Jaryd's Adventures

A Quick Summary Thank you for all the support and prayers! I spent the first few days this week recovering in Cusco and then felt well enough to go hiking. We spent 3 days hiking to some Inca ruins called Choquequirao, and then returned to Cusco afterwards. Highs and Lows Choquequirao: The Choquequirao hike had so many photos that I decided to make a separate post about it! Melted Underwear: One funny thing that happened was when we arrived at the trailhead to the Choquequirao hike, I discovered that my bag had been sitting on something hot in the taxi. It had melted through two layers of my bag, and through 2 pairs of my underwear. Since both the bag and underwear were synthetic materials, it actually melted the underwear and fused it to my bag. I spent a while trying to patch the hole and cut the underwear off, but I now permanently have part of 2 pairs of underwear fused to my backpack!  Holey bag Cutting around the fused underwea...

Since I had so many photos from our hiking trip, I decided to just put them in a separate post! Check out the other post for the full weekly update. Hike Summary Choquequirao is a set of Incan ruins (similar to Machu Picchu) that is only accessible by a 2 day hike one way. It is fairly difficult, although it is not super remote as there are villages along the trail. However, due to the difficult access, it is much less busy and controlled than Machu Picchu which is why we decided to go explore these ruins instead. Day 1: To start, we took a collectivo (shared taxi) from Cusco to another town about 5 hours away, however we asked the driver to drop us at the side of the highway about 3/4 of the way. Next, we got a taxi from the highway about 2 hours in to the trailhead. In this taxi, we met this amazing Peruvian couple, Franco and Yoana. They didn't speak english at all, so we had to communicate only using broken spanish and hand signals.  We stayed the night...

A Quick Summary On Monday we took a bus from Lima down to Ica, which is a city in the desert of Peru. From there, it was a short tuk tuk ride to Huacachina, which is a tiny town built around an oasis. We spent two nights here exploring the sand dunes by foot, buggy, and sandboard before hopping on a long (18.5 hour!) bus ride to Cusco.  Cusco is a mountain town in the Andes, best known for being the starting point for visiting Machu Picchu. Since the elevation is so high, we gave ourselves a few days to explore and acclimatize before attempting any of the hikes in the area.  Highs and Lows Being on the sand dunes: The desert oasis of Huacachina almost seemed like it should be fake. It is a small pool of water surrounded by palm trees (and hostels) in the middle of endless sand dunes.  Huacachina from the top of a sand dune  It was a lot of fun exploring the desert on dune buggies and sandboarding (like snowboarding but on sand), an...

A Quick Summary We made it to South America safely! I left Vancouver on Thursday evening, flying to Calgary where I met up with Cam, then to Houston, and finally to Lima.  We stayed one night in Lima near the airport and got to do some exploring of the suburb there. Then, we bussed over to an hostel in the touristy part of Lima, where we spent two nights getting settled, exploring the area, and surfing! Highs and Lows Thankfully so far, there hasn't been any major lowlights. Here are two highlights of the trip so far!  Community culture: One thing I've really enjoyed about Lima is how people seem to always be outside of their houses, doing things and interacting with their neighbours. On Saturday morning, we walked around the area near the airport and it seemed like everyone was outside in the street. Children were playing with these spinning toys, and people were in the streets doing everything from spray painting a coat rack to washing their cars. The...