More torturous bus journeys to get us over the border into Peru (the hangovers didn’t help), but a day of travelling for 16hrs on skanky buses with cockroaches is not fun!  We finally made it into Peru at about 2am and thankfully found a lovely beach cabin to chill out in for a few days in Máncora (apparently the surf capital of Peru….waves would have made it slightly more believable!).

Laguna camp at Máncora

Kitesurfing at Máncora

We were now on quite a tight schedule to get further south in Peru we finally had to take night buses in order to get around, something that we were not too keen on, but, they are like first class aeroplanes, nearly a flat bed, english movies, food, rugs, what more could you ask for!!! Peru is no where near as pretty as  the landscape in Ecuador, its all very barron, dry and brown which doesn’t do much for it, however the people are un believeably friendly….sometimes too friendly.  We arrived in Trujillo just in time to watch the Champions League final, but trying to find a pub to watch this in was a bit tricky, until our helpful tour guide found us and lead us to the restaurant, proceeded to stay all afternoon trying to sell to us, 2 mates came too to sell various other bits and bobs, finally after the match and leaving without buying anything from them we got a slightly frosty reception to say the least!

Trying to tune into Champion's league...

We arrived in Huaraz in the Andes, 3,100m high and realized that our days of warm weather are now gone for a few months- it was freezing and definitely time to buy some more jumpers!

  We decided to go on a trek to ´laguna 69´- a lake located at 4,600m(phew).  It was a tough old climb to the top, having to stop every 10 meters in order to catch our breath because of the altitude, we also had a sense of humour failure when it started to rain, clouds came in and the “beautiful view” disappeared!  We finally made it to the top and back down again, however I think its safe to say that we totally overdid it.  The altitude killed us (well nige anyway) who got really ill for the next couple of days, so we learnt a valuable lesson not to do the hardest trek without acclimatising!

Laguna 1 on the way to Laguna 69

Highest mountain in the Huascarán National Park

Climbing up to 4500m

The next step was to head back down to sea level, which thankfully made us feel automatically better!  We headed south of lima to a place called Pisco, which has what is described as teh poor mans Galapagos Islands. Pisco wasn’t quite as we had expected.  There was a massive earthquake in 2007 which had pretty much destroyed the town.

Decrepid pisco...

It was very depressing driving through the town and seeing the signs of the Hostals that we were planning on staying in and then seeing the pile of rubble of where it used to be.  Despite all this it was a very friendly town and the locals had a great fighting spirit.  We took a trip out to the poor mans Galapagos which was amazing (but I’m sure not as good as the real thing!!)  There were thousands of birds ( and a lot of bird poo called Guano which is used as a fertiliser back at home!).  I finally got to see my favourite animal, the penguin, hundreds of sea lines and even dolphins- it was pretty impressive (despite the bird poo smell!)

Sealions, birds, and crap

Penguins on Isla Ballestas

It was now time for us to make our way up to Lima for a night or two in order to get to Cuzco to do the Inca trail.

That is where we are now, a beautiful city but again so so so cold, im very jealous of your English summer right now as I am wearing all my layers i own and still cold!  So we are in preparation to start the Inca trail tomorrow morning- I have a certain amount of fear about it but fingers crossed all will be ok and we will be pro hikers by the end of 4 days (or more likely unable to walk!!)

Be Sociable, Share!

•