To Speak of a New Week

i’m going to have to say that not much has happened that was tremendously exciting since my last update.

On the one hand, that means that i get to bore you with stories and pictures that may not be quite of the caliber of other stories and pictures from this trip.

On the other hand… that means that nothing has gone terribly wrong. And i assure you… i like it when things don’t go terribly wrong… although it usually makes for awesome stories when things do go terribly wrong.

So… i’ll let tales of things going terribly wrong before last-minute rectification and tooth-skin escapes and swagger and bravado wait for another day.

Sunday ended up being a pretty laid back day after the rafting experience, much as i had hoped. i eventually did exciting things in town (i bought oranges, for example… and a Sublime ice cream bar… now that’s exciting!) before finding my way back to the lodge.

i had conceptualized a picture idea involving one of the mountains near the lodge on Saturday, so after returning to the lodge i made my way over to the canyon overlook that has served as one of my primary sites for taking pictures. Much to my horror and chagrin, however, the moon proceeded to rise in precisely the wrong place… i told it not to, my friends, but it did anyways. Seeing how i would need to run about two miles and find a suitable place for my tripod in a combined total of about five minutes (i was feeling too tired for that at this point in time) or to pick up my kind mountain friend and relocate her (him? I hope the thing doesn’t get mad at me… [Note: Spanish has me assigning gender to everything.]) about 750 or 1000 feet to the right (once again… i was feeling too tired for this, as well… but just barely) in order to get the picture that i had envisioned… i eventually just tried to make the best of the situation and come up with another idea on the spot.

i dare anybody to make sense of that last sentence. Three parentheses and a set of brackets. English teachers everywhere are feeling sick to their respective stomachs.

So… whenever i am completely out of any other ideas whatsoever… i resort to self-portraits. So this is just my attempt to fly? (To Australia? Nothing happened? i did get the night sky, though?)



i only tried this 33 times. Yes… 33 times. i hope that i like at least three of them. And my legs got very tired.

i decided to go for a little walk on Monday. i left the lodge at about 9:50 and headed upstream. It wasn’t a particularly eventful walk (although my legs felt very tired throughout it, probably related to my hill experience from Friday and my self-portrait experience from last night?), but i did enjoy watching the landscape slooooowly pass by and having time to note the subtleties of the countryside. i occasionally—although not very often—stopped to take pictures of people working beside the road… but i still am not quite comfortable enough to walk up to people hard at work and ask if i can shoot off, oh, 50 or 75 pictures… or merely five or seven, for that matter. Soon, perhaps…

Regardless… i occasionally would take a few pictures of people working in daily life fashion as i passed… but something inside of me strongly objects to taking daily life pictures zoomed all the way in to 200mm, particularly if the subjects aren’t explicitly aware that i am doing so.

So… Poor style or no style, here’s one of my people working pictures… a pretty typical scene here… bright colors against neutral colors—never any middle ground at all—bright, harsh midday sun, some unused bricks, some haphazardly stacked rocks… and lots and lots and lots and lots of dust.



i had no destination… but at around 1:15 i got there. The road and the river swerved around a soaring rocky ridge before angling towards the east. The road had been several hundred yards and about a hundred feet above the river for much of the journey up to this point, but road and river reunited at the aforementioned ridge. A short hike down the rocks that separated road from river brought me to a comfortable rock that had been smoothed by the rise and fall of many floods, at which i stopped to eat lunch (mmm… oranges and bread!). i had rolled up my sleeves earlier in the day, as it was pretty hot, and remembered to pull one of them back down when i got to the river, but not the other. i personally find that fact slightly amusing… but not as amusing as the fact that the arm of the still-rolled sleeve was utterly devoured by the ruthless biting bugs of Aplao, while the other arm was untouched. It’s kind of like a crazy tan… but better. Oh yes…

In retrospect, i knew the light was utterly deplorable (that’s what 1:30 does, i suppose), and should have tried something to break up the mundanity of the scene that i photographed (like maybe stick my camera on a tripod and prance through the rocks on the riverside… prancing usually adds healthy spice to my self-portraits.), but i didn’t, so you’ll have to live with the boring version, which features my friend the very large nearby rock, the Majes river, and a few hills. The one that i climbed on Friday is the tiny thing barely visible in the upper left.



So, i left my spot by the river at about 1:50 in order to arrive back at the lodge at 4:57… just moments before the 5:00 target time i had set on Saturday night.

Julio asked what i had done, so after consulting my map, i told him that i had gone to Hacienda Peru, a settlement that i had passed a few minutes before stopping. He told me a little bit about the history of the valley—apparently Hacienda Peru was developed by the German man who owned most of the Majes Valley between the 1920s and early 1960s—before stating that i had taken the combi. i told him that i had actually walked, much to his surprise.

Apparently he thought it was kind of a long distance… and it makes me feel like i’m not doing too bad if the locals think i’m walking far.

My estimate—somewhere between 12 and 15 miles in total. Not too bad for a short day, i suppose. i’ll have better numbers for everything when i get back to Arequipa and can use the internet on my own computer… or when i start remembering to take Tye Brown’s GPS with me on my brief excursions… i can’t believe that i forgot it again. Never again! (i hope…)

And… i made some chicha with Julio this morning, which was pretty cool... not much to tell a story about though. We stuck some logs under a stove, lit them on fire, broke some purple corn in half, threw it in some water, set it on the stove, and let it boil for a while... but it was a lively cultural experience!

Very well… i now away.

And remember—it takes true talent to succeed in the Icelandic Circus.