account has not been taken over by some crazy loon here to embelish her blog, rather I'm her new (some might say foolish) traveling partner on her great south american trek. I can surely say it has been quite an experience so far! It´s day 10 of our trip and today is the first day we have managed to get some down time at a place with internet access and reflect on the adventure to write in the blog. So far we have checked out 6 airports ( Sydney, KL, Taipei, LA, Panama city, Lima), numerous bus rides (one of which we lost our tickets temporarily just before boarding, gave me a mild panic attack), and one crazy ass taxi ride crossing the Peruvian/Chile border with 3 Austrian tourists.

In between all the exhausting travelling, the highlights have been so far: Huacachina - a small oasis in the middle of the desert where we experienced a beautiful sunset at the top of the desert dunes after doing a couple of runs of sand boarding... though lying flat on your stomach sliding down since it was too steep wouldn´t really be classified as that :) We also had our first proper Peruvian meals of deep fried chicken and beef with fried potatos and rice at the oasis. After this meal Pauline was craving some Asian food so the next day she decided to eat a Thai curry for lunch - against my advice, and boy did she pay for it. Lucky we had stocked up on Imodium back in Sydney so we were covered and spent the afternoon chilling out under the trees by the water.

The other highlights have been Isla Ballantos where I got to see some amazing wildlife up close of pelicans, peguins, dolphins and sea lions, and the condors at the Colca Canyon. The David Attenbourough documentaries didn´t do it enough justice. Unfortunately Paulie spent most of the time at Isla Ballantos with her head pressed against the side of the boat seasick and even had a massive drop of bird poo land on her head! Lucky I managed to get a lot of videos and photos so that she could catch up on what she missed out on.

So the adventure continues and my concerns about altitude sickness on the Inca Trail have faded as we have reached up to 4900 metres on our way to the Colca Canyon and I was fine! I even jogged a bit on the spot to which Paulie gave me the exasperated school teacher look of disapproval!

Now the pressure of writing the first blog post has finally been relieved, hope you enjoyed it and it lived up to your expectations OTFOM :)

ps. I can´t help fight this feeling wasn´t playing at any of the airports but was shown in a movie on one of the bus rides in Lima.