Blogs from South America - page 13

Greetings from rainy Baños! July and August are the wettest months...after all, it's winter here now! Mostly it's been raining at night. There are new leaks in my master suite roof with every downpour! The add-on, it seems, didn't add on seamlessly to the existing structure...and they seem to keep popping up in new places all the time. When I awake in the night to hear interior drip-drip-dripping, it's often hard to fall back asleep...my brain starts fuming. It doesn't even make sense to repair water damage of paint and plaster until I somehow get this resolved.T his week a worker is coming to 'silicon-ize' some problem areas. We shall see if there is any improvement. Shana and I continue to have lunch and play Scrabble at least 2-3 times a week. CiCi is always under ... read more

Wow! I can’t believe that it’s been almost four years since I posted my last blog to share with my beloved Travelblog friends! “What happened to you, Tab”? Yes, what happened to me? Well, first I had an accident in Africa in 2018 and I was forced to cut down my trip. I flew back to Canada for an imminent surgery on my leg. Then the downtime ended when I planned to travel back to Africa again in 2020 to cover Rwanda genocide! Bang! The pandemic hit the world and destroyed our world order. Like many of you, I was restless but powerless to change the world. So, what did I do? Well, I continued to write my experience of traveling around the world and publish them as books. I got inspiration from my aunt, an ... read more

(Day 367 on the road) If you ever wondered where some of the most stupid German people live in this world, fret not: I found them for you. They live in Paraguay. The number of simply bat-shit dumb Germans I have met here is unbelievable. I had read reports a while ago that a fair number of Covid-deniers, anti-vaccination believers and anti-immigration people (spot the irony) had emigrated to Paraguay. But I didn't expect to meet them literally on my first day in my cool hostel in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. And then again and again on a fair number of occasions during my roughly two weeks in the country. Interestingly, literally all of them were Germans - not Italian, British, Chinese, South African or from anywhere else (take your pick), only Germans. Where do ... read more

(Day 339 on the road)I have the feeling that this is going to be a tough blog entry to write. Put simply, nothing extraordinary happened in the last four weeks in Argentina. No Machu Pichu to stare at in awe. No lost city to discover in the remote jungle. No 6.000m-high mountain to climb. No death road to bike down. No multi-day camping trips high in the Andes. No vast salt desert to drive through. No volcano to scale. No close encounters with tame wildlife. Put simply, no major highlights to write about - compared to virtually all my last entries. Instead, I discovered a northern Argentina full of pretty landscapes, with appealing and (fairly) orderly cities, and with a sophisticated and educated population. In fact, travelling south after spending many months in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru ... read more

This blog is available with more photos on my website https://heatherjasper.com Waqra Pukará is one of the most spectacular Inca ruins in Peru and one of my top recommendations for alternatives to Machu Picchu. It’s an isolated tower, with two giant stone “horns” that give the site its name. Waqra is the Quechua word for horned and Pukará means fortress. The Apurímac River Canyon far below makes the high promontory even more dramatic. The ruins are at 4,140 meters above sea level (13,583 feet) and the river is at about 3,230 meters (10,600 ft). I think the location is much more impressive than Machu Picchu. From a distance, Waqra Pukará seems completely natural. When you get closer, you’ll see the remnants of walls surrounding the site, flat areas that were obviously leveled by people and stairs ... read more