Hi folks, I regret to advise it has not been a good week for the old farts on the technical front. Firstly, we lost our camera a few days ago, and today our notepad computer has died on us. Wrt the camera, we had just finished a tour of the Inca ruins of the Sacred Valley near Cusco,when we took a motobike taxi over a heavily cobbled road to our hotel. Given we had the camera (with a hundred or so photos from the ruins that day) at the end of the days travels, but not later at the hotel, we can only assume it vibrated out of my pocket in transit, and one Peruvian moto driver is much the richer for it. The alternative is that it was stolen, but I guess we'll never know ... read more

And so to Machu Picchu, arguably the ´jewel in the crown´ for our total visit. How sad to be going up there armed with only a box brownie equivalent disposable camera, but I guess at times life sucks! Anyway, our trip really started at the end of the Sacred Valley visit (see Cusco blog), as we opted out of this trip at Ollantaytambo, and stayed there the night (when I lost my camera), in order to reduce travel time to MP the following day. The train trip from Cusco to Aguas Calientes (AC), which is little more than a village a short distance from MP, is around 4 hours, but by getting onto the train at Ollan. we were able to reduce this journey by over half. The train used for this trip, called the Vistadome, ... read more

OK guys, a quick quiz to start the day! What is the deepest canyon in the world? No, it's not the famous Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA, nor the Copper Canyon of northern Mexico. It is indeed the Colca Canyon, situated high in the Andes in southern Peru, which for 100 km averages 3,400 metres deep. The only practical way for us to get to this fairly desolate location, some 300kms round trip along windy roads in only average condition, was on an organised tour. And if you want to see the condors in flight (and who doesn’t?), it requires an overnight stop and a very early start on day 2. So our intimate little tour group of a Dutch couple, an Israeli couple, a Frenchmen and a guy from Uruguay duly joined us for ... read more

Our flight from Guayaquil to Baltra on the Galapagos took around 1.5hrs and was pretty uneventful. On arrival, we met our 13 fellow travellers for the next 8 days aboard MV Letty. Quite an interesting mix of 15 pax - 9 female & 6 male; 8 of our generation (I’m probably the oldest!) and 7 kids around their 20’s; 6 Brits, 6 Americans and 3 Aussies. And most importantly, everyone mixed really well. To service the 15 guests, we had 11 crew, incl the captain & 2 assistants, 2 naturalist guides (Orlando & Harry, both very knowledgable and experienced, with excellent English), 2 engineers, 2 cooks, a barman & a housekeeper, who all looked after us all fantastically well. The company running the cruise was called Ecoventura - you could do far worse than contact them ... read more

I’m really using some licence here, quoting yet again from that famed authority Lonely Planet, but they certainly got it right this time. We basically have some time to kill prior to our Galapagos cruise, and Cuenca was a great place to just chill out for 5 days. It is a big enough city (400,000 pax, #3 in Ecuador) that you are not running into the same people all the time as you stroll around, but it doesn’t have the hustle and bustle traditionally associated with big cities. More importantly, in the central part of the city where we stayed, it has narrow cobblestone streets, white-washed red tile buildings, and many plazas, generally backed by old domed churches. Furthermore, it lies on the banks of a very attractive river, where women still wash their clothes ... read more