Peru

Cusco

As a small, tourist city it had a lot more charm than one can expect. But it had enough of small girls in national costumes carrying lamas asking if you wanted to take a picture. Only one soleeeees...

We stayed at the Point Hostel, where you find a variety of people. Compared to other places we have been there were actually people from Peru staying here too, and we had a good time with the Peruvians! Funny and well oriented people. A lot of people in Europe wouldn't know that Norway isn't a part of the EU for example...

Machu Picchu and the Lares trek

Being the main thing in Peru and one of the biggest attractions of our trip we were really excited when we started the trek. The first day was spend in the Sacred Valley where we saw a lot of old Inca ruins. We stayed in a small town called Ollantaytambo. The trek itself lasted for 3 days, and on the first day it was hailing! We have to admit we didn't expect that and was wearing pants that stopped way over the ancles... I have to admit I asked myself why I was doing this the second day. The hills were steep and the air thin... breathing like a damp engine... Getting to camp was so nice, every time! Went to bed early, because it was so cold. Glad I had invested in an alpacca jumper in La Paz... We also had rain, fog and sunshine on our trip. The highest point was 4450 m altitude!

On the 4th day we were finally going to Machu Picchu. Getting up before sunrise... When we got there we couldn't see anything because of the fog. That made it more interesting, now we saw it bit by bit... AMAZING!

On of the things that really made the trip was the nice group. As well as the two of us (known as the Weegie Weegies), there were 6 English and 8 Canadians, the eldest was over 50, what a lady!

Lima

After weeks in the mountains in Peru and Bolivia it was great with some city life. Lima is a huge city, with almost 8 million people. We stayed in a part called Miraflores. It's nice with shops and cafees. We even found a mall!! OF course most of the shops sold things made of alpacca... but they had a cinema and Starbucks:)
We went paragliding with crazy Marco, fun! Not as scary as expected, and I think my mother and grandmother would have liked it. We got to look into people's homes.. hehe... Wouldn't mind having one of those apartements...

Mancora

We were planning to go to Arequipa, but decided we needed some beach and sun. In Mancora we found both, and the Point Hostel is even at the beach. We enjoyed the laid back atmosphere and friendly staff to the max! We achieved another goal as well, we went surfing and both of us stood up at the board! Maybe we should mention we had an instructor each helping to paddle, chosing the waves adn telling us when to get up.. ;)

Tupiza to Uyuni

We decided to do a 4 day trip from Tupiza to Uyuni. This was the easy option. Wish we had been a bit luckier with the company in the jeep though... While everyone else was in groups of 4-5 in the 20-30s we ended up with a 65 years old lady from Switzerland. 4 days in a jeep is quite a few hours...

The trip started by climbing from 2950 m altitude and to around 4-5000. Most of the time we had the heart in the throat, with a gravel road that goes straight down into rocks and nothing. seat belts? never heard of! Just as we were thinking "what if we meet another car now", we met a huge truck/lorry loaded with kids... Solution: he had to back down a bit and then we could drive off the road and past.

The scenery is amazing! Mountains in all colours, stones shaped by millions of years sand and wind, and multi coloured lagunas with flamingoes. Not to mention all the lamas. They are cute and taste good too.

The highlights of the trip were the salt flats, of course, and the hot springs! The funniest thing is to use the optical illusjon the salt desert makes...

In Uyuni we tried pizza with lama at Minute Man Pizza. very good!

Thank heaven, no sickness due to altitude. But running, or moving about here is a lot of work. At the highest we have been at almost 6000 m altitude.