Bob and Karen's Circle Pacific Tour: NZ and a wee bit of AU

Peru was the right place to begin a year's travel

Peru was an eye-opener of a place to launch our trip. It’s a little difficult to remember all the things that went through our minds as we settled into our year off during that first month of leisure. But I recall being sharply aware of the need to travel differently than any previous travel we’d done. This was a year off, and there was no way any person could spend that many days in full-on explorer mode. You have to stop and let the time pass you by. And you have to do that surprisingly frequently. You can bully your way through the strenuous two days of climbing Mount Putukusi and neighbouring Machu Picchu after a big bad bout of altitude sickness, but there are serious physical limits in the longer term. I speak now from a position of clearer understanding. Our first major steps on returning home were health care – Karen to a naturopath to fix her digestive tract, me to the family doctor to treat a knee injury. Now the knee MRI data is in and it turns out that a year of stress to one’s knees doesn’t necessarily cause ligament damage. At least not in my case. Instead, a year of daily strain (and about a dozen mountain climbs) results in bone injuries – extensive bruising and a small fracture to my left femur. My knee may take as long to heal as it took to cause the damage. And Peru was a powerful dose of knee wear with which to begin our year’s adventure. About two-thirds of the way through our year off we began to look back at Peru and comment that it was a good thing we’d done Peru first, because at that point we didn’t feel capable of the mountain exploits we’d done back in September. Now, a full year later, I have similar thoughts regarding the year off. I don’t think I could do it again. I certainly can’t do it again in the condition I’m in now. The effects of aging isn’t the point of this piece but I had to get past that to get to the wind-down in Huanchaco. While Machu Picchu was one of the icons that we built our year off around – the others were Easter Island (up next) and Angkor Wat (towards the end) – the lazing away of days and weeks in Huanchaco is the travel style that we wanted to perfect. Later, we executed a nearly perfect down-time dropout on the island of Koh Phangan, where we spent 33 days doing as close to nothing as two people can manage. In Peru, we spent almost half our month in Huanchaco. It is a small fishing village, with little going for it but charm, and we made it our home. By the time we had wandered every street I knew we were successfully living in the moment. That’s a sensation that we are striving for in our travels and, as much as Machu Picchu was a miracle in the mountains, Huanchaco was its own miracle on the seashore. I am more likely to go back there, but that may just be the bad knee talking. We could always bus it up Machu Picchu.

Re-living our tour in photos

A totally unexpected result of travelling for a year (unlike any other number of months) is that we are re-living the experience month by month as we sort photos. It's September now so we have spent weeks sorting and editing our Peru pictures. As we build a slideshow of our month in Peru, we are choosing from photos that weren't available for posting during our trip. We carried two cameras but only blogged from a backup point-and-shoot. So, here's the result, a handful of our Peru favourites. We might find a few more before the end of September when we switch to reminiscing about Chile. But first we'll have an essay on Peru, which will be our next text post.

Friday, December 4, 2009

NZ and a wee bit of AU

Everything in New Zealand is an acronym, thus the title of this post. We spent 20 days touring the South Island in the rain in a van. We kept saying, over and over, "I'm glad we're not in a tent." After so long in the van, however, things were awfully cramped, our belongings were a mess and everything was a bit smelly. Let's not even talk about the claustrophobia that Bob suffered with his head wedged into a back corner and his feet shoved between the front seats. Karen had a cold the whole time. Yet we loved it. We hiked every day (well, one hike was cut short by a bathroom emergency, but we survived). Some of the campsites were spectacular Department of Conservation areas where you paid $5 a person and parked on the lawn adjacent to mountains, lakes, rivers and sheep farms. Others were more like trailer parks where we crashed when we needed hot showers. Sometimes there were hottubs, but these places cost up to $40 a night. Still, the ease of just pulling in and making yourself at home was remarkable. At the south end of the the South Island, we decided not to go to Stewart Island because of the six metre swells. And after a couple of rainy weeks, we wrote off the West Coast because it's the rainy part of the country and that just seemed like a bad idea. Our one extravagence was a cruise on Doubtful Sound which is further south, more remote and much bigger than the more popular Milford Sound. The wee cruise boat we were on was only half full so the trip didn't seem so touristy, but the guide running the show was great . . . he got a handful of people up to the bow of the boat as the captain slowly creeped up under a waterfall. Karen collected a cupful of falling water to drink while I kept the camera dry. We were fortunate to have cruised Doubtful Sound because when we got to Milford a few days later it was socked in with fog. The hundreds of wee waterfalls on the road in were cool but it wouldn't have been worth going on a cruise under those conditions. Our biggest hike was up to the Rob Roy Glacier near Wanaka. Even the hour-long gravel drive to the trailhead was amazing. We crossed 9 fords (you know, water running across the road) and 9 cattle stops (metal bars across the road). Bob even took his shoes and socks off at one ford and waded in to make sure the water wasn't too deep for Syd the van to traverse. The drive and long hike was worth it to get up into the glacier valley and watch bits of the ice calving off and tumbling into the valley. Chased after some alpine parrots, too. Since NZ we've had a couple days in Australia, and went straight from Sydney where hotels are pricey to the Blue Mountains for some more hiking. Yesterday we were out for 6 hours. Gaa. Lovely clifftop hikes, looking across at other cliffs, all looking down on eucalyptus trees that make the distant hills look blue, really. The 900 stairs down and up were a bit much, so we're taking a rest day today. Karen ate kangaroo steak last night so we really must be in Australia. Hard to believe.