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 or so, then living in a village near Cuzco and teaching English for about 8 weeks (during which there will be a week in the Manu rainforest and a couple of weekend trips, including Macchu Pichu), then travelling again for the last 2 or 3 weeks.

I set off on Friday 29 May, via National Express and TAM airlines (they are incredibly cheap!), and arrive in Lima at midday on Saturday 30th.

Having been warned by several people that Lima is not a place you'd want to stay in (fog, very heavy traffic with manic drivers, MacDonalds and museums with fake Inca aretfacts . . . ), I've decided to head striaght out south to a village called Paracas. There are boat trips from here to the Islas Ballestas (home to sealions, Humboldt penguins, boobies and pelicans) and tours of the Paracas National Reserve, where I'm hoping to see flamingos, red-headed vultures and - if I'm VERY lucky - condors.

A recent article in the Independent featured www.leaplocal.org, which lists local guides (it started in Peru and is slowly expanding). There I found a very helpful man by the name of Silvio Espinoza. He has arranged for someone to meet me at the airport, take me to the bus station and make sure I get on the right bus (I have more than once got on a wrong train!). Silvio will meet the bus in Paracas, where he has booked a room for me in a hostel. He'll pick me up early on the Sunday morning for the boat trip and tour of the Reserve, then put me on the overnight bus to Arequipa. It seems that in Peru if you say you don't eat meat, they give you chicken! The menu for the bus trip offers: anything, meat, chicken, vegetarian or refrigerated! I'll be taking some St Dalfour tins of grains and sweetcorn from Green & Pleasant - these come with little plastic forks (not very green, I know, but sometimes needs must). I've heard a lot of horror stories about bus journeys in Peru, involving drivers who are drunk or fall asleep, ambushes, terrible roads etc, but I plan to sleep my way through it all!

Arequipa is Peru's second city, built of white volcanic rock, and is apparently very beautiful. I'm going to spend 4 nights there in a ridiculously cheap hotel where they serve breakfast on a rooftop terrace overlooking the 3 volcanoes surrounding the city - it sounds idyllic. The next instalment of this blog should come from there, about 6 June.

Then I'll catch a bus to Puno, the town from which boats take you to visit the islands of Lake Titicaca, and a couple of days later another bus to Cuzco.

I've made sure I'll be in Cuzco by 11 June, Corpus Christi, when there's an enormous fiesta in the city - it actually lasts all week. I'll also be having 3 hours of Spanish lessons every day, 1 hour in the classroom and 2 hours of practical Spanish, out and about in the city with a local woman, visiting the market, shops, museums etc and talking all the time. Although I've been working very hard to learn as much Spanish as possible before going out, it's still very hard to understand what someone is saying, and I speak at the rate of one word a second! Then it will be time to move out to Chinchero, where I'll be teaching and living with a local family. I'm told the children are very enthusiastic and friendly, and like to invite the volunteer teachers home for a meal. Honoured guests are often served guinea pig, apparently (how am I going to get out of that? - Heather would never forgive me!). This part of my trip is being arranged by an organisation called PoD (Personal Overseas Development) and they have someone there to whom volunteers can go for help and advice, which is very reassuring when you're travelling alone.

Meanwhile, Gary will be looking after the dogs and the house - I couldn't have done it without him! To keep in touch we've organised cheap calls to Peru (dialtosave) and I've had to replace my antique mobile phone, which I very rarely use and which wouldn't work in Peru, with a quadband model which will work anywhere in the world. I'd never heard of quadband until this week!

I've also had lots of helpful advice and information from a homoeopathic pharmacy, and I'll be taking homoeopathic nosodes instead of having vaccinations against yellow fever etc. The pharmacy tell customers that there is no proof that these work, but I'm happy to rely on them.