Hello Arizona!! Hi there loyal patrons of my amateur travel-blog. I recently spent my spring break backpacking Havasu Canyon and canoeing the Colorado River in the Black Canyon below Hoover Dam and have had some requests for pictures and a story (apologies for the delay, been super busy). The first leg of the trip was a 12 hour ride from Santa Barbara to the rim of Havasu Canyon, part of Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona. We camped there for the night before backpacking in approximately ten miles early the next morning. The hike began with an extremely stee [View Full Entry]

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Buenos Aires y Iguazu Falls I have finally made it home, and California has never seemed so good. Upon arrival home I have traveled roughly 15,555 miles, and am ready for some Cali´ in my life. Spent the day today on the beach in SB. Our time spent in Argentina was great. We began with touring the city for a few days and enjoying a traditional tango show. We found Buenos Aires to be a very cosmopolitan city in comparison to the rest of South America. The Porteños (locals) go as far as to consider it the Paris of South America. [View Full Entry]

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Hi everybody, Just wanted to say I really appreciate the texts and emails concerning the Peru earthquake and my whereabouts in South America. My friends and I are already over in Argentina and missed the quake by about 5 days. We actually spent some time last week where the epicenter of the quake was, and are feeling grateful to have already left. The sand dunes on my previous blog are very near the center and the picture of the sunset on the water is where around 450 people perished in the quake. We fly back to Lima on Tuesday for 1 [View Full Entry]

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A Desert Oasis Amazingly we made it out of Bolivia in one piece. Public transportation has been shady at times in Peru, but Bolivia is a whole differrent world. We caught a 24hr bus ride a couple days ago from La Paz, Bolivia to Huacachina, Peru. AFTER getting out of Bolivia we had a very pleasant ride up through the desert of western Peru, more specifically to the oasis town found on the back of the Peruvian 50 sole bill, Huacachina. The town is made up solely of backpackers looking for some sandboarding and working on their tan. We figured it [View Full Entry]

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School´s Out! Well we finished school on August 3rd. We had a final dinner as a class out at one of the nicer restaurants in Cuzco. Some very interesting meats were served (kidney, heart, etc.) but very good none the less. After a late night of drinking and saying our goodbyes seven of us set off for a 22 hr bus ride to La Paz, Bolivia. Along with an absolutely insane border crossing, a flat tire on the bus and chasing down buses in a city without a bus station, we made it to the capital of Bolivia where we stayed [View Full Entry]

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Well, I´ll start by saying that I am extremely dissapointed about this website crashing. For those of you that had been following the blogs, you know how much info was lost. Life goes on though right. Well I have three little adventures ready to be ¨blogged¨, the narrative may be a bit short though, my apologies. I am now on the road, and internet access is kinda rare. Anyways... the Mighty Jungle From the 27th to the 29th of July we made it out to the Amazon Basin, more specifically Puerto Maldonado. It was a short 45min flight down out of [View Full Entry]

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Machu Picchu So we made it to Machu Picchu last weekend, most definitely the highlight of my trip thus far. We spent 3 days in the small town of Aguas Calentes. REally good to get out of Cuzco for a while. Aguas Calientes has no cars, is 3,000´lower than Cuzco and the air is so fresh. There are some hot springs there as well where we spent a few hours each night. My professor even bought the entire class a round of beers there, excellent time. The first day we hiked a couple miles through the jungle to some waterfalls. [View Full Entry]

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Well the past week has been fairly busy. My class made another trek up to Saqsaywaman on Saturday. We had our teacher along this time which made things more interesting. After lunch at the ruins we played a game of soccer with some local peasant children then hit the trail on our horses. Probably the slowest, laziest horses I have ever seen, but we had an awesome time. We were able to go much higher on the mountain and get a better view of the city and the Saqsaywaman ruins (refer to pic). On Tuesday we headed to the Sacred [View Full Entry]

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Well I´m a little more settled in now in Cuzco. We have met a lot of new Cuzqueno friends that have been gracious enough to take us out on the town, etc. My roommate, Galen, had arrived in Cuzco earlier then the rest of us and knew the city a little bit. He offered to take us up to the best Inca ruins in the city limits of Cuzco, Sachsaywaman (or ¨sexy woman¨), a couple days ago. It was my first taste of the what the Inca´s were capable of. Pretty amazing stonework, some stones weighing up to 185 tons, [View Full Entry]

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Well I made it to Peru . I met up with two of my classmates in Lima on Friday night and we got a hostal in the Miraflores district, a new suburban neighborhood on the bluffs of the Pacific Ocean. Lima was a bit gloomy but we found plenty of things to do. Went out to dinner and had our first Pisco Sour´s (pisco is similar to brandy, then mixed with sugar and whipped with an egg) and had some South American steak. We then got up at 3:30am Saturday morning to catch our flight to Cuzco. Upon arrival at [View Full Entry]

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