Continuing North with my friends from France, we headed up to Dharamshala, the home away from home for the Dalia Lama. The state of Himachal is a land of rolling green hills chasing up to the base of the Himalayas. The culture is much more relaxed and less hectic than the rest of India. In Dharamshala specifically, there is a large settlement of Tibetan refugees. Due to continual occupation of Tibet by China, many Tibetans have opted to escape to Northern India. It takes about a month of heavy walking through the Himalayas to cross the boarder. Some stories of escape [View Full Entry]

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Walking down the streets of Delhi, a man comes up to me and asks if I'd like to get my ears cleaned. Since I couldn't remember the last time I had'em cleaned, I figured why not? Now, I don't feel like my ears are particularly dirty, but the amount of gunk he pulled out of it was incredible. Gobs of wax. Icky icky gobs. He dug in so deep that it felt like he was tickling my brain. And at 10 rupees a ear I was getting the deluxe service and quality customer care one would expect of a professional ear [View Full Entry]

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When I was at the immigration desk leaving Kuwait, the lady saw my ticket it and with one eye raised said, "So you're going to New Delhi...... Why????" With a half smirk I replied, "Well.... I don't really know." Enter the Crazy. There is no way to successfully describe what India is like. Every moment is overwhelming. Overwhelm is the verb with the most activity here. When I first landed in Delhi, I got a ride into town and just sat on the steps at the side of a busy intersection. I sat there for 3 hours just looking at India [View Full Entry]

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Step off plane into oven heat. Get a laser put to my head to see if I have the Disease. Walk into a crowd of black and white dish-dashes, burkas, dresses and robes. BOOM! Get covered in confetti and glitter--- Welcome to Kuwait City! But wait a second Pete what you doing? Where you going? Que pasa? Well, I decided that was that with Latin American and I need to keep my feet moving. So I hopped on the next plane to India, which so happened made a stop in Kuwait. Being that I didn't know much of anything about Kuwait, [View Full Entry]

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The boarder from Argentina to Bolivia was a bridge between two worlds. Argentina - a beautiful country with an European style and standard of living. Bolivia - a poor country, wild and unkept. Now boarder towns are never a good representation for a country, but this time it was bit extreme. Night had already fallen and I had someone guide me through the slums between the bus station and the boarder. When I was to pay him he demanded I pay more and he tried to rip more money out of my hand than I owed. The immigration officer said to [View Full Entry]

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Was traveling with a friend from Peru for a few days in Bolivia when he said to me, "Hey, Pedro. I´m going to Argentina today. Want to come?" Never been there before... "Vamos!" So on a whim we went to Argentina for the next leg of the adventure. Omar (de Peru) and I started our adventure in the Salt plains of Bolivia. When we crossed the boarder we had enlarged our entourage to one kid from Denmark and two girls from Australia. We were becoming a very interesting travel group. We took the overnight bus from the frontier to Salta, the [View Full Entry]

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Bolivia, our good friend to the South, is my current stop. It´s like Peru but all the edges are tinged with crazy. Sort of like how there´s Superman and Bizarro Superman. But I think I like it more. La Paz is an really different kind of city. The highest capital in the world consists of a pueblito type look to it. It´s as if it started as a small Bolivian town and just oozed out over all the hills. And then they stuck a couple million people and all the major businesses inside to clash with it´s ancient style. The corporate [View Full Entry]

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Tried to make Hummus tonight and while I can´t call it a success I have called it supper. I´m back in this very small town, Lircay, that´s very nitch and warm, despite it´s nights of freezing mountain air. Tomorrow, I´m going up to one of the local pueblos to help with a reforestation project. It´s all Peruvians that will be working so I think it will be nice bit of cultural exchange as usual. In fact, I think I´m the only foriegner for a good two hours in any direction. Little over a week ago I was in Lircay but instead [View Full Entry]

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Well, I´ve let a few weeks go by for the waters to settle here in Peru. I feel like I´ve been running around everywhere and now I can relax for a bit. Currently I´m staying in an apartment in Lircay, a town in the middle of the Andes. There´s sort of a connection for me here but we´ll dive into that later. Now outside of it being a long day, entry into Lima was not so difficult. The only thing that worried me that day was the fact that I had a one way ticket to Peru. It wasn´t so much [View Full Entry]

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Back here in sunny Chicago trying not to remember I was in a slightly more pleasant climate only a few weeks ago. Let's trace back a little to see where we left off. By this time I had already spent several months in Nicaragua and I thought it wise to gain a fuller experience of Central America. Thus I set off north to Guatemala City on a direct bus from Managua. Although it was direct to Guate, we stopped for the night in San Salvador, capital of El Salvador. Highway robbery and hijacking is rather common in Guatemala with it’s prime [View Full Entry]

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