¡Hola de Cusco!

Hello hello! wow, it´s been a very very long two weeks....Last you heard from me, I was about to leave the sacred valley for a hacienda and the jungle. well...esta bien! everything went almost according to plan, and now Í´m settled quite nicely with a family in Cusco for my week of language school. I´ll have access to a computer every day, so I think I´ll just write about the first part of the past two weeks instead of all of it. If you want a different perspective, or are just curious, my group also does a blog once a week. The address is samcarpediem.blogspot.com....i think. Anyways, onward!
So..on the...I don´t know the day, but around two weeks ago, we left our friends in the Sacred Valley and had a 5 hours van ride to a hacienda outside a small village in the Eastern edge of the andes, Paucatambo. We stayed at the hacienda for two days, three nights, helping out the woman who owns the colonial times house, Maria, and her little hired help who maintains the outside, Gregorio. Both of them were probably around 70 years old. We hoed a tomato field and helped get a field ready for planting by plowing all the old growth under with two bulls and a plow!! it was so unreal...oh, and we split wood for the fireplaces in the hacienda. I was horrible at splitting wood, so I just got to make about 14 trips, at altitude, up a 20 ft hillside to transport the wood to the house. It was so crazy hard, but it felt good to work after sitting around at the retreat center for three days.
It was at the hacienda that we met our guide for the jungle, Andrés. Andrés lives in Cusco, but leads groups, some like ours, but mostly nature-oriented groups, on trips through Manu national park, the part of the jungle where we were headed. He was an awesome guy. Hís english was good, if not fantastic, and he had such a passion for wildlife. Everytime he´d spot a bird through his scope he´d say Oh My God. Look. Oh My God. it was hilarious. We also met up with our cook for the jungle, Luis, and our coordinator for all our jungle and cusco travels right before going to the hacienda, Hugo. Hugo is a character...and we had a lot of fun getting to know him over those few days. Hugo didn´t end up going to the jungle with us, but we all wish he had!
On the third day, we left the hacienda to start off into the jungle. This meant another 6 hour van ride through the Cloudforest to a small village on the edge of the jungle called Pilcopata. The cloudforest was very very cool. There was something like around 90% humidity all the time (literally...cloudforest), and, according to Andrés, 8 different levels of ecosystems as we traveled up and then back down the rainy side of the mountains. Everything was SOO green, it was insane.
That night we stayed in a hostal in Pilcopata, with one last chance for internet if we wanted it. And the next day, it was off to Atalaya, our launching point for a four hour boat ride down a tributary of the Amazon until we reached the village of Shepiteari, which was another 30 minute walk from the river.
Ok, enough for now! Maybe mañana or the next day I´ll write about the jungle, but right now I´m sick of sitting in front of this computer in this noisy internet cafe! An hour and half of bad 80s music and loudness is about all I can take! Thank you for the comments, and you´ll hear more from me later!
Besos,
Kate