The trip begins. Finally.

It's happened. Both of us are in Cuzco, and it's better than we could have hoped -- hence not much time for blogging. But now that we have a moment to rest in our baller hotel (the slide show is exactly what it looks like, except it doesn't show our balcony and me reading a book on it), I can give some updates and stories.

First off, Patricia just arrived a few hours ago, three days later than expected. Because of this, we're probably canceling the Titicaca expedition, but it'll give us more time to explore Machu Picchu (can you say "sunrise hike" in Spanish? If you can, please email me) and the surrounding Inca areas.

So as I was awaiting the Wagon's arrival, I decided to put my knowledge of the Inca empire to good use. I've been studying up with the help of Kim MacQuarrie's epic historical saga, "Last Days of the Incas," in which he vividly describes the workings of the empire, the Spanish conquistadors, and the political maneuvering that eventually led to one of the world's great civilizations. That, and there's lots of good war stories.

So upon my arrival, I was expecting a pretty legendary place, and it totally lived up to the hype. No, it didn't just live up to the hype. It was magical. Seeing the Plaza de Armas, Cuzco's main square measuring 100 yards across, and realizing it used to be twice that size, filled with Incan merchants and military leaders, was pretty exhilarating. Watching the rainbow flag waving high above the square, symbolizing devotion to the sun (no, not gay rights) was a good reminder that Peruvians are still really into the Incas. Any tour guide I talked to would always describe Incan customs, recount a story of the Spanish destroying it, and then give a heavy sigh -- not to me, but to themselves. They took their history seriously. I wanted to discover some of it.

After checking myself into the cheapest hostel in town ($6 per night), I was ready. I have more to write, but I'm going to try to break these posts up for your sake. Read on if you like.

"Yes, and...what else can go wrong?"

Whoever said I'm not a great improvisor -- and yes, there have been many of those people -- certainly didn't notice that I'm spending the night in Lima.

"Why?" you ask.

"Wrong," I say. Don't ask questions in improvisation. Suggest something and run with it.

"...because your flight was canceled?"

Absolutely, my improv pupil, my...imprupil. Yes, my flight was canceled, aaaaannnd I decided I absolutely could not spend another night in that airport, as gorgeous and as renovated as it is (not renovated in time, though -- if this system had been implemented as planned in 2010, fog wouldn't have been an issue).

So I grabbed a cab, and told the driver to take me to the very first hostel I could find in my Lonely Planet guide. Something should have tipped me off when I tried to call and received no answer, though, since I was dropped off in front of a clearly abandoned building. Piled up newsletters in the front yard. Broken glass on the side windows.

The driver sped off.

Again, time to improvise. This time, improvisation meant aimlessly wandering the streets of Lima with a roller suitcase in hand, giving my best "screw you, I'm from New York, I can outwalk all y'all" scowl to anyone who was labeling me an easy target. I'm not sure that was actually happening, since everyone in Lima has been remarkably friendly, including my driver, Carlos, who taught me valuable lessons about honking and following your dreams. But in improv, you don't always use logic. Sometimes luck plays a hand.

In this case, luck played a huge hand -- in the form of a hot shower at Friend's House, a local backpacker's hostel where they give you a cute keychain with their phone and email addresses and a picture of a llama as a gift, and in the form of my friend Arturo, who was born and raised in Lima. With less than a half hour's notice, Arturo picked me up at the hostel and took me out to dinner at Tanta, one of the many creations of Peru gastronomy behemoth Gaston Acurio.

Over dinner, I asked Arturo about the Peruvian relationship with food. His eyes narrowed. "We take it really seriously," he said between bites of ceviche. "Gaston Acurio is like, Peru's food ambassador. Everyone knows him."

So over papas a la huancaina (boiled yellow potatoes served with a spicy cheese sauce), lomito saltado (a stir-fried steak dish that plays to Lima's Asian influence), and ceviche (you obviously know what ceviche is, come on), we discussed everything from American cuisine (our chicken tastes like it's over processed) to care for automobiles (despite everyone screeching around like it's a stock car race, Peruvians will get genuinely upset if they clip someone else's car).

After a grueling 32 hours in airplanes and airports, not to mention that fact that Patricia is still held up in Quito, Ecaudor, due to this fog situation, not a bad way to start the trip for this master improvisor. Here's hoping that tomorrow, Cusco sticks to the script.

Becoming Intimately Familiar with Chavez International Airport

Arrived on time in Lima. Wish I could say the same for my travel partner. Instead of spending quality time with her friend, Patricia decided to depart from foggy Jackson, Mississippi, where her flight was canceled and rescheduled for half a day later. We have received word, though, that she is in the air and scheduled to arrive in Lima about a couple of hours before our connecting flight to Cusco takes off.

In the meantime, I have:

- Regained circulation in my legs by walking around the airport 3 times.

- Taken stock of all the food court offerings in Chavez, which includes its Dunkin Donuts.

- Remembered I brought turkey sandwiches from home.

- Gone to sleep on the floor in a small commune of overnighting backpackers. Don't worry, Chavez is ranked second in South America by this site, which actually exists.

- Tossed and turned, put on a sleep mask, returned to sleep.

- Been woken up by a member of the cleaning crew, asking me to move. They needed to mop, and had done the entire floor except the spot I was sleeping on. The foreman had even set up cones around me, trying to let me get as much sleep as possible before they moved me. If the airport cleaning crews are this courteous, I have a good feeling about the rest of this trip.

Gotta go search for the Pattywagon. Catch up later.

At long last, it's happening.

Tomorrow, South America gets its first taste of Mielke.

That's right, travel fans. America's favorite game show, "Brad Mielke: Dead or Alive?" is making its way south of the equator for the second time in its history. This time, the locale will be the majestic nation of Peru -- home of the Incas, home of Pizarro, and home of a ton of llamas. Hopefully we'll see this dude above.

After the decision to make it to South America, and after pleas to "save Buenos Aires for a family trip" by my loving family, Peru was a natural choice. After all, how many chances in your life do you get to visit Machu Picchu? So if you're anxiously waiting (and I'm sure you are), here's the itinerary:

January 9-13: Flying straight into the belly of the beast, so to speak: Cuzco, capital of the Inca empire, is traditionally called The Bellybutton of the World. At over 11,000 feet, we'll try to adjust to the altitude enough to take a jaunt around Machu Picchu.

January 14-16: Lake Titicaca. Yes, it's the real name of a real lake. And unlike Cuzco, it's not 11,000 feet. It's fifteen thousand feet. So after mopping up my contact lens solution, which will have inevitably exploded, we'll explore the largest lake in South America, and the highest navigable lake in the world.

January 17-18: Finally, we'll settle down in the nation's capital, as we rest our thin-blooded feet in Lima. With temps expected to be in the 80's, I'll enjoy a little bit of a January summer before heading back to New York.

Vamos!

USA 1-0 Algeria

I know. I'm actually back. But in the interest of posterity, I should blog the last few days of my trip.

First off, the USA-Algeria game. If you take pride in being alive, chances are you've seen the highlights, so you know what was at stake. So Alexis and I were already pretty psyched heading into Loftus-Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria. Now let's bump it up a notch. We sneak into the lower section of the stadium, and we search for friendly faces with which to blend. As long as we're this close to the field, we ask a nice older dude with a Bocanegra jersey to take our picture. He asks where we're sitting, we explain that we're squatting, and he encourages us to hang around as long as we can. He's sitting next to some other Bocanegra fans, who are sitting next to some Dempsey fans, who are sitting next to some people in Marcus Hahneman shirts. Hm. Weird. Not to offend, Marcus, if you're reading, but I've never seen a real live replica jersey of our third-string goalkeeper, let alone 4 in a row.

We started to clue into what was going on as we continued looking around. All the Oguchi Onyewu fans looked a bit like Gooch (black and large), all the DeMarcus Beasley fans looked a bit like Beasley (black and skinny), and there were about double the number of people with the name Bradley on their backs. Finally, we spotted a guy who was sporting a Tim Howard jersey, and he was...a dead ringer. I tentatively went up to him and asked, "do you know Timmy?" I mean, you gotta act like you belong.

"Yeah, man, he's my little brother!" The guy is totally Jersey, which is where the Howards are from, it turns out, and Alexis and I go off. We introduce ourselves to DeMarcus Beasley's mom, I chatted up Stuart Holden's mom (her name is Moira, and Moira was rocking the red/white/blue Venetian shades), Alexis became best friends with Gooch's brother and eventually got her face painted by Beasley's wife or sister. She had had to re-do her own face paint, since Clarence Goodson's wife had forgotten she wasn't looking at a mirror, but rather a face, as she carefully wrote "A-S-U." See, these are the stories you get from the family section.

So if we thought the stakes were high before we walked in, imagine what we were going through when the whistle blew. Any mistake we saw for the next 90 minutes was accompanied by a group of 4-6 people hanging their heads, clasping their hands, and screaming as quietly as possible to no one in particular. When Dempsey hit the post late in the second half and followed it up with a complete shank on an open goal, things got very quiet around the Dempsey clan, as Americans around the world got the feeling that this just wasn't their day.

Until The Goal.

It's a funny thing when a goal is scored late in a game. The players on the scoring team forget they've been running for 90 straight minutes, and all of a sudden they're sprinting around, chasing the hero, who after exerting all that effort is running faster than anyone. The failed defense, all of a sudden, is a study in stillness. That's what happened on the field, and that's what happened in the crowd. The Algerians, who represented quite well, had been jumping and singing for the whole game, completely content to go through the tournament without a goal scored, if it meant points against England and the Americans. But when Donovan pounced on one of the biggest goals of his career, it was like someone had hit the pause button on half the stadium. The green and white in the stadium all seemed to stop moving.

In the American sections though, it was like someone had just reported a bomb threat. People couldn't stay in their assigned seats, they had to run somewhere. Anywhere. They climbed over seats, they pounded shoulders, they yelled at strangers, and they hugged anyone they could find. I hugged some African dude I was sitting next to, I ran down an aisle, and I was caught in a bear hug by that big bearded man, otherwise known as Mr. Bocanegra.

We left, talking to Mrs. Holden and Herculez Gomez's best friend from childhood in Las Vegas. Eric was rocking the dreads, along with a red, white and blue vuvuzela and a USA makarapa. "Dude, I bought these as soon as I got to the airport," he said, before he ran screaming out the gates into the USA-dominated night.

Transportation in South Africa = INTENSE

So the rest of our time in Durban was great. Watching the Brazil-Ivory Coast game at Soccer City was awesome. So far, staying with some dudes in Pretoria is fantastic. Getting to and from each of these destinations has been...weird.

After our flight got delayed, we were in a hurry as we came into Joburg ahead of the Brazil-Cote D'Ivoire match, but we decided to take a risk. The risk came in the brand-new shining package of Johannesburg's Gautrain -- a high-speed train that will service Joburg, Pretoria, and the major international airport in the area. Because it opened the day before the tournament, there were hardly any riders, the attendants dutifully showed every tourist how to operate the ticketing machines, and as soon as we were in the train, it quickly sped up to 100 miles per hour.

Half an hour later (the journey into town usually takes over an hour with traffic), we were on the doorstep of our hostel, begging them to find us a taxi to Soccer City. Great, right? Wrong. When the cab driver showed up, he offered us the World Cup Gameday Special: double the usual price. After a lot of snorting, haggling, walking away, and calling of bosses, we got the World Cup Gameday Special, Student Edition: 50% more than the usual price.

The next day, we got jammed by a tour bus operator in Soweto -- Johannesburg's famous township suburb, which was originally created to keep non-whites out of the city, but close enough to work for white urbanites -- to the tune of 40 dollars per person. We made up for it by having a fantastic day -- a family had us over to their house. We ate their food, talked soccer, and ended up playing a pickup game with the neighborhood kids.

After all these trains, taxicabs, and tour buses, we decided to find a different way of traveling around the city. We found it in South Africa's unique system of minibus taxis. Rather than expansive bus or subway systems, black people in South Africa have traditionally relied on private car companies who make their money jamming as many people as they can into a vehicle, and making the price per person more affordable. Most of these buses offer rides for under a dollar, which is pretty great, considering Johannesburg is about the size of Los Angeles.

The tricky part is this: minibuses have asserted a virtual monopoly over affordable transportation throughout South Africa. So much have these companies taken over the transit industry that, when Johannesburg began instituting a large, low-cost, government-run bus system, city officials began to receive threats against the safety of themselves, their drivers, and their vehicles. The plan was quickly scaled back. In Cape Town, minibus taxi hit men were notorious a few years back for straight up murdering the competition. In addition, most locals say the drivers make the roads dangerous to other drivers, and their own passengers.

It was with this knowledge that Alexis and I decided to board our new, cheap, exciting option for door-to-door person delivery. Over the years, the minibus system has become a massive web of vehicles that can take you nearly anywhere you need to go -- if you know the system. Alexis and I found out which hand signal to use ("wave a 5. If he's waving a 1, don't get in."), and we were on our way throughout the city. By the end of the day, we were so impressed with ourselves that we decided to use minibuses to take us to Pretoria, an hour away. Rather than a $100 cab ride, or a $50 bus ride, Alexis and I are sitting pretty after having spent three dollars and fifty cents each. We are now free to spend our money on face paint for tomorrow's do-or-die game against Algeria tomorrow.

All this, plus the fact that we're couchsurfing with some lovely Afrikaner dudes named Cobus and Handre. Stay tuned to see how that works out.

Durban!

Just flew OUT of Durban, which means I was just IN Durban. It advertises itself as The Warmest Place To Be during the World Cup, and they ain't kidding. Where Cape Town is in the low 50's on a good day, and Johannesburg is hovering just above freezing, Durban is a beach town that rarely sees a day under 70, even this winter.

We stayed with a friend-of-a-friend, and once again were blown out of the water by the South African hospitality. Our new best friend, Rico -- yes, his name is Rico -- pretty much scheduled his weekend around us, taking us to the beach, treating us to food, and driving us wherever we wanted to go.

Highlights:

- Going for a swim in the Indian Ocean (water temps were in the 70's)
- Consistently finding ourselves walking around the seedy sections of the city. There are a lot.
- Trying to see the Southern Hemisphere's largest mosque, not being able to find the entrance, and getting picked up by an old Indian lady named Rashida. We were informed we wouldn't be able to see the mosque that moment -- the call to prayer had just gone down, and all the real people were inside. In the meantime, she took us down a dark alley to her house, gave us bananas, introduced us to her sister Amina, and gave us a private tour of the mosque. The only faux pas I made all afternoon long was giving her an appreciative pat on the arm -- "don't touch me. It's OK, you didn't know, but...you mustn't touch me."
- Winning lots of money at Durban's casino! It's the place where all the Indian locals go to blow their earnings, and we showed them how Californians who have spent a lot of time at Indian casinos play blackjack.

That's all for now. Someone's giving me dirty looks as I hog the computer.