There's a lot to catch up on now.
We're back from Chile! We had a lot of fun there, but we're going to Bolivia next.
We finally bought our tickets for Puerto Maldonado, for about the same price we've been expecting this entire time, but after hours and hours of frustration with the Lan Chile site we went into the actual physical office. This was after we got back from Colca:
Colca
We got back from our 2-week mission trip in Colca on Friday. It was cold to say the least, according to the paper we got down to (-10) degrees Celsius (14 Fahrenheit). Wow, right? This plus no internal heating anywhere in the Colca valley means we were using many, many blankets at night. The mission itself went well, but quite a few people got sick from various things, including myself. The biggest issue was altitude sickness, since we were at tweleve thousand feet in Chivay (our base camp) and 15500 feet at our highest clinic. Most people just had more trouble sleeping than normal, a few were dizzy, sick, weak, etc. The other thing that aflicted the group was some stomach issues. The worst cases were vomiting and sick in bed, the rest of us had some gurgles.
It was a pretty rough trip, with some very tough cases as well. But overall it went well, and was fun. Christian was there, and brought his dentist friend from Lima. Besides that, there were quite a few young people (Mick--Christian's girlfriend's brother, Dr. John's daughter and her boyfriend, etc). The rest of the group was fun too, and the trip as a whole was one of the funner ones I've been on.
I was almost sent home to rest on Thursday, but I fought Tania and convinced her to let me go anyway. I had a lot of fun at 15500 feet, and actually felt better there than anywhere else on the mission, I even ran up a small hill there to see the view. Catherine got burned, clinic was very informal, everyone was tired and it was a long trip back to Chivay (almost 4 hours). We had spent the last two nights in the small village of Callalli, where it was even more cold than Chivay, and the middle of nowhere. There was a bonfire, and good food, including questionable trout (that everyone blames for getting sick).
Bad news on the Arequipa front, the MMI office here was robbed while we were in Colca. They took both computers in the office among a ton of other things (including a surgicial equipment set) and nothing has been recovered yet. Hopefully they'll find some things today, if not... ugh. It's just a bad situation all around. Many many un-backedup documents have been lost.
Anyway, photos on the next post (just testing the email-posting feature of Blogspot right now), coming in a second!
-Will
We're back from Chile! We had a lot of fun there, but we're going to Bolivia next.
We finally bought our tickets for Puerto Maldonado, for about the same price we've been expecting this entire time, but after hours and hours of frustration with the Lan Chile site we went into the actual physical office. This was after we got back from Colca:
Colca
We got back from our 2-week mission trip in Colca on Friday. It was cold to say the least, according to the paper we got down to (-10) degrees Celsius (14 Fahrenheit). Wow, right? This plus no internal heating anywhere in the Colca valley means we were using many, many blankets at night. The mission itself went well, but quite a few people got sick from various things, including myself. The biggest issue was altitude sickness, since we were at tweleve thousand feet in Chivay (our base camp) and 15500 feet at our highest clinic. Most people just had more trouble sleeping than normal, a few were dizzy, sick, weak, etc. The other thing that aflicted the group was some stomach issues. The worst cases were vomiting and sick in bed, the rest of us had some gurgles.
It was a pretty rough trip, with some very tough cases as well. But overall it went well, and was fun. Christian was there, and brought his dentist friend from Lima. Besides that, there were quite a few young people (Mick--Christian's girlfriend's brother, Dr. John's daughter and her boyfriend, etc). The rest of the group was fun too, and the trip as a whole was one of the funner ones I've been on.
I was almost sent home to rest on Thursday, but I fought Tania and convinced her to let me go anyway. I had a lot of fun at 15500 feet, and actually felt better there than anywhere else on the mission, I even ran up a small hill there to see the view. Catherine got burned, clinic was very informal, everyone was tired and it was a long trip back to Chivay (almost 4 hours). We had spent the last two nights in the small village of Callalli, where it was even more cold than Chivay, and the middle of nowhere. There was a bonfire, and good food, including questionable trout (that everyone blames for getting sick).
Bad news on the Arequipa front, the MMI office here was robbed while we were in Colca. They took both computers in the office among a ton of other things (including a surgicial equipment set) and nothing has been recovered yet. Hopefully they'll find some things today, if not... ugh. It's just a bad situation all around. Many many un-backedup documents have been lost.
Anyway, photos on the next post (just testing the email-posting feature of Blogspot right now), coming in a second!
-Will
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