After a fun yet challenging time in Bolivia it was time to hit a new country: Peru. Our first stop was the beautiful, hot and very relaxing city of Arequipa. Perfect for our recovery....
Hello Peru!
The city is surrounded by incredible volcanoes, dominated by the majestic Misti...
Once of the most famous sights in the city is the beautiful Santa Catalina monastery. Founded in 1579, this city within a city is a national heritage site where, back in the day, the nuns were once selected from among Spain's richest families and pretty much had a jolly. However, this all ended in 1871 when pious living was restored. It's a stunning place to wander through for a few hours...
A water purification system...
Sarah: My hot boyfriend.
We happened to be in the town during a local celebration and saw some dancing in the streets Peruvian style...
We capped off our stay with an outdoor Peruvian cooking class...
With a Pisco Sour cocktail lesson...
And a visit to the city's old market...
Look carefully above this fish monger and you'll notice his dried frogs for sale... Yum!
And no visit to Peru would be complete without meeting an Alpaca...
After a week basking in the sunshine at the relatively low altitude of 2,335 metres, it was time to head to the capital city of Cusco to prepare for the famous Inca Trail...
After a slightly nervy overnight bus journey, we arrived in Cusco - the Inca Capital. Matt: Our only remaining camera decided to simply stop working pretty much as soon as we arrived in Cusco. That meant we had to use my phone to snap the city (and no more HD videos for the rest of the trip), before picking up a new camera. Bloody typical! The 100 foot high statue of Pachacuti, the Inca Emperor responsible for transforming the city into the centre of a vast empire...
After a few days of preparation, we headed north for one of the most exciting parts of our journey: the legendary Inca Trail. We were to spend 4 days and 3 nights hiking and camping along this ancient religious path to the city of Machu Picchu. Sarah sums up our pre-trek mood:
While we spent the days with our own guide, Juan, we had lunch and camped at night with another small group consisting of Alfonso and Alberto from Spain (1st and 2nd from the left); Karsten and Maibritt from Denmark (3rd and 4th). They all made for great company...
The first Inca site...
Our camp the first night after a relatively easy days walking. We all had an early nights sleep as day 2 was the dreaded 'Inca Steps' up to our highest point: Dead Woman's Pass...
The end of the first day video:
Day 2: Inca Steps...
That's the way!
The scenery on the second day changes to jungle...
Steps and more steps...
Admiring the view halfway up the steps...as our guide said 'the best excuse for a break is to take a photo'. We did this a lot.
Lunch on the second day. The cook needed to give us an injection of rocket fuel to attack the hardest leg of our trek up to Dead Woman's Pass. Steps all the up, and over 4000 metres in altitude.
Walking up to Dead Woman's Pass:
Sprinting the remaining steps up to Dead Woman's Pass:
We headed into the next valley for a well deserved rest before pushing on the next morning. Needless to say, the scenery continued to drop jaws...
Having a spot of lunch in the midday sunshine. All very civilised...
Our first glimpse of Aguas Caliente: the town on the valley floor below Machu Picchu, built purely to fleece tourists arriving and departing by train...
On the last night we finally got to meet all of our amazing porters, and Alfonso cracked open a bottle of rum to celebrate the trek...
The fourth day we got up at 3am to get in the queue for the Sun Gate entrance...
2 hours later we finally had our first glimpse of Machu Picchu...
It was time to explore this breathtaking city in the clouds...
After a few hours of soaking up the views we took the bus down to our hotel in Aguas Caliente, said goodbye to everybody in the team and then pretty much slept for 12 hours straight. However, there was one last piece of business to attend to the next day: scaling Huayna Picchu (also know as 'Wayna Picchu'). Only 200 people per day are allowed up so we were extremely lucky, as well as privileged to have permits...
It is as steep as it looks, with some of the route just shy of vertical, and some sections are without ropes or handrails...
45 minutes (and plenty of breaks) later, we did it!
Inca Trail, Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu: done! We caught the train from Aguas Caliente to Ollantaytambo...
...where our pre-booked bus was ready to pick us up. About 2 hours into the 4 hours trip, the driver pulled over and made everybody get off the bus as the engine had caught fire... Great!
Matt: One of the other passengers, who was fluent in Spansh, asked the driver for the 'no bull shit' estimate for how long our replacement bus would be. "Around 3 hours" was his reply. Given that we were in the middle of nowhere and the sun was rapidly dropping, the prospect of sitting in sub-zero conditions to wait for another bus wasn't exactly a winning one. However, luck was on our side as a local bus service due for Cusco drove past about 45 mins later and picked us all up... for a price of course! Nonetheless, we finally got back to the luxury hotel room that was part of our Inca Trail package booked back in London, and decided we deserved a proper dinner...
We booked a bus south to Chile for the next evening, which left us with a day to kill. In was only appropriate that we spent it with the two people we met way back in Brasil on day 5: Claire and Paddy. Given that they were headed north, making it the last time we would see them in South America after hanging out with them countless times over the previous 3 months, there was only one thing for it...
