Most of you probably speak Danish or Spanish, but we have decided to write our blog in English as the common language - and provided a GoogleTranslate button in the menu to your right, which will translate all the text into your preferred language.
We are going to Peru and Bolivia!! :D For four months! We're leaving from wintry Denmark on February 1st and coming back in summer. We're going to the southern hemisphere, which means summer!!! But it's so close to the Equator, meaning it will be rainy season! Yay! Well it's actually ok because it makes things much greener than it otherwise is in the very dry area of the Altiplano, a plateau in south-eastern Peru and western Bolivia.
As most of you know Andrés is studying Agricultural Development and for his thesis he is going to research some things about the cañawa crop in the Andes Mountains (exactly what that will be, we will find out sooner or later), a crop similar to quinoa but not as well-known outside the Altiplano. And I am following him as his personal assistant, while trying to learn as much Spanish as possible, so I can communicate with his family and with some of the other 550 million Spanish speakers in the world, plus it's an awesome language to speak! I also have to write a project for my geography course at Roskilde University, and am planning to write about consequences of climate change on Lake Titicaca and the vulnerability of the Aymara people. I was going to write most of it before leaving to Peru, but have been using all my time playing DuoLingo learning Spanish and planning the trip. There are more things to prepare for such a trip than you think! Subletting your apartment; getting to know the people who will live in your apartment with your furniture, books and plants; applying for some sort of visa to stay in the U.S. for two hours and paying them 14 dollars for that!; making a blog; finding cheap plane tickets and hostals.. We found a really cheap ticket from Amsterdam to Lima, but didn't realize that there weren't cheap flights from Copenhagen to Amsterdam in the morning - so we have to fly the day before and sleep in Amsterdam. So I found basically the cheapest hostal in Amsterdam and booked it straight away. But I was too fast and hadn't looked through the reviews, which all strongly recommended to stay far away from that hostal if you're not a fan of rats, church bells in the early morning, mixed with drunk roommates barging in at night and tiny moldy bathrooms. Even though Andrés didn't mind the 'crappy hostal', we booked another one close to the airport, which really wasn't much more expensive. Couchsurfers, which are always my first option before hostals, was just too time-consuming to find, especially because they could live 15km or 100m from the airport for all I knew, and the cost in transport could amount to a night in a hotel close to the airport.
We don't know much about our trip yet: where we are going to live, where Andrés will do his research, which mountains we will climb, whether an El Niño will happen this year... But all this will unfold when we reach those turns in our adventure. And we will keep you updated with most of it along the way! Hopefully with lots of pictures if the internet connection will accept that.
We do, however, know where we will live the first day in Peru! After that point, we trust God will help us like He always does, or give us an adventure where nothing goes as planned and we learn to trust Him more! ;)
