Peru

After spending the last couple of weeks at altitude we decided we might as well continue and headed from Cuzco to Puno, where Lake Titikaka is. Some say Lake Titikaka is the highest navigable lake in the world...Others say it´s not, there´s higher. Either way it´s very beautiful with bright blue/green waters.

We took a boat trip onto the lake to see the floating reed islands where people live. It´s amazing that they´re made out of reed and as the reeds rot with contact with the water they literally have to pick up their houses and put more reeds under every 15 days.

From Puno we crossed the border into Bolivia. This involved a bus and ferry journey across the lake. Our bus took one ´ferry´ and us another. How the bus made it over on the flat wooden ´ferry´ without toppling over was a marvel.

We stayed on the Bolivian side of Lake Titikaka for a night, in a town called Copacobana. Much more attractive and less poluted than the Peruvian side.

From here we went to La Paz, the crazy capital. It´s built in a canyon (and still at altitude) with houses on all the hills surrounding it.

Peruvians and Bolivians love their parades and demos. Nearly everyday we´ve seen them. There was a huge demo in La Paz, literally thousands and thousands of people marching through town, letting of fireworks and bangers. Ended up shut inside an internet cafe at one point and sounded like gun warfare outside. All noise though. It was a very peaceful demo!

It was explained to us in Brazil that ´compared to Brazil, Bolivia is for free´. Very true, it is sooo cheap here that we´re living it up, staying in posh hotels, eating out, drinking bottles of wine. It´s going to be hard when we get into Chile and the price goes up again.

We´re heading down Bolivia to visit the salt lakes, which sound very interesting, and still at altitude. When we return to sea level, we´re hoping we´re going to be very fit from all this altitude!

In case anyone´s interested we´ve been charting all our travels on a travel map on this blog, which shows exactly where we´ve been and when.

More bus journeys but this time to altitude. Cuzco, the ancient city greeted us with thin air and steep slopes. The Inca city stands at over 3000 meters above sea level making you run out of breath when taking on even the mildest of slopes and giving you a real fear of altitude sickness. We had arrived to acclimatise before we took on the famous Inca trail, a 4 day hike of mountains steep passes and glaciers.
We had to book months in advance to get a place as it fill up pretty quickly due to the fact that there are only a limited amount of people allowed throughout the year.
We soon realised that our meagre sleeping bags would not withstand the cold of the second nights trek so we had to hire some which did the required job adequately.
The first day, we were told, was the easy day. We met our group of 13 people and took a bus to the start of the trek. “Easy” wasn’t the fist word that sprang to mind when faced with the first climb. The paths were steep and the air was thin but we got through it with good humour and the group bonded very quickly. We were all in the same boat so their were many helping hands when things got tough.
The next day we all soon realised why they called the first day easy. Our wake up call was 4:45am, starting the walk well before 6. Were warned about this day but the toll of 4 hours up hill to a mountain pass called the, “Dead Woman’s Pass” was a lot to take. The pass was 4200m above sea level. The going tough. Every footstep was laboured and every meter higher we went seemed to take just that little bit more air out of your lungs. Sue, to her credit and defying her asthma, made it with out any problems. We all did. It was hard but the surrounding views of vast mountain ranges and our own sense of accomplishment made this one of the most memorable moments in Peru. And that was all just before lunch. We walked one hour down hill and ate a hearty lunch only to discover we had another full day of walking all up hill!
The next day was shorter, stopping after more lunch. It also gave us a chance to thank our porters. These men are truly supermen. The walk the same trail as we do but carrying all of our tents, food, our clothes ect and there own equipment, setting off after us and arriving before us (they would pass us on the trail during the day) to make lunch and the campsite ready for us. Tipping them at the end of the trek was essential.
Photos cannot come close to how beautiful the Inca trail is. Nor can my words for that matter. Just trust us to say it is one of the most incredible, awe inspiring places that anyone is likely to visit. Mind bending vistas, cloud forests and hills whose heads touch the heavens. Nature showing off.
We passed many incredible ruins on the trek but nothing prepares you for the spectacle at the end. The great Machu Picchu city. The last day we woke even earlier 3.45 am and started a 1and half hike to the Sun Gate. A place overlooking the city ruins that catches the first rays sun. We did it 45 minuets. I don’t know what happened to the group but we steamed through the last trek. Stripping off layers (but not stopping!) as the sun appeared on what seemed like a race to the end. The group even left our guides behind! They turned up 10 minutes later confused onto what just happened.
Again, words and photos fail to describe just how wonderful Machu Picchu is. I can just tell you that we spent half the day there wallowing in its beauty. We were fatigued and our legs ached but we all had a great time.
The group we trekked with, two couples being honeymooners (!), all met up for a drink the day after to recall how tired, smelly and out of breath we all were over the last 4 days. An experience we all will not forget.

We arrived in Peru via a couple of bus journies to the boarder town with Brazil, only to find that there were no buses into Peru from here (or so the taxi driver and his mates told us). So we ended up getting into his taxi and after 5 hours driving on roads that were being built as we drove on them and a boat crossing, we ended up in Puerto Maldonado, a smallish town in the Peruvian Amazon. The route we chose to cross from Brazil into Peru, is not an obvious one and not one that we´ve met anyone else who´s tried.

From here we flew to Lima, where we were surprised to find that it´s cold and have had to get used to the feel of socks and boots after 2 months of flip flops. In Lima our hotel was a converted old colonial house and was like staying in a mansion, with marble statues and elaborate decorations along the corridors. Our room wasn´t so grand - probably the servant quarters.

Didn´t get to see much in Lima as the Presidents of all the South American countries were in town and when the streets surrounding their offices weren´t closed preventing us from getting anywhere, they were visiting the local museums and sights and so they were closed. We did get to see round the catacombes beneath one of the churches, where the archaeologists who excavated them have arranged them in strange circle shapes, with the skulls in the middle??

From Lima we got the bus to Pisco, where we were served hot coffee on board by the poor hostess who had to carry them down the isle while the bus continued to bounce along the bumpy roads. In Pisco we took a boat trip to a nearby island and saw Penguins - the first time we´ve seen penguins in the wild and very exciting. There were lots of other birds too, including boobies (tee hee) and seals and we were advised to wear hats to protect ourselves from the white bombs they were dropping. Dan got hit twice! We saw bottlenosed dolphins on the way back, who came right out of the water to have a look at us. They also make Pisco (a white grape brandy) round here, which we treated ourselves to a bottle of and goes quite well with sprite.

One of the most popular drinks here is Inca cola, which is Perus take on cola, but bright yellow!

From Pisco we took another bus to Huacachina, a small desert oasis town where we´ve been sand boarding. We took a dune buggy (driver included) which raced up and down the dunes and was far from the sedate drive we were expecting to our sand boarding site. Dan got the hang of it quite quickly and managed quite a steep slope until he stacked it right at the end and got a face full of sand. I stuck to the safer belly and bottom strategies, which was a lot of fun. Some of the most fun we´ve had!

This afternoon we get a bus to Nazca, where wé plan to fly over the Nazca lines.

We´ve hired a camper van to spend our three weeks in New Zealand in and are hoping the heater works as it´ll be winter there.