Nathan Cheng nominated me to complete the do-stupid-stuff-to-draw-attention-to-a-cause aka ALS ice bucket challenge. I have accepted the challenge by donating to the Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis association (ALSA) in memory of my high school principal, Dr. Eric McLaren who recently passed away from ALS. I encourage everybody who sees this to learn more about this debilitating disease and to donate to research by visiting the ALSA website here: http://www.alsa.org/about-als/what-is-als.html.
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Author: apip
Moving into MIT
It has been a while since I posted. The day after my return to Boston, my cousin Mark and his mom arrived to move him into MIT. I am getting pretty decent at this whole chauffeur/tour guide thing, if I do say so myself. It helps that I’ve hosted quite a few visitors now. I must admit that moving into MIT is much worse than moving into Stanford. I remember we had all sorts of music blaring, tons of friendly faces, and loads of signs all over campus.
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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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Day 2 in Peru
Today was a pretty relaxing day. Nothing on the schedule except for planning/booking activities for the next few days and a beer pong tournament at the hostel. I spent the majority of the day reading my kindle, thinking, and enjoying the nice weather out in Plaza de Armas. (more…)
First Day in Peru
I absolutely had a terrible flight itinerary to get here. I flew from ORD -> TPA -> MIA -> LIM -> CUZ ~24 hours door to door. The worst part is I know that I grossly overpaid for the tickets (~$1200) since at the time of my booking, I could have gotten late August tickets for like $600 >.<. For me though, the money wasn't the biggest crunch factor--it was the dates. At the time of booking, I didn't think I could do more than 2 weeks, plus I wanted to get back to the real world. (more…)
Peruvian Preview
Ach! I really wanted today to be a triple posting day to make up for the dearth of posts over the last few days. The three posts I had in mind were: 1) Summary of Belize with Travel Tips, photos, and videos; 2) Recap of Khang and Kathryn’s wedding in Indiana; and 3) The Peruvian Preview and my Packing List (this post). (more…)