I´m addicted to cocain.
well actually, coca tea. i´ve had a real bad time with the altitude up here. i´m at 11,000ft. air is pretty thin. yesterday 10-nov-09, i had to call it quits before i saw the last two things on my itenerary. my head was pounding so bad. i was really missing sea level. coca tea is supposed to help with the altitude, so i drink it regularly. when i´m drinking coca tea, the pain decreases. without the tea, the pain is almost unbareable. however, i´ve created a multivariate problem. i can´t tell whether it´s the altitude, the tea itself, tea withdrawal, or the 3 beers i had on my first night here that were making me feel so bad for the next two days. oh, i also started chewing on coca leaves. the pain was so bad, i considered cancelling my tour for today and save myself for machu pichu.
luckily, i didn´t.
one of the couples on today´s tour (who happen to be grape growers in napa) gave me a diomox (sp?) pill for altitude illness. a half hour after taking the pill, most of my symptoms were gone! the rest of the day, i felt like a million bucks!
today, we went around the sacred valley. sacred to the incas cuz this weird corn with HUGE kernals only grows there. the kernals are like the size of a thimble.
fast forward to tonight. i sat with a dutch couple for dinner. we were at a bembos (peruvian macdonalds) and this peruvian family sat down next to us. this 13yo girl starts speaking to us in her broken english at the urging of her father. she´s learning english and her father thought it would be good for her to speak to us. long story short, the father is a sportscaster for futbol (soccer to us yankees). he offered us free tickets to watch the game on sunday! i´m supposed to be in santiago, chile that day. i´m going to try to find a flight from santiago to cusco and back for sunday. oh, the game is Lima vs Cusco. can you imagine? that´s THE game for cusco (maybe even for Lima). can you imagine going to a soccer game in s.america? craziness!
itenerary
11-nov: machu pichu, sleep in cusco
12-nov: leave cusco, sleep in lima
13-nov: leave lima, sleep in santiago
14-nov: santiago
15-nov: santiago (and then cusco?)
