The Adventures of Dave, Lindsay, Cora and Edie

Southeast Bolivia is home to the world´s largest salt flats. This amounts to huge expanses of flat land surrounded by snow capped mountains. Big lakes, super dry deserts, and llamas, alpacas and vicuñas everywhere. As you can see from the photos, there are a few interesting things going on here. First, and most notable, is the huge population of flamingos. There are three different species that summer in Bolivia and winter in Chile and Argentina. But what makes it even more interesting is that the salt flats are roughly 14-15,000 feet above sea level. We are way up here. That makes the hills and mountain surrounding the plains almost 20,000 feet. Mt. Everest is less than 30,000 feet. This is home to flamingos? Yep, lots of em.

La Paz is a big, bustling city built into the mountains. It`s the world`s highest capital city. The women wear bright, traditional outfits with funky hats on the top of their heads (photo included). We walked the streets, visited museums, went to the theatre for a dance production, went to a movie (in English!) and got a city tour from a local who happens to know a friend of ours. Definitely one of our favorite capital cities so far.

After about 3 1/2 weeks in Peru, we have crossed the border into Bolivia. We were ready for a change of scenery and were actually in a bit of a travel funk our last few days in Peru. I suppose that happens after 4 months of "being on the road!" (I know..hard to believe it has been that long since we pulled out of Kalispell in our HUGE Uhaul truck) Thankfully, little brother Brent was there to add some humor to our days! The morning he left, we took a bus across the border and, thankfully, had no issues along the way. And then we pulled into the quaint little lakefront town of Copacabana (yes, we have been singing the song constantly)....and found just what we needed to get our spirits up. Beautiful views of Lake Titicaca, a small town to explore and a great little hostal on the hill with DVDs in English, wonderful food (which we discovered they would happily deliver to the TV room) and not a care in the world. We did make a day excursion to Isla del Sol to explore the i...

Ok, so a year ago, if someone had asked us to point to Lake Titicaca on a map, we might have started by looking around Africa. No joke. But now we've been there and know right where it is. This little record breaker of a lake straddles the Peru/Bolivia border. It's a huge lake. Big enough to make Montana's big 'ol Flathead look like a little fishin' hole. It sits 12,507 ft above sea level making it the highest commercially navigable lake in the world. Cool stat? Sort of. But what is truly amazing about this lake is the community of people living on it. The Aymara are a native people who call this part of the world home. Not all of them live on the lake, but a small group have made their home on islands made of reeds. Yes, these are human made islands. They cut and stack enough reeds to keep entire communities afloat. Then they anchor the islands to eachother and replenish the reeds every two weeks as the underside rots out and sinks to the bottom of the lake. Again,...

It´s been a crazy week in Cusco. Padre Biedel arrived on Saturday morning and we´ve been busy ever since. We started escuela de espanol on Monday and have jumped right in to 4 hours of class each day completely in Spanish. It´s been interesting but we are learning. And we get plenty of practice throughout the day as we attempt to have conversations with our host family in Cusco. On Sunday, we got to take part in the celebrations for Carnaval and in Cusco that means burning things up, lots of music, parades and a city-wide water fight with every person under the age of 20 running around with water balloons and buckets of water just looking for their next victim. They also have this wonderful spray foam that they attack you with as you walk by. Needless to say, we were avoiding young boys and girls all day and did end up covered in water and foam. We´ve also had a lovely flu bug being passed between the three of us so that has added to our adventure. Yesterday, we were all feeling pretty...

Hey all... Dave here. As some of you know, Monday the 4th was my 30th birthday. For my birthday I went to a nice studio and had some portraits taken. They even had some flashy frames to put my favorite photo in. After a few funny emails and blog posts from friends, regarding my beard, I figured a good photo would make sense. ¨This is it.¨

At the suggestion of a good friend, we decided to use a few open days we had to take a quick trip to Arequipa, a beautiful town south of Cusco. We jumped on a night bus on Wednesday night and experienced a crazy night of speeding around sharp corners and racing across gravel roads towards our destination. Unfortunately, our bus had some minor issues along the way and finally called it quits just outside of Arequipa so we sat on the hot, smelly bus waiting for someone to tell us what was happening in a language we could understand. Eventually, another bus showed up and took us down the hill to our destination. Always an adventure! We spent the morning touring the amazing Monasterio De Santa Catalina, which is an old Spanish Monastery that takes up an entire city block and is truly the most picturesque place we´ve ever been. We loved the spanish architecture with old wood window panes, beautiful murals and bright colors on every wall. The monastery was only opened to the public in 1970 a...