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With Machu Picchu off our list, we had time to visit one more spectacular place in Peru as we bombed it to the border.  Peru’s rainbow mountain was only discovered in the last decade due to global warming melting its once ice covered peak. With the snow gone, the stones were revealed in stripes of several colours, giving it its name. It’s a huge tourist destination and you can book tours to it from pretty much anywhere, naturally for us though, we’d take a different approach.

By the time we left Cusco, there was only a few hours of daylight left and so we didn’t head far. After paying for three nights of proper camping and thoroughly enjoying all of the nice food and drink the city has to offer, it was time to reign the budget back in and head somewhere free. Lee picked a nice looking little laguna an hour or so in the right direction.  We were both pleasantly surprised when we came over the hill and saw the snow covered mountains glowing pink in

I could have happily spent a week in the desert at our own private slot canyon, but we had to keep moving. Our time near the coast was nearly done and the next stage of our journey would take us over the Andes mountain and to the city of Cusco. The final point of interest for us here would be the world famous Nazca Lines. There are a couple of places to see these without paying for one of the aeroplane tours to see them from above. We decided to visit the first, this is a ver

Huacachina, located just 15 minutes away from its much bigger neighbour, Ica, is not a town of particular note. For it’s not the buildings that make this place special. While the architecture is the usual everyday affair, the town square is not. It’s home to the only natural oasis in South America.  We arrived after a few hours of driving, having left the capital behind us and spent the previous night on the silent beach of Puerto Viejo, just south of Lima. After the bustle o

Conveniently for Lee, our arrival into Huaraz coincided with the football and so once we found the campsite and said a brief hello to our friends, we headed into the town itself to find a bar. We got into the world's slowest collectivo and so by the time we had eventually arrived into the town we only got to the bar for the second half. Still, there hadn’t been a goal yet and soon with a nice cold beer in hand, and rather angry Lee turned into a happy one. We had contemplated

Now that we were somewhat acclimatised to the altitude, we wanted to do one more hike in the national park, the famous, Laguna 69. This is a moderately challenging, but relatively short hike that would take us from the campsite at 3800m to a glacier lake at 4600m. As this is quite a popular thing to do, we wanted to get in there before the weekend and so we stocked up on supplies in Caraz, before heading straight there. As part of trying to be better with money, we had resolv

After a quiet night in the canyon, we were able to see our spot in the light of day and realise how it would have been even better if we had camped further down. It's one of the reasons I hate arriving in the dark; it’s so hard to gauge your surroundings. I could have stayed here another night, but time was ticking and we needed to push on. Now we jump back for a second.  First we’re sitting on the beach in Lobitos. Then in our chairs on the campsite in Piura. Lee is angry an

There is not much of interest on the northern coast of Peru and so we had planned to head inland to the visit the Gocta waterfall, the second highest in the world. However, after spending two whole weeks in Porta Verde and an entire month of our visa in total, we decided we didn’t have time. Instead, we headed down the coast, planning to get to Huaraz within a few days which offered cooler weather and spectacular hiking. We hadn’t done driving much for a while and so we didn’

After the rather unpleasant, but short lived drive around Talara, Piura was the first biggest town we’d really been in. Having driven through 9 other Latin American countries, we are used to the drivers. Colombia’s towns are inundated with scooters. They cross in and out of lanes as if they don’t exist and completely disregard any kind of traffic lights, signs or other road users. In Piura, it’s the tuk-tuks. This is even worse than a scooter, because while they drive with th

Much to my displeasure, Lee roused me less than four hours later at 8am, to cross the border. As the camper was such a complete mess there was no hope of coffee. We hadn’t even been able to brush our teeth the night before and I pulled back on yesterday’s clothes in the muggy morning before crawling out of the cab. We grabbed a slightly warm cheap energy drink from a nearby vending machine, that would have to do. Happy Birthday to me. After wrestling the pop-top back down, we