Titicaca Lake
Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake and quite impressive with its size and high altitude (3800m). It’s also a very pretty sight with its dark blue water, surrounded by yellow hills and far away, glimpses of Andean peaks. Puno on the other hand was rather ugly. Though very busy. On day one we could […]
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Nazca Lines
For our “backpacking” part of the trip we travelled by bus from Lima to Nazca (6h), overnight to Arequipa (10h) and with the last very comfy bus to Puno (7h). Final bus transfer from Puno via Copacabana to La Paz was no more shiny buses with wide leather seats reclining 180 degrees and personal entertainment […]
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Santa Cruz hike – part 2
Initially we planned to do the four day Santa Cruz Trek trek on our own, renting trekking gear in Huaraz. Luckily we decided instead to take an organized group trek with Quechuandes. First, we met some great people to hike with, Erica & Maxine from Toronto, Debbi & Michael from Zurich and our crew, Héctor […]
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Santa Cruz Hike – part 1
Initially we planned to do the four day Santa Cruz Trek trek on our own, renting trekking gear in Huaraz. Luckily we decided instead to take an organized group trek with Quechuandes. First, we met some great people to hike with, Erica & Maxine from Toronto, Debbi & Michael from Zurich and our crew, Héctor […]
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Huaraz – acclimatization hikes
Peru, May 17-June 2 Back to Peru, back to Lima. The food here is great, the city itself is meh. We quickly moved on to Huaraz, the hiking capital of Peru. There was not a single person on that flight not wearing hiking boots and carrying hiking poles. The Cordillera Blanca is the highest mountain […]
Read MoreAmazon cruise p2
Our last destination was Iquitos, for a five days Amazon river cruise on Cattleya, a small boat with only four cabins. With the whole wall being one big window, we could lie in bed and watch the river passing by. On activities, we enjoyed most the skiff rides on the smaller channels with almost black […]
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Amazon cruise p1
Our last destination was Iquitos, for a five days Amazon river cruise on Cattleya, a small boat with only four cabins. With the whole wall being one big window, we could lie in bed and watch the river passing by. On activities, we enjoyed most the skiff rides on the smaller channels with almost black […]
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Sacred Valley (p.2)
We returned by combined train-car ride back to Cusco and spent two more days in Cusco, including a full day taxi tour to the Sacred Valley, visiting the Inca ruins in Chinchero, Moray and Ollanta and the salt mines in Maras.
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Sacred Valley (p.1)
We returned by combined train-car ride back to Cusco and spent two more days in Cusco, including a full day taxi tour to the Sacred Valley, visiting the Inca ruins in Chinchero, Moray and Ollanta and the salt mines in Maras.
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Machu Picchu day two
The next morning we got up at 4am, which would feel much worse if not having fallen asleep at 8pm the evening before. Still, almost too late, the queue for the first bus at 5.30am was already going through half the village. Now the karma points paid us back and we still got to the […]
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Machu Picchu day one
After a relaxed day in Cuzco, realizing that on 3.300m even the 200m difference to Sacsaywamán is a though hike :), we took an early morning taxi to Poroy to board our 3h PeruRail train ride to Aguas Calientes. 3h of pan flute music is definitively way too much. Aguas was nicer than expected, but […]
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Cuzco
The travel back to Cuzco was another 3h boat, 1h car, short ferry ride, 2h van and 1h flight from Puerto Maldonado. Next up Cuzco and Machu Picchu. The seven days jungle tour was a great way to experience the different ecosystems from the dry mountains to the cloud forest and the Amazon basin. The […]
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Peru – Manu national park – Macaws
Manu Wildlife Center was another basic but comfortable bungalow in a very pretty garden setting. We got to see lots of birds, climbed up to a 36m treetop viewpoint (needing careful coaxing back down in Sabine’s case on the rickety spiral staircase) and went early morning to the macaw salt lick. We entered the blind, […]
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Peru – Manu national park – Day 4 – the Jaguar
On the way back it started to rain and wouldn’t stop for the next 36 hours. The afternoon we spent in the dining bungalow, sorting pictures, reading, eating popcorn and watching the wildlife from inside, as we had tamarin, capuchin and squirrel monkeys all passing closely by. The next morning it still rained, not too […]
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Peru – Manu national park – Day 3 – Giant otters
On our full day in Cocha Salvador, we went for a wooden catamaran trip on the actual Cocha, an oxbow lake near our camp. We got super lucky to see the resident giant river otter family with all its nine members coming back from a mid-morning fishing trip. The younger ones were quickly ushered back […]
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Peru – Manu national park – Day 2
Second day in Manu with even more traveling, first by car and long hours by boat on Rio Alto Madre and Rio Manu to the tented camp at Cocha Salvador. Along the way we saw turtles, caimans, capybaras and many more birds. Early morning we passed by one of the indigenous groups living in the […]
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Peru – Manu national park – Day 1
It’s a long way to Peru, curtesy to AirFrance with an extra hour before take-off looking for some missing luggage – unfortunately not ours as we realized later in Lima. 12h flight in an old cramped plane, with an outdated entertainment system, sad movie selection (The Fate of the Furious was the lead movie) and […]
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