rodents, swedes, more people, mountain bikes and speed

it´s only been five days since i last posted but i don´t even know where to start. so at the risk of sounding boring, i´m just going to list what happened after i watched the sunset on friday.

but before i do that - so i neglected to mention that i have met some seriously FUN swedes in arequipa last wednesday. i met up with lisa for lunch on wednesday and we obviously didn´t mind each other as she invited me to join her and her other swedish friends for supper that night and i went and had a LOT of fun eating and chatting and being completely rude (well, as rude as a canadian can get) and blunt (mostly at nik´s expense). and the food was SOOOO good. yummy sauces. weird colours - but super tasty. anyways, there were two german girls who are also traveling that joined us and we decided that we would try the local specialty - cuy or, for those of us who don´t speak spanish, guinea pig - on friday night and all the swedes (there are four of them in total that i met) said they´d bring us somewhere. now maja can´t complain about me not having mentioned the swedes in my blog. you guys got a WHOLE paragraph - and there is more to come as i need to tell people about the cuy experience.

• so later friday night we all go to a restaurant so that i could try cuy. oh, and two canadians from ontario (katie and mike) who were staying with lisa came along. the original plan was that the german girls and two of the swedes (simon and nik) were in on the experince, too. however, simon and nik spent the day petting guinea pigs and couldn´t bring themselves to eat one and the german girls just bailed on the whole idea. so i still ordered cuy - which was described as ¨smashed fried guinea pig¨on the menu. i don´t have my memory card with me but those of you on facebook, lisa took a picture of me and the rodent so it´s the most recently tagged photo of me. it was kind of creepy at first but as long as i didn´t touch it with my hands, i was ok. so with a fork and knife i started cutting meat off. it was deep fried and it actually tasted pretty good. a lot of work for not a lot of meat, though. and the left all the insides and i don´t do well with insides that are still inside the animal so i left all that. nor did i do anything with the head - that stayed in tact. overall, it wasn´t bad. and now i can say that i have eaten a rodent.
• the plan was to call it a somewhat early night to wake up at 0700 to start my three-day bike ride around the colca canyon - one of the deepest canyons in the world but we were just going to be biking around the rim. but as i´ve mentioned before, plans are made to be deviated from. a few arequipians that the swedes know came out and i had my first non-asian dominated karaoke experience - and what an experience it was. long story short, i didn´t make it to bed until 0430.
• colca canyon - with two and half hours of sleep under my belt, i got picked up by the tour guide and driver on saturday morning for the bike trip. driver´s name is lucho - super fun guy with limited english. i imagine if he knew more english or if i knew more spanish, we would have had a hoot together! bike guide was a local arequipian named roy who does some serious high altitude climbing on a regular basis (i think he does a 6800 meter climb on a regular basis as a guide) and is somewhat new to mountain biking but was in FAR better shape than any of us. and ¨us¨ was me and an american couple (jen and mark). i´m not really sure how to sum up the entire trip but let´s just say that i TOTALLY love the idea of bike tours where you can do all the downhills and hop into a van for all the uphills. our first leg on the bike was a 32 km paved road that started at 4900 meters and ended at 3500 meters. i think we did it in something like 30-40 minutes. lucho said that he clocked us going somewhere between 70-80 km/hr while he was following us down. and all roy said at the bottom was, ¨wow, that was fast.¨ SOOOOOO MUCH FUN!!!!!!!!! that was probably the highlight. there were a lot of other downhills but none quite as steep. and it got rather technical at times as roads were very rocky - and at those times, i thanked the people from my dragonboat team this year that took me out to canmore to do my first real mountain bike ride. there was a wicked 20 minute uphill climb through SAND on the second day. ok, so it wasn´t all sand but i´ve never biked in sand before and had to walk my bike up a good chunk because my tires were spinning whenever i hit a sand patch and my bike would just stop. so that was probably the not-so-fun part of the whole trip. other than that, no one had to throw their bike into the van before it was time to. oh, and we biked through a tunnel!!!! no lights, super dusty, a little wider than a tour bus. so we biked through two-by-two and lucho followed behind with the high beams - until he decided that it´d be funny to turn off the lights completey for a few seconds. we all yelled at him. so he turned them on again. and then turned them off again. oh, and the food on this trip was SO good. mmmmm. nothing but good food so far in peru. =) so yeah, no injuries on my part. mark wiped out three times on the first day, though. i guess he wiped out enough for all of us.
• alberto - my spanish friend who took it upon himself to make sure that i found a place to stay in puno ok and that i will get out of puno ok. he was my seatmate on the bus ride from arequipa from puno this morning and though his english is limited and broken, he thought he´d be friendly and started chatting. conversation was limited but he seems to be a nice guy. so he basically found us a hotel to stay in tonight, got the tour for the floating reed islands booked for us today, helped me get my bus ticket to cuzco tomorrow and has offered to go with me to the bus station tomorrow to make sure i get on the right bus. very sweet guy from spain who is studying agriculture in a small town in peru. his visa expires today so he has to cross the border into bolivia tomorrow and then come back into peru to get a new visa. i´m VERY thankful to have met him as he has been SUPER helpful today. and he might be able to hook me up with cheap accomodations in cuzco!

and speaking of alberto, he´s just waiting for me to finish up right now before we head out and explore more of puno. so that´s it from me for now. it´s been...two weeks now and STILL no injuries (yay!!!!) and STILL haven´t lost anything (yay again!!!!)