To Speak of a Few Days in Aplao

Greetings from Aplao!

What an interesting trip this has been… and i haven’t even eaten a guinea pig yet.

i safely arrived at Aplao (although if i remember correctly, the word “sound” in the expression “safe and sound” refers to mental state, so i’m not sure that i can say i arrived safe and sound…) on Thursday at 2.

If you expected any logistical issue to resolve itself in a pleasant and reasonable way on this trip…

Well… I’m assuming that none of you were as foolish as me to expect something like that. So, for the rest of you who eagerly wait whatever tales of strange logistical circumstances causing me to crinkle my forehead and scratch my scalp (which may be slightly burnt… i should buy some sunscreen today… although i probably wouldn’t put it on my scalp… i suppose i’ll use a bandanna for that…)… i have great news for you!

i arrived at the lodge where i’ll be camping for the next indefinite number of days and pitched my tent… to find that—surprise!—the tent had no rainfly with it.

So… that’s always interesting. A three-season tent… and this time without a rainfly… somewhere (it would be Tulsa, for those who truly must know), Brent Higgins doesn’t know whether to laugh a lot or cry a lot.

Just laugh, my friend… just laugh.

For those worried about my health… the rainfly is in the mail, and i’m currently on the outer reaches of the driest desert in the world, so i’m not horribly worried about getting rained on. If a storm hit… well… a rainfly wouldn’t be the least of my concerns. Plus… how cool would it be to say that i lost a night of sleep because i got hit by a rainstorm in the driest desert in the world after leaving my rainfly in Oklahoma during a three-month trip to Peru! That would be awesome!

After thinking of that… i kind of hope that it rains before the rainfly gets here. It would be awesome to have that to tell the grandkids…..

Regardless of what the grandkids have to say about the issue… here’s my four-star setup here at the Majes River Lodge near Aplao, Peru... and you can click the pictures for larger versions now:



The sick mountain in the background is named Cerro Huatiapa, and is actually just a small foresummit of Cerro Luceria, which is almost 14,000 feet… but actually is just a small foresummit of Cerro Tururunca, which is around 15,200 feet. i can’t see any of those from where i am. The mighty Cerro Huatiapa (elevation: about 8,000 feet) is blocking my view. Things are big here.

i went for a brief walk on Friday to get to know the area. The Majes Valley’s main products are tourism, dairy, honey, and grape products, with a few wines that are fairly well known throughout Peru. i know all of these things but tourism merely secondhand.

They grow corn, too… and this was taken while sneaking around the periphery of a corn field while on my walk. It’s really pretty typical of the area… rocky soil in gently wavy furrows, a few young plants growing up, a field braced by endless rock walls, some hills looking on from the distance. It’s pretty cool, eh?



i’m thinking about charging up a hill or two while i’m here… i haven’t really decided which one, though. The two that look the most conducive to good stories are also on the other side of a river that i’m not quite excited about freezing in (it’s snowmelt not so many miles [and 14,000 or so vertical feet] upstream)… but i found another one that looks perhaps a little bit easier, but still very interesting to the northwest. It’s one of the central mountains in this picture, taken on Thursday.



Finally, i just thought i’d leave you with a picture that i took while waiting for the sun to set on Friday night. This is, once more, the mighty Cerro Huatiapa, bathed in the late evening light that comes around here at 4:15 or 4:30.



i’ve taken 250 pictures now… not nearly on pace to hit 15,000, but i expect things to pick up here in a little while. Being alone, i don’t have the fallback option of taking pictures of my partner when things are slow, which is what i do on most trips… but as i get more comfortable with the local culture and as i start to see people for the second, third, fourth time i think that we’ll start to be comfortable with each other enough for me to take some pictures. Currently i feel a pretty strong urge to devote myself more to social photography than landscape photography… so perhaps in the next week or two there will be less pictures of mountains and more pictures of people. Mountains are just easier to take pictures of while i’m still adjusting to changes from 13,458 angles at once.

(i made up that 13,458 number.)

Also… i just thought i should say that my parents are basically rock stars. You should get their autograph the next time you see them. They pretty much know how to be encouraging stateside support like you wouldn’t know. You should all grow up and be parents like mine. Unless you are already grown up… then you should just be parents like mine.

And i think that Caroline is pretty cool, too. If you ask her to be your friend on facebook… i’ll… smile and laugh and think it’s cool?

That sounds like pretty good incentive to me!

Very well… 9pm is rolling around as i type this on my computer from the lodge, from which i will save this update on a flash drive and take it into Aplao tomorrow morning, it has been dark out for the past three hours, my sleeping bag is terribly comfortable, i went through the trouble of getting my pillow out of my backpack today, so i’ve got that on last night, and some Jesus time and sleep is calling for me.

Sleep at 9pm? Whatever has Peru done to me!

So… it’s time to keep on keeping on, i suppose.

The trivia question for today has two parts:

1) What do the native Inuits call Greenland?
2) If you were an island, which island would you be, and why? Fruit answers such as papaya are unacceptable.

And if you’ve got a minute theeese days, just remember what i said about double-decker buses and ten ton trucks, eh?