Well, yesterday we decided to visit the Pre-Inca, Chachapoyan city of Kuelap. Its kinda like an off-the-beaten-path Machu Picchu. One that we can afford. The city itself is completely amazing. Sitting on the top of a 9,000 foot tall peak, surrounded by green mountainsides, Kuelap is about 3 times the size of Machu Picchu (said someone in our tour group) and has the remainings of over 400 stone buildings inside its giant walls. Wow. SO glad we got to see something so beautiful, and for like 30 bucks for the both of us. Why is such a site so cheap to visit you ask? This is why...
It´s a two and a half hour drive out there up and down unpaved mountain roads. The definition of gut-wrenching. On one side, you´re hugging the stone walls, where there are landslides covering half the road at times, and then the other is a straight drop, probably 3,000 feet, down the side of the mountain. I mean, nothing beats the view, but I was literally hyperventillating the whole time. Jenna and I sat in the front of the tour bus with the driver and he was making fun of us freaking out the entire time. He took his seat belt off half way through and said it was safer, so that "when the van starts to roll down, you can escape more easily". Only half kidding...? Mine didn´t work anyways. Jenna took hers off, just in case it wasn´t a joke. He said he has been driving that route almost every day for the last nine years. "You know you have thee most dangerous job in the world right?". "No, todo tranquilo!" (Everything´s easygoing... right.) On the way back down, he told me to honk the horn around curves so he could keep both hands on the wheel. It was probably overkill, but I honked it pretty much the whole time. Safety first, right? Holy shit.
He did get us back safely though, with only a few near-collision encounters. Again, thanks, God. And now, we need God´s guidance some more... because we´re doing it again. We just bused an insanely curvy hour from Chachapoyas to Pedro Ruiz (sitting next to a Peruvian girl who literally threw up into a garbage bag...) and tonight we´re taking our last night bus of the trip (I think) to the port town of Yurimaguas. From there, we´ll hop on a boat, string up our hammocks, and spend the next 3 days drifting down the river in the Amazon River Basin. Pretty awesome. Well, as long as we don´t get Malaria....
Bring it on.
Nae
No comments:
Post a Comment