(Note: I have written this over time. The server at Travelblog is malfunctioning, so there are no pictures, but two videos made it through. I will try to add the pics in a couple weeks. Love you guys, A) How to describe the last ?? months. La Y has been an experience that I will continue to digest for a long time. Years. Currently, I seem to be experiencing a healthy amount of indigestion, making it quite difficult to communicate to all of you where I am. I suppose I could just start with where I literally am at this moment. [View Full Entry]

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La Y de la Laguna is a community of about 30 families situated on a hill overlooking a rapidly vanishing megadiversity zone. Its heart gives rise to two sopping trailroads, in the form of a ´Y´, falling towards about 12 communities known as ¨Al Dentro.¨ It also overlooks a distinctly ´Y´ shaped laguna. Thus begins my confusion concerning what has been my home the last month, and where I will remain the next five. I arrived in La Y (pronounced ¨La Yeh¨) the 18th of April, or about 10 days before scheduled. The night of the 17th I got a [View Full Entry]

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(Parts of this were written at different times over the last month and a half...) Hola from Puerto Puyuguapi! So I am officially in the middle of nowhere, and it looks strikingly like my home state... Pto Puyuguapi is about 500km of bumpy road south west of my last blog in El Bolson. The town is a sleepy salmon fishing village of several hundred inhabitants. Initially the people are somewhat closed but thaw quickly when you speak to them in their language, as the vast majority of tourists on this road are hitching Israelies who seem to rarely make the effort [View Full Entry]

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Hail from the Hippie Haven of El Bolson! We left Bariloche Tuesday afternoon, finally en bici. The days pass slowly in the way you feel when watching a slide show of warmly lit photos or laying in a field looking at rorscharch cumulous clouds. Going south on Route 40 is like taking a trip through time. All the mileposts are numbered in descending fashion towards Ushuaia, El Fin del Mundo. Annie remembers dates like the initiation of the Ford assembly line and for some reason I think of flu epidemics and wars. We began our trip in the future, around the [View Full Entry]

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I feel I am living in multiple worlds with the same language. Well, more or less, the Argentineans speak castesshhaaaanno and I don´t have a freaking clue what the Chileans are uttering but on paper it all looks the same. It turns out you really cannot know much from paper, this is something I have been slowly finding out since I began medical school. The trees the paper came from, however, know how to speak to me... Below is some jibba jabba from different points I glazed over or have not submitted. I will try to make it as anachronous [View Full Entry]

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Ahh, La Paz. This is now my fourth time arriving in this fair city so I figured it deserved mention. There are give or take a million people who claim residency in La Paz and its uphill counterpart, El Alto. Not including El Alto, most of these people are stuffed into a valley with steep walls and a mix of colonial cobble and indigenous resourcefulness. I have spent altogether a couple weeks in this place but still haven´t quite wrapped my brain around it. However, as I am unable to refrain from doing so, below are some contrived observations and sweeping [View Full Entry]

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This is a retrospective entry for the last few days before taking off to Indonesia a month ago... 12-6-07: The best sunset of my life to date. I took a shuttle boat from Copacobana to the Isla del Sol on Lago Titicaca, which in addition to bringing back to the elementary school playground days name is a magical place. I got to the lake at 0930 and packed my stuff to the most distant corner of the island, and stumbled upon a beach hidden from the hills above by an overhanging cliff. There I found what could only be described as [View Full Entry]

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So, back from Indonesia. I had forgotten how slow the Internet was in Indo and decided to wait to post until returning to La Paz. The holidays were great with the family, and while it took a bit to adjust to that style of traveling it´s not a bad way to go... with necessary intermittent breaks. There is too much to write about last month so here´s the truncated version (for more pics and descriptions of these places check out the first few entries on the blog; they are from my trip last year). Unfortunately my camera decided to die half [View Full Entry]

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Amazing few weeks. To begin: A night in the Inca ruins at Pisac in the Sacred Valley with three great people, and a sky that danced with us to fend of the cold. A couple days before leaving for the trek two French guys, and Swedish woman, and I took a bus to Pisac and hiked up to the ruins at dusk after the guards retired. There we spent the night walking among the Tolkienesque structures in the moonlight and used body heat for warmth on a sort of lookout platform above the ruins. We stayed up until dawn, feeling sufficiently [View Full Entry]

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The Incas built Cusco in the shape of a Puma and I have been living just north of its anus for 8 days now. I´m in this great dorm complex with a huge courtyard, full kitchen access, and great stories from the transients. Vacant, old town Cusco is actually a pretty impressive colonial site with imposing churches staring down various plazas along with cobblestone streets and other Spanish remnants, some of which still on Inca foundations. Most of the day this is somewhat obscured by hordes of gringos you don´t see in the smaller towns along the way. I´ve been taking [View Full Entry]

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