Today we are in Trujillo and it is not a great day. I am sure under different circumstances I would give this bright and sunny city a chance. Under the circumstances, I am looking forward greatly to returning to the Second Home in Lima. We were originaly going to be in Trujillo for two days and go on to Chiclayo for another two days. However, Alli got very sick in Lima and we pressed on to Trujillo. Yet, it is not grabbing us. We are missing the comfortable environs of Second Home in Barranco, and we know that Lima has much [View Full Entry]

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Our hotel in Lima was fantastic, a little b&b called Second Home. I have written extensively about the hotel elsewhere, so I wont' repeat myself too much. Just a little - it was a tudor home located on the cliff-front in Barranco. The artist Victor Delfin still lives and produces art there, and his gorgeous, colorful and erotically charged art is all over the house. Barranco is a cool suburb of Lima, very artistic and beautiful with tree-lined streets and old mansions, some decaying, others in good shape. It's right on the cliffs and the sound of the ocean is very [View Full Entry]

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The next day is another 5am wakeup call. It gets easier every time. Alli sleeps in for this one, but Michael, Tricia and I head out after an early breakfast. The day before, we had fitted ourselves with wellington boots, knee high rubber boots, to wear into the jungle. It was quite a comedy trying to find a matching pair that fits. The reason for the boots is that, after a 45 minute peke-peke ride to the dock, there is an hour and a half hike to Lake Sandoval along a muddy trail. Sometimes the mud reaches up to mid-calf, or [View Full Entry]

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(Post-Dated - this was written originally on my Palmpilot) When we arrived in Puerto Maldonado, Inkaterra picked us up in an open truck. This was the beginning of a very different phase in the trip. For example, there would only be English from here on out. Even if you spoke Spanish to some of the staff, they would reply in English. All tours were given in English, no matter how much of a strain it was for the tour-giver and how much easier it would be for all of us if we just all spoke Spanish. Also, instead of me being [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday, we woke up early in our stinky hotel (the bathroom smelled so bad of mold that we were retching as we brushed our teeth) and headed for the bus to M.P. at 5am. We got the first bus at 530 and were the 3rd people through the gates to the lost city of the Incas. A thick mist shrouded the city, rendering it invisible. We could see the steps in front of our face, and climbed to what we thought might be the guard hut, as it is called by Hiram Bingham. This is a vantage point far above the [View Full Entry]

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Preface this with that I love traveller's towns sometimes. The happy hours, the cybercafes, the travellers everywhere to chat with. Udaipur was like that, and San Ignacio in Belize too. Today we took the train to Aguas Calientes from Cusco. It was a long ride with a few beautiful vistas, but mostly territory we had covered before in our Sacred Valley tour yesterday. But at the end, we began seeing mountains covered in green foliage, misty mountaintops, and descended into the cloud forest that surrounds Machu Picchu. We were lucky enough to have gotten a hotel at the last minute - [View Full Entry]

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We took a tour to the Sacred Valley today. Our bus tour picked us up at our hotel and we continued gathering two Brits, a pack of Japanese, and assorted other nationalities. Our tour guide Ignacio was okay. He wasn't bad, he wasn't good. He sure did get a lot of kickbacks. He wasn't anything special. In a way I wished we had gone on our own but taking combis and buses to all these towns would have been quite difficult to do in a single day. The first stop was the Pisac market. Although I thought I didn't like markets, [View Full Entry]

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I just lost my whole entry. That´s okay, although I went into some detail on some interesting neighborhoods, I was mostly writing about the boring part of our day. I´ll give a quickie here and return and write in it later. altitude makes it hard to breathe, spanish speaking lots, san blas very different from neighborhood around train station, got tickets, no hotels in aguas calientes for us, andean travel web donation great, valley tour set up for tomorrow and got maps and stuff, saw Qorikancha and lunch at inka hut. The altitude makes it difficult to breathe here. It is [View Full Entry]

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This journal is post-dated, and was written on my Palm Pilot while in Cusco. After a very long series of flights here, we finally arrived in Cusco at 7am actually. It is May 20th. Our flight took over a day. We also had a long layover in the Lima airport, where we hung out in the coffee shop and played UNO and other card games. It still felt like we hadn't left "Airport Country" (that country that extends around the world, only in airports - it's a special universe) until we arrived at the Cusco airport. Open to the outside, a [View Full Entry]

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This post is mainly about Clare County though we are staying in Limerick. Well, when last I wrote, it was Monday and I didn't expect much excitement for the remainder of the week. Last night, some of the local lads took us out to a place called Copper & Spice. The food was delish but I didn't think it worth writing about. Tonight, on the other hand, despite working until 6pm, we had an adventure. My co-worker's last night in Ireland is tonight, so we went out for a drive. Every site is marked by a brown sign from miles away. [View Full Entry]

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