Last year our planned trip to Peru was canceled due to Covid, but this year we were able to make it work! Geoff belongs to the Young Global Leaders (YGLs) and one particular YGL, Julia, who is a professor of sustainable leadership at Stanford, organized a family resiliency journey to the Peruvian amazon, and we were joining the expedition.
Even though we were with a group and all was organized, it was an enormous amount of work to prepare for this trip! We had a guide for the amazon and I organized a guide for a trip to Machu Picchu, and they needed all sorts of information and documentation. There were multiple flights and hotels to book, a whole packing list with specific items we had to find and buy, Covid forms and tests to fill out and take and arrange for different stages of the trip according to current regulations, and on and on. We discovered six weeks before the trip that Ceci and Adele's passports were going to expire within six months of returning to the US, so they needed new passports, and quick! But there is no expedited service that can guarantee anything faster than three months right now. We sent them in with the understanding that we would have to travel to the nearest passport agency 72 hours before our trip (NY for Adele and Denver for Ceci). Miraculously, we got both of their passports back in THREE weeks!
I did a little crash course in Inca history, trying to fill in Geoff and Ceci as I read.
We had to carry everything on our backs in the jungle, and we had cooler days we tagged on post jungle to Machu Picchu, so packing had to be minimalist yet sufficient. We packed in stages, picking things up we had forgotten and leaving things behind that didn't fit. Finally it was time to go and we headed out on the 14-hour journey to Lima. Ceci and I got a solid 1.5 hours of sleep, and Geoff, who is always upgrades and therefore more comfortable, got a bit more. It was the beginning of a very physically demanding trip.
We arrived early in the morning in Lima, got checked into our small, local hotel and headed out to get a SIM card for Geoff's phone (which unfortunately took the entire day and three different locations. Eventually we got out to see some of Lima's Old Town. I wish we had time to explore more, but we were grateful to get a quick glance and tour of some interesting sites.
First our hotel...
We made our way to the Plaza de Armas, passing Iglesia Merced on our way.
The Plaza was full of Colonial Spanish architecture, but somehow we had a difficult time really appreciating it knowing what was lost because of the Spanish being in Peru.
We toured the cathedral where Pizarro is laid to rest (he is the Spaniard that led a mere 200 men to conquer the Inca Empire), followed by a tour of the archbishop's palace.
We also didn't have a chance to tour Casa Aliaga, the 1535 home of the Aliaga family that is still inhabited by the family's decedents (17 generations!) We also wanted to tour the Convento de San Francisco where there is a library from this same time period of the early 1500s, but we couldn't get a tour in our short amount of time before dinner. Darn!
Casa Aliaga doors...
We met up with the YGL families for a welcome dinner at a lively Lima restaurant in the Miraflores neighborhood where Adele met up with us. She was a bit last minute in deciding to go with us and I'm so glad she did! We missed Tennie, who was concerned about missing so much school. (During the trip she found out that the classes she was most concerned about were canceled for two additional days around Thanksgiving, so she could have come. Bummer. But she had her own adventure. More about that later.)
After a very early wake up call we were on a flight to Puerto Maldonado where we would start our Amazonia adventure!
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