We arrived in Puno on the evening of the 16th after a bus journey that was supposed to take 5 hours but took 7! We booked into our very nice hostel and had a cup of coca tea before heading out for dinner. We had decided to have a cheap week after doing a lot of expensive activities recently, so we went to a local cafe and got a two course meal for 4 pesos each - thats about one pound! We spent the evening swapping stories and advice with travellers who were going...

Another overnight bus took us to Peru's second city, Arequipa. Arequipa is an attractive city with a lot of colonial architecture still in tact and a really nice plaza, but seemingly little to actually do which was fiune with us after our busy week! We spent a couple of days relaxing before heading out on a two day tour of the Colca Canyon - the second deepest canyon in the world at twice the depth of the Grand Canyon in the US. The first day was spent largely o...

Our next stop was the town of Pisco which had been devastated by a massive earthquake in 2007. Unfortunately it hasnt recovered yet with most of the town run down and attractive. Our reason for staying here was to visit the nearby Ballestas Islands, a wildlife haven known as the 'poor mans galapagos' and the Paracas National Reserve. The Ballestas Islands were fascinating and our tour very informative. As well as seeing a giant cactus shape (El Candelabra) carve...

Huacachina is a tiny village sat around a lake in the Peruvian desert south of Lima consisting of no more than 50 or so buildings. The majority of our time was spent sandboarding (basically snow boarding on sand dunes) which was great fun but extremely tiring as we had to walk up big sand dunes all day in the desert sun. We both got the hang of it after a couple of days and picked up many bruises along the way as well as each of us wiping out once (Ashley's was c...

Arriving in Nazca at 6am we decided to book up a plane tour over the Nazca lines for the same morning. The lines are a series of shapes and images (whale, monkey, 'owl man', condor, hummingbird, parrot and a dog to name a few)cut into the desert by the Nazca culture hundreds of years ago. Due to a mistake by the tour operator we were put on two different planes which was both annoying and a little unnerving for Ashley who has a fear of heights. The views of the l...