The curse of the shoulder...

This week started really well and ended not too well... A friend invited me to go to river witha rafting trip he had going out. I went to the river Jatun Yacu for the day, a really fun class 3 big water section. I then agreed to stay here in Tena (Ecuador) to help out with the company for the rest of the week. I was selling trips in the office and safety kayaking on the rafting trips. Tena is a really cool place to work because it 's a very laid back place. The jungle is not too far and it's a very warm area. There are lots of really good quality rivers nearby and they don't tend to have problems with the water levels.

So I worked for a few days and was really content in what I was doing, the team was great to work with and I felt like I fit right in. Then we headed to the Jondachi River, a class 4 section that I was due to work on this weekend. After a really great morning of slaloming our was down the first half of the river alongside the raft we had a big lunch to get ready for the slightly bigger volume second half of the river. I'm warming up on the first few rapids and we get to a flat section with a big flat rock in the middle. I go to do a rock spin and 'POP' out comes y right shoulder again (just for the record, the rock spin went perfectly, style points for that...). Damn, not again... I grab my shoulder and shove it back into its socket, this is the fourth dislocation I've done now so I've had a bit of practice at putting them back in place. We had about another hour and a half or two hours to get to the take out so I chose the easiest lines and walked around one rapid that probably would have taken my shoulder out again.

The day started with high hopes

So Ecuador doesn't seem to be my luckiest country. Now to finish my trip and get training to get massive shoulders so it doesn't happen again. Something tells me that I´m going to have to spend a while off rivers before I venture back into whitewater. The main thing is that I'm still smiling, Ecuador is an awesome country. Lessons of the day:

1) Do a first aid course if you're kayaking in remote areas, the knowledge you gain will be invaluable
2) Surround yourself by a strong team, you have to support each other
3) Keep those elbows down...

The next time I post I might well be back home, I've got 10 days left of my year abroad. Tonight I head for Colombia to try my luck on the other side of the border!

Peru to Ecuador

After Cusco, I didn't really spend much time at all in the rest of Peru. I passed through a town called Ica, from which I got a short taxi ride to Huacachina. The taxis are called mototaxis and are exactly what I know as tuk-tuks from Sri Lanka, small rickshaw like things that beep their horns way too much. Huacachina is apparently South America's only desert oasis. Yup, I didn't realise that S.America had an oasis either. But it's really quite a sight. 

 That day I got a dune buggy tour which drove us around the dunes to see the sunset. We also took sandboards with us to slide down some of the bigger dunes. I think that sandboards are pretty much just snowboards that you have to wax before you use them. Having said that, I've never been snowboarding... So I could be wrong in thinking that snowboarders don't wax their boards, though it seems a bit pointless.

 From Huacachina I went to the capital Lima. Lima was not my favourite place, it's big and loud. I was only there for a night, so took a walking tour around the city. We went in a lot of churches... The guide said that Lima has 44 churches. The interesting thing is that they are all connected by an undergrund network of catacombs, where worshippers used to pay to have their bones buried. However, and this is the weirdest part, the tunnels were actually created to flee from pirates. No joke. The churches were centres of massive wealth in the form of gold and jewels, so when the old pirates used to land in Lima, the priests would flee in the tunnels with all the valuable goods. Remarkable.

From Lima I had a series of pretty rubbish bus journeys, the travelling totalled up to nearly 40 hours with all the stops. I finally arrived in Cuenca, Ecuador. I have no pictures of Cuenca, because I was only there a few hours and a few hours was enough for me. It's not the most inspirational city. I carried on to the small adventure town of Baños which is where I was until yesterday. Baños is a really cool place, set in the Ecuadorian jungle. I got speaking to a rafting company who invited me to go and paddle with them yesterday! After a really great morning on the water, the boss asked me if I wanted to work as a safety kayaking in the afternoon (an offer which I obviously accepted). It was great to get back into the swing of working on the river, especially since Ecuador is the country in which I hurt myself.

Doing some more paddling in Ecuador and loving every second

Today I am back in Tena, Ecuador. I say 'back' because I was here 5 months ago with the boys from back home, that time in a sling... Tomorrow and hopefully the day after I've been invited to do some more paddling, this trip is fast becoming a South American kayaking adventure. I'm not complaining.

Back to Tena. Same place, different circumstances

Peru!

My bus journey from La Paz (Bolivia) to Cusco (Peru) was quite possibly the coldest bus journey I have ever been on in my life. 12 hours of shivering in my seat, I made a note to self that I would definitely wear more than shorts and flip-flops for my next bus journey. It’s ok though because Cusco turned out to be one of my favourite cities so far. I spent the first day wandering around the town, it feels like a really safe place. There are plenty of reminders all around the city that it used to be the Inca Empire’s capital, loads of ruins can be found in and around the city. Though I do always seem to find myself in some weird situations… The day I arrived there was a teacher’s strike, so riot police were all over the city. There was no violence at all though and the teachers marched through the city very peacefully. That would definitely not have been the case in Chile!

I found the localo market too, where I had lunch. A really tasty bowl of Peruvian ceviche (raw fish marinated in lime juice, rice and sweet potato, for hardly any money at all. It’s quite nice to find a place to eat where there aren’t many other tourists, it makes you feel as though you actually are abroad rather than in a holiday camp.

Hunting out some good food

You'll have to take my word for the next point, since I have zero photo evidence. I went whitewater kayaking again!!! Almost exactly 5 months after my accident in Ecuador, I convinced a Peruvian rafting company to lend me some kit and let me follow them down the river. We did a little exchange in the sense that I helped them out with their safety procedures and English safety briefs, so they lent me the kit and gave me transport and lunch for free. It was great to be back out on a river (albeit a pretty easy grade 3), I felt strong and smooth. I'm really looking forwards to getting paddling back at the level I was at before Ecuador!

The following two days I spent on a trip to Machu Picchu, a must do for any traveller in Cusco. The first day was a long 6hr drive up a winding road, followed by a two hour walk up the railway to the town of Aguas Calientes, a kind of Machu Picchu base camp. I'd opted for the bus transfer to be able to do it in two days since I was fairly short of time, though there are 4-5 day trekking options too.

2hrs of flat along this railway to Aguas Calientes

The day I climbed up to the peak was an early start. You have to walk about 20mins to a bridge which opens at 5am, so you start queueing at around 4:30am. I then walked for about 30mins up loads of stairs as the sun came up, it's through a kind of jungle so the sweat clings on to you, which was kind of annoying. Then I waited for my guide up the top and he took us in the explore the ruins. The first thing that hit me was the sheer scale of the place. You have to remember that Machu Picchu was built something like 600 years ago, so the technology they needed to move those massive rocks must have been incredible. In fact, the Peruvian authorities are no longer planning to renovate any part of the ruins because they simply don't have the technology to be able to do it. The Incas carved the most perfect shapes out of rock and slotted these rocks, weighing several tons, together with zero gaps or imperfections. No mortar, no concrete. Mind-blowing.

The Condor Temple, some intricate brickwork

It was quite foggy at the top which I really enjoyed. It meant that you couldn't see a lot of the other tourists and gave the whole mountain an eerie feel. We did have a clearing in the fog to get some spectacular views of the ruins from above though:

The amount of work that went into this must have been insane

I also trekked to the Inca Bridge, which is a pretty narrow path carved into the side of the cliff that the Incas used to use to transport things.On the way down the fog closed in again, which made for some pretty dramatic llama shots. They posed pretty well I think.

Sketchy path to the Inca Bridge

Work it llamas. Work it.

Yesterday, I went up to Rainbow Mountain. This is a place I'd seen in a photo whilst in Chile and was determined to see it in real life. A 3am start was not on the top of my priority lists, but it was worth the effort. We hiked 5km, and 700m up to 5039m altitude to get the classic views. Hiking at this altitude is definitely a bit harder work than usual, everybody was puffing and panting on the way up. The curse of the fog hit again though, the summit was pretty cloudy. Though the fog did clear again for 5 minutes, so a couple of us that were at the top by that point got some amazing views. 

Yes it really does look like this. #nofilter

So that was Cusco. Stay tuned for the rest of my Peruvian adventure!