Bored. Snapped a few pics in the airport. 3 hour layovers in terminal 1 are toooo looong. Happily the Red Rocket supplies us with beer. 2 pints of Rickards – an outlandish $19 after tax and hefty tip (hey, I’m on vacation and happy). Looking forward to $3 bottles of Argentine Red!! Next up, the hung for Chester Cheetah’s Cheese Corn! Rumour has it that Nacho Libre is slotted for the next flight. THe Notebook is also on tap, but luckily, it’s later on so I won’t have to stay up.
13/01/08
Yeehaw! I did it! I reached the highest point in the North Island of New Zealand. Yup, Ralph and I achieved our goals yet again on another glorious day in Tongariro National Park. We managed to summit Mount Ruapehu, through the aid of both a car, and some chairlifts. Hows that you say? Well, the start point was 6km up the road, very much uphill, so we decided to hitch-hike up and back instead of biking. Also, rather than try to scale the entire vertical distance by foot, we took the park people’s advice and paid 20NZD for the chairlifts to take us up to 2000m, leaving us only an extra 700+m of vertical to climb. Our plan was to be on the first chair at 9am, and be back in Whakapapa Village around 1pm, and in National Park Village and the included spa by 3pm. Read on for a bit more of the day, and check out the map. Sadly, the GPS was paused at some point early in the climb, and I didn’t realize till much later, so a lot of the pictures are in the wrong place. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do for now.
Hey Gang!
With the brief internet breaks I´m using, it´s easier to just send a message to everyone rather than respond personally. Don´t take offence, and please keep writing back, great to hear from home.
Anywho, here we are in Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incan Empire. I´m sure those Incas would be rolling their collective eyes at the amount of panhandling / harrassing going on here! It´s nuts. I mean, I don´t mind getting a restaurant suggestion, but getting swarmed by 5 different people at once yelling about their menus to me just gets to be too much! But, given that over 60% of this city´s population of >300,000 has only tourism as their income, I guess I don´t blame them.
So we´ve spent several days now at high altitudes (right now, i´m sitting at 3462m above sea level!). We went direct from Lima to Puno, which is on Lake Titicaca (and over 4000m up!). That caused me a bit of a problem on the first night, which resulted in my going to bed around 8:30. Luckily, the one good night sleep fixed me up. Well, that and the coca and mint tea that I was sucking back!
We spent 2 days in this region, with one of the nights being spent on and island called Amantani, living like the locals. Whew, what a unique (read intense) experience. Our family of 9 lived in 2 little shacks (about 7ft x 14ft), the third shack was for us. We were treated like family, which meant zero privacy, with fairly frequent ´visits´ by some of the children. On this island, we also hike up to the top, which sits at about 4180m. That´s almost as high as our Inka trail will take us (4198m). We also got a chance to dress in the traditional clothes of the island inhabitants, and attend a fiesta, with local live music (wouldn´t buy the CD), and lots of bailar (dancing).
01/01/08
Well, I’d better get used to starting to type out 08 instead of 07, since the new year is now upon us. As I write this, I’ve already spent an entire day in 2008, and am indeed looking forward to getting to bed and resting, as tomorrow it’s back on the bike for a tough slog up a very long hill up to 500m to get to Rotorua. Luckily, I don’t have to stress too much about it, as I’ve already booked accommodations, as well as deciding to spend 3 nights in Rotorua, since it is basically one of the major tourist locations, and a center of sorts for Maori culture, which I’d like to learn a bit more about. However, this post isn’t about tomorrow, even though it comes to you from the future 🙂 Read on about my day off in Tauranga, as well as my New Years experience in this charming city.
Greetings race fans. Welcome back to another riveting race tale. This particular narrative comes from the sunny and warm skies found in […]
