We arrived in Puno at around 8pm. It was dark and it was raining hard. We had booked a hostel by phone and we thought our taxi had taken us to the right place. It wasn’t until the next morning, when Grant got dropped off at a totally different hostel across town after giving the driver the name of the place we were booked in for, that we realised that we’d been scammed. Here’s how it went: it’s wet, it’s dark and we just wanted to get to our hostel. “Please take us to Hostel Randomio”. “Si!” We arrive at a place where we can’t see the sign because it’s dark and it’s raining. The driver comes into the reception (which again is dark) where there‟s a man behind the counter. The driver says something to him in Spanish. We say that we have a reservation and that we’d advised …[Read More]
Travel
Camino Inka – The Inca Trail
The next morning, we loaded up the van with our duffel bags. We were allowed 6kg per person and I just filled mine with socks and baby wipes. Jose was in high spirits, joking around and getting to know the group; it was great to see that my first impressions may have been completely off. We left Cusco for the Sacred Valley, passing a small village along the way. In the village, we met women and children who fashioned artisanal products such as blankets and scarves using traditional means. We saw how they extracted dyes from local plants, how they coloured the fibres in huge pots over open fires, and how the alpaca fibres were made usable. The people were dressed in frilly black skirts and bright red shawls with jauntily angled stiff berets. There were no men around; they must have been working in the surrounding hills. From here, …[Read More]
Cusco – The Imperial City
At 4.30am, after some brief, violent stomach upsets at Lima airport, we were on a plane to Cusco and, looking out of the window at our first sighting of the majestic snow-capped peaks of the Andes, it felt for the first time that I was actually ‘travelling’. Growing up in the UK, the Andes are an absolute mile away, both in distance and in the imagination, and it carried a powerful mystique. I knew that the range contained the mighty Cerro Aconcagua (in Argentina), the highest mountain in the western hemisphere, thousands of kilometres to the south, and here I was flying right over its northern tip. With few clouds in the air, I could see just ice and snow below. Despite the flight from Lima to Cusco being little more than an hour long, Cusco was a huge change in altitude. The city is more than 3,000m high and the …[Read More]
Lima – The City of the Kings
“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.” Gordon Gekko, Wall Street PERU IS ON THE west coast of South America with Ecuador and Columbia to the north, Chile to the south, Bolivia to the south-east, and Brazil to the east. To its west is the Pacific Ocean. It’s a huge country with 29m people and it’s diverse, both geographically and ethnically. Geographically because Peru has flats near the coastline, the sierra highlands in the Andes itself, and jungle in the Peruvian section of the Amazon rainforest. Demographically, the largest of the ethnic groups (at around 45%) are people of Amerindian descent, followed by …[Read More]
Prologue
“As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.” The Epic of Gilgamesh THEY SAY ALL GREAT IDEAS happen when at the pub. Don’t believe me? Ask Van Gogh where he was when he decided on some irreversible cosmetic surgery. It’s a little-known fact that Columbus set off for the East Indies in the wrong direction as a result of a dare after knocking back a couple of bottles of rose with tumblers of port to chase whilst in an Algarve finca. I‟m convinced that Hitler decided to open up a second front with the Soviet Union whilst in a Berchtesgaden tavern with …[Read More]