We stayed in Lima for a few days before our flight back home. It is a big city! Many people say they like Lima, but most only actually explored one or two of the nicer areas of the city. We were no exception. We stayed in the rich area of Miraflores, which includes a beachfront with surfers and a super fancy mall. We also ate a lot of good food, including the Peruvian dish of ceviche (diced raw fish 'cooked' with lime) and cow's heart (well, one of us ate cow's heart. It was very good). We ended up not doing [View Full Entry]

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Huacachina is a tiny oasis in the middle of the desert, east of the coast of Peru. It consists of two streets several blocks long, and a small lagoon. On all sides are towering sand dunes, which is pretty surreal. To get there, we bused to the nearby city of Ica and took a taxi from there to Huacachina. The main attraction is sandboarding! This is similar to snowboarding, but on sand... sand is softer to fall on, but it's harder to keep control, and the boards are quite thick and heavy, so precision boarding is not a realistic goal. Many [View Full Entry]

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The town of Nazca is near the famous Nazca lines, the mysterious shapes in the desert made by the Nazca civilization around 500BC. These shapes are of animals, plants, people and some 'abstract' designs, and were created simply by brushing off the black top layer of desert to reveal the white sand underneath. Due to the lack of rain and tiny windstorm that 'clean' the desert, the lines have remained almost perfectly intact save for the occasional car track (and the highway built by the government before the lines' discovery). We viewed several of the line shapes from a lookout tower [View Full Entry]

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We bused straight from La Paz to Arequipa, in Peru. Since we had already made the same journey the other way, this time we felt like experts. When the bus driver told all the confused tourists - in Spanish - to get off the bus and catch the water taxi across the lake, we knew just what to do! Getting entrance and exit stamps in our passports... no problem! We led the pack of gringos like shepherds. The remainder of the bus ride, however, was long, hot, and terrible. The later portion was even accompanied by a second bout of food [View Full Entry]

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From Lake Titicaca in Peru, it is so easy to make a small detour into Bolivia - the lake straddles the border between Peru and Bolivia. Therefore, we took the bus to Copacabana, a small, pretty town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. However, we didn't end up doing much exciting there, and then went on to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. This bus ride was eventful, as the bus stops at a wide river and everyone is told to get off. You must buy a ticket (always the extra charge!) for a small river taxi, and meet the [View Full Entry]

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After Cuzco, we made our way more or less directly to Puno, a town on the edge of Lake Titicaca. This is the highest lake in the world, and it quite beautiful. It also has floating islands, which are one of Peru's top tourist draws. Long ago, some of the native people living on islands and the mainland got tired of being bossed around by some of the others, so they built thick boats and platforms out of reeds, and floated off into the lake! They are still there today, hunting and fishing in the reeds, and maintaing their islands, which [View Full Entry]

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First thing in the morning, Renato (our guide from the trek) collected us from our hotel and hustled us to the bus station a block away. We queued with a huge number of people, got the eighth bus of the day despite being so early, and then queued outside the gate to Machu Picchu. Why the rush? Although several thousand people will visit the site, only 400 can climb Wayna Picchu, the mountain peak towering above the ruins that you see in all the postcards (and we wanted to climb it). Thus, as soon as we got in the gate, we [View Full Entry]

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We did a four-day hike to Machu Picchu from Cusco. Instead of walking the traditional Inca Trail, which is filled with other trekkers and must be booked months in advance, we did an alternate route called the Lares Trek. It starts in the small city of Lares, in the mountains. We (Simon, Lorenzo, Blaise, and us) were picked up early from our hostel and driven several hours to Lares, where there were hotsprings to start us off on our hike. We had lunch, then walked for three hours to our first campsite in a 'low' pass in the mountains. This walk [View Full Entry]

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Finally having arrived by plane in Cusco (from Tegucigalpa, Honduras) we reached our hostel and were shown to the room we booked with the cherubs (Simon and Lorenzo, who we met in Mexico). It was 7am, so they were still asleep - Simon was thrilled when we jumped onto his bed! Another English kid has been added to the group - Blaise, who went to school with the cherubs in London. Together, we all spent several days in Cusco acclimatizing, then did a hike up to Machu Picchu (separate entry). Cusco is a beautiful city, full of colonial architecture and twisting [View Full Entry]

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They say there are only three lies on Utila: 1) "I'm leaving tomorrow", 2) "I'm not drinking tonight", and 3) "I love you". In our experience here, we have found this to be true. It is the perfect combination of sunny snorkeling and wild nightlife! Utila is one of the three Bay Islands off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. We came here to relax in the sun and visit with some friends who are also here. Everyone else comes to scuba dive; naturally, we signed right up. Utila is the cheapest place in the world to learn to dive, and the [View Full Entry]

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