Vern: The minibus to Colca Canyon picked us up an hour late at 4:40am. We climbed in with five other trekkers (one of them hurling abuse at the driver for getting lost since she'd been on the bus since 3:15am) and tried our best to get a little more sleep. Two and a half hours later we stopped for a basic breakfast and then after one more hour we pulled over at Cruz del Condor - a view point over the canyon near a condor nesting place. "This is pornography for g...

Vern: I'm sure that in the same way that the human body forgets childbirth and severe trauma so that we can get on with our lives our bodies will forget the bus ride from Cuzco to Arequipa but in the meantime we're still coughing up soot and insanely scrubbing dirt from our clothes like Lady Macbeth. We'd bought tickets from an upper class bus company but at boarding time that evening we were informed that our bus wasn't going anymore because of violent rioting m...

Andrea: The Inca Trail to magnificent Machu Picchu was awesome. This is camping the way it should be: your tent is set up for you by the time you arrive, 3 meals a day are cooked for you plus you get snack-packs for the walk and you can pay extra to hire another porter to carry your stuff! So, one of the porters carried our sleeping bags and our warm clothes that we only needed for night time and we just carried our little backpacks. We didn´t even use ...

Vern: We arrived at Cuzco (Peru´s colonial jewel) at a reasonable time in the morning and made our way to the hostel. We were to start the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in 3 days, and the plan was to acclimatise to the altitude and see a few sights before heading off. We started with Qoricancha, a nearby site where an Inca Palace once stood which housed a Sun temple - a room lined in gold and designed to illuminate completely when hit by the sun on the two solstice...

Vern: The overnight bus dropped us in Lima just before 6am and a taxi took us to our hostel shortly after that. Luckily the night-receptionist heard the door bell and checked us in at the crack of dawn. We crept into the dorm and went to sleep. The hostel, strangely named HQ Villa, is a converted mansion built in the 80s with an out of fashion exterior but classic finishings, large reception rooms and mosaic courtyard give the house a grand manor feel. We liked ...