Notes on hilly bits

From Luodong, Taiwan-

Yesterday I opened my traveling notebook (a gift from Tianne last summer). It is the kind that's multifunctional-- this one is full of directions, phone numbers, notes from meetings, boarding pass scraps, and the remnants of poorly torn-out pages. In the back I found a postcard that Jeannette and I bought for Mom in Valparaiso...and clearly forgot to give her during the 23 hours I had in LA. It's hard to believe that only a month ago, Jeannette and I were at the historical port city of Chile, and looking incredulously at the hilly streets.

This is on the way to one of Pablo Neruda's homes. The inspiration we found from the windswept hills of Valpo were not as poetic as his. We were inspired to find food, and settled on a popular snack--a bun holding a pool of mayo, guacamole, and tomato sauce, with a hot dog somewhere in there.

How do older folks deal with the hills? The thought occurred to me more than once. At 80, if going home means walking up a hill and then the equivalent of seven flights of stairs, I think I'll spend the night in the park, next to the hot dog stand, thank you very much.

Gliding over El Parque de Amor, or the Park of Love. We left Santiago in the middle of the night for Lima, where we found a few paragliders in Miraflores and flew tandem.

One of the things I enjoyed most was the quietness-- you don't need an engine, just a hilly bit to run off of and a bit of wind. On a beach near here, I saw a few people paragliding, over this beach (Adam's great shot of Waiao). I'd appreciate any information on Taiwanese paragliders.

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Other larger hills, these large enough to induce altitude sickness. Hiking along the Lares Valley near Machu Picchu in Peru, we crossed two passes nearly 4500m in altitude. Moving one foot in front of the other was hard enough at the end of the day, but there were also harder things to grapple with--seeing little kids in the countryside asking for more bread, women weaving and getting ready to plant potatoes high on the steep hillsides while their husbands porter for the many trekking outfitters in Cusco, such as ours. The average Californian's life is so different, though perhaps not more satisfying.

And finally, we climbed a hill to see Machu Picchu. Walking through the old city to the foot of Waynapicchu, I imagined the specially chosen women living there, nearly six hundred years ago, tending the llamas and getting ready for the next shipment of goods coming through the Sacred Valley from the Amazon, to the rest of the Incan civilization. After the peace of the Lares Valley, the many visitors at Machu Picchu were overwhelming.

The footprint of Machu Picchu from Waynapicchu is humble, a scattering of stones carefully carved and arranged on the mountainside, at the foot of jagged peaks. From the top of the hill, I couldn't tell that many of the buildings were made to Imperial Incan standards, the stones cut to fit perfectly.

On our way home, we stopped in Panama. From the plane window, I watched dozens of ships bottlenecking at the canal, circumnavigating the island-hills nearby.