Category: Peru

Street Foods of South America

Street food holds a special place in the whole travel experience but is often a gamble for the faint stomached. To my surprise, most of the street food vendors I came across in South America had pretty clean set up and there was rarely anything alarming. In...

Border Crossing – Peru to Bolivia

To cut to the chase, here’s what one needs to do to get pass that line between Peru and Bolivia: Step 1: If you hold a US passport, be sure to have pristine US dollars of $135 or more (in case they reject any). Between...

Floating Islands on Lake Titikaka

Most often seen spelling is Titicaca but while we were there, the locals spelled it as Titikaka, so that’s what I’ll go with. In the morning we were picked up by the tour van for a two days one night trip on Lake Titikaka. The...

Most Touristy Way to Puno

Between Cusco and Puno lies an eight hour bus ride. After a day to recover from the tiresome trek to Machu Picchu, we were ready to head off into the next destination — Puno. A city known as the must stop for Lake Titikaka (Titicaca). Lake...

Up Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu

Woke up at 4 AM to eat breakfast before we head up to the almighty Machu Picchu with our newly joined group,which consisted of Annie, me, the three California girls, one Irish couple and one Australian couple. All of them except for us, decided to...

Salkantay – Day 2 & 3

Day Dos To wake up at 4 AM is almost natural when one goes to bed at 8:30 PM. Unless you had been chugging coca tea all day and have the caffeine kick in not when you needed it, but when you sleep. With roughly...

Salkantay to Machu Picchu – Day 1

You need at least two days to acclimate, so it says on the tour brochures online and everywhere. Not true! I think I needed a week to acclimate. But two days we stayed, in Cusco, the starting point for nearly all Machu Picchu treks. Our...

Sandboarding (eating) in Lima

Traditionally, the closest sandboarding location is Ica, which is about 4 hours from Lima. However, with a bit of luck, a new area much closer to Lima now offers sandboarding as well. We found Sandride Sandboarding Lima online and booked for a day trip. It...

Lima, the City that Never Rains

After a 10 hour boat ride from Santa Rosa to Iquitos and an hour flight from Iquitos to Lima, a city that (almost) never rains. What they have instead are mists (called “la garua”) that blankets the city every morning. The roofs are flat and it...

Border crossing – Leticia, Colombia to Iquitos, Peru

Surprisingly, when I googled, I found very little information on the interweb about this topic and had to explore my options a bit all over town. A few of the local guides/travel agencies offered to make a tour out of this at the cost of...

Amazon, Monkey Island & Giant Lily Pond

Some time ago in the 1960’s when there were no wildlife restrictions, a Greek man brought a load of squirrel monkeys to an island he owned. Without predators on the island, the monkeys thrived and La Isla de los Micos (Monkey Island) was born. Today,...

Amazon, Leticia, La Frontera

The heat loving German bartender in Buga raved about this town, Leticia, and the Amazon. He gave hope and a way out for the travelers stranded a few towns from the border of Colombia due to protests and road blocks. I never considered Leticia. It...