I left Arequipa early on Friday, on a 6 hour bus ride to Puno. At first we passed mountains with cacti, quite bleak, then vicuña country. Next came lakes with ducks and some pale flamingoes (apparently the flamingoes I saw at the coast would have flown there from these lakes to feast on crab larvae, which give them their pink colouring). Then mining towns, and people in traditional dress tending alpaca, cattle and sheep, there was also a field of black ostritch...

I´ve got loads more photos to upload but apparently there´s maintenace work going on that won´t let me do it, I´m so disappointed! Watch this space It was lovely to have all your messages after the last entry, thank you! I´ve been taking it relatively easy here after all the travelling, and getting used to the altitude (currently 2000m, but moving up to 4000m tomorrow.) The weather is cloudless, hot sunshine during the day, chilly by 6 p.m., when it gets d...

I´m here! Set off from Leicester at 3 p.m. Friday, and went to bed in Paracas 35 hours later. The flight from London to Sao Paulo wasn´t as bad as I expected in terms of claustrophobia, but there was some turbulence that caused the man next to me to scream! The next leg of the journey, to Lima, was really exciting once the mountain tops started to appear through the clouds. By the time we flew over Lake Titicaca (which took a good half hour to cross, it´s so b...

Since the sale of Green & Pleasant was completed on 1 May, I've at last been able to organise my trip to Peru and now it all seems to be happening incredibly fast! For my 60th. birthday last month, my daughters bought me a backpack and put lots of really useful things in it - a special lightweight travel towel, water bottle, Rescue Remedy, arnica, etc etc and now I'm going to be able to use them all! I'll be away for 3 months, travelling for the first week o...