Showing posts with label islands. Show all posts

04 December 2011

taquile island


I don't have as many photos of the second non-floating island we visited, in part because I didn't really like it as much. Taquile is a bit lusher than Amantani, and quite possibly objectively prettier, but by the time we got there, I was a bit burned out on being on a tour and bracing myself for a island even more touristy than Amantani. 


Weirdly, we saw almost no people there who were not tourists, so I'm sure other people visiting on other days had a completely different experience than we did, but the whole thing had slightly ghost-townish feeling to it. 


After hiking across the island, stopping for lunch and listening to a pretty long description of what the different men's hats on the island symbolized (okay, I did like this part; life would be so much easier at home if people had hats to signify whether they were single and looking, or married), we hopped back onto our boat for the three hour ride back to Puno. 

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03 December 2011

amantani island


After the Uros Islands, our boat (named Royal Caribbean, by the way) chugged three more hours over increasingly choppy waters to the comparatively bleak island of Amantani, where we waited awkwardly in front of a gathering crowd of local families, and our guide called our names one by one, matching us up with our hosts. There aren't any hostels on the island, so guests instead have little choice but to do a homestay with a local family who has a room especially set aside for tourists. 


Fortunately, our family (Javier and Mathilde, above) turned out to be quite friendly. Other than buying some of their handknit hats and making small talk with them and their four year old (camera shy) son Lieber, there wasn't much else to do on Amantani except hike up the two local hills, Pachapapa and Pachamama. 


The walk up Pachapapa is flanked by more women and girls selling more bracelets and hats. Leslie and Nilda, above, sold me a keychain that looked like a cross between a sad raindrop and a ghost, and later followed us down the mountain in the dark, giggling, asking for our names, for English translations of Spanish words, and then abruptly demanded a sol in exchange for their names, which of course they'd already told us. I tried to ask for a sol in exchange for my name back, but apparently my name doesn't command a particularly high price out there. In any case, we parted on friendly enough terms, but it was still a bit awkward. Though I wouldn't put it past my terrible Spanish to find out that we'd actually been talking about something else entirely different, so who knows. 


Also on top of Pachapapa, we met a really friendly dog, and he and Iain had a moment.

On Pachapapa, you're supposed to walk four times around the mountain and either make one or four wishes (sources were unclear, and we missed the guide's speech because I'd gone slowly up the mountain buying keychain ghosts); only we screwed it up and walked around clockwise one time and counter clockwise three more, because everyone else seemed to be doing it that way, and apparently we're lemmings, or sheep, or cuy, or whatever animals live on Amantani. So hopefully our wishes (either both of them or eight of them) come true. 


After the hike up Pachapapa, we headed over to Pachamama, which was not only curiously free of bracelet sellers, but which had the most amazing panoramic sunset views I think I've ever seen in my entire life. It was awesome. Also freezing, but totally worth it.


We hiked back in the dark, accompanied by Leslie and Nilda, and were eventually collected by Javier and taken home to a pretty satisfying candelit dinner consisting of a lot of potatoes. Afterwards, there was the option to put on some traditional clothes and go to a dance party, but we deferred - something about the pitch black of the (mostly) electricity-less island made us both tired enough to fall asleep by eight o'clock.



I have about a thousand more photos of the sunset and the island in all it's bleak glory, but thought I'd spare you for now.  So that was Amantani! It doesn't look like we did much, in retrospect, but it was probably the high point of the tour for me. 

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02 December 2011

the floating islands


Our second day in Puno, we went on a two day tour of Lake Titicaca itself, which began with a stop at the floating, manmade Uros Islands: 


As your boat draws closer to the islands, the women all stand on the banks waving and calling out hello in Aymara - it's a very strange feeling, making the whole trip feel vaguely theme-park-ish. On the plus side, I now know how to say hello in Aymara. 



above: check out the solar panel behind the guy! 

Once on the island, we were given a presentation on how the islands were made using a miniature island with all the materials, complete with little tiny reed houses and - even better - tiny dolls wearing the same hat as the islander showing us how they built everything. We kept waiting for tiny dolls of tourists and a tour guide, but they never showed up. 


above: Olga, who sold me a miniature straw boat. 

Afterwards, we were given time to poke around the island and look inside the houses, which felt even stranger, since as far as I know the people showing us around actually lived there. We didn't poke around too much (though I did buy a miniature straw boat from one of the ladies, above) but it was cool just walking around on the reeds -your feet sink unnervingly deep into them with each step, so it takes some getting used to. 






Touristy as the experience was (and I'm okay with that - I'd rather show up in a place expecting tourists than go bug some people who weren't), the manmade islands were definitely unlike anything I'd ever seen. 

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07 October 2010

the best public restrooms ever


... sighted on Hatsushima island. I love how the squids' eyes are actually kind of crossed, like they're watching what happens inside, or something.

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06 October 2010

hatsushima island



A few weeks ago, one of Iain's students invited us for a day trip out to Hatsushima Island, a small island about 30 minutes by ferry from nearby Atami City. Though some fishermen live on the island, it's predominantly occupied by various spas, hotels and botanic gardens for visitors, and we didn't see much more than the botanic gardens and their weird shaped cacti:


above: Iain thinks this plant looks like a dinosaur.


above: mmmm, kakimizu. 


roadside onions! 


fishing nets...


... and lots of fish, which, sadly, we didn't eat (we had a picnic of convenient store food on the beach back in Atami instead). 


Is it just me or is that fisherman seriously evil? 


Yay, Hatsushima! 

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06 February 2010

the isle of lewis


The Standing Stones of Callanish.

Iain's father's side of the family is from the island of Lewis, so we spent our first day being shown around the island by his second cousin once removed, who graciously picked us up and drove us around for several hours. We covered all the major roads on the island and saw a lot of the big sights, like the standing stones (above) and beaches at the northernmost tip of the island, all of which were beautiful, even in the freezing February cold.


The port of Ness.


Roderick MacLeod, a chief of the MacLeods who died in 1498. There's sort of a family resemblance if you squint? 

The best part of the tour, though, was being shown all the places of historical relevance to Iain's family. As the MacLeods once controlled the island, you can't throw a stone without hitting a MacLeod, a truck with their name painted on it, a monument to a bunch of them who stole bunch of sheep back in the day, and of course, graves with their names on it, including Roderick, above, who was an ancestor of Iain's. 


Not far from the crumbling ruins of the MacLeod chief's tomb, Iain's cousin walked us to a patch of grass that was the unmarked grave of another ancestor (they couldn't afford a headstone, and the stone they'd dragged up from the beach rolled away years ago); he also took us to the old houses of Iain's great-grandparents and great-aunts, including this tiny, abandoned blackhouse, above, which is now inhabited by some incongruously friendly sheep.

Anyway, more pictures of Harris to follow, and bigger, edited versions of photo will hopefully appear on the photoblog soon.

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03 February 2010

driving to ullapool



Posting from our bed and breakfast in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis; yesterday, Iain and I piled into the car and drove west. Being from the States, it still seems strange to me that you should be able to drive across the entire country in four hours, but that's exactly what we did, past Inverness, through some truly otherworldly snow, all the way to the coastal town of Ullapool: 


More on Lewis itself later!

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25 February 2009

bay of the descending dragon


Tuesday marks a year since I landed in Vietnam; Iain, who has been here longer than me, had never been to Ha Long Bay, so we made a quick day trip out to the rainy, overcast bay last weekend . (PS, don't forget to cast your vote for Ha Long Bay as a natural wonder of the world). 

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31 October 2007

Ruins, rain AND islands




sunrise at tingwall ferry

So for the first few days, the weather in the Orkneys looked like looked like the photos I posted below. The rest of the days looked like this:




The first day of un-pristine weather began innocently enough (see ridiculous sunrise above); I woke up early and took the bus to the Tingwall ferry so I could go to the small island of Rousay, which is home to a wide variety of ruins ("You're the first passenger to Tingwall I've had all week," said the busdriver, though I didn't take much warning from this since I was also the only passenger on the bus for most of the ride). The ferry itself was tiny, with about 80 lifejackets for the three of us onboard ("odd time of year to go to Rousay," said the ferryman), a copy of the New Testament and Psalms and a coffee machine; I had planned on renting a bike when I got to the island, though there weren't any signs of life anywhere (the Visitors Center next to the ferry was dark but unlocked). I walked a bit up the hill and found a sign that said BIKE RENTALS tacked to a trailer containing bikes, but when I followed the directions taped in the window, I found only an empty and apparently abandoned-for-the-season farm with ducks and chickens who scattered and hid behind rusted barn equipment, so I went back to the main road and decided just to hike for the day, since it was only about 4 miles to the furthest archeological site I wanted to see.

There is definitely something both sort of awesome and yet deeply unsettling about walking all alone down the only road in sight on a tiny island where you have yet to see another human. After a few minutes it started to rain lightly, and I found the first of the various neolithic funeral cairns (it is still weird to me that you can just open the gates to these things and walk inside; I kept feeling like I was trespassing but the sign merely said Please shut the gate behind you); inside it was cramped, with a tiny ladder descending into an even darker second level.


inside the cairn looking out.

I wish I could say I was cool enough to have waited out a rainstorm in a cairn, but after a few minutes I started to get slightly creeped out at the thought of hanging out in what basically amounts to a grave (and where the map of the tomb included little marks where they had found bodies) and decided to just keep walking. By the time I got to the second cairn, it was raining much harder and I think I would have been able to get over my fear of graves if I had been able to open the door (which was metal and heavy and along the top of the mound). At this point I was soaking wet and getting cold, so - ignoring the pitying stares of the sheep - I turned back around, hiked down the road and hung out in the abandoned visitor's center till the Pier Restaurant opened (the woman looked utterly horrified when I crawled in and pathetically asked for coffee while a puddle of rainwater collected at my feet). Fortunately the next ferry came not long after that, and the guy who took my ticket was kind enough to get his friend to give me a ride back into town, since there weren't any buses for that particulary ferry.

Anyway, not a particularly exciting story but hey, look, I got to actually combine all the words in the blog-title that I hastily made up way back in my little cube at work. I do really, really wish I could have spent more than two hours on Rousay, but maybe this just means I'll have to come back someday. At any rate, it is late and I'm heading out early to Wales tomorrow, so goodnight :)

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30 October 2007

Orkney Photos




Woefully out of order and incomplete, but here are a few photos from Orkney - the first, above, of a ruined croft house, is my favorite; as bus access to historical sites is mostly shut down in the off-season, I signed up for a bus tour of the Orkney Mainland, which hit way more sites than I had expected to see and which was run by incredibly nice people. I was the last to be dropped off afterwards, and the guy stopped on top of this hill as the sun was beginning to set, so, maybe everyone else who visits Orkney has this same photo but looking at it now I still can't believe I actually got to be there (on such a beautiful day, no less).



I took a lot of photos of the two stone circles we saw (the Stenness Stones and the Ring of Brodgar), especially since I masochistically biked to them the day after the tour, but photos of rocks aren't particularly interesting (and also I'm being too lazy to sort through all the photos I took to find the most representative one); there were a bride and groom being photographed at the Ring of Brodgar though, which all things considered is a pretty awesome place to be photographed for your wedding.



Stones in Loch Harray, which I only noticed because I was painfully cycling past them.



Not pictured: dirty, dirty Viking thoughts.

Maes Howe was my favorite neolithic site and I wish I could better show you what it looked like inside; to enter you have to crouch to almost half your hight and crawl down a long passageway, at which point you emerge into a beehive shaped tomb that is older than the pyramids and covered in grafitti left by Viking raiders, which range from "The man who is the most skilled at carving runes carved these runes" to "Thorni fucked; Helgi carved." I love Vikings.



incoming tide.

This was taken halfway across a slippery, seaweed coated walk to the tidal island of Birsay, which is home to the remains of a Viking settlement (apparently the Vikings had a spa? Who knew.)



hey look, more livestock!


It's lateish (though I realize these postings are still timed for New York time, I think?) so I'm going to turn in now and tomorrow try and head to Canterbury like a good English major, but I have lots more Orkney photos and still haven't even written about the great day I had in which I managed to combine ruins, rain AND islands, and get soaking wet and mocked by livestock, so, more to come, soonish.

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25 October 2007

orkney

In Kirkwall, the main city on the Orkney Mainland, where I've finally been able to get internet access; I got here by ferry on Monday night after taking a slow bus that wove its way through the highlands and up the coastline from Inverness, and spent the first two days in Stromness, a smaller city on the south end of the Mainland. My first day here I took a bus tour (as no one in Orkney would appreciate it if I tried to drive) which went to a handful of the major archeological sites on the island; the whole landscape is peppered with neolithic and viking ruins, most of which are largely unrestricted, which means there are giant stone circles older and vaster than Stonehenge that you can frolic around (if you're so inclined) and touch, and partially excavated prehistoric village settlements that you can wander around freely. Yesterday I rented a bike and somewhat stupidly set off through cow pastures and past two lochs back towards some of the stone circles I'd seen the day before; it was about ten miles round trip and I haven't ridden a bike in years, which means I can barely walk today, but it was probably worth the searing pain to be able to stand all alone in the middle of a cow pasture with just the cows and stones for company.

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