A few days ago we passed the border from Bolivia to Chile. The change is quite remarkable: from one of the poorest to the most developed nation. Prices went up a lot and due to the high season here we're suffering difficulties finding accomodation.

Still some nice places here, like San Pedro de Atacama in the desert and La Serena where we are right now. Thankfully Argentina should be cheaper again :)

Last three weeks were spent in Peru. Landed in Lima, continued to Huacachina to live on a desert oasis (sandboarding, dune buggy riding, etc.), proceeded to Cusco, where we spent 13 nights due to a need to wait for a trek from our chosen agency Lamapath.

Aino got a combination of different illnesses including salmonella which forced her to drop the trip, while I participated (no refunds, no other good dates).

When we finally got out of Cusco we headed out to lake Titicaca and visited the floating islands, stayed in a local family on an island, saw Puno and crossed the border to Copacabana. On the bus ride to the border we remembered that we left our money belts in the Puno hostel.. thankfully after some arranging with our bus company rep, we evaded the need to return to Peru and got the stuff via the company. The hostel didn't make it easy though as their phone was occupied 24/7, hence I do not recommend Qorikancha in Puno.

Now we're in La Paz and finally in front of a computer that has something better than internet explorer (which won't work with this blog). From here to the Jungle I guess.

And as an extra note, we missed the current crisis situation in Machu Picchu by a few days. The river did look quite scary already at that time. Aguas Calientes is a nice little place, but I wouldn't want to be stuck there...

Returned yesterday from a tour on the Mexican south-southwest coast. Went through Zipolite-Mazunte-Puerto Escondido-Acapulco-Zihuatanejo in a bit under 2 weeks. Mazunte was the best, Acapulco the worst. No surprise there.

During the 9 hour busride the environment changed from the continuous 30 degree beach to plus 15 or so here in DF. And it's great! I can wear a sweater! And I'm not sweating all the time!

Tomorrow I'm out of Mexico... off to South America. Sad to leave the good ol MX behind, but on the other hand it'll be nice to find entirely new places.

School is out so I have a bit more time on my hands now. I've been slacking in my own field as my time has been consumed by random mexican studies and other stuff. To make up for that I started experimenting with Equalizer, and today I managed to get a simple OpenGL-thing rolling.

See the video. It's dead simple and currently running on my Asus eee 1000HE (hence the slowness!), but it could easily be running on 4 separate computers connected to projectors (for instance).

Last weekend we took a quick trip to the second (or third?) largest city in Mexico: Guadalajara. Very nice. Much easier for the passing tourist than D.F. as the city centre area is walkable and easily navigable (although my impeccable sense of direction led us astray once). Missed the Orozco murals which pains me. Perhaps I'll return one day.

Also we took a day tour to Tequila - an area famous for guess what.. it was wild (hostel provided the tour, so only youngsters), fun and educative! We visited three distilleries, the village of Tequila, fields of Blue Agave and got to experience and learn the process first hand. Of course we also tasted a Lot of different tequila - all 100% agave of course. Even the silver variety beats pretty much anything I've found in Finland.. not to mention the añejo or even extra añejo, of which I have one bottle awaiting my upcoming guests.

That was a week ago and I'm still feeling the consequences. This week has been spent mostly indoors. Working on stuff for uni. All the deadlines are now approaching fast.. fortunately I'm almost done with all the work now. Should perhaps focus on more important things like WELP..