Peru: 22nd February - 15th March

We arrived in Piura early in the morning. We climbed out of the bus into a chaos of taxi drivers pulling us in all directions. Sam, Bryce and Rogers were whisked instantly away by a driver who was going to take them to the bus for Tarapoto, from where they'd get a boat down the Amazon to Iquitos. I was suddenly alone again. All there was to do was find an ATM, get some Peruvian money and find a bus that would take me to Trujillo. After a change of buses, I arrived in Trujillo late in the afternoon. I wanted to jump straight onto a night bus to Huaraz that same night, but all buses were booked out until the following night. So it meant I had to spend a night and the whole next day in Trujillo, which was no bad thing as there was plenty to do and see. This is the centre of town, the Plaza Mayor.

Next day, while waiting for my night bus to Huaraz, I spent a few hours at the nearby beach resort of Huanchaco. The local fishermen still ride their traditional reed canoes out through the breakers while the tourists surf those same waves alongside them.

The following morning I was in Huaraz, 3000m up in the Cordillera Blanca. I spent a night at the Way Inn hostel, to acclimitise while I sorted out a trek into the Cordillera. The view from the hostel's roof was fantastic, stretching all the way to Peru's highest mountain, the 6768m high Huascaran (in the centre of the photo).

After a day in Huaraz sorting out stuff, I started out on the four day Santa Cruz trek with a company called Euroinka. I was trekking with a guide, Jose, and three other tourists; two girls from Israel and one from Belgium. On the bus ride to the start of the trek we passed the foot of Mt. Huascaran (invisible though due to the cloud), and then over a 4500m pass with great views down the valley to the Llanganuco lakes.

We started the trek in the village of Vaqueria, where we met our donkeys and their driver, Jesus. Here Jose and Jesus load our equipment onto the two poor donkeys.

The first day of the trek was fairly easy, the first couple of hours being more or less level ground along the sides of a valley and through a few small villages.

Some girls from one of the villages on the first day.

We passed lots of sheep on the trail. I was disappointed though; this was supposed to be the Andes and I wanted to see llamas, not sheep. I can see sheep in Wales any time :-/

Our first night's campsite, a beautiful spot in a deep valley with an icy river flowing right past. Unfortunately it rained quite heavily that night, and even more unfortunately my tent proved to be somewhat less than waterproof, and I woke up at about 2am with my sleeping bag and mat completely soaked. Spent the rest of the night sleeping fitfully but thankfully not too cold. The next night, when we would be camping at over 4200m, would be a lot colder...

This is (I think) a puya raimondi plant. Their flowers can grow up to 10m tall and the plants can live for over 100 years.

A picture of me on the second day of the trek, on the way up to the 4750m Punta Union pass.

Our donkeys on the way up to Punta Union.

Punta Union, the highest point of the trek. The peak in the background, hidden in the cloud is Taulliraju (5830m).

A view of the Santa Cruz valley from just below the Punta Union pass. The big mountain on the left is Artesonraju (6025m).

This was our campsite for the second night. Even more amazing than the first night's site. Every direction you looked there were gigantic snow capped mountains and glaciers. From here another view of Taulliraju, with a bit less cloud this time. Although it rained again this night, we were better prepared and had spread out a big thick plastic sheet inside our tent which kept us much drier (and therefore warmer) than the previous night.

Fanny jam. Seriously good jam, and a funny name to boot.

Beautiful scenery on day three. This is Laguna Jatuncocha. Despite it being the height of the rainy season in Peru, we were really lucky with the weather on the trek. It rained a little bit on the evening of the first day, and a lot during the nights, but otherwise it was generally dry and sunny, although the mountains themselves were mostly hidden in cloud.

Serious trekking demands serious rest too.

Another view up the Santa Cruz valley towards Taulliraju.

Our third and final campsite. Each site was more beautiful than the last. That waterfall in the background is actually enormous (just far away).

Jose cooks dinner while Isabelle looks on.

Dinner time.

Trekking buddies. Isabelle from Belgium on the left and the two Israeli girls on the right. I've forgotten their names - they were complicated names...

This dog followed us all the way from Vaqueria on the first day, sleeping in the porches of our tents and eating the scraps we threw him. The Israeli girls christened him Glossio; they said it meant nothing. I don't know whether they meant that it means literally "nothing", or whether they meant it actually doesn't mean anything... Whatever, he took a serious disliking to these cows. I think he was defending our campsite from them, which was very valiant of him.

Me with Glossio in a more peaceful moment. From the last campsite, the final days trekking was a very gentle couple of hours down to the trailhead. From there it was back to Huaraz and then that night I was straight on a night bus to Lima.

I only stopped in Lima because I had been careless enough to lose my little Panasonic Lumix camera somewhere on the way to the start of the Santa Cruz trek in Huaraz. Lima scared me a little bit frankly, but it was the only place I was going to be able to find a replacement camera before I got down to Santiago in Chile. So I decided to spend two nights in the city; first stop on my first day was to buy a new camera. That done, and a pretty horrible price paid, I headed downtown to use it. This is the Cathedral on the Plaza De Armas.

After that I decided to take the very cheap ($1.50) mini-tour up to Cerro San Cristobal, a steep hill just north of Lima's centre which gives great views over the city. It was very hot, so I opened the window fully to let some air in. The road to the Cerro leads up through one of Lima's poorer neighbourhoods, and at one point the bus had to stop due to some traffic ahead. I was half asleep in the heat, closed my eyes for a second - and suddenly felt my sunglasses being lifted off my face. I looked round and saw some guy sprinting off down the street. He had reached in through the window and swiped my sunnies clean off of my face! I thought about jumping through the window and running after him, but knew I'd never catch him and didn't fancy being out on the street in that neighbourhood either. So if I look a little cheesed off in this photo, that's the reason.

Despite that, I enjoyed my time in Lima and was glad I had stopped there. Sunset over the Pacific in the Miraflores district, where I was staying, was beautiful. There were lots of paragliders soaring back and forth along the cliffs that made for great photo opportunities.

Next stop was Nazca to see the famous lines. This lady and her daughter sat next to me for the eight hour journey south, and were very interested to know where I came from, what I did for a living, etc. She asked me how old I was. I said "treinta y dos", which of course means thirty two. She laughed and told me to stop joking, of course I wasn't that old, I didn't look half that old. I started feeling very pleased with myself, that this lady should think I look so young. Until she said, "ochenta... creo no mas que cuarenta"; my dodgy pronunciation of "treinta", with a "ch" sound instead of a "tr", had sounded to her like eighty. Deflated, I spent the rest of the trip watching the desert roll past outside the window.

In Nazca, I took a flight in a small Cessna to see the lines from the air. I wanted to tell the pilot that I used to fly planes like his Cessna 172 and ask if he'd let me take control for a bit, but there was only one set of controls so that wasn't possible. I mentioned that I used to fly too, but he looked like he really couldn't have cared less so I didn't labour the point.

The area around Nazca is quite hilly, being the foothills of the Andes. But just to the north there is a large, rocky plain, which from ground level appears unremarkable. Approaching it from the air, at first it seems to be crossed by nothing more than the marks left by seasonal water courses, and the Lima highway...

But as you get closer, large quantities of straight lines and trapezoids, like giant arrows, can be seen on the ground. I wasn't expecting there to be quite so many or for them to be so large. Some are several kilometres long. At certain points there are figures, some human in form, some of animals, and some, well, some are just wierd, like these giant hands. Nearby is the observation tower erected by the most persistent of Nazca researchers, Maria Reiche, who died in 1998 at the age of 95, having spent over 40 years researching the lines.

The lines were produced by the Nazca people between 200 BC and 700 AD, by removing the surface layer of oxidised (i.e. rusty) rocks to leave the whiter earth underneath exposed. Because of the extremely dry and windless climate in Nazca, the lines have remained well preserved for over a thousand years since. There have been many theories postulated as to exactly why the Nazcans made the lines, but the most generally accepted one is that the lines represent sacred paths that lead to points of religious significance, from where the Nazcans would worship their Gods to ensure the annual rains didn't fail. Some of you will no doubt be disappointed to learn that theories involving space ships have been pretty much universally discredited.

Lines aren't the only things the dry air of Nazca has preserved in the desert. About an hour from Nazca town is the graveyard of Chauchilla, where several dozen mummies can be seen, huddled in their tombs, still with hair and clothing intact after more than a thousand years.

It was grave robbers who discovered these tombs, and they unfortunately took any treasures that were undoubtedly buried with the mummies, leaving just the corpses and the bones.

From Nazca I took another night bus to Cuzco, ancient capital of the Inca empire. I arrived there the same day as Rogers, Bryce and Sam did from their jungle trip, and we met in Paddy Flaherty's Irish pub to watch the second leg of Liverpool - Barcelona in the Champions' League. Liverpool lost the match 1-0 but won the tie on away goals. Happy days again. Here's a shot of the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco, with the cathedral in the background. Paddy Flaherty's is over there somewhere behind the fountain :-)

I watched this kid for a good five minutes as he watched the water in the fountain. He was absolutely entranced by it.

This statue of Christ the Redeemer stands high on a hill overlooking Cuzco. It was built in 1945, modelled on the much more famous one in Rio de Janeiro, and was a present to the city from Cusco's Palestinian community.

A view down one of Cuzco's ancient streets at night.

The American boys were booked to trek the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in a few days time, and I decided to join them. We had three days spare till the start of the trek but there was lots to see in and around Cuzco to fill that time. First up was the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuaman (pronounced like "Sexy Woman") on a hill overlooking the town. As a warm up for more impressive ruins to come, it was very interesting.

Incan stonework is unrivalled in its precision and is a joy to look at. Don't you think?

A llama at Sacsayhuaman doing what llamas do best. Chewing grass. We took a few photos of it, then heard a shout from behind us; an old lady was running towards us, demanding tips for us having photographed her animal. So what did we do? We ran away!!!

Me standing in an Inca doorway at Sacsayhuaman.

Located in the so-called Sacred Valley, about three hours from Cuzco on the route to Machu Picchu, are the very impressive ruins of Ollantaytambo. Built nestled into a notch in a hill, the massive stone terraces of this fortress were strong enough to withstand the Spaniards' attempts to capture it in 1536.

So here's me at the start of the Inca Trail. Despite it being rainy season in Peru, the weather wasn't too shabby at all and we had no rain... at first.

After just a few hours' walking, we stopped for lunch. The American chaps were beat. No stamina, these kids.

We came across our first ruins of the trail, called Llactapata, just after lunch on the first day. There are several Inca sites scattered along the Inca Trail, and while mostly interesting and impressive in their own right, they generally just serve to whet the appetite for the main course at the end of the trail - Machu Picchu itself.

Bryce, Sam, Rogers and me on day two, more or less half way up to Warmiwa�usqa, or Dead Woman's Pass (4200m), which can be seen in the background.

A shot of trekkers and porters making their way up to the Dead Woman's Pass. After 4750m Punto Union on the Santa Cruz trek, this one was a walk in the park...

Follow the yellow brick road. Much of the Inca trail is original Inca stonework like this. In this and the last shot you can see the kind of weather we had for the first three days of the trek: very cloudy, but not really any rain. It wasn't too cold either.

A nice picture of me at the top of a lower pass, called Runkuracay, on day three. In the background you can see a range of snow capped mountains; the cloudy weather gave us frustrating glimpses of them without really allowing us to see them properly.

More ruins, these ones called Sayaqmarca. In the distance are the huge terraces of Wi�aywayna, and beyond them, behind the hill partially hidden in cloud, lies Machu Picchu.

Sam & Rogers combing their beards with forks. No, I don't know why. You'll have to ask them.

Us with our porters during the so-called "Tipping Ceremony", where we tip them for their hard work and good service, carrying our tents and food during the previous three days. We'd all obviously tipped them quite well, because they look very happy. All except me, apparently, because that porter seems to be making a rude gesture over my head...

After three days of reasonable weather, day four, our Machu Picchu day, dawned grey and pouring with rain. Well, I say dawned - we were actually up a couple of hours before sunrise so as to walk to Intipunku - the Sun gate - to watch the sun rise over Machu Picchu. We walked for an hour through the pouring rain, and this was the view of Machu Picchu that greeted us when we got there. To say I was disappointed would be a gross understatement (the black spots in the picture are drops of water on the lens - impossible to keep it dry in the pouring rain).

If the weather didn't live up to my expectations at Machu Picchu, the scenery definitely exceeded them. It is absolutely spectacular. Well, that's a gross understatement. The scenery is totally mind-numbingly jaw-droppingly unbelievable. Whatever possessed these people to build a city so high up on such a steep piece of land, I will never understand. But I'm glad they did.

The rain stopped for about two hours later in the morning, and the clouds lifted and dropped again but it was never any better than cold and damp during our day at Machu Picchu.

Me & the boys in the ruins.

Machu Picchu. There was a nice story in Rogers' guide book on how Mr Hyram Bingham had discovered Machu Picchu. He had been down in the valley below, near the site of the present day village of Aguas Calientes, exploring the course of the Urubamba river looking for more ruins like the ones he had recently discovered at Ollataytambo and Llactapata. He met a local man who lived in the area, but who was distrustful of Mr Bingham's motives. Mr Bingham explained that he was exploring the area looking for Inca ruins. "Oh", said the local man, "in that case, there are some fine ones up on this hill here." The rest, as they say, is history.

The tall mountain behind Machu Picchu on all those postcard shots you might have seen is called Huayna Picchu. We climbed it for a spectacular view down onto the ruins 400m below. We got mostly a cloudy view, but now and then the clouds parted to reveal the city lying so far below.

Inca Kola - even better than the Real Thing.

After returning to Cuzco from Machu Picchu, we had just one night there before heading on to Lake Titicaca. We were all in something of a rush, which was a shame but that's the way it is sometimes. We had just one night in Puno, on the shores of the lake, before heading on to Bolivia the next day. Here is a shot of the lake shore with some of the many boats...

...and here is a shot of the MS Ollanta, which was built in Hull and served on the lake from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Next page: Bolivia
Back to Index