More Pix

Hey, Shawn here. Got a few more photos for you. We are now at Lake Titicaca in a town called Puno. It's very cold here because the elevation is nearly 4000m above sea level.

The first photo is of some of the many thousands of sand dunes near Ica. Sandboarding was actually faily un-fun, unless you rode the board like a sled. It is impossible to turn and you basically fall directly down the hill and get completely filled and covered with sand. So to all the Canadians: Be proud, snowboarding is infinitely superior! I must admit though, it was a lot of fun riding the dune buggy up to the slopes.

The second photo is of one of the domesticated birds that freely lived at the Haucachina Oasis. They were friendly and (as you can see) let me get some very close-up photos of them. I made sure to take lots of bird photos for whoever likes parrots and such.

We went on a long car tour of the coast near Paracas. There was an absolutely revolting bathroom with an absolutely spectacular view out the back window (photo 3). It was a bit of a tourist trap area with food that cost 4 times as much as elsewhere, so we just had a drink each and ate about 10 bowls of free corn nuts. Very economical.

The last photo is from one of our many bus rides. I can't remember

exactly which one, but I think it was when we were heading back to Arequipa following our 3-day trek in the Colca Canyon. We made a lot of friends on the trip - a few people from Seattle, a couple of Australian girls, and two well-travelled guys named Tom. One of them was from Austria and the other was from Zimbabwe. We talked about nik-naks, chappies, Johnny Clegg, and all the other things I could remember from Southern Africa. :)

That's all for now. The internet here is fast-ish but the pictures are huge and uploading them still takes a while. Unfortunately there is no program available to shrink them, but I know that most people reading this will have super-fast connections anyways. Anyways, cheers from Lake Titicaca.

-Shawn