wonderful peru, first stop lima. thank god! there’s a mcdonalds across the street!

(although i do wish i had just eaten at mcdonalds after trying cebiche)

me and ian’s first stop along the gringo trail is huaraz…

with its gorgeous views from the roof of your hostel…

and where you can to go hike up a mountain (ours is the the white one on the left)…

and strike dramatic poses…

and not-so-dramatic poses…

while stopping to take pictures take a break because i’m already exhausted.

apparently these flowers only grow above a certain altitude, which would have been probably 4000 m by then.

base camp:

where we sleep for a few hours and then start hiking just after midnight. 6 or 7 hours of tredging up this cold mountain under the light of the stars and our lil headlamps later, the sun rises:

only another couple hours, including a seemingly death-defying vertical climb (to me at least. i may have been getting hazy near the top, 5700 m up is sparse on the oxygen…) and we make it to the peak!

ian took self-portraits while i laid in exhaustion on the ground

until i get too cold and have to get up and enjoy the view:

click for bigger

job well done, but now we gotta hike down the fucker

having not seen anything in the dark on the way up, we actually see the mountain we just climbed on the way down.

ian and the andes

andrew and the yellow boots with suspenders

next stop on the gringo trail: Trujillo

which was celebrating corpus christi day…

so ian chatted with his adoring fans…

before we left for the beautiful beach town of mancora, where we drank giant beers with our newly befriended dogs…

and watched stellar sunsets

where were we… somewhere in saskatchewan… well we gotta outta there quick (i’ve been to saskatchewan twice this year and that is entirely two times too many), then stayed at a friend of laura’s family ranch in alberta, where we rode horses and ate bbq’d venison. laura’s friend is pretty much like a modern day cowboy — minus shootin the ingins — and he brought us out to their family’s lake where the horses he was raising/taming were just hanging out, enjoying the stellar sunset going on across the lake. it was like the most serenely beautiful moment, so of course i had forgotten my camera. we partied in calgary, and saw a badass car accident downtown. we’re walking down this wide street with towering buildings on each side, and then all of a sudden this van flips over right in front of us! it ran a red light and got jacked by this little white car, somehow flipping the whole van and it skidded to stop like 20 or 30 feet in front of us. it was surreal, and like totally awesome, haha (everyone was ok, minus a bloody arm). and we went to the big dinosaur museum in Drumheller where i envisioned a zombie dinosaur movie, but apparently ben stiller already made that movie as a comedy?

next stop, the glorious stretch of land from banff to jasper. banff national park has to be the best part of canada, and i’ve only been there twice, briefly. the lakes and mountains are just incredible (pics are comin, but gettin thru them and all my south american ones is too daunting right now). after some camping, ultimate frisbee, and very cold, crystal clear skinny dipping in the valley of the five lakes, we booted it to vancouver. it feels good to be home… and kinda weird that vancouver feels so much like home now…

and how could i not with events going on down my street like “parks are for people not pigs”

reporting from camsack here, somewhere in buttfuck nowhere saskatchewan. we just got trapped in the most unreal hail storm, but the chateau held up strong (despite a salsa disaster). don showed us a grand ol time in wawa, jumped off some cliffs, took a gander at some dump bears, skinny dipped in lake superior then warmed up at a huge driftwood fire. we also spent a night in shilo manitoba, a military base that was fuckin bizarre, visiting friends of laura. and the whole shebang started in algonquin, where we canoed up a storm and got a stern talkin to for some uproarious flipcup.

oops, forgot about july there. summer of andrew has left no time to update the clamoring masses of my whereabouts and misadventures. buenos aires was grand, but instead of getting kidnapped in a taxi or jacked by some street punk to complete my south american experience, i left my wallet on the plane. laaame. i ate a lot of steak, and communicated primarily thru pointing. pictures of the whole trip to come when i get back to vancouver and can photoshop my way out of still not being able to use my camera properly.

tomorrow i leave on my cross canada (well, except for the loser east side and all dem territories) trip in our Ford Club-Wagon, Special Edition “chateau”. look at this beaut!