Last week in the City!

I'm sorry blog, I've been neglecting you. It's not that I don't care.. I've just made other friends.

Where to begin? This week has been crazy. It turns out Cuzco has quite the night life... and apparently anything goes. I'll come back to that (maybe) but first I'm going to work through some of what's happened this week. Honestly, the time since my last post has been a blur. I was looking through some shots today and remembering entire days I'd completely forgotten about. Some of the things that have happened are completely insane while other's just make you stop and think for a moment. For example, on my way to class I came across this kid sitting quietly alone, washing a llama statue. 

So, lets begin. I've met an absolutely great group of people through my spanish school and have been having a fantastic time out here. I'm not really sure what the policy is regarding talking to the internet about people you've met, but if you guys are reading this, you're awesome! I've been having a blast, and to those of you who are leaving soon or have already left, I'm gonna miss you! (Hey, you guys back home, I miss you too!). 

Anyway, with my stomach still not fully recovered I've avoided typical Peruvian food for the last few days. The shot below is from one of the classier touristy restaurants (can you even say that?). They make a killer breakfast, though they're a bit pricy... almost $7 for the more expensive meals. 

I've also been frequenting McDonalds.... I know.. I'm the worst. Who goes to a foreign country just to eat McDonalds? Well... someone who made an effort to only eat local food and suffered for it. Yeah, it makes me feel sick, but it's the comfortable McDonalds feeling I know and love. It's right outside the clubs and there are always adorable kids waiting to sell snacks and cigarettes to wasted tourists.. along with the cutest puppy. Mom, you're going to have to start building a new house in the backyard for all the kids and animals I'm bringing home with me.

There seems to be something happening in Cuzco all the time, though that may have something to do with the city center being a 10 minute walk from my hostal. Saturday was no exception, with a huge art festival taking place in the central plaza. There was a huge variety of art, ranging from some fantastic abstract photos to fairly loaded political cartoons. 

There was also live music and quite a few street artists, my favorite of which were a pair of incredible chalk artists. We must have spent at least a good half hour watching them work. 

One of the things you notice about Cuzco, and I imagine much of South America, is that the people really LOVE anything and everything colourful. At night the city lights up with neon, from the cabs to the water fountains. People on the streets sell glowing toys and half of the cars have some sort of florescent light or sign strapped, glued, stapled or tied onto them. 

Now, I don't go clubbing at home so I really can't comment on whether or not it's better here... but the club scene is pretty insane. Of course, the fact that I travel with a pack (that really does seem like the most appropriate word choice to me) of gorgeous ladies (I know you're going to read this, ahah) gives me a pretty big advantage when it comes to having fun. First of all, we don't pay cover, nor do we pay for drinks. More importantly though, everyone seems to be totally fine with us dancing on the bar tables... all night long. Unfortunately (or fortunately) my stomach has refused any sort of alcohol but it hasn't really mattered. The key was just to acknowledge that I can't dance and do it anyway. There's nothing like having a bunch club goers taking pictures of you as you fall 5 feet off a bar (don't worry, I'm fine... It wasn't my fault, I swear) to remind you that it doesn't really matter what you do. Friday was my first day out, but things got a little more intense on Saturday. Somehow Kylee (below) and I ended up in a pissing contest (you don't know how long I've been waiting to use that... though I'm not sure why) of sorts. 

Sorry Kylee.. it's the only picture of you I've got. Anyway, someone from the spanish school mentioned that they had stayed up all night to watch the sunrise, and of course, it became our goal for Saturday night to do the same. By 2 am everyone was too exhausted to keep dancing. By 3 am, the only people not begging to go home were Kylee and I... only because we were too stubborn to admit defeat. The group slowly began to trickle away to their respective homes and we made the (mostly insane) decision to go get our sleeping bags and hike to a vantage point to wait for the sun to rise. Now, you're all thinking that tropical Peru must have lovely, warm, humid evenings. WRONG! It drops to just above  0°C every night in Cuzco. So in theory, it was a great idea... in practice, it was incredibly cold. We couldn't sit in the grass because of all the frost. That being said, sitting on a ledge for 2 hours overlooking Cuzco as the sun began to crest the mountains was one of the more beautiful experiences I've had of late. Kylee, thanks for being such a champ and joining me for such an awesome night! Unfortunately we thought the sun was going to rise directly in front of us (photo below) but it actually came up far to the left behind a hill. By 6:20 it was getting bright out and the sun still wasn't visible... so, it turns out we completely missed the sunrise. Oh well, next time, right?

Since then I've just been taking spanish lessons, sleeping and hanging out. I also turned 20.. oh the horror! I was sitting in my room when someone knocked on the door. I opened it to find most of the employees of the hostel waiting outside with a cake! They had planned a mini surprise party for me and we sat around in the courtyard eating cake and laughing at my awful Spanish skills. Definitely one of the sweetest things anyone's ever done for me, so thank you hostal Qorichaska! 

My next post will probably be from the rainforest... so stay tuned (and tell all your friends!).

* Because blogspot is hosted by google it keeps track of the stats of all my site visitors. Whoever is reading from Malasia, Hi! 

A New Look

I've decided to switch hosts... blog.com was slow, almost always down and impossible to use. Hopefully I won't regret choosing blogspot over wordpress.

Ok, so I'm still alive. Turns out that going back for more street food may have been the wrong decision. Very wrong. So wrong that I spend from Saturday night until Tuesday afternoon slowly dying in bed (did I say bed? I meant the bathroom). Really nothing to mention from that period of my life that anyone wants to hear. I spent almost the entire time watching Bobs Burgers; not necessarily the best decision considering my reason for being bedridden. Today I finally satisfied the intense craving for a good bacon cheeseburger that I'd been building for the past 4 days. Nortons Pub managed to provide me with an enormous burger, complete with smoked ham (basically Canadian bacon), cheese, mushrooms and avocado. Perfect for those who have suffered at the hand of the local cows heart... oh ya, that street meat I've been eating is cow's heart. Neato!

I haven't really got much to report as far as activities. Before getting sick on Saturday I went to 2 hours of salsa lessons, which are provided free for people at my Spanish school. The only thing I learned other than some of the basic footwork is that I was not meant to be a salsa dancer (go figure, right?). Oddly enough, I also attend the school for spanish lessons. I've been taking 5 hours of lessons a day this week and will hopefully continue with the same amount next week as well.  Originally this was 1 hour of private lessons and 4 hours of group, but the amount of lessons I'm taking allowed me to surpass the first group in a day. So, they've put me in an "Intermediate" level group that contains only me (2 hours of private for the price of group lessons!). It's definitely starting to come together and I think I should be able to make basic conversation by the time I head out of Cusco.

Things I've noticed:

You can buy anything on the streets. Pick something and I guarantee you'll be able to find it somewhere. Want a universal remote? A rather grumpy man on Avenida El Sol sells them exclusively. Individual roles of toilet paper, BBQ lighters or pocket sized containers of maintenance oil? They're there too.

People here are incredibly short. I fit XL pants in Peru...


Relevant Info:

I haven't mentioned anything about why I'm in Peru as of yet, so here we go. I'm here with a professor from my school (Jill Jankowski at UBC - though she isn't actually in Peru until August) to study, in general, the reasons behind birds geographic distribution in the tropics. For a bunch of background info on the project, where I'm living and what I'm doing; take a look at her website: www.zoology.ubc.ca/~jankowsk/Manu_Project.html.

Here's a short video describing one of the components of the project (not what I'm working on but at the same location): http://vimeo.com/25010852.

One of many fascinating aspects of tropical bird distribution is that they often have what we call "shoestring distributions" with very distinct replacement zones among species. Imagine tying shoestrings of different lengths into loops and then draping them over a model of a mountain range. They're all spread out across the mountain range but every one sits at a different height. Similarly, you find many birds with large ranges stretching along the Andes but very narrow distributions when you look at their elevational range. Furthermore, as you change elevation you hit a point where one species abruptly stops occurring and another, often similar species, replaces it. Our project looks at why this happens. It's essentially niche modeling with as many variables as we can measure (which is a lot, but only a small fraction of the actual amount of constraints). In specific, I'm studying the variation in Corticosterone (a hormone that broadly reflects stress levels in birds) levels within species as one moves from the center of their elevational range to the fringe. Hopefully this will fit in well with the other data that's been collected and give us an idea of how much pressure these birds are facing as they reach the edges of their range.

Irrelevant Info:

Crowd-sourcing is a (as far as I know) relatively new phenomenon on the interwebs. I recently came across a fascinating application of it at www.petridish.org. For those of you who haven't heard of it, crowd-sourcing allows people to pitch ideas to the internet and readers can then donate to fund these projects. They are either rewarded with a share of the outcome of the project or set rewards depending on the amount donated (as on petridish.org). This is absolutely fantastic for many aspects of scientific research, which are generally underfunded. Ecology, for example, is difficult to find funding for but often requires very little money to get meaningful results (just enough to send a researcher and field assistant to live in the rainforest for a few months). Considering the amount of nature programming on TV and the hoards of people who call themselves animal lovers, one might think ecology would be well funded. With projects like this, people can give money to researchers in need that will directly accomplish something (sending cool people to cool places to do cool things). Anyway, check it out. Maybe someday you can help pay for me to go somewhere cool! Me, or starving kids in Africa... it's your choice.

* I'll put up some pictures when I get a chance to take some. Been a bit sidetracked by the stomach issues and spanish lately.

** The other two posts are acting weird. I'll make em pretty when I get a chance.

Sexy Woman

Ya, this got pretty long. I’ve confined myself to my room due to the effects of street food and drinking tap water… so I’ve been writing. Having only taken private spanish lessons (group starts next week) so far and made no effort to be social, I’ve spent the last 3 days mostly alone. As such, I am making an effort to develop an inner dialogue to keep myself entertained.. It might pop up occasionally (I JUST WANT TO BE LIKE ABED).4 days in, what’s the weirdest thing that's happened to me? I came home today to find that my room had been cleaned and my laptop had been turned off. Initially, this seemed only slightly odd. It’s not until I turned it on that things got weird. First of all, my desktop picture had been changed to one of the standard mac ones. Second, all my torrents had been paused. Finally… I get a portuguese error message whenever I try to load any facebook page followed by ChromeSetup.exe downloading itself. The chances that it’s a Trojan virus are somewhere around 100%. I just… I don’t even know. Am I going insane already? I thought I had at least another month before I started losing it. Oooh, also, anyone want a purse? These things are like 5 bucks… complete with pockets and everything. Really, anything knitted could be yours for next to nothing. I got an alpaca toque, hoodie and pajamas for about $22 (and probably got ripped off at that). 

As far as food goes, people ask me (I mean… I supposed they don’t really), “Torin, whats so great about a 7 soles lunch?”. Well, first of all, it’s 3 courses with juice for less than $3. But (arguably) more important, its an adventure! Knowing basically no words on the menu means I get to choose 1 of 3 mystery foods (it’s a set menu). Yesterday’s surprise appetizer was chicken foot soup. I was half way done the soup before I even noticed the feet..

Now, for those of you who decide to go travelling, you’re going to find people selling kebabs on the streets at night. Yes, they’re delicious, juicy and probably the best kebabs you’ll ever eat. Sure, they cost less than 30 cents. DO NOT EAT THEM. It’s not worth it. Well, actually, maybe it is? You’re going to get sick regardless, might as well enjoy the food while you can. I mean, you’ve just gotta build up a tolerance to the bacteria, right? I want that incorporated into my obituary.


Anyway, I spent the last 2 afternoons “birding”. This involved sitting with binoculars on a street overlooking someones rather wild looking backyard and becoming increasingly overwhelmed. Have you seen birds of Peru? Probably not, because none of you care in the slightest about birds. Its big though, 1800 bird species big. Finding a bird in it is like playing where’s waldo in a 640 page book, except that multiple people in the book look exactly like waldo but aren’t. Why? Just because (actually habitat, elevation, foraging strategies, location etc.). Oh, also, the picture of waldo isn’t what he actually looks like.

If you’re feeling adventurous, look up Black-throated flowerpiercer, Band-Tailed Seedeater (above), Chestnut-Breasted Mountain-Finch (an endemic – Woot!), Rufous-Breasted Chat-Tyrant, Golden-Billed Saltator, Rufous-Collared Sparrow and White-Browed Chat-Tyrant. Notice anything? Ya.. they all have the same color scheme. They were also all in this persons backyard. Actually pretty damn cool if you think about it in an evolutionary/ecological perspective (but I’ll move on). Here’s my birding spot, where I was joined by a dog for a while. Nice guy… hates cars.

As all the birds seemed to be flying into the hill/mountain behind me I decided to climb it. After skirting some gnarly barbed wire I found a tiny trail. Very cool place (forgot to take pictures)… but no new species. The top of the trail finally broke into a narrow clearing facing a series of rock walls. It turns out that my birding trail is actually used to avoid the entrance to the ruins of Sacsayhuaman (pronounced by white folk as “sexy woman”, hence the title). I guess it only took me 3 days to start breaking into places. With the entrance fee still in my wallet I spent a little time wandering the ruins. The view more than made up for the lack of birds on my treck up. Gotta say, I’m a big fan of being at the same level as the clouds.

The internet is undecided on the role of Sacsayhuaman in Incan history but it seems to have been both a temple and a fortress. At the least, it was the scene of one of the last big stand against the spanish by the Incas. Someone who knows history (Tegan), tell me about it please? 

The walls are made up of intricately placed boulders… and when I say boulders, I dont just mean big rocks. Some of these things are triple the height of a person yet perfectly fitted. Nobody really knows how they were built. Unfortunately, there isn’t much left of Sacsayhuaman as the Spanish tore down most of what they could move for their own buildings. For perspective:

Whats even better than crazy ruins, you ask? You guessed it, birds! I came for the Andean Lapwings (below) but stayed for an American Kestrel that perched 20 feet from me. Unfortunately, I managed to butcher essentially every shot. (Photography rant, please ignore).

What I can’t understand is people who swear by Manual mode regardless of the situation. For wildlife, it just doesn’t make sense. When you’re taking some artsy picture of a building, by all means, you’ve got the time to fiddle with every single option. But with something that is constantly moving in changing lighting, aperture priority seems to be the most reasonable way to go. Cameras these days are sophisticated enough that you should be able to trust them with setting 1 component of your photo. And if not, there’s exposure compensation and a whole bunch more. I say this only because I forgot that my Camera was on Manual from some stupid ruins and didn’t realize I was under/over exposing every shot until the lapwings flew away.

Also, I found an old manual 19mm lens back home that can almost always be counted on to produce a ton of lens flare. How much do hipsters pay to get that effect on their iphones?

Welcome

Disclaimer: I’m not going to pretend that I’m a good writer. In fact, I generally stay as far away from this kind of stuff as possible. However, this is the easiest way for me to keep everyone updated on where I am and what I’m doing while I’m gone… so I have submitted myself to the blogosphere. Photography is also an area where I have little experience, so it’s going to start out pretty rough. I imagine the general focus will be on birds, with a bit of other stuff thrown in along the way. I’ll do my best not to noticeably edit pictures but until I can really figure out my camera I may need to use a little post-production. Feel free to let me know if my writing is crap or my pictures lacking.

With that out of the way, here begins my next 6 months in Peru:

After close to 19 hours in transit I awoke to what I can only assume are the Andes as my plane began to make it’s descent into Cuzco.

I’ll be staying in Cuzco for the next 2 weeks, so you can expect this to resemble the typical tourist blog. Come back in 3 weeks and I might have something interesting for you.

Food, as expected, is dirt cheap and delicious. My first 3 course meal cost about $3 and looked something like this:

 Completely unrelated.. The drug dealers on the streets seem to have a great grasp on English. Along with that.. drugs are incredibly cheap. If you’ve got a cocaine addiction and are reading this… save yourself some money and come to South America.

As with most developing countries, there are strays everywhere. They just happen to be incredibly cute. Mom, can I bring one home?