Lima

This is the last blog post about Maria and Andrés' adventures in Peru and Bolivia.

Before flying back to Denmark from Lima, we spent a few days at Andrés friends' house. One of his friends is starting up a project in the jungle, a healthcenter based on permaculture agriculture. He has some really cool ideas.

Lima isn't the nicest place to visit, the dusty grey buildings and the black vultures that fly over them give the city a gloomy atmosphere. However, the coast in Miraflores is a nice area with gardens and has a beach. So we wanted to try surfing. For Andrés it was his first time surfing. 

Maria in the love park (Parque Amor).

Andrés hadn't forgotten his skateboarding skills and had no problem surfing. 

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu needs no words.

You can read some comments below the pictures.

Train is the fastest way to Machu Picchu, but you also pay for it. The bus takes around 4 times longer than the train, and we only had one day left on our holiday to visit Machu Picchu.

It's amazing to think that this river flows through the Amazon and ends in the Atlantic Ocean!

Andrés enjoyed the wildlife as much as the Machu Picchu ruins

Andrés enjoyed the plants almost more than Machu Picchu

They say that between 400-1000 Incas lived here permanently

The Inca bridge shows the impressive paths that the Incas built to get to the temples from different places

At the top of the mountain in the background lay the Huayna Picchu ruins

It's impressive how they could shape these huge granite stones to fit so well in their temples

Good models make good pictures!

Once more Andrés enjoyed all the different types of ferns

Beautiful Cusco

Our time in South America was reaching to an end, but we wanted to take some time to really relax and be "real" tourists. The place chosen for that was Cusco and Machu Picchu. However this post is only going to be about our relax time in Cusco. Machu Picchu will come in the next post.

Cusco is a very beautiful city, with lots of historical buildings from the colonial times and ruins from the Incas. Many of the colonial houses are used today as hostals, and some have very nice small courtyards, as the one we stayed in. One of the neighbourhoods stands out for its coziness, and that is San Blas, which lies at the foothills of the hill with the impressive Sacsayhuaman ruins from the Incas. The ruins are nice, but the entrance is extremely expensive (way too much!), 36,6€ (273kr.) per person, even for us as students with an international student card, just because we are over 25 years old.

Anyways, we had some very nice and relaxing days there. I think we needed that!

Three-day hike on the Illampu-Janq'u Uma massif

Three weeks ago, Maria and I went again to the Andes montains to see another glacier lake, the Laguna Glaciar, which is one of the top 20 highest lakes in the world (5038m) (number 17 or 19 depending on sources). The lake is located between the Illampu and the Janq'u Uma peaks, both around 6400m, and relatively close to the town Sorata. From there we hired a guide with a mule and hiked for three days on these beautiful mountains. The first day we started from close to Sorata (2678m) to the Chilata lake (4200m) where we camped both nights. The impressive Chilata lake is located at the border of a quite thin rock ridge. On the other side lays a huge sloped rocky mountain which for some reason, the Incas decided it was a good place to build a village. Our local guide told us that during the Universal Flood from Noah's time, the Inca people living in the valley had to move there to avoid the waters.

The next day after a cold night that froze our tent door like it was a wooden door, we hiked up to the glacier lake and back. Once we got to the laguna glacial Maria and I decided to get closer to the glacier front, but when we were around 100 meters from there the big rocks we were walking on started to become very unstable, and after a small incident, we had to walk back thanking God nothing had happened.

The second night was not as cold as the first one, and after packing everything, we hiked back down from the heights into the deep valley.

Left: the Inca village was located on top of the steep mountain's side. Right: Maria is standing at the entrance of the Inca village.

Chilata lake.

These two plants are gathered by the locals and used for decorative purposes during carnivals.

"Base camp" by the Chilata lake, and our guide who is cooking dinner.

Sometimes the view from these heights was amazing.

Contour of a viscacha on our way up to the glacier lake.

The Illampu peak, not the highest but considered the hardest 6000 of Bolivia (in normal route).

At the glacier lake (5038m) with the glacier at the back.

While watching the glacier a sudden small snow avalanche happened and the noise echoed impressively.

A closer look of the glacier.

Llamas.