We are in our hotel room in Valparaiso. Tomorrow we board the Crown Princess. It's hard to believe the 1st part of the trip is done. Today I had arranged for a local guide to pick us, and 4 other couples from Cruise Critic, up at various hotels in Santiago, go on a tour of the area, and then drop us off at various hotels in Valparaiso where we board the ship. Michael the German Pirate is an East German ex pat who has lived in Valparaiso for about 20 years. We kne...

After getting a few hours sleep we got up and still caught the end of the hotel buffet breakfast. We love the Magnolia Hotel - it is a small boutique hotel with only about 40 rooms located in the main shopping district. We planned to do a walking tour in the afternoon so we headed out to find where we were to meet the tour. We walked around the very busy downtown shopping area for over an hour. It was very clean and modern and looked just like most North American...

What we expected to be a long and tiring day of travel turned out to be not so bad. Our flights from Cusco thru Lima to Santiago started at 5:00 PM and ended in Santiago at 3:15 AM. Our transfer to the Cusco airport was not until 2:30 so we took the opportunity to take a sightseeing bus tour around Cusco in the morning. The area surrounding Cusco is quite pretty. We went way up a hill where we saw some more Inca archaeological sights and a smaller version of Chri...

We had an appreciated day of R&R. I guess we are not 20 anymore. Our legs were very tired from that past two days, so we did lots of walking - just no steps. Even stepping on and off a curb seemed like work. We did get in about 4 hours of walking around Cusco. Well actually 3 walking and about an hour off for beer at a restaurant overlooking a park. Cusco is a surprisingly vibrant and active city. The downtown area has lots of shops and restaurants. We will p...

The day started with getting picked up at the hotel at 6:45 AM for a transfer to the train station. The train ride from the Sacred Valley took about an hour an a half and the views were spectacular. On the right were snow capped Andes peaks and on the left was the Sacred R (also called the Urubamba) River Valley. We found out that it eventually flows into the Amazon. From the train station in the town of Machu Picchu, we then took a 25 minute bus ride up to the r...