quito, centro del mundo

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hola amigos, familia y viajeros

First let me say that i have a NEW "host" for my photos/fotos. click the below link to see all my photos from this trip

my photos are now on smugmug.com CLICK HERE

I am currently in Waukegan, Illinois and will be leaving on the second to last leg of my trip tomorrow when I will take a greyhound bus to Duluth, Mn. This will probably be the most uncomfortable leg of my entire trip. If you don't know, the bus system in the US sucks to say the least. The trip is a 7.5 hour ride by car, but by bus it will take me about 16 hours or so. From Duluth I will probably have to hitchhike to Ely, MN (which is a two hour car ride from Duluth) since there are no buses or trains that go there. Ely is where my house is.

I left Peru two weeks ago yesterday and flew to Miami for some warm weather before winter starts (which is any day now in Minnesota). unfortunately I did not get much time on the beach because hurricane Wilma chased me out of there. i have spent the last 8 days visiting with family and friends. I am lucky to have good friends like you guys (even though you probably quit reading this already) and also lucky to have met a lot of great people while traveling. I have to admit that I am proud of what you guys have accomplished. Going to the Muck is always interesting and Fun!!

My trip to Ely will close one chapter and open another chapter in my life. I have put my house there up for sale and I will sell all the "stuff" that I have there (which thankfully is not much). I think that I may buy a place outside the US, maybe in South america or maybe in Central America - a place that will be used initially as a rental property and later, as a place where i will live (at least part of the year).

The final leg of my trip is in about two weeks or so when i head out to Park city , Utah where I will start working in December!!! I look forward to seeing all my friends out there!!

I will miss all of you and hopefully will see everyone again on this trip we call life. ok, now the blog.

Well as usual i am a bit late.


on the spring equinox, September 23rd, Gene and i went to the equator. we went to ciudad de centro del mundo. it was a typical tourist place with little shops and restaurants ... and a museum about the Ecuador. Well, we were not at the real equator, this place was at 0'00'08, ie at 8 seconds longitude, or is it latitude??? Anyway we took a little tour to see a city that was inside a volcanic Crater. We didn't drive in because there are no roads, we just looked down form the top. Then we went back and went to a museum that was at the equator. Of course there was a line marking the equator and it must have been the real Ecuador - marked by GPS. At the line a sink full of water drained straight down, now swirl. Move the sink two feet into the northern hemisphere and the water swirled, move the sink to the southern hemisphere and it swirled in the opposite direction. At the equator i stood a raw egg on end on top of a nail. There was also a small village and even a few real shrunken human heads. They don't use human heads anymore, just monkeys heads. Afterwards Gene and I went to Kentucky fried chicken to get a fix and then went to the old town of Quito.

Ok, just found that the water swirling thing was a trick. Well it looked real to me.

I took a trip to a glacier yesterday (sept 28) and well, it turned into .... oh, first let me explain the trip. About 13 of us from the hostel took a trip from the hostel to a glacier. It had snowed the night before so the van couldn't make it all the way up to the glacier parking lot so we had to walk about an hour uphill at 4700 meters sobre del mar. We got to the starting point and it took us about 15 minutes to walk to the glacier. only about 7 of us went to the glacier. We were on virgin snow for about 5 minutes and the sun came out. No one had sunscreen but me so i gave everyone sun screen and a few people did not have sunglasses. we stayed at the glacier for about 10-15 minutes and then walked back down to the van. It started to rain on the drive back, which it is starting to do as i write this. Anyway, we got back to the hostel and there was a free rum and coke party. I felt a little sunburned and most of the people from the trip were sunburned. at about 10 or 11pm one of the guys was having problems seeing and he couldn't keep his eyes open or closed because they hurt so bad. A girl had similar problems and so i called the hospital and they went to the hospital. About an hour later an irish guy form the trip had similar problems so he went to the hospital also. All three were suffering from snow blindness. ie the eyes were sunburned. Luckily the damage wasn´t permanent and the two guys had to keep their eyes bandaged for a day. The Irish guy was suppose to go to the Galapagos today but missed his trip and had to forfeit $1000. So the trip turned out to be a bit more exciting than planned.

OCt 9th? as usual i am a wee bit behind in writing.

The day after the glacier trip, ten of us from the hostel went to the "jungle", the highland jungle, about 1800 feet above the sea. We took an overnight bus to lago agrilio (sp), met our guide, had breakfast and then took a two hour (latin time - actual time was closer to 4 hours) to a river where we took a motorized canoe for about three hours to our camp. It seemed that our group was jinxed. On the way to the river, a big rock, about the size of a baseball flew off of a passing truck and grazed the top of the head of a guy who "survived" the glacier trek. If that rock was an inch lower, who know what would have happened.

ok, back to the jungle. The trip was three nights and four days, we did various activities, swimming, fishing for piranhas, a trip to a local village, night boat trip to find caymans (alligators), a day walk through the jungle ( including a george of the jungle swing on a vine and finding the most deadliest frog- the one they use to get poison for their darts),a night walk through the jungle ( including finding the most poisonous snake in the jungle).... as most of you know a lot of modern medicines were synthesized from plants from the jungle. Our guide showed us several as well as demonstrated the results of various insect bites. The jungle was rather quiet, the season was starting to change to the dry season. We did see some monkeys, sloths, birds, insects.... but it was a lot quieter than i thought. And not many mosquitoes!!!!!!!!

After we left the jungle it was bus after bus for me until i got back to Peru and saw paddy and suzie from Ireland again for the 7th time in south America and the last time in south America. We took yet another bus, an 18 hour overnight bus to Lima on Friday night. Paddy and Suzie were going to catch a two day bus to Santiago chile the next day but when we got to lima they found out that the bus was actually on Saturday not Sunday and it was leaving in 1.5 hours!!!! (hope you guy´s arses are ok). Well we make a quick dash to McDonald's so paddy could get his big mac fix and they went off the the bus station. ok that pretty much brings me up to date. I am in lima with only one week to go before returning to the US.

some quick thoughts on some differences .....

Some quick thoughts on some differences between South America and the United states (ok, the US and the rest of the world). In the US most cars have only one person in them, in South america the cars have about 15 people in them. The cars in the US are much larger. Food, in the US, junk food, ie McDonald's is cheap, and the portions are bigger and healthy food, ie vegetables are expensive. Down here, McDonald's is expensive, more than $5 for a meal deal and healthy food is cheap. You can get a meal in a restaurant (not a tourist one of course) for about $1.50. Size, the people......Houses are a lot smaller than in the US. People outside the US appear to be more happy and not concerned about trivial stuff, i.e. the O.J. trailer, Martha steward, Cobbie Bryant or whatever else the media thinks is important.
Unfortunately a lot of people are concerned about just getting enough food to eat.

I think people outside the U.S. appreciate things more than in the U.S. I am going to blame the differences on the impact that the advertiser in the U.S. have on Us. Hell they spend over $600 a year on each person in the U.S. (and there are 280 million of us) to convince us that we are not happy and need to buy xyz to make us happy. Hey, I solved the world hunger problem, take the money we spend on advertising and feed the worlds hungry with it. hey, without advertisers telling us we are unhappy we wont need to take pills to make us happy (juwt solved our health care crisisi) Hey while we are at it lets take the money we are spending on Iraq and spend it on something good, like alternative energy sources or not spend it at all. Hey i just solve our $8,000,000,000,000 deficit. well almost.

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Photos

\"the real equator museum\"2
sun clock

equator 2
sun dial

equator 7
shrunken head

equator 8
shrunken head

Comments

[annie]

welcome home
'glad to hear your wild adventuring went well and you are home safe for now. 'Got married and honeymooned for the month. All is well and life is good. We're keeping it simple....works better. cheers annie from Washington