Machu Picchu Pictures--starring Brad Johnson, Christine Brown, Jon Ferris, Kristen Burton, Speedy Gonzoles, and one unidentified Inca Trail Bandit.

The first day everyone arrived in Cuzco, we went horseback riding and spelunking. Although the pics weren´t great, because everyone was on horseback, in the first pic, you can get an idea of who had the piggy horses. Christine and Dan´s horses are already chomping on grass before everyone is even ON!! We also shared the landscape on our ride with various barnyard animals--cows, llamas, sheep, etc.

This is a pic of the sunrise as Jon waited for the rest of the group to arrive from his hiding spot along the trail the first day.

These kids played with us as we ate lunch on the first day.

The first ruins we saw along the trail--there are many ruins before Macchu Picchu Jon´s view on his walk the second morning

Campsite, night one.

Ran out of room for pics!! Will do day 2-4 next time:)

Departing the Andes (and the comforts of Español)

As we write this entry, Jon and I are awaiting the take-off of our flight from Quito, Ecuador to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where we will begin our exploration of the South American country famous for its beaches, its beach attire, football, dancing and parties, and unfortunately, Portugese!!

Our last ten days in Ecuador have been the perfect end to the past two months we have spent exploring the Andes of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. After the Ferris family left, we traveled just a few hours north of Quito to Otavalo, the town famous for "the biggest markets in South America." Although we cannot claim to have seen all the markets in SA, these were certainly many times larger than any others that we have visited. We began the morning at the livestock market, where we saw cows, pigs (really, really, really, big ones), sheep, and horses being sold and loaded into trucks or led off on foot to their new homes. As a Delaware native, I am closely familiar with livestock, and my family was visited by the occasional loose pig running through our yard when I was growing up. The pigs in this market were much bigger, uglier, and louder than any other I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. They were black, rather than pink, with course hair, and the weirdest scrunched up noses--they looked like they used to have a long snout, but had run into a few too many walls.

After the livestock market, we moved on to the main part, which consisted of thousands of stalls lining the streets of the town. There was a produce section-- where we bought pineapple rounds on sticks (like a pineapple lolipop)-- a cooked food section-- where you could buy meat cut off a whole pig that had been dropped in a very big deep fat fryer (it still had it's teeth!)-- an artisan section--where we managed to refill all the space in our bags that we had freed by sending things home with Jon's mom and dad--and, of course, the everything else market--where you could buy anything from baby shoes to bras to a VHS player.

The best part about Otavalo, though, was the hostel where we stayed. It was an hour walk from the town, through the local farms and up into the foothills. The views from the hammocks on the porch (yep, that's right) were amazing, as was the fireplace we had in our room (all for the bargain price of 9 dollars a night)!! Both made for great relaxation after doing some of the dayhiking in the area. On Sunday we walked up to three lakes formed by volcanic craters with a Kiwi couple--we had a great time, despite the fact that after 4 hours of walking, we never found the 3rd lake!!

Although we had planned to return to Quito for Spanish school after a long weekend in Otavalo, we enjoyed our return to the Andes so much that we decided to spend our last week in Ecuador at a different Ecolodge in the mountains called the Black Sheep. So, Monday morning we left Otavalo for the long trek (8 hours of car-bus-bus)to the town of Chugchilan, population 100, and home to the Black Sheep Inn. The last bus ride we took to get to Chugchilan was 4+ hours....and 60+ miles. Uhhhhh, nurse? It was very uphill, and very unpaved--road would be a loose term for the surface upon which we were traveling!! But, we found the destination to be well worth the trip--to keep you coming back, I will save the details of our week there for the next entry--I know, the suspense may kill you:)

So, after 10 days in the mountains of Ecuador, we are leaving the spanish speaking mountain nations of South America. Exploring the Andes and the language of Español have been two of our favorite parts of the trip so far, but although we are sad to be leaving, we are looking forward Brazil. Upon landing tomorrow, my Brazilian friend Bruno, who was an exchange student at my high school, is taking us to the beach to watch Brazil play in the Quarter-finals of the World Cup--this should be an explosive start to an amazing trip through the cities and beaches of Brazil.

We will update the blog soon with Black Sheep stories, and stories from the game--we may have to purchase Brazil shirts in the airport so we fit in--although, Brazil fans probably paint their bodies or do something much more extravagant than just wearing a jersey....we'll let you know:)

Gooooo Brazil!!!

Love,
Jon and Kristen

PS Sadly, although we have old pics that we will be posting very soon, new pics will be few and far between due to some technical difficulties experienced on the city streets of Quito (a VERY sneaky theif managed to take our camera from our bag without us even knowing it)!! The day the camera was stolen, we had downloaded over 500 pics saved on its memory card onto a CD--so, although we were upset, we felt like it was the luckiest robbery EVER!

"The Ferris Family Explores the Equator"
Quito, the Galapagos Islands, the Rain Forrest, and Setback

Just as essential supplies started to run out in the Southern of the Americas, the Ferris family arrived to fortify our toiletries, our bodies, and our hearts with the familiar comforts of home!! On June 10, Jon´s brother Pete, his wife Tammy, and Jon´s parents Anne and Mike arrived in Quito, Ecuador for the family vacation and a much needed visit all rolled into one. Jon, his younger brother Daniel(who had been traveling with us for a month), and I met the rest of the family at the airport--jon and dan were sporting the famous ecuadorian hat called the Panama hat (really, this is no joke, go figure) and island shirts in an attempt to begin the family vacation with a little flash.

Jon, Dan, and I started the trip a day earlier than everyone else by checking into the Marriott in Quito. After three months of Hostals that often were just barely scraping by the line of adequate, we were like kids on Christmas morning checking into a hotel/resort with much missed items like predictable hot showers WITH water pressure, clean pillows and toilets that you can put toilet paper in! The best surprise didn´t come until that night though, when we got turn down service in our rooms with free AMAZING chocolates (every night after we found the turndown cart and helped ourselves to some extra chocolates).

The morning after everyone arrived, we traveled just 40 minutes outside the city of Quito to the official equator line. Interestingly, there are two equator lines within 400 meters of one another in this particular location. The French mistakenly drew the line in the wrong place when they were initially exploring, and it remained there until the advent of GPS, when it was moved to its correct location 400 meters away. We started at the real equator line, where we learned that toilets DO flush the opposite way in the Southern Hemisphere. We also can now say that we experienced winter and summer at the same time, with a foot in each hemisphere. If you look carefully at the pic below, you can see that Mike, Anne, Dan, and Peter are in the middle of summer, while Jon, Kristen, and Tammy are stuck in Winter.


The day after our visit to the middle of the earth, we left the haven of the Marriott early for our flight to the birthplace of the theory of evolution, the Galapagos Islands. Despite the fact that flight schedules seemed to operate on island time, our travels were uneventful. We were tramping through snoozing sea lions to board our boat, Santa Cruz, which was to be our home for the next week, by mid-afternoon. That afternoon, we disembarked via pangas (spanish word for Dingy) to visit an island that was home to the closest thing i´ve ever seen to a dinosaur--pictures below. There were two different kinds of lizards on this island, and many other islands in the galapagos. The first has adapted a very good disguise for his home on the lava rocks. The one in the pic is crawling up from a swim to find a rock to sun on. Their body temp drops as much as 20 degrees during their swims!

Day two in the Galapagos we hiked to a lookout--the view in the pic does not quite capture what we saw. The landscape behind us looked like what you might find if you dropped the Carribean ocean onto the moon--an arid volcanic landscape surrounded by vivid blue waters. All of the islands were formed by volcanoes, but they are so old that the land formed by active volcanoes has actually moved from the geologic hotspot that spurred the initial eruptions. All the species indemic to the islands (there and nowhere else) floated there over a million years ago (on the boats they built...haha) and began to adapt to their new environments, which is what made it such an interesting place for Darwin who arrived to find species like those in Ecuador and South America but not quite the same.... After finishing the morning snorkeling among the creatures of the sea like sea lions, giant parrot fish, skates and...Tammy saw a Shark, we spent the afternoon hiking around on the volcanic rocks on a new island (as you may have noticed, none of us can remember any of the names of the islands!). In addition to more sea lions and lizards, on this island we found Darwin´s toilet--a giant hole in the volcanic rock where cool critter like giant sea tortoises like to hang out---cooool. The evening of day two we began a tradition which changed the future of free moments on our trip--we began an epic tournament of the Ferris family favorite card game, setback.



Day three was a day for the birds.....we visited an island that was home to the guys below. The first is the freakin´ friggit, who is a pirate bird, living by swooping in and stealing the food of other birds as they regurgitate--yummy!! And, the second little guy was the instigator of one of most exciting moments of the trip--Dan was able to finally see his very first booby.....thanks to the red footed one inhabiting the island! In other exciting moments, during lunch of this afternoon, the captain called everyone to the windows of the dining room to look out to see something amazing--he then announced that if you looked at the bottom of the ocean you could see the equator line painted in red, as we were passing over it as he spoke. Of course, none of us fell for it....

Day four we met the namesake of the Galapagos Islands, the Galapagos Tortoise. The hombres of this species weigh up to 500 lbs. and live for 150-200 years!! They are so big and have such a slow metabolism that it takes them a month to move 8 miles (although they really prefer not to move at all). Talk about obesity issues.

After returning from the Galapagos, we traveled 3 very curvy hours by car to a resort in the rain forrest. The highlight of this two day trip was a hike to the waterfall below. On the way we saw cacao trees, coffee trees, banana trees, sugar cane, and all sorts of unique flowers like birds of paradise. After swimming in the waterfall (and in the cave underneath it with bats) we returned to the resort to make sugarcan juice from the sugar cane and lemons we had picked AND chocolate from the cacao beans (which we put over fresh bananas--mmmm). The chocolate was almost as good as the marriott chocolate! Unfortunately for Jon and I, the local rum was all you can drink at the resort where were staying. We have become such bargain hunters on the trip that the last night at the resort we felt incredibly pressured to make the most of our money. This made for an uncomfortable curvy trip back to Quito the next day.

Through the car rides, the boobies, the toilets (the Marriott´s and Darwin´s), the freakin´ friggits, and the card games, we shared a lot of laughs and learned many incredible things about the world in which we live. Although you may not have to go all the way to the middle of the earth for an experience like ours, it certainly wasn´t a bad place to have a family vacation!!