Peru, pt 2, and a rather dry catch-up of the last few months...

Having now left South America I'm afraid that a concise catch up is required from the blog. Here goes:

After the less-than-comfortable trekking experience in Huaraz, the Inca trail was a welcome contrast; we were treated and fed like royalty: two breakfasts, amuse bouches before each meal and great food otherwise. Our fellow hikers were a lovely lot, the guides knowledgeable and the scenery on the trail stunning. Each of the sites we saw on our journey added a little bit of knowledge, excitement and anticipation for the main event. And at the end the view from the sun gate as the sun crept over the mountains and illuminated Macchu Picchu itself was magical. The complex looks magnificent- tourist numbers are now limited, and visitors limited to pathways, meaning that the large communal spaces between the buildings are pristine lawns, and the whole place looks beautiful. A definite highlight of the trip.

After a day of relaxing and spending a fortune on ethnic tat in Cuzco we set off into the jungle, again. After an inauspicious start where the guide was pointing out dragonflies smaller than the ones which show up in my London bathroom, we found ourselves delivered to a picturesque little lodge straddling a burbling river within a lush verdant crevass. We could see birds from our room windows, but still ventured out to see them closer up. cock-of-the-rocks were the highlight, I believe, alongside woolly monkeys and dusky titties, just to complete the hilarious-name list. I also got to wield a machete as we fought our way through an overgrown Incan path.

After another brief pitstop in Cuzco we headed towards the coast, stopping in the sand-dune playground of Huacachina. I wondered why sand boarding never really took off: there must be as many dunes as pistes. I now know why. It is not the ideal material to slide down, it is difficult to manoeuvre on and slow. The best part of our time in the dunes was an absolutely insane dune buggy ride during which I (and by their screams, presumably Hes and Eleanor), felt sure that the driver had overcooked some of the jumps, only to bounce back onto four wheels. Also, I had a rare day of lounging by the pool, occasionally accompanied by a cold beer.

After a fond farewell to Eleanor in Lima, Hes and I set out for Columbia. We suffered our first setback within a day, as a roadblock near the Peruvian border with Ecuador cost us about ten hours. Ten hours of idling around in a back-of-nowhere little village by the sea. It was quite nice. We eventually rolled into Guayaquil in the early hours of the morning, and slept well beyond the departure time of our intended bus. Instead we hopped on another bus, this time to Quito, which arrived late at night. The next day we woke up and tried to organise the next leg of the trip, ending up getting a local bus to the border town, and crossing out of the country late at night.

That was Ecuador, then. Fastidiously ignored by we two, it is apparently an extremely interesting place. But given our time remaining, we could not have given it nearly the attention it deserves so it can wait until next time, when I can persuade Hes onto a plane to go and see the Galapagos.

We also gave Columbia short shrift, having only ten full days there. We immediately took a night bus to Bogota, just to complete a full six days of sedentary travel. We later realised that this is not advised, as bandits still operate on the roads in the south of the country, and daytime travel is recommended. But we were on a mission, and we made it. We met up with Inder, Hester's friend from college, and his lovely wife Carolina, whom neither of us had previously met, and they helped us have a ball in Bogota, despite being there only three nights. We got to see the sights, eat the local specialities (including what seems to be, essentially, sugar soup) and live like locals. We went out to bars, saw the Gold Museum and Salt Cathedral and got utterly, utterly hammered at the institution that is Andres Carne del Res, a restaurant-cum-club which serves killer cocktails in coconuts. Neither Hes nor I remember getting back to the hostel, and the next day's eight hour bus ride through the mountains was incredibly hard.

But we ended up in a beautiful little hostel in the middle of a lush coffee plantation, where I sat in the pool with a beer whilst Hes excitedly flitted about looking at and photographing colourful birds- which were abundant. We had a tour of the plantation and a lesson in the production, treatment and tasting of coffee. I am now determined to buy a coffee grinder and roaster, as well as a big old espresso machine. I shall have to extend the kitchen.

The place was so beautiful that old no-fly was persuaded to take a flight to the next destination, rather than a night bus, just so we could have an extra day relaxing, walking and drinking free coffee. The flight, when it came, was an hour long and in a significantly larger plane than before. Small steps, but better every time!

The next, and final, destination, was Cartagena. It is a lovely old colonial town on the Caribbean, there's no doubt, but I must admit to being slightly disappointed. It could be the curse of the high expectations again, but I was disappointed that the old walled town was separated from the sea by a wide stretch of land accommodating an orbital dual carriageway. And it was horribly, stiflingly hot, to the extent that it really was difficult to go out during the five or so hours around midday. Perhaps had we stayed longer we may have acclimatised and enjoyed the place more, but our time on the continent had come to an end and we had an appointment with a catamaran.

We turned up on the 'sailing koala' for our briefing in the morning, as requested, and met our fellow passengers, who would turn out to be ten of the loveliest people you could meet. One, however, was a chap travelling on a Dutch passport but eminently not Dutch, who was carrying a large, heavy duty black suitcase and seemed unenthused with the Captain's descriptions of what we would see, and where we would go. On our return to the boat for the evening departure it turned out that the captain had since thrown the chap off the boat (with a full refund) on suspicion that he was muling something naughty out of the country.

After a long first day or so crossing the Caribbean, we arrived into the midst of the idyllic San Blas islands at daybreak. These are hundreds of picture-postcard palm-fringed islands with beautiful white beaches (though some, tragically, were litter strewn on closer inspection). Nevertheless, the real magic of these places were the playgrounds under the waves- great banks of coral and hundreds of fish and other aquatic beings. We swam through glittering clouds of tiny spratty things, chased colourful squids and saw rays and lionfish. One of our party even came face to face with a nurse shark. I was glad to miss that one. Three beautiful days of sunbathing, boozing, card-playing and plopping off the boat with a snorkel on passed before we arrived into Panama proper.

We had a day or so in Panama, so we bought hats and saw the canal. Then we got a bus to Costa Rica, where we are now. And I am now more up-to-date than I have been for a while so I shall leave it there...

A Month in Peru, Part 1

I am sitting by the pool in beautiful, lush countryside 8 hours west of Bogota. I am still absolutely wired from overdosing on Columbia's finest and most famous export, which is absolutely everywhere. But this is, after all, the 'Zona Cafeteria' (you knew I was talking about coffee, right?). It really is stunning here, and I'd love to talk about it, or about our wonderful few days in Bogotá with Inder and Carolina, or our 5 day bus mission from Ica, fastidiously ignoring Ecuador from the bus window. But it has been ages since I posted anything and there is a month's worth of Peru to cover, so I must cast my mind back...

Our first taste of Peru was the town of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca. We hadn't planned to visit Puno, but after being denied the Isla del Sol in Bolivia we decided it was the only likely way we would get to see this famous lake. And we saw the lake. It is a high, big lake, and we saw it. It is blue, it is wet. I am not entirely sure what more there is to say.

Instead of visiting the floating islands (which we had heard and read- even in the town's tourist website- are agonisingly commercialised and touristy) we decided to kick off our Incan adventure early, by visiting a nearby site at Sillustani- a place of huge, stone burial chambers, both Incan and pre-Incan. The location was pretty lovely, but I couldn't help but be a little underwhelmed. Embarrassingly and ignorantly, I suppose I had always thought the Inca empire truly ancient, but it was really in full swing only five or six hundred years ago. This realisation weighed heavily on me, and as our guide eulogised about the mind-boggling exactness of the stonework, I couldn't help but think of better examples, from earlier, in little old England*. But that is lovely, because travelling around should make you aware of what you have at home, as well as what you find abroad.

* An aside: I have since mellowed on this rather jingoistic point of view. I suppose the quality of the stonework is surprising to us because it comes from a culture completely alien to a traditional notion of history, by people who were at one point (and, in some places, still) thought to be 'savage'. And if i may flirt with nerdiness, the sophistication of their drainage infrastructure and agricultural methodology was, actually, quite amazing. And finally, the magic of the places comes as much from the surrounding landscape, and the structures' interaction and relationship with such stunning scenery, which will explain more generous descriptions later*.

From Puno we descended to Arequipa, off the altiplano and into 'Canyon Country'. Arequipa itself is a lovely city, bustling and frantic yet friendly and fun. It has a big, slopey main plaza with empirically stepping arcades on three sides, all absolutely lovely in the local bright white granite. The market is a huge cornucopia of wonderful smells and sights, where I had a fruit smoothie made with dark beer and a plate full of delicious raw fish, rice, chicken and potatoes, like a plate from a proper-nice wedding buffet. And it has a little city-within-the-city, a convent which takes up a couple of city blocks and is a maze of squares, streets and stepped alleyways, all festooned with geraniums. It is now a museum, but until a couple of decades ago the nuns lived in cosy little houses, with kitchens out the back and guinea pigs on the roof, for food. It looked like a lovely place to live, I wondered why they had moved into their new, more modern accommodation. We went at night, and it was especially atmospheric, the hundreds of nun's homes, still containing original furniture and iconography, lit with gas lights and candles. Wandering around was so lovely, and reminded me of the hours we spent pacing around the cemetery in Buenos Aires.

The Colca Canyon, near Arequipa, is one of the deepest in the world. i struggled with this fact, a bit, because it isn't exactly clear to me when a 'valley' becomes a 'canyon', and this 'canyon' looked a hell of a lot like a 'valley'. But it was very jungly and pretty 'valley/canyon' and Hes got her closest yet view of Andean Condors, just a few metres above us and hugely impressive. I found the green, terraced slopes of the lower hills around the 'vallyon' more interesting- the landscape completely re shaped by the Incas into meandering terraces and bowls. Though the terraces would have been filled with different crops in their day, they now look beautiful covered in grass, like the sculptural efforts of my favourite landscape architects today.

We only had a day to scope out the area because we were hot-tailing it to Huaraz to go trekking in the Cordillera Blanca before our long-reserved Inca Trail (which, due to demand, must be booked months and months in advance). This area in central Peru is supposedly the range which features on the Paramount Studios logo, and I warn you, whenever I watch a Paramount-produced film I will be saying 'been there' at the start. It may get annoying but it will not stop. Alas the central mountain was completely obscured by cloud on the day we might have seen it, but this is by-the-by.

The four-day trek was not a complete success. I think for Hester it may have been a rather low point. It rained every afternoon, a situation not helped by the fact that our tour operator was, it turns out, a pretty shoddy outfit with even shoddier kit- all the tents leaked. Every evening the combination of dropping temperatures, wet tents and wetter trekkers was pretty grim. For me, though, apart from a particularly soggy few hours tramping through what could have been Dovedale on a drizzly February afternoon, it was a pretty amazing experience. Most interesting was the sheer difficulty of climbing to and crossing a mountain pass 4750m above sea level- though the path was not hard nor steep, the sheer lack of oxygen made it a Herculean task. There were tears in the group as almost everyone struggled with exhaustion and debilitating headaches.

On the night we got back into Huaraz we wearily climbed onto another nightbus, bound for Cusco to meet up with Eleanor, our mutual friend, who was coming to join us. Ah Cusco. I hadn't expected much from it, thinking it was perhaps just a jumping-off point for Macchu picchu. And it is true, Cusco is principally a tourist town, but what a beautiful place. Over the next couple of weeks we left and returned three times and it was always lovely coming back to a base which felt so homely. Its buildings are gloriously colonial but houses inca treasures, it is compact and mazey, safe and friendly. I really loved Cusco and I don't care how gringoey that makes me. I even ate a guinea pig there. You can't do that in London or New York.

Eleanor arrived jet lagged and sleep-deprived early in the morning- so what better than to whisk her off on a 48hr tour of the Sacred Valley? She coped brilliantly, and the sights we saw were quite stunning. My favourites were the terraced water courses of Tipon, a really beautiful and inspiring landscape. We also enjoyed the huge agricultural installations at Moray, if not our guide's utterly incomprehensible explanations of what exactly the site was for*. We spent a night in a beautiful little hotel in Ollantaytambo, the place whose name no gringo can pronounce, overlooking the huge fortress which looms next to the town, and visited various markets through the valley. The valley is a beautiful place and visiting the stunning structures constituted a good appetiser for the Inca Trail and 'main event' of Macchu Picchu.

* Another aside: we have had a lot of guides recently, after only two or three for the first six or seven months of travel. I suppose it is in the nature of the places we have been visiting- fewer expansive landscapes, more things of zoological or historical interest. Most have been lovely but I shall be glad to live my life without a guide for a while. There is a certain level of bullsh*t to be cut through from each, and it takes a certain amount of experience to identify when they are 'winging it'. We have heard directly contradictory 'facts' from different guides, which would be ok if they weren't delivered as gospel truths. And most seem to have a disconcerting habit of belly-laughing at my honest attempts at answering their occasional questions. At the same time, though, it has been genuinely sad to say goodbye to some of them because, as with our fellow tourists on many excursions, close bonds can be formed in a very short time when you are experiencing wonderful things.

With that I am going to go and get ready for dinner. The sun has dropped behind the mountain and it is getting a little chilly. Hester is wandering round, open mouthed, with her binoculars and camera, agog at the bird life here. It really is beautiful and we have all day here tomorrow, so I'll complete the Peru missive then.