Money is being spent on all sorts of necessary things: airline tickets, backpacks, related travel gear and so on and is still being spent on the house, a $100 here, $200 there and it all adds up. Some days it feels like the title of this post.
We are in full planning mode for the trip. Main tasks that have to be finalized here are booking our Galapagos trip and possibly the Machu Pichu one. My list of tasks to be done before we leave (three pages long) has dwindled pleasantly down to relatively few items mostly pertaining to arranging our financial lives and such.
With the Galapagos trip there are just so many choices it is a bit overwhelming although in the end it comes down to how much we want to spend which relates pretty directly to size of boat (and thus services to some extent) and duration of trip.
With Machu Pichu the choices are a little simpler: Do we want to hike or not? If “yes” then we can either take the Inca Trail (http://www.apus-peru.com/inca_trail.htm) or the Salkantay Trek (http://www.apus-peru.com/salkantay_inca_trail_machu_picchu.html). I am leaning towards the latter more for the possibility of solitude than anything else. The Inca Trail does sound pretty good but we have to book now and once booked we can’t change our minds or travel date which is a tad restrictive considering that in general we want to be free to ramble where we please, when we please.
We bought ourselves really nice internal-frame packs on Wednesday, now we need to pack them up with what we think we want to bring and see just how bulging they are (hopefully not bulgy at all) and then figure out what we can give up to lighten the load. We also plan to do a couple of day hikes with the packs loaded to make sure they are adjusted right and to begin the process of breaking them, and us, in.
We have bought our tickets to Mexico City. We leave on October 31 for the first step on our odyssey or is that oddisee (grin). Off to look at Frida Kahlo’s house, Inca ruins and so on. From there we plan to head up into the hills North of the City to San Miguel de Allende and settle ourselves in for a month or so of language study. The San Miguel area has lots of other cool towns nearby to visit so it should make a good base.
We figure to be in Mexico for several months, at least through Christmas before we head South. We may head over to Belize for some diving and to pop across the Guatemala border to go check out Tikal (http://mayaruins.com/tikal.html). If we head over towards Belize we will probably also spend some time in the Yucatan (Chichen Itza (http://wikitravel.org/en/Chichen_Itza) and so on.
Heading further south we intend to go to Costa Rica, jumping over Guatemala, Nicaragua etc.
Haven’t really settled on a time frame for most of this. In large part our plans will be corralled by our Galapagos trip and possibly our Machu Pichu trip. Suffice to say that from Costa Rica, we will either head to Ecuador and travel around for a while before or after going to the Galapagos and thence to Peru or we will head to Peru first and thence to Ecuador.
Our only two limitations being money and in the end time – Darcie must be back to start teaching by August 2010.
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