It's about that time again.
LA PAZ (97%)
La Paz is one of the best South American cities I've been to. It was relatively clean, safe and the hotel we stayed in had the Three Great Things of Travelling (WiFi, electricity and the other thing. I forgot what that was.) and had an interesting, efficient way of getting around - gondolas. There were about seven gondola systems that ran all around the city, which were also solar powered. The overnight bus arrived there and we stayed for around four days.
There were a few parks near our hotel, and they were nice too - although it had a few cliffs and ravines littered with trash. That was really sad to see.
We also used Google Translate's feature of reading text with the camera and translating it automatically. We read out a few memorials and the park dedication sign with it. We also went to a hilltop, low-budget amusement park with an amazing concrete slide with two bumps. You could get air, and get air we did. I'm not sure if that was correct grammar, but we did it anyway. I got a pretty bad rugburn on my leg, but that didn't deter us! Until it started bleeding, anyway. Then we got deterred. Well, at least, I was deterred.
In all, La Paz is a great city, and I'd like to visit again sometime. I felt like we didn't really see all of the city, there's like two swimming pools and who knows what else out there.
COCA CABANA (87%)
Coca Cabana is a small lakeside town that really was quite tiny. There was about ten resturaunts and like one hundred buildings in total. We stayed in a house that I, personally, loved. It was a doctor seuss style house that I think was one of our favorite places on the trip. Angus and I made a vlog about it somewhere on a phone. Anyway, we didn't actually see a lot of Coca Cabana, since we were only there two nights. But from what I saw, it was nice.
URUBAMBA (89%)
Urubamba is a town we stayed in for ten days, located in a place called the Sacred Valley. It's a pretty nice town, although it's a bit unfinished. It had a really big market like in Santiago, which is where I discovered one of my new favorite foods: salty trout! Yum! We took a few tours around the area to Incan ruins which were pretty interesting. We saw their agricultural systems and someone had a hypothesis that they made staircase-like fields to test which crops grew better at which altitudes (because this was about five thousand meters above sea level), but it didn't seem like enough of a difference to matter much. It was a great town, and at the end of our road there was this little convenience store run by a old lady who called herself Mama Sita (which translated as little mother). She called us Papa Sita, Mama Sita and she called me Papa Sita Sita. We really liked Mama Sita.
CUSCO (92%)
Cusco is the last place we stayed in Peru. It was a lot like La Paz in a lot of ways, including that it sprawled across the valley and up the slopes of the mountains on either side, and the buildings were mostly made of brick and corrugated tin roofing. It was really nice to be there, and our apartment was great, overlooking a park and the city. We did lots of fun stuff at that park. We also had a local cafe which we went to almost every day, called the Meeting Place. We also discovered a writing group in that cafe. We all attended a meeting there. I enjoyed Cusco for its long walks, interesting community, lots of grassy hills everywhere (like in the middle of the sidewalk) and their intense love for competitive soccer. We watched a game once and they were very enthusiastic. Some people yelled things in Spanish that we guessed we wouldn't want translated. It was remarkable how much it looked like La Paz - minus the gondola system, unfortunately.