Fair warning, this is gonna be a rant, but writing angry emotions out like this is fun and hopefully it’ll be entertaining to read too. Nothing drives the willingness of people to write stuff online like a bad experience. On Saturday morning, I flew from SF to Chi with Southwest. The airport, airline, crew and aircraft were all great—in fact I got a super legroomy window seat on this brand new 737 (800 series I think). The only bad part of the row I was in was the fact that the seats didn’t recline… but the extra legroom plus window seat more than made up.
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Category: Travel
Moving Moving Moving
Moving always has and always will be a huge pain overall. Packing boxes, sorting things, carrying furniture up and down stairs, it’s all just very unpleasant. It doesn’t mean every aspect of the process is negative, though. I’ve moved a number of times over the past few years for school and work—longer moves being Illinois to California to Milwaukee to DC to Boston to San Francisco.
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PAX South
Winter storm Juno hasn’t quite hit Boston yet, despite the predictions calling for her wrath last night. It’s fine by me, and figure a good chance for me to write about my more recent travels. Early last week I was in SF for an interview, I flew back to Boston and then flew out to San Antonio for the first ever PAX South.
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Belize Summary (with pics and videos!)
Alright, so this post has been in limbo for quite a while. The gating action has been sifting through and compiling all the footage. I have finally done that and have uploaded the video to YouTube.
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Apurimac River Rafting Summary
My 3-day rafting trip to the Apurimac River was an awesome part of my travels, but definitely got off to a rough start. I returned from Machu Picchu to Cusco at about 10pm after leaving at 4pm because the train was delayed due to engine issues. I was feeling pretty sick at this point—I was exhausted from travel, my throat was sore, I was starting to get a fever, so I just wanted to get to sleep. When I found out one of my roommates was an Australian girl who had been bed-ridden from sickness all day, I knew I was in for a long night. I was further vindicated when I went to go take a shower, and there was a schwasted girl sitting down on the ground with her friends all around her trying to get her to drink water. Sigh… oh Loki Hostels. It was like undergrad all over again.
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Machu Picchu Recap
I booked my 4-Day Incan Jungle Tour through Loki, who subcontracted to Conde Travel. Overall it was a fantastic experience, although a lot of it can be attributed to the awesome group I was with, and our guide. Although we ended up at Machu Picchu with 16 people, only eight of us completed the four-day trek together, so we had ample opportunity to become like a little family. Half of the group were doing the three-day version of the tour joined in with us at the end of our second day.
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Salt Mines and Moray Ruins
Today is my last full day in Peru. It’s kind of a bummer that it is raining right now in Cusco since I wanted to go hike up to the Jesus statue at the top of town. It’s a bit too wet, slick, and cold for me to make the trek in my semi-sick state. It is alright though, because it didn’t rain during my half day tour, and it was a lot better than I was expecting.
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Sacred Valley
Ugh. Today was my first actually crappy day while on vacation. I had a full day Sacred Valley Tour, and it was really terrible. We were supposed to stop at three historic sites but only made it to two. At the two we did make it to, we were incredibly rushed (45 min) and barely got to see anything. We wasted over an hour at these two BS markets, which could have been much better utilized exploring the sites. Lunch was also super overpriced. 10/10 would not recommend. #nothappy
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Machu Picchu and Rafting Summary
Today was my day of rest after a full week of travel, so this post has the potential to be a ridiculously long summary… I am going to try to avoid that though, and plan on giving both trips (Inka Jungle Trek to Machu Picchu and Apurimac River Rafting) the individual posts they deserve. This will just be a higher level summary of tips.
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Falling into Place
Today has been my most action packed day in Peru so far, but it is just the start of the busy part of my trip. Tomorrow morning, I am going to be doing a 4-day/3-night trip to Machu Picchu followed immediately by a 3-day/2-night trip to the Apurimac River. I doubt I’ll be posting much at all for the next week, but I will be taking pics, videos, and writing offline.
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