Brett's Southern Crossing

Second in a three-part series about what I’ve been up to and what I plan to do next year.

In Part 1 I talked about my first trip to Australia all the way back in 2003 and the process of getting my visa.  I returned to Australia just a few weeks ago for a vacation, which was necessary to meet my visa’s “first entry” deadline.  That left a 6 year gap between trips, but even though I hadn’t been to Oz in a while I was still able to get abroad most years.  In 2007 I visited Peru and Bolivia for about 3 weeks.  In 2008 I went to Ecuador for a week.

Somehow I can’t even remember what made me originally decide to go to Peru.  If I had to guess, I was probably looking for a good deal to use the frequent flyer miles I had accumulated during my Thanksgiving and Christmas travel between Austin and Ann Arbor.  While planning prior to the Peru trip I wanted to see some of the more rural areas of the country and I decided I would head straight to Iquitos and explore the jungle and Amazon river areas.  Iquitos has a population of over a million people but it is so isolated that the only means of access are planes and Amazon river boats — No roads!

Machu Picchu

This brings me to my first rule of travel:  It’s no use planning an itinerary because I’ll just end up ignoring it.  I arrived in Lima and it became clear to me that my non-existent Spanish and the Peruvian people’s non-existent English was a bit more of a barrier than I thought.  Other than a family trip to France when I was 15 I’d never visited a country that spoke a foreign language (no comments about Texas, y’all).  So I decided to stay on the tourist trail and headed for Cusco to see Machu Picchu, and on to Lake Titicaca.  It turned out to be a great trip and I learned how a couple dozen words and some patience are all you need to get by when you don’t speak the local language.

The trip to Ecuador was really short…my only chance to get away in 2008 after my vacation days got cashed out from being laid off by AMD.  I just wandered around Quito a bit and then headed to a small town called Tena, located in the Amazon rainforest.  I took a fantastic day long rafting trip, with really intense rapids.

View of Quito

What I really like about South America is how informal everything is there.  Getting around is really easy, every town has a bus terminal with dozens of bus companies running buses to anywhere people want to go.  In most places you can just show up, and within an hour or two there will be a bus going just about anywhere you need.  Within the cities informal colectivos (shared vans) will run along any route they can find.  Once the van is full, it goes.  Of course you might have to wait for a while.  Street vendors selling tasty food show up anywhere there’s a crowd.  It’s nice, you hardly have to plan anything.

Next time: What’s next for me.  I’ve got a rough plan for the next year or so and it means going all over the place…