Recap -- Back from South America

"Curious, Outlandish Ways"

A tiresome day selling fruit in Leon, Nicaragua

"We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can 'show off' and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our own untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off. ... The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad."

---Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad

Catching up after our 31 day 8400 nautical mile trip from San Diego down to Peru and back.


Costa Rica

Shannon, not so sure about those mesh suspension bridges

Meh

Camo Butterfly

Passion Flower

Classic Costa Rican Cart for collecting coffee beans

Mural of the same
BTW Costa Ricans say that Juan Valdez drinks Costa Rican coffee.

Exotic Varieties at a Roadside Fruit Stand

Nicaragua

Lion in Leon

View of Leon's Parque Central from the Cathedral

Very Interesting Roof of the Cathedral

Hmmmm ... no comment

Volcanoes in the far background

The San Jacinto Mudpots

 It ain't no Yellowstone

Locals allow their children to play around the mudpots

Guatemala

Buggy ride around the Parque Central of Antigua, “Safest town in Guatemala”  (Sounds to me like Damning With Faint Praise), Cathedral in the background.

Vendors everywhere, of course

Arch beyond the arch.  Behind the town hidden in the clouds is a volcano.

 

Santuario del Santo Hermano Pedro, one of many churches in Antigua damaged or destroyed over the centuries by earthquakes.  Of course the Spanish overbuilt, planting a church in each and every neighborhood.

Many of them sit like this, broken, simply abandoned.  Looks almost like a Roman ruin.

Others, like the ornate and lovingly restored church and convent La Merced, remain beautifully intact.

Smoke from one of Guatemala’s 33 active volcanoes

View of the countryside, more volcanoes

Classic Guatemalan textile work

 Last Two Stops in Mexico

Manzanillo

Sport Fishing for the Pez Vela or Sailfish is big business here.
MS Statendam docked there behind the palm trees.

We explored the hillside neighborhoods of Manzanillo

Puerto Vallarta

Fun Sculptures all along the Malecon

And Cra-cra Pastimes for the Adventurous Tourist

Manta, Ecuador

Little Ecuadoreans on Playa El Murcielago

Much of the world’s tuna is caught off Ecuador.  Here they are unloading the catch from a commercial tuna boat that has its own helicopter for spotting schools of fish.

Lima y Cuzco, Peru y Machupicchu (Ma-chew-peek-chew)

Three days off the ship, in order to spend three hours wandering around the hauntingly beautiful complex of Machupicchu,  the Inka Empire’s highest expression of Stone Age technology in architecture.  Worth … every … penny.

“In you, like two parallel lines,
 the cradle of the lightning-bolt and man
rocked together in a thorny wind.”     ---Pablo Neruda

From the port of Callao, took a bus to the Lima aeropuerto; flew LAN to Cuzco, then overnight at our Hotel Libertador.  Disco around the corner outside our window pounded out the insomniac beats till 0315.  Up at 0400, muy cansados, to ride a bus over the mountain two hours to Ollantaytambo train station; train to Aguas Calientes, then bus again up (a dirt road series of hairpin turns) to the Parque Nacional.  Later, reverse.

Dire warnings.  Of course we had planned wild naked escapades before lunch, but, being forewarned, were then afraid we’d be reported to the US embassy.  It might have appeared on our Permanent Record.  Horrors.

 

Como se … llama

 

The famous Three Windows

 Sector Waynapicchu, my personal favorite.  An extremely dangerous climb up a neighboring peak.

Windows to a different perspective.

Just how the Inka accomplished their massive mortar-free stonework is still not fully understood. 

Central Park

Temple of the Sun

Some of the Legos spare parts in Cuzco.

Parks in Cuzco use Minions for trash cans.  Despicable Me would be offended.

Lovely Peruvian:

Her, not him.

Third Stop, Panama City

The beautiful Biodiversity Museum, designed by (duh) Frank Gehry.

Not all structures around Panama City are so nice.

Colorful, but a tad run-down.



This is Mola, an art form stitched by the indigenous peoples of Panama.

Casco Antiguo was the original Panama City, sacked by pirate Captain Morgan in 1673.

The Casco Antiguo lookout tower

View from the tower

Graffiti in the tower

The modern Panama City skyline from the original

“I have in my hand a device capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge; I use it mainly for arguing with strangers and looking at pictures of cats.”

As we're sailing away from Panama City a storm followed us out to sea.  The high-rise skyline is visible behind the line of rainclouds.