Llamas and Yummy Potatoes

The following has been edited by me (Caleb), and is composed of emails from Liz.

Give Griff a big hug for me, I miss him a lot, especially because I can’t email of call him on the phone. I told all my friends about dad noticing Lucy’s eyes and we had a good laugh!

We treated more llamas and alpacas yesterday and then bailed hay. Bailing hay is really hard. We did get baked potatoes for lunch though, which I really enjoyed. After work we went to a hot springs near one of the university centres. Today we did ultrasound on llamas/alpacas for pregnancy, but they were all open. Then we did some GPS for one of the engineers who are mapping the area. After lunch we went hiking to this high altitude lake we had spotted on Sunday while hiking the mountain. Two school children cruised past us on the way up, and we felt pretty silly geared up in all our hiking stuff.

We are here until Tuesday when we will go to Cusco for a couple of days. We are just missing a huge festival there, which makes us sad, but our plane ticket cannot really be changed : (

I think we are all really missing food from home. There is a pasta place here, but pizza-pasta gets tiring after a while, and everywhere else is meat-ariffic. We ordered beans and rice at a restaurant the other day, but the beans were mixed with pork. We had been warned about that, but all our bean-rice meals until then had been meat free. On my first day back, I want a marinated tofu wrap from cornerstone. And popcorn. And garlic bread from Zehrs. And a huge stir-fry with lots of fresh veggies and tofu in peanut sauce with roasted almond slivers.

Oops, sorry, sometimes I get carried away.

Soon we are meeting friends from IVITA to go out before we leave for Puerto Maldonado tomorrow morning. The nightlife here is unbelievable, last Saturday we danced until 6:30 am, then took a 3-hour bus ride back to Merengani. I hope my Latin dancing is improving :P

We finally went shopping for souvenirs today, the only problem is I want to keep it all for myself! I really like bartering too, sometimes we get stuff for almost half price.... my mom would be in heaven.

Anyhow, gotta run. I don’t think we will have Internet access until we are back in Cusco on July 2.

Say hi to griffin for me!

-Liz