Heading down to Chile

Greetings from Valparaiso!!! So I have officially made it back to my old stomping grounds and it is wonderful. I have been here for a couple of days seeing old friends and favorite places. I forget how amazing this city really is. The trip here was by no means short or easy but it brought me to some wonderful places.
Before leaving La Paz I decided to ride a mountain bike down the the most dangerous road in the world. You take off from La Cumbre which rests at 4600 m up in the mountains ride all the way down to 1200m, that is a lot of meters in only about 4 and half hours. For those of you who know me well, you know that I dont mountain bike and I havent really riden a bike in years, so this was an experience. Like the rest of this trip, there has been a lot of personal growth. There were only four of us in the group and it was wonderful. We started on a concrete road and then got onto the actual death road which was just beautiful. There are no longer any that use the road, they opened a new and better one six months ago, but it was still scary. There were hair-pin turns with cliffs that were at least 500m high. We also stopped a number of times to see busses that had fallen off the side of the ride or memorials for bikers drivers. Overall it was a wonderful experience to push myself physicall and also to see the transition in landscape. We started up in the mountains and ended in the jungle, totally wild.
From La Paz I headed to Lake Titicaca for the third time. This time I visited the town of Puno which is on the Peruvian side. From there I went and saw the Floating Islands. They were very touristy but amazing. The indegenous people created these islands to try and maintain their culture and fight outside influence (kind of ironic that now it is a tourist trap in a lot of ways). There are full towns with supermarkets, public phones and schools floating on the lake and it is all made from natural materials. I am always amazed by the innovation that has been present throughout the years way before the introduction of modern technology. From Puno I headed to find Maggie and Brenda in Arequipa.
I was in Arequipa, Peru for almost a week but in the end did not see much of the city. We spent most of our time just hanging out around Brenda´s house with her wonderful family and friends. This was a good break because at this point I had been traveling for about six weeks and I was exhausted. It was really nice to be able to spend time with a family and friends, it was a lot more like real life.
From Arequipa Maggie and I took a side trip to the town of Chivay in beautiful Colca Canyon. On my trip I have seen a lot of amazing things but this may have been the most beautiful place that I visited. We stayed in a hostal owned by one of Brenda´s family friends and had a great time relaxing there and playing with their two children. The first night we were there we soaked in the towns hot springs under the full moon. It was amazing because we showed up as all the tourists were leaving and had the whole place to ourselves. The next morning we woke up at 4 in the morning to go and see condors. We had to ride 2 hours standing on a really full bus with blasting music but once we finally got there it was amazing. We were there before all the tourists and it was so tranquil. After about an hour we saw some birds deep down in the canyon and we got all excited that we saw the Andean Condor because a lot of people travel to this site and dont even see one bird. But then about an hour later the real show began. The birds that were down in the canyon came up and put on an amazing arial show. They would fly back and forth about 20m above our head. The condor is a sacred bird in the Inca culture and in the wolrd of Andrew Merrell which I did not really understand until this morning and now I am totally in love. They are huge but graceful and beautiful animals. While in the canyon we also did a day tour of the region with Miguel, the owner of the hostal, and saw a bunch of amazing things. It is wonderful to know someone where you are traveling and you can just chat with them about the culture, history and people of a region rather than having to pay a lot of money to go on a tacky tour. From Colca we went back and had a crazy last night in Arequipa and then started to head south.
To get from Arequipa to Valparaiso it is about 35 hours on a bus so we broke it up a little bit but overall we were on a bus for a long time. Although this may seem horrible we had a good time, met some cool people and watched a lot of bad dubbed movies. But it was all worth it because I as back home in the city of cerros and bad spanish.