Following 4 days of hard trekking we could have done with a lie in, sadly this was not to be the case and on the final day, the day we would finally ascend Machu Picchu we were awoken at 3.30am in order to leave the hostel at 4.00am. Why so early? We wanted to climb to Huayna Picchu, the prominent peak that overlooks Machu Picchu. Only 200 tickets are available for the (better) 10am slot (there is a 7am slot too) which go to the first 200 souls at the ent...

The trek that we decided to take us to Machu Picchu was the Salkantay Trail on which we would cover over 100 kilometres in 5 days ascending to 4,700m at the highest point at the foot of the Salkantay Glacier (Salkantay itself is 6,271m high so no chance of climbing that!). After the failure at Cotopaxi we were both a little concerned at the walking, but this proved unfounded as the trek was pretty straightforward if hard work. Things didn't start out too well, w...

There had been some debate as to how we World make the journey from Lima to Cusco. Gemma preferred the cheaper bus journey taking 20-odd hours (but would assist acclimatization to the high altitude), Craig favoured the one hour flight. In the end Craig just booked the flights anyway as he couldn´t face another long bus journey, nor did he want to lose another day to travelling. Our hostel in Cusco the Pariwana, was a good one, the only set back being that we we...

The bus journey from Guayaquil to Lima was the longest that we had done on this trip, but it was bearable, due mainly to the fact that we had booked executive tickets with big seats and great movies! There was of course the usual and inevitable discomfort when crossing borders by bus of having to get off the bus twice, once to clear Ecuadorian and then to go through Peruvian immigration. As usual we sailed through these formalities with the good old British passp...