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# South American experience
- URL: https://keithhayden.net/south-american-experience/
- Published: 2026-02-02T22:41:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-02-02T22:41:23.000Z
- Description: Summary of a trip south of the equator
- Author: Keith Hayden
- Tags: travel

Joey,

I just returned from a week and a half long trip to Peru and Bolivia. Was it a transformative spiritual journey?

No. The trip was full of multiple setbacks and annoyances. There was constant gut-twisting stomach pain and diarrhea from the elevation (average was 3500 meters and I stayed as high as 3990 meters along Lake Titicaca), massive transportation delays including one that made Peruvian news, hours-long bumpy bus rides, and the worst rice in the world. 

That's just a brief summary. More mishaps occurred.

However, there were also good things. I visited the legendary Machu Picchu— one of the acclaimed Seven Wonders of the World–- and it absolutely lived up to the hype. In the Bolivian desert I visited the Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Flats), a place I previously had no knowledge or care about, but came to enjoy it very much. (That's the cover picture of this email)

I also revived my Spanish, which I had not spoken regularly for half a decade, and bonded closer with my wife through the uncomfortable experience. But most of all, I got a TON of writing in.

The novel *Cereus & Limnic: Escape From Okinawa*, got nearly 15K new words added. And I wrote regularly by hand in a journal project I'm working on. Finally, I had time to map out and write the intro for a massive project that I will probably be working on until death: "The Lexicon."

I've been learning foreign languages since high school, and I always envisioned a project where I combined as many languages into a single grand narrative.

That project spawned during the trip and I'm already 1,000 words in.

So even though I'm exhausted from the last week and a half of a grueling travel pace, writing progress continues even stronger than before.

Now that it's February, are you working on anything new?

Let me know in a comment.

\-Keith