Adventures in Mountain Biking!

Yeah I kicked this mountains trash! Mount Ben Lomond I'm coming after you next!

Week 3
Holy smokes my time is seriously going way to fast! I'm having such a good time and meeting so many cool people I don't want it to end!

For the third week I finally got someone else in my class, I was kind of nervous to see how it would be with someone else, but it was awesome! I was with a girl named Shannon who is a doctor in San Diego, she is just finishing up her residency in Pedatrics! Even though she had only been there 2 weeks she was definitely keeping me on my toes! I felt like it was really good to kind of have some competition because I think it was really pushing us both! My teacher this week was Elvira and she was really great as well! Everyday in class we all kept talking about different kinds of food and it would make us hungry so on Friday we had a sharing day and we each brought in different kinds of food, naturally that was my favorite thing of the week! :) haha


Food day! These are Alfajores and they are the most amazing things ever filled with dulce de leche and strangely enough, from what I can understand from the label they're really healthy too! :)

Tuesday April 13
Isabelle made Spaghetti for lunch and was so excited to give it to me because she still thinks Italian is the most common type of food in Utah.... Oops! Went running after lunch and there's this kind of park thing that doesn't really have any grass but it has cement benches and some plants and different things, anyway after running I go there and do a few exercises lunges and tricep presses and things but it's kind of becoming a ritual that anyone within eye sight of the park just seems to stare at me as I workout, haha I'm sure to them a white girl running in the pollution is just plain weird!

Later that night I met up with the girls from Puno and we had a picture exchange party! That's sort of like a Bar Mitzvah without the whole coming of age thing....

Wednesday April 14
Wednesday night I attended a salsa class with Lauren and her host brother Tiago, he's from Brazil and is such a nice kid! The one thing I took away from Salsa lessons, I dance like a white girl!


"Hey Jayne, are you in giant land, because that corn looks ginormous?!"

Later that night we ate at Chez Maggy (I think I've been to that place 4 times in the last 8 days it's so delicious!)! They always have a traditional Peruvian band come in and play live music and it was so good! I even bought the CD and the band loved us, we were just chattin it up like it was old home week!


Oh it's fine, we're just a couple groupies hangin with the band!

Thursday April 15
Isabelle volunteers at a hospital on Thursday so she was gone in the morning and when she got home she brought us as a snack Jello in a plastic cup, it's really weird but they sell it all over the place here, and it was actually way delicious!

Went to dinner at Chez Maggy again, awkward when the band personally knows me.... It was the last night with Shannon and a couple other doctors who were here studying for a couple weeks! Afterwards went and played so more soccer, there were two americans from my school there this week too so it was pretty fun! Some of the guys didn't get the memo that it wasn't the World Cup though so there were a few fights that were pretty lame! haha

Friday April 16
For lunch I had the most amazing homemade fettucine alfredo and it was divine! Later that night I met a bunch of people for dinner! We ate at this Israeli place and it was really good! There were like 20 of us and we kind of overran the place, but it was a really good time!


Oh yeah, we're a rowdy bunch!

After dinner a few of us decided to go salsa dancing..... Although I have the grace of a swan when I walk (no?) somehow that doesn’t seem to translate in to my salsa moves! Weird! Later on we met up with a few American students who are here with their University and it was way fun


Me Lauren Tiago and Hank dancing!


I'm anticipating an invite to Dancing With the Stars in the near future so I just thought I'd brush up on my Salsa skills a little bit!

Saturday April 17

Woke up early and got to school where we were picked up by a van with 3 mountain bikes on top at 7:30! Our guide was way cool, his name was Edy and he works at a hotel but competes professionally in downhill mountain biking competitions! We got dropped off about an hour outside of Cusco in what felt like the middle of nowhere!


This is the hard core crew before we got started! You don't wanna mess with this!


This is the kind of terrain we were on for the first part of the day, maybe you think this looks soft, trust me it's not....

We rode for about an hour in the country through fields where people were working the land manually with a horse and plow, it was so cool to see! And the backdrop was these amazing mountains!


This is Moray, they're some Incan ruins they used as an experiment to grow different kinds of food, they would plant something different on each layer because the lower down you get the hotter it is! Naturally when I was standing at the bottom, it felt like the place was on fire!

We finally rode up to Moray, weird how we didn't see anyone else doing it on bikes but I sure saw a lot of tourists on buses, I guess I didn't get the memo that riding up to Moray involves a lot of up! :)


These are the big Incan steps that you have to climb down in Moray


Me and Edy the Italian stallion, did we actually call him that? Nope just made it up right now!


Behind me you can see a really steep hill that drops in to a river and then we had to climb back up, tough ride and I even passed a couple cows on my way up!


Look mom I'm flying!

So we ate our sack lunch at Moray and then headed on our way! The biking path we took in the 2nd half of the day had been part of a down hill mountain biking race trail the week before and our guide, who is a professional biker, had competed in it and was showing us all the jumps and things, he even showed off on a couple jumps for us!


Edy the Eagle (that's another new nickname I just came up with, although the only people that will get that will be my mom and any other Olympic enthusiasts, although I doubt there are many enthusiasts out there like me!)

So as we were following Edy down the steepest part of the mountain, it was some pretty gnarly terrain! Edy kept off on little tangents that were really tricky to get down but there was always a little bit easier trail for us to follow. After riding for a while I of course decided it was time to show off my mad skills, the problem with this was that I don't actually have any mad skills to properly show off..... I tried to follow Edy down one of his crazy shutes and things got ugly!


This picture does not do this monster hill justice.... Yep somehow I managed to do an endo coming down this....


Polite pain, that is the expression you're reading on my face in this picture!


Oh it's fine, I just wanted to bring a little Peru home with me in the form of a massive scar!


Somehow my ankle got tangled up in the mess that was me and the mountain and my bike!


Yep I look good, all the Peruvians want me now! I seriously have bruises up and down my body! I had some coins in my pocket and I hit so hard that they left a circular scar in my skin that is still here and it's been 3 weeks!

The worse part about this situation was not the bruises, or the blood, or the blacking out when I stood up, it was the bike pinning me down like a helpless child as I laid there in pain while Edy and Tiago looked on in horror! Tiago was so nice though and helped clean out as much of the dirt as he could! When I told him thank you so much he said, "It's ok, you are my sister!" It was so sweet! I was really glad he was there to save me!


You can kind of see the salt mines behind my giant muscles!

Needless to say the rest of the ride in to town, I was slightly more hesitant! It was still really cool though, we passed the salt mines, where there are over 400 pools of salt, and rode through this cute town and finally took a bus home! I was so exhausted and a shower never felt so good in my life! Went out for dinner that night and then fell asleep at 9 and slept almost 12 hours!

The moral of this story is, if you're going to crash in the mountains in Peru try to let someone know ahead of time so they can at least get it on video so that you don't have to keep wondering what the heck went wrong! :)