Blogs from Salkantay Trail, Cusco, Peru, South America - page 7

Just finished a 5 day trek on the Salkantay Trail and it was sick! We used Llama Path which is an excellent company and I would def recommend them to anyone. Our guide Santiago was also perfect. He really made this trip alot more enjoyable than it would have been with anyother tour guide. We had a group of 7 that consisted of another New Yorker, Canadian, Irish and two Frenchies. The group was great too, we all really got along perfectly. The first day we all had a pretty hard time hiking due to the altitude but managed to make it to camp after EIGHT Hours at a hight of 13,750 ft.! Santiago explained everything from the medicinal plants to the animals we saw. Our Second day took us NINE hours total but was my ... read more

"The alternative Inka Trail" The Salkantay trek is one of the alternatives to the "original" inka trail (which is booked up to the end of september!!) It's named after Mt. Salkantay (6271m), in Cordillera Vilcanota. I booked a tour with one of at least 200 companies in Cusco and headed off last monday at 4 am! We ended up with a group of 12 people and one guide: David & Ruth (England), Héléne (France), Alexa (Switzerland), Abraham (Mexico), Chris, Holly and John (USA), Nir (Israel), Astrid & Tim (Holland/Germany), Percy (Peru, our guide) and me. A nice mix of people as you can see : ) And it turned out to be a really nice group to spend the time with for the 5 days the trip lasted (and a couple of nights out in Cusco ... read more

This entry will be very hard to write because it is such a mixture of amazingly good stuff that we did (mostly involving scenery and time spent without our guide) and amazingly awful stuff we did on the way to Machu Picchu (usually involving the name Felix). If you haven't read the previous entry about pre-trek panic then it might help you to understand the following... We left at 4am on Sunday morning trying our best to give Felix the guide another chance and got picked up slightly late in a taxi with a broken door that didn't shut and one headlight. After a two hour bus journey to Mollepata we met with the other 'staff' who would be making up our group for the 5 days - a cook named Victoriano and a horseman named ... read more

Po nekolika dnech v Cuzcu jsem se konecne vypravil na turu do Machu Picchu - zlaty hreb cele cesty. Vybral jsem si turu s nazvem Salkantay trail - petidenni turu pres hory. Vyrazelo se pekne brzo - ve ctyri hodiny rano autobusem do vesnice Mollapata. Kdyz jsem se probudil, tak v hostelu na recepci nebyla ani noha a ze stropu jim tam tekla proudem voda. Zvonil jsem asi 5 minut ale nikdo se neobjevil. Tak jsem vyrazil a zanechal spoust za sebou. Do Mollapaty jsme dorazili v sedm rano, nasledovala ospala snidane, kdy se postupne vsichni seznamili. V nasi parte jsme meli dva Anglicany - Johna a Laurence, dva Argentince - Anu a Maxe, Svedku Sandru, Belgicanku Kato, Rakusanku Cristinu, Australana Dava, Izraelku Yoev, Jihoafricana Daniho, me a pruvodce Edwyna s dvouma kucharema a jednim konakem. ... read more

I arrived in Cusco on a very rainy morning, off the night bus from Arequipa. I was pretty excited to have finally made it to the centre of the gringo world in South America. Surely every backpacker on this continent comes through this city at some point, and most them move on to trek to Machu Picchu. Cusco is a really nice city with loads of colonial buildings throughout the city, and particularly around another huge Plaza de Armas. However, there is also evidence everywhere of the remains of the Incan empire, with some bits of stonework, walls and archways remaining throughout the city that weren´t destroyed after the arrival of the Spanish. Cusco, pre Spanish arrival, was the capital, for around 500 years, of the Inca empire. At it´s maximum, the empire stretched from Northern ... read more