On my sister Donna Jean’s birthday last week, the above screensaver photo popped up when I first turned on my PC. It brought back some nice travel memories for me.
While officially titled and recognized as Peru’s “Machu Pichu” (Big Mountain) it more correctly should be titled Wayna Picchu (Young Mountain) which is seen in the background.
Buzzy and I visited there with our friends Iris and Robert Willey in the early 2000’s. We spent a couple days in a little town Aqua Calientes located at the base of the Machu Picchu. We spent one entire day touring the ruins. Here is Buzzy wearing his U.S. Immigration Hat posing at Machu Picchu.
The next day was set aside for us to do our own touring and our guide offered to escort any of us who were interested in doing so to hike up Wayna Picchu. Robert and I signed up for that hike. Here we are at the top of Wayna.
When I asked him what he had planned to do for the day, Buzzy said “I’m going to hang out with Dot and Peggy who are going to roam around the town.” (These two ladies from Arizona were on the tour with us and as with Molly and Joy in South Africa, we had become friends with them. Both of their addresses are still in Buzzy’s address envelope adjacent the Store cash register. See a pattern here?)
I remember advising him that Dot and Peggy were both in pretty good shape and that he may have troubles keeping up with them. He replied, “When I get tired, I’ll find someplace to drink and meet up with ’em on the way back to the hotel.”
Robert and I joined up with the others who had signed up for the hike and proceeded to make our way up Wayna Picchu. We were escorted by our tour guide shown here telling us all about Machu Pichu .
When we reached the top of Wayna Picchu, our guide gathered us around and began telling us how his wife had recently left him, how he was very depressed and that he did not want to live anymore. With that he turned and proceeded to jump off the mountain.
Of course we were all shocked and quickly ran to the edge to look down to see what had become of him.
What we saw was our guide crouching on a small plateau a couple of feet below us and laughing at how he had tricked us. He said something like “Works everytime.” We then took turns duplicating his trick and while neither Robert nor I cared to do it, I did get this photo of one of our tour members doing so. Note that that is our tour guide on the right. The co-hiker on the left is the gentleman who took the above photo of Robert and me.
Music-wise I am happy to report that Van is compelling me to do something that I haven’t done in quite awhile and that is plunk down some money to purchase a new album. He has just released his 47th album Remembering Now and I’ve got my Amazon lady with that free shipping chip ordering it for me. (Should be here Friday.) This is the first tune from it:
