We arrived in Huaraz early on Saturday morning after our overnight bus from Trujillo. Huaraz is located in the middle of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range which is the 2nd largest after the Himalayas, it is surrounded by peaks of up to and over 6,000m and is the central town where trekkers etc acclimatise before setting off into the really spectacular mountains. There is so much to do here and we've already realised we'll end up here longer than we had planned...

More archaeological delights in Huanchaco, a little coastal suburb of Trujillo, Peru's 3rd biggest town. Chan Chan is a vast complex of adobe (mud) buildings lived in by the Chimu people in around 1300. We took a tour around the remains of what was one of 8 palaces. There is not much left but it's impressive just to see the scale of the city complex, all built by hand in the really dry desert. The Huaca del Sol y de la Luna, across the other side of town are tw...

We left Piura pretty early and took another bus down to Chiclayo which is Peru's 4th largest city, again we travelled with Lars, Louise and Guy. We didn't do a great deal on arriving other than wander round the town during the day. We did however find a great steak house in the evening for dinner, following the Chinese the night before the eating options in Peru seem to be surprisingly good. On Wednesday we headed 30km north of Chiclayo to visit Tucume which is ...

We officially arrived in Peru for the first time today, we actually had already been into Peru when we visited the Amazon but it's not so easy to get your passport stamped there. We spent over a month in Ecuador and again we enjoyed our stay there, for me it's not quite as good a place to travel as Colombia but that's largely due to it being considerably smaller and therefore the huge variety of geography etc in Colombia can't be matched. It would have been nice ...

We left Cuenca with Guy, Lars and Louise and all headed to Vilcabamba which is a small town in the Andes, situated in what is called the valley of longevity as people are alleged to live to very old ages. I say we all headed to Vilcabamba, Lars didn't actually make it as having spent 5 hours on a bus to reach Loja he had to turn aroun d and go back to Cuenca to pick up his and Louise's passports, meaning he spent 16 of 24 hours on buses. I could empathise a littl...