Sorry everyone for taking so long with the blogg. We still dont have the camera so visually all we have are some videos. To summarize our recent movements; we spent our first three weeks in Màncora in the very north of Peru. It is a small beach town in the desert with lots of partying. We stayed there for christmas, new years, and my birthday. Then Camden left for Ecuador again to pick up Jenny while I headed to Cuzco (through Lima) to meet my best friend Joey. Camden arrived with Jenny a couple of days after. Joey left a week later and Will (Camden's best friend) arrived. Since then the four of us have found jobs in different bars and are living together in an apartment in the artsy side of town. Until a week and a half ago when we made the trip to Puno, a small town on the border of Bolivia and Lake Titicaca after a day on the lake we came to Arequipa in Southern Perù.

Màncora historically has very little to offer. Camden and I chose to stay there because it is purely beautiful and fun. Because it's a party town most people hang out on the beach by day drinking delicious natural smoothies and eating great street food like papa rellenas (a potato mashed, then meat and veggies mixed in, deep fried, then split open to make room for tomatoes onions and lettuce). At night you can stand on the beach and hear five different clubs blasting a different latino song, the waves crashing, and foreigners trying their broken spanish on the beautiful latina women. We ate fresh seafood, in the region's most popular dish the Ceviche, which differs greatly from the Mexican version. Rather than mainly shrimp, the ceviche here has an assortment of seafood, no tomato sauce, and often is accompanied with camote (like sweet potato) or something to balance the acid in the lime juice. I took advantage of the soft sand by takig a run at sunset most days. The first time I went I was determined to get away from the town and the reach of man. Màncora is situated in a strange very dry dessert, so on the left there were sandy mountains iluminated by the setting sun and on the right brlliant yellow orange and purple waves crashing over the flat sand leaving the sun's reflection there only broken by seashells and the indentations of my footsteps. When I reached my turn around point I ran into the water to cool off and my bathing suite string fell off. So afterward i ran to the top of the sand dune to find some kind of thread but when I reached the top I was shocked to find a laguna filled with about 200 flamengos. Màncora is dangerously fun and beautiful, It was a good start to Perù.

The day after my birthday Camden headed North to Ecuador and I South to Lima and from there to Cuzco to meet Joey. The bus ride from Màncora to Lima (the capital situated about halfway up the country on the coast) is supposed to be 18 hours. The first bad sign was that the bus arrived an hour late to pick us up. I said goodbye to my friends and got on board. The pan-american highway runs down the coast where it is flat. So the ride was smooth and i fell asleep easily next to a nice old woman. But when I woke up in the morning the bus was stopped, so I turned to the lady and asked what happened. She said 'oh nothing just some small engine trouble, we should be going soon.' I looked out the window and there was an enormous pool of oil underneath the bus, so big it actually surrounded a commercial bus. We waited. Then we got off and waited. It was cold out and we were in some ugly little town that smelled of old fish. I got back on to sleep, but soon awoke to shouting. The lady seated next to me and another one were shouting about a cell phone. Lady 2 was shouting that someone stole her phone, there was a large group of people surrounded around them eager for the entertainment. She started flayling out insults and threats, blaming anyone she could. Lady 1 launched herself onto lady two just as a teenager behind them decided this was a good time to punch his (what seemed to be) step dad. Kids were screaming and the fish was starting to make me sick. Just then the bus roared to life and the pile of people stopped instantly, looked around, then sat quietly in their seats. It's hard to say how wierd this really was especially because no one had slept very well and we had just spent SEVEN hours in this crap town. It turned out the bus wasn't actually fixed... it just made it to the town bus station where we got on another bus an hour later. by the time we made it to Lima I was about 7 hours late already and we hadn't even braved the traffic of a 10 million person city. As we pulled into the station I was positive that atleast one thing must be missing from my bag or that the whole thing some how dissapeared. So I was really pleased to see it intact, but when I grabbed it I realized it was completely soaked through and on top of that the fluid seemed to have come from a tank of dead fish. My friends picked me up and declined hugging me it was so bad. The bus was so late that I missed all buses to Cuzco, meaning Joey would have to wait for me there. Luckily my friend Javier gave me a room, I got to shower (after fish juice and 25 hours in a bus I was repulsive), and then he took me to a nice club with 8 of his most attractive female friends. We got in V.I.P. and free.... a nice finish to a horrible day.

Vilcabamba and Perù!!

First, sorry we have not written in a while but we should be on a pretty regular schedule now. Also our English has gotten steadily worse so excuse the grammar and spelling. Thirdly, our camera finally broke after a slow and painfull death, the pictures we have will have to be loaded later when the new one arrives. And for that we'd like to full heartedly thank Grandma Gene for coming to the rescue after VERY short notice researching, buying, and sending a new one to vilcabamba where we will return to pic it up. So thank you grandma for this blog would be so much less with out your generous help!


The last six weeks of our trip were spent in beautiful Vilcabamba, Ecuador. For a town of only four thousand residents, it has quite the reputation both nationally and internationally. Internationally, Vilcabamba is known to have some of the longest living people on the planet. The face printed on the locally made cigarettes belongs to a man that lived to be 127 years old while smoking their cigarettes. The locals tried to use this fact to disprove most western ideas about medicine. From a national perspective, Vilcabamba is home to a bunch of crazy gringos. When Ben and I first arrived this was our impression as well. We had been traveling for the two weeks before we arrived to Vilcabamba and, as a result, we had come with a group of about 9 other travelors we had met along the way. We all agreed that it was very beautiful but that there was something a little off about the people. As our friends started to leave one by one we decided it was time to start our next farm. This was, after all, the reason we had come to Vilcabamba in the first place. This meant one last night of crazy partying and then to the farm. Our night started at the Hostal Izhcayluma, which might as well be a 5 star hotel, where after enough drinks I got introduced to a guy from California that also had a Woofing farm and he invited us to join him. This was really good news because the farm we had planned on going to was charging 5 dollars a day and the owner was said to be crazy. So we packed up and headed to the new farm. It turns out that it was just a mountainside because the farm had just started. It´s also important to know that the infasis is on it being a community not a farm. So Ben and I got introduced to our first hippie community up in the remote mountains of Ecuador. The stereotypes were almost spot on. Lost of pot, lots of talk, almost no work, cool people, and some really crazy ideas. Some of our friends were reptilians, which you can look up if ur interested, and the others are convinced of the 2012 prophesy and have fled the USA. Most political arguments were derailled when the aliens were brought up, which happened everytime we talked. I thought it was a great experience. I learned and thought more about the merits of religion and belief systems in that week than maybe I have in years. That weekend we went into town with the intent of finding a new farm or a job and, of course, to party a bit too. Evertime i´ve set out to get a job i´ve gotten one and I base this success on the fact that I always cut my hair and shave my beard before applying. At this point, it had been two months since Ben and I had done either. So while Ben was making breakfast I cut it all off. Friends I had been living with didn´t even recognize me and my own brother had to do a double take before he realized it was me. The trick really worked though. I got three jobs from Ecuadorians in one day. This all happened on a Saturday so we went out to the lone club in Vilcabamba to celebrate. I was feeling lucky from all that had happened earlier in the day and so I picked out the cutest girl I could find and started dancing with her. This takes alot of courage because both Ben and I are notoriously bad dancers and latinas are notoriously good. Anyway, it worked out and as we were leaving to go meet up with some of her friends I said hello to the owner/bouncer at the door. I told him I had been looking for work and he started offering me work as a bartender/waiter. So now I had to balance a really good future job or a really hot ecuadorian girl. I got the job but when I looked around the girl had gone. I couldn´t believe how stupid I had been but later on I found her and as the time past she became my girlfriend. In our next blogg we will have to go into more detail about our adventures in Vilcabamba but for now i´ll say that it was split between waiting tables for bus drivers and taxi drivers(typically the best and nicest people right), bartending, and hanging out with our ecuadorian friends.






Dragging ourselves out of Ecuador was difficult, but the daunting $400 fine encouraged us to get out before the visa expired. Our plan was to head to Màncora, a beach town in the north, before returning to pick up our new camera. Unfortunately we headed south from Vilcabamba (it was the last bus we could take) rather than heading west to the much smoother Panamericano Highway. From vilcabamba to Màncora it took us two and a half days of non stop traveling. We first started with a bus to Zumba, through the night and got off at 5 in the morning. Then a giant truck (a Chivas truck for those who were with us in Baños) that has rows of sketchy open air seating that can fit around 30-35 people. It has no seatbelts and only wooden planks for benches. The ride lasted a couple of hours on a dirt road through the mountains that was so bumpy I felt like we'd been sitting on a mechanical bull for 2 hours. A large bridge marked our arrival at the border, to my dissmay there is no public transportaion. You walk accross in the blistering sun and then wait for a long time as a taxi (the only means of transportaion from the border) comes and gathers enough people. Unlike in Ecuador they use normal sedan taxis, but they cram as many people as will fit to make more money. So for another 2 hours we rode with 7 men and luggage through the Peruvian Andes.
Northern Perù is somewhat shocking, culturally. In Comparison to Southern Ecuador there are NO gringos there which meant we stood out... alot and they stare.. a lot. I felt like a dwarf with terrets syndrome. Some people even jumped when they turned around to face two pale strangers with giant packs. Also we noticed that Perù makes use of the ¨Mototaxi¨a modified motorcycle that is essentially a giant trycicle. This is their main means of transportation whithin the cities.. and there are THOUSANDS of them. From San Ignacio (near the border) to Faèn we took another taxi filled with another seven people. Camden and I sat, together, in the passenger seat (welll camden was more on the center console for lack of space). This four hour ride worsened when I mistakenly asked for music, the driver put on really abnoxious traditional singing... very nasally and repetitive with really horrible music videos to accompany. Then randomly in the middle of nowhere we get out and drink the best fresh squeezed pineapple juice I have ever had at some small shack on the side of the road. The worst part about traveling in South America is that the natives seem to never open their windows, no matter how hot or stuffy it gets, like in a taxi filled with seven sweaty people traveling through the high desert at noon, they always seem to wear a jacket and complain if you open your window (if you are lucky enough to have one). This means that most of the time in buses and taxis im am pressing my face and hands against the window to get as much of the chill it brigns from the outside.. as you would do in an airplane. Once in Faèn we took many mototaxis to get to the next bus stop where we waited for the bus to the coast (Chiclayo). During the wait I watched as four boys, who were taking their gallos to Chiclayo for a cock fight, kept getting up and hanging out with some bus drivers that just got off duty. The kids and the drivers were drinking beer and then everyonce in a while I'd watch as two of them at a time would go to the bathroom to do coke. I had hardly slept in the last couple of days and was sick so watching bus drivers from our bus company do coke made me VERY apprehensive about our 9 hr night ride through the Adnes. Luckily they were not our drivers and the kids crashed by the time we borded so they were no longer as jumpy and obnoxious. After that we had one more long bus ride and one more taxi ride (minibus packed with 12 people) to reach Màncora. But we are here now and it is beautiful. The beach is wonderful and were considering staying here 3 weeks or so for the holidays and to learn to surf.

Ok so it seems the only internet cafe in Vilcabamba has horrible internet and our new pictures arent loading, we will try to go to one in Loja to finish this blog.
After leaving the first farm in Baños we went to Salinas, a small town at 3550m by Mt. Chimborazo. It is known for great chocolate, salami, cheese, and llama sweaters. The next day we left on another 8 hour bus ride north to Quito to stay the night on our way to the Orient (jungle). That night we went to Quicentro Sur, the biggest mall in all of South America. It was a depressing concentration of the wealthy Ecuadorians trying to imitate American lifestyle. Quicentro Sur was an unfortunate contrast to everything we've been doing here in Ecuador. The next day was another 10 hours of sickening bus rides all the way down into the jungle. Because of a friend we met we decided to stay in Lago Agrio (named ¨sour lake¨ after the oil found there). Being 30 min from Columbia it was dangerous and had little to offer other than oppressive heat. So once again the next day we took off back towards Baños on our longest ride yet to make it there for halloween. Baños was a welcoming sight. we stayed at a hostel rather than the farm and met many new friends while enjoying some of the more touristy aspects of the city. We left towards Riobamba in hope of cathing the crazy ¨Nariz del Diablo¨(an infamous section of the railway in ecuador) but to no avail (its cosed because two guys died om it recently). Two of our friends, Maria and Maria, from Baños traveled with us all the way to Cuenca where we spent two nights. Cuenca was amazing (resembles a european city), we explored churches and ran into more friends.
Vilcabamba is a small town with many ¨gringos¨but is incredibly beautiful and known for people living until they are 130 yrs old. We ended up meeting owners of a brand new farm where we spent a week out on the mountain. Then we got an offer from the discoteca owner to work and live with him. So we are now working 12 hrs a day at Papayas (the restaurant above the disco, and is Ironically named our least favorite food) for about 30 cents an hour. One day off a week, all meals are given to us and a room nearby! On the weekends we are the bartenders for the club (though he said we can dance too).

The craving of the week: Well it was easy to know whats NOT the craving of the week....cui(guinea pig). Seriously though, let us introduce Atkins French Onion Soup! Make french onion soup and make sure to add lots of cheese on top. Equally as important as the soup, is the container in which it comes. The container is mostly imaginary and open to modification. If possible make a bowl out of 100% steak. If not, use a bread bowl and line the inside with steak.


As you can see, our weekend was packed with many lasting memories. Therefore Camden and I are going to only give a small description of each event to convey personal emotions.
First, there was guinea pig. After work we headed to a friends house hoping to participate in one of the country's oldest culinary traditions. The killing, preparing, and cooking you can observe in our pics and vids. After all the build up we sat down (4 gringos and 6 Ecuadorians) to eat half a cui each, lettuce, rice, potato, camote, and a peanut sauce with intestines and liver inside. The cui smelled strongly of the skin, a greasy odor mixed with a hint of the burnt hair (or maybe I was imagining it). My first problem was where to start. I ate a leg without too much trouble, but then i reached the spine and had to reconsider. There were no feet left because earlier (while cooking) the grandma pulled them off and handed them to us as treats... each time we accepted saying ¨gracias¨enthusiastically. The tonails and bones were, needless to say, difficult to swallow. The testicals (pictured above entering Camden´s mouth) were more chewy, but not much better. My favorite part, I discovered after much timid experimenting, was the face. Or atleast until I bit off too much and the piece of cheek in my teeth pulled with it the eyeball, surrounding cartilage, and a bit of brain.. and that is my experience eating the nation's favorite delicacy.

If you read Ben´s description and you watched the videos then you might be wondering why in the world we would ever do such a gross thing. The answer "we wanted to try something new" falls wildly short of the motivation necessary to put cui testical in your mouth. Saying when in Rome just doesn´t cut it. The true answer is one that my dad and I discussed before the trip; being polite. Every travelor has their fair share of gross things they have done in order to not offend their hosts, however, I would like to point out how rediculous being polite can be. First, rodent foot is all bones and is painful to actually consume. Second, eating an animal that in your home country would be named Pinky brings up ethical questions with every bite. Third, testicals are testicals and no matter what it tastes like thats always on your mind while you are eating them.

The weekend continued the next day with a five minute bus trip to Pampa. One of our friends had told us that there would be a bull fight and jokingly said we should participate. I was in no joking mood. Ben was intent on us jumping off a bridge the next day(I hate hieghts) and I wanted him to have feel some fear aswell. However, I miss interpreted bull fight and just thought we were going to be running down a crowded street with bulls behind us. In that senerio I just had to be faster than the next guy and I would surely make it out. Instead, there were just tons of people watching as the drunken crazy youth would go out and taunt the bull. The game boils down to one very large very pissed off bull and a few guys trying touch it or get as close to getting nailed as possible without actually getting hit. The main thought on my mind and on Ben´s face was 'shit'! Regardless, we were full of pure cane alcohol, adrinaline, and promises we had made to get in(we are from Oklahoma after all). So I got in next to one of the friends we had made. At this point it was still somewhat safe becasue the bull was on the other side and the fense was right next to me, but the bull kept getting closer and closer. It was time for me to run for the fense but my new ¨friend¨ran up behind me and pushed me right at the charging bull. Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!! I ran as fast as I could for the fense and ended up jumping almost on top of the new friend. Nothing hit me but I could hear the croud cheering loudly as they do when someone almost gets hit. We ended up getting much better and one round was even annouced as the extranjeros vs. the ecuatorianos. To most peoples surprise, including our friends, we won the round by actually touching the bull and good use of carpets(Ecuadorian version of the red capes they use in Spain). The next day some guys recognized us in the street as those ¨Yankee torreros.¨

In bullfighting the goal is literally to get close enough to the bull to make it think it can destroy you before you make it back to the fence, and then somehow make it back to the fence. Though I nearly peed my pants Camden and I got in and took on the bull in our own way. While one of us taunted the bull the other would sneak up behind in attempt to touch it. It sounds horrible being bait for such a large animal, but the exhiliration of working in a team and winning the round and the cheers of the crowd offset the fear.

Finally Sunday came and my adrenal glands were at it again. We headed down to the biggest bridge in Baños (200m high) to do the stupidest thing we could think of; jump off. Outfitted with pump up music and two harnesses, I had to wait nervously for what seemed like hours as the ropes were prepared. The jump off platform is literally three slats of wood hanging meekly over the edge. The guy prodded me to the top of the railing where I climbed out into strong gusts of wind. Every muscle in my body hated me. He told me to stand up and put my toes over the ledge (I began to hate him at this point). Each movement felt impossible, I get scared just thinking about it now. As you can see in the video you are forced to lift your arms and then he immideately counts down. All of this sucks but the worst part for me was that while I was falling there is just nothing to hold onto, your body gains a speed you haven´t felt in such a vulnerable position. Then, suddenly your excrutiating fall is cut short by a rope (NOT bungie), this rope is attatched to the harness, which puts all the stress directly on your balls. It was a very worthwhile second of utter fear, but I won't be jumping again anytime soon..

Below me there is 700 feet of nothingness and then jaged boulders and a rushing river. I´m wondering how I always end up in these situations. I hate hiehgts and have no greater fear, and yet, here I am holding onto the railing trying not to get blown over. The way I manage to get through this type of thing is by tricking myself into impossible situations. I know that if I just don´t think about it and have the guy strap me in and lead me up then I will end up past the point of no return. At this point, the shame of backing down would be too great to bear. So there I was standing on the little wooden ledge judging between what I thought was my certain death and getting down infront of a crowd. Luckily, I jumped and it was the most amazing exhilaration ever(other than the pain Ben described).