animals we saw in peru:

1 dogs
2 cats
3 birds of all kinds [i don't know much about birds, but i think cormorants and penguins and sea gulls and maybe pelicans? and prolly a million more]
4 cows
5 horses
6 sea lions
7 dolphins
8 goats
9 sheep
10 pigs
11 llamas
12 alpacas
13 guinea pigs
14 chickens
15 ducks
16 i think that's it?
17 oh and donkeys
18 do insects count?
19 butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, cockroaches, flies, mosquitos, other gross bugs

also because of the season we also saw lots of baby animals. puppies, lambs, calves, everything.

most of the farm animals we saw when we visited cuzco and the surrounding areas. it kind of made me want to live on a farm. i can't lie. i love animals. i took like at least three or four stupid pictures of guinea pigs alone.

case in point:

what i didn't get any pictures of, unfortunately, was the cats. they were adorable and smaller and leaner than the cats here [especially a certain cat i know]. a herd of cats lived in a park by the hotel where we were staying in miraflores (in lima). at night they would run around, chasing each other up trees and through flower beds. once i saw a lady put bowls of something (milk, maybe?) under a tree for them. those cats have the sweet life.

on our trip to nazca, we spent a night in paracas and took a boat tour out to islands where all these sea lions and birds live.

the following picture represents about .0000001% of the birds we saw.

it smelled kind of rank. and there was guano everywhere. apparently they harvest tons of it every few years and sell it as fertilizer.

on the boat ride out to the islands we saw three or four sea lions swimming past our boat. when we reached the islands, there were beaches and beaches covered in them, including a "maternity beach" with lots of baby sea lions making baby sea lion sounds. mrah! mrah!

the two darker (wetter) sea lions in this picture were fighting not long before it was taken. rian captured a video of it, but i am too unmotivated to make that available to you. but it is hilarious, as is basically everything sea lions do. including but not limited to crawling over/on top of other sea lions who are not too happy about it, sunbathing, sitting with their heads in the air (if they're fat & male. the one in the picture is doing it, but he's not half as fat as some of the other ones we saw), looking back at us on the boat over their shoulders, and any sort of movement really. sea lions lol.

okay, okay. i wasn't going to put any more pictures of sea lions here but i just convinced myself.

the fighters

checking us out

donkeys aren't as exciting as sea lions, but we saw some of them too

there was a butterfly flying around on the top of machu picchu that i wanted to take a picture of, but my camera and i were too slow. i thought it would be sweet if i could capture it flying in front of huayna picchu (the mountain behind machu picchu in all the pictures), but it flew too fast/erratically, so i mostly ended up spinning in circles with my camera and looking like an idiot.

but when we came down the mountain to eat lunch and i had got my plate of food from the buffet, rian said, 'i got you a present,' and there was a butterfly on the windowsill by our table.

sadly, it was probably dying. it didn't seem to be able to fly and could barely walk. i wanted to take it outside after lunch so it could die outside instead of trapped in the restaurant, but of course i forgot. anyway, here it is:

and of course, since we were in the andes, we saw alpacas. and i may or may not have made an excessive amount of kissy faces at the alpaca in the following picture. well, i think it's an alpaca. our tour guide explained the difference between alpacas and llamas, but i'm still not entirely sure.

one phenomenon we experienced in peru was the free dog, as rian called them. basically there are dogs running around everywhere doing whatever they feel like doing. all kinds of dogs, too, big and little. and i would pet them and rian would yell at me not to get rabies. he is kind of a worrywart sometimes.

on our tour of a certain ruin whose name escapes me, this dog followed us up every terrace, every stair, everywhere we went on the tour. our tour guide would throw rocks for her and she would sit chewing on them as he told us some facts about the quechua people. apparently he even trained her to drag a stone across the ground with her front paws. this is how the incas moved all these rocks, he joked.

no, those aren't real animals. i tricked you! our bus had stopped in the plaza de armas in cuzco and this little hand with colorful animal finger puppets on each finger presses against the window, fingers wiggling. it was kind of hilarious and kind of heartbreaking at the same time. stefan (rian's brother) ended up buying a condor.

and i guess that about wraps it up for animals i saw in peru.

i saw a llama.