Tomorrow I will be taking off for a vacation to Peru with my new fiancée. Why am I telling you all? I don't know, I just can't hold my excitement. I don't know how I'm going to make it through my last 8 hours of work with any reasonable level of productivity. We'll be gone for 9 full days, hoping to see as much of the country as we can. If anyone's interested, I'll do a blog type of thing here with this thread. I'm hoping to have at least some sort of internet connection every couple or few days with Wifi on my phone. If not, maybe I can find an internet cafe. I'm getting super excited though.
We did suffer a little disappointment earlier in the month when we learned of the mudslides that hit the Machu Picchu area. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we'll be able to do that due to the damaged railways. However, Peru still has a ton of great places to see. There are three or four different climates (depending how you want to classify them) just in the one country: desert, rainforest, beach, and mountains (The Andes). So you can go to the beach, to the desert, to the amazon, skiing in one trip, if you really wanted to. To me, that's incredible to think about, for all of that to be in one country. Our new plan is to check out the coastline, the desert regions (you'll see why later), the Amazon river, and the capital of Lima, as well as a few surrounding areas.
Last year my fiancée, girlfriend at the time, went to Costa Rica for about the same period of time. This year, we decided to do something really different and go to another hemisphere. I hope I come back in one piece. I may even do para-gliding, if I muster up the courage/stupidity.
Also, if I can see this bird when I'm there, I'll consider the trip a success:
The Andean Cock-of-the-Rock!!!