Cusco, Peru

Cusco is a medium sized city at 11,000 feet elevation. It is very old. It was the Inca capital before the Spanish came. There are still some Inca walls left, but they have Spanish buildings on them. There is one place where there is an Inca wall. There used to be a church built on it, but there was an earthquake and the church fell down. The Inca wall only got a small crack in it. There are some Inca ruins in the middle of Cusco called Koricancha. It is the temple of the sun. There is a sun calender. The Incas knew that the sun moved from side to side every 6 months. They used this to make a sun calender. They even knew about leap years. On a leap year they would sacrifice llamas so the sun would return to normal. Koricancha was covered in gold by the Incas before the Spanish came and stole it. Everything was covered in about an inch of gold. There was an estimated 20 tonnes of gold. The streets are all cobblestone and rocks. The city of Cusco, since it was the Inca capital, was shaped likea puma because pumas were sacred animals. The head of the puma is Sacsaywaman. There is a 300 tonne rock at Sacsaywaman. The walls zigzag because they were the puma's teeth. If the Incas were being attacked, the soldiers went to Sacsaywaman because it gave a view of the city. When the Spanish came they took all of the stones they could carry down the hill, so there is only about 20% left but it is still huge.

Amazon

Day1

We got up at 5:30 am and had breakfast. After breakfast,we walked out to a tower. The tower is built around a huge tree. It goes 40 meters (120 feet) up, so you are above the forest canopy. The view is amazing. We saw monkeys and a lot of birds. Then we walked out to a lake. On the way, I swung on some roots. It turns out, our guide told us, that what we think are vines are actually roots from strangler plants. When we got to the lake we paddled around in dugout canoes. Dugout canoes are very heavy and tippy.

Day 2

In the morning we took a boat ride up the river. On the boat ride we saw a parrot clay lick. The clay licks are clay banks full of vitamins and minerals, so the parrots eat the clay. Different types of parrots come at different times. Many other types of animals have clay licks, including Jaguars. Then we went up to a local village. The villagers live in bamboo houses on stilts. Since it is warm all year round, only their bedroom has walls. Most women in the village had ten or twelve kids. When someone needs a house, the whole village helps to build it, and it is finished in one day.

Piranha fishing

We went piranha fishining. You get a line with a piece of wire attatched between the hook and line. If there wasn't wire in between the hook and line, the piranhas would bite it off. I didn't catch a piranha, but my mom did. It was about 4 inches long, and they cooked it for us to eat. It didn't taste like fish, it really tasted like nothing.

Chocolate Factory in Mindo

We went on a chocolate factory tour. First the cacoa beans are put out to ferment for 6 days. If they are out for 5 days they aren\t nearly as good. If they are out for 7 days they are completely ruined. Then they go out in a green house to dry. They take 7-21 days to dry in the green house. Then they are roasted. They take 35 minutes to roast. If you don\t roast them for long enough, they have a taste like wine from fermenting. If you roast them for too long they get burned. You can smell them burning, but by then they are ruined. Then they are put through a Champion fruit juicer. Bigger companies have a special machine, but the fruit juicer works well. It crunches the cacoa beans around and removes the shells. Then they are dropped in front of a fan. The beans fall into a bowl and the shells get blown away. The beans have to go in front of the fan 4 times to get enough shells out. Then they go through the juicer again. This time the beans get powdered and fall through where the juice would go. After a few minutes the motor has heated up, and the cacoa powder comes out as a paste. It is pure cocoa and very bitter. Then some of it goes into a grinder which has 2 stone wheels close to each other. The grinding from the wheels melts the chocolate so it flows through. The grinding also makes it smooth. It stays in the grinder for 2-3 days. The rest of the paste goes into a press. The paste goes into a cylinder with a filter on the bottom. It is pressed down with a car jack and blow torched so it stays melted (again bigger companies have a special machine for these functions).  Under pressure, cocoa butter goes through the filter but the cacoa paste doesn't. The cocoa butter lookes like real butter, and is added to the chocolate in the grinder so it will set well when it cools. The pure chocolate left in the press is ground for hot chocolate. White chocolate is made from the cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is also used in lotion.

Baños

Baños is a hot springs town. It is the second most touristy place in Ecuador, with the Galapagos being the first. On the first day we went to a hotel which had hot springs. They also had a water slide, but it wasn't very steep, so you had to push yourself. The next day we went downhill to the next town. It was 20 km downhill, so we barely had to pedal. It was very fun.

Bella Vista

In Bella Vista, they had a dome where you ate meals. There were also rooms in the top of the dome. We stayed on the very top floor. The view was amazing because the walls of our room were totally glass. They had hummingbird feeders out. They had some bumble bee sized hummingbirds come to the feeder. We went one morning to see the Cock Of The Rock birds. A group of them come to one place to try and attract a mate. The males come and make a huge din. If a female comes, they start jumping up and down and flapping their wings while they screech even louder. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see a female come.

This is the dome.

Climbing up the ladder.

A new country

We are now in Quito, Ecuador. It is one of the world's highest capital cities at 9,800 feet (3000 meters) elevation. We are staying in the Old Town part of Quito. Some of the buildings are 450 years old. The buildings have huge carved-wood doors. There are also a lot of churches in the Old Town. The San Francisco church was built in the 1500's. Two Sundays a month there are no cars allowed in the Old Town. We were there on one of the Sundays. It is nice because you can just walk in the street. There are also lots of people on bikes because when  there are cars, there isn't any space to ride a bike. We walked to the Basilica Del Voto Nacional. It is a 1920's church were you can climb up the tower. The tower is 17 stories high, and you can climb right up to the top.  There is also a restaurant on the 9th floor and a gift shop on the 8th floor. The tower doesn't look very big in the picture, but the clock is about 12 feet (3.5 meters) across. You can see the whole city from the top of the church.  We took the cable cars up a mountain just outside of Quito. In ten minutes, you go from 9800 feet to 13451 feet. It was the highest place I have ever been. The air was very thin and you got out of breath just walking around. The view over Quito was amazing. You could see Quito and the surrounding hills.

Pacuare Reserve (Leather Back turtle volunteer program)

The Pacuare Reserve is just north of Limón.  The reserve owns 5.7 kilometers of beach. Every night they have people going out at 8pm, 10pm and midnight on turtle patrols. Even when it is very dark you can see the turtle tracks, because when they crawl on the beach, they expose the wet sand. If you find a turtle track, you stop and wait while the group leader goes and sees what it is doing. If it is looking for a place to nest, or digging a body pit, you want to stay away from it because it is very easy to scare it off. When it starts digging its nest, you can come up behind it, but not go in front of it because it still might get scared off. Sometimes the turtles come up and go back to the water without laying eggs. When it is laying its eggs you measure its shell and you can touch it. Each turtle has a tag on its right back flipper, and one on its left back flipper. The tags help them to figure out where the turtle has nested before and also so they can tell the turtles apart when writing down where it nested, how many eggs it layed and how big it was. They usualy lay 70-100 yolked eggs and 20-30 yolkless. They think that the yolkless eggs make the cavity in the nest bigger so there is more air. After it has laid its eggs, it will fill in the nest and start flinging sand around and digging big holes. All of this mess it is making makes it hard for predators to find the nest. Unfortunately, we have to get sticks and flatten out all of the mess it has made so poachers don't see the nest. The poachers drive up and down the beach in boats, and look for the mess the turtle has made. If there is a mess,then they know there is a nest, and they come ashore and dig it up. So if the messes are flattened out, then they don't see them all and don't think it is worth it to come ashore. The beach is divided into sectors. One sector is 100 meters (300 feet). On our first night we saw a turtle in sector one, which is directly in front of the building that we eat in. I got to hold its flipper while it layed eggs. Then we walked up the bech to sector 3, which is 300 meters (980 feet) away. There was another turtle there. After that I went back because it was 11:30 at night. We went with EPI. They have a place on their website where you can look up the turtles you saw. I will put up the information about the turtles I saw in 2-3 months, when they update their website.
EPI website for Costa Rica
The largest Leather Back turtle ever recorded weighed more than 900 kilograms (1980 pounds). It was drowned in a fishing net. A Volkswagen Beetle weighs 952 kilograms (2100 pounds).  A Leather Back turtle can dive to 1600 meters (5250 feet) because its shell is flexible, and compresses. They can stay under water for 6 hours because they can store oxygen in thier muscles, but when they are caught in fishing nets, they panic and use all of their oxygen quickly, and then drown.

A butterfly on the trail between the stations.

The nesting beach.

Making a sign.

They had good sunsets.

This is what the turtle tracks look like.

I dug a hole on the beach.

San gerardo de dota (in Los Quetzales National Park)

San Gerardo is a cloud forest about an hour and a half from San José. It is at 2500 meters (8250 feet) elevation, so you are in the clouds a lot of the time. There was an amazing viewover the mountains and it was made even better because one side of our cabin was mostly glass. Apparently there are tapirs, but we didn’t see any while we were there. There is a type of bamboo that has what looks like clumps of grass growing out of each joint. This is a staple in a tapir’s diet. There was lots of this bamboo, but no tapirs eating it. We went for a walk down to the creek. In some places the ground was springy. This was because a rotting tree got buried and rotting wood is springy. On our way out, we went to see a Quetzal. The males have two tail feathers that are longer than their bodies. They also fly in a funny way, going up and down like a butterfly. There was a nest with babies, but it was in a hollow tree, so you couldn't see the babies. While we were there, the male fed the babies. When he was holding on to the side of the tree with his head in the nest, he blended in well, and would have been easy to miss. Every night, we went to Mimiriam’s Soda (a soda is like a small restaurant in Costa Rica). They gave the four of us five drumsticks, two trout, a bowl of rice, a bowl of beans, a bowl of potatoes, a jug of juice, a plate of tortillas and four stewed peaches, and they gave us this much every night!

Drake Bay

Drake bay is on a peninsula in the south of Costa Rica.

It is very hot and humid in Drake. There was a creek near where we stayed, so we rented kayaks and paddled up the river. We saw a sloth and a caiman. It was very pretty up the river. There were some beaches and mini waterfalls. We paddle up as far as we could, to the start of the rapids and stopped and swam. There is a caiman that lives in the river, but swims out to the ocean to catch fish during the day. There are Scarlet Macaws in Drake Bay. We had already seen one by the time we got to our hotel. They like to eat the almonds from the almond trees. We went out to Caño Island. It is about an hour boat ride from Drake. We went snorkelling on Caño Island. There wasn't much coral, but there were a lot of fish. All of the fish were making clicking sounds. At the top of the island there are huge stone spheres. We didn't go and see them.They think that they were made and put there by the inhabitants of Costa Rica, long before Spain found Costa Rica. They think that the island was a burial site. It was all good until someone stole my backpack. He came into our room at about four in the morning, so I was asleep. He had gone through my duffel bag, and only found clothes, so he left it. Then my dad woke up and saw the man and jumped up and ran after him. The man grabbed my backpack and my dad's day pack. He tripped going down the stairs and dropped the day pack, and a kitchen knife which he had been using to try and open other people's doors.

Monteverde

I had another week of Spanish school in Monteverde. Monteverde is a cloud forest up in the mountains. Monteverde has a very interesting history. In 1951, 11 Quaker families fom Alabama moved to Costa Rica when two of them were jailed because they refused to fight in the Korean war. They looked at different places in Central and South America, but they chose Costa Rica because they had gotten rid of their army in 1948. The families bought 3000 acres in Cerro Plano hill. They named their land Monteverde. It took them three months to travel 18 kilometers from the main road to their land because they had to make the road as they went. Two years later, in 1953, the Quakers founded the cheese factory. The cheese factory is still there today, and we went to see it. They make cheese and meat products, because when making cheese, only 10% of the milk turns into cheese. The rest turns into whey, and they have a few hundred pigs which they feed on the whey.
Spanish school was good. My teacher didn't speak any English, so I learned a lot more than in Heredia. The weather in Monteverde is strange. Since you are usually in the cloud, it doesn't really rain, though it is misty most of the time. We went on a night tour and saw a fox and two Agoutis. Agoutis are like huge guinea pigs with long legs. We also went to a humming bird cafe. Outside they have 8 or 9 hummingbird feeders. There are always lots of hummingbirds around, and they are not afraid of people. Some of them fly really close to your head. My dad saw eight different types in the hour we were there. It is amazing how agile the humming birds are. It is also amazing how they can fly so fast because Monteverde is at 5600 feet (2000 meters) so the air is thin, and they must breathe very fast. We went to a bat jungle. We learned that there is a type of bat which eats nectar, and it beats  its wings even faster than a humming bird. They also have small fruit bats which get a piece of fruit and hang upside down while they eat it. They are very cute. They didn't have any bug eating bats because a bug eating bat eats 500-3000 mosquitos each day.

Volcan Arenal

After we finished Spanish school, we went to Volcan Arenal. Nobody knew it was a volcano until it erupted in 1968, killing 97 people. Since then it has been steadily active.The first place we stayed at was amazing. When they put food in the bird feeder, toucans came and ate it. They also had a waterfall and a funny spider thing. There were so many spiders that when you scared them, they all moved and it looked like the plants were moving. After that we stayed at Los Lagos. We could see the volcano from the window in our room. They also had 4 hot pools, 3 cold pools and 3 water slides. Their waterslides went much faster than regular ones. You went about twice as fast as the water. The also had butterflies and a crocodile farm.

   

Water slides are much more fun when there is a big drop at the end.

The view of the volcano from our hotel room.

There was a gecko in my suitcase.

Our "Tico" Familia

The Tico (Costa Rican) familia that we stayed with.

The Ticos call this a "Suicide Shower"

Spanish school

Our first day with our family was very tiring because we couldn't understand anything that they were saying. They have three very friendly dogs. Our first day of Spanish school was very tiring too. We took a test to see how much we knew. The teachers can speak English but don't during class. The only other person in my class is a 4 year old who speaks quite a lot of Spanish. In my class we do fun things. We play with balls, watch movies and draw things. By the end of the week I could understand a few words. By the end of our second week, I could understand a bit more, but I can't say very much.

Costa Rica

We flew into Costa Rica and spent the night in San Jose. The next day we went to the Manual Antonio beach. We took surfing lessons. Surfing is hard. I fell off a lot. The next day we went to the Manuel Antonio Park. We saw monkeys, Three Toed Sloths and racoons. One of the monkeys tried to steal a man's bag of snacks. Every day the racoons come to the picnic area and steal people's food. One man fed the racoons and then was surprised when the racoon tried to steal some of  his food. Then next day we went on a canopy tour. You go on zip lines and swim in a waterfall. The zip lines are amazing. They are fully supported by trees. The longest one is over half a kilometer (one third of a mile) long. The waterfall was very cold. The next day we took a bus to San Juan, the town that we stay in with a family and do Spanish school.

                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                               

Etosha

Moremi and the Okavango Delta

Makgadikgadi Pans National Park

Tuli Block

Ngorongoro crater and The Great Rift Valley