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Tags: Floods / Peru Travel / Machu Picchu / Tourism / Travel Safety / Weather / → All Tags

How Long Will Machu Picchu Be Out of Reach For Tourists?

For tourists to Peru's famed Machu PIcchu site, the nightmare of being trapped by raging flood waters in the nearby Vilcanota River has ended. The last trapped tourists were airlifted out of the remote area at the end of last week, but locals are already attempting to rebuild as the waters subside.

As the river gushed out of control, beginning back around January 25, over 3500 visitors found themselves stuck in the town of Aguas Calientes with the only transportation route back to the nearest city of Cuzco—the train—wiped out in the flooding and mudslides. As evacuation by helicopter progressed slowly and prices of basic things like food and water were jacked up in the small town, tourists became desperate, and a few even hiked back along the dangerous route.

So how long will Machu Picchu be out of the commission?

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Tags: Southern Peru Field Trip / Peru Travel / Cocoa Leaves / Lake Titicaca / → All Tags

Seeing Peru's Amantani Island Through The Eyes of a 13-Year-Old

All this week, Nathan Paluck will be filling us in on "The Real Peru" outside the capital city of Lima. Any questions or suggestions, send 'em to us here.

You can't visit Lake Titicaca without spending a night on one of its islands. That's what people told me, and they were right. Late Titicaca straddles Peru and Bolivia and is one of the world's highest at 2.3 miles. It has three populated islands and a series of floating, human-made reed islands. They're all reportedly amazing, but Lonely Planet advised that Amantaní Island was the least touristic, so I chose it for a night stay (LP's South America on a Shoestring was my reference throughout).

Two persistent workers at the lake dock tried selling me on a trip to the islands that included a homestay on Amantaní. Large groups of white tourists filed into tour boats. But I was determined for a DIY trip, and at 8 a.m., I and a couple dozen Quechua-speaking villagers from Amantaní embarked on the four-hour boat ride.

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Tags: Southern Peru Field Trip / Peru Travel / Puno Day / Inca Travel / → All Tags

Getting Puno With It In The Folklore Capital Of Peru

All this week, Nathan Paluck will be filling us in on "The Real Peru" outside the capital city of Lima. Any questions or suggestions, send 'em to us here.

Though I didn't plan it, I arrived to Puno, called the folklore capital of Peru, on the eve of its anniversary day. In a region that lays claims to 4,000 distinct traditional dances, you better believe there was some fierce dancing. From 2-9 p.m. the next day, Puno elementary and high schools performed choreographed street parades in lavish costumes.

Puno is a port of Lake Titicaca and is way high up: 3,800 meters, or 2.3 miles. It was so high up that I had a headache upon arriving. After I found decent lodging (Hotel Arequipa, on Arequipa with Oquendo, has private rooms, a computer room with Internet and a clean, shared bathroom for 15 soles), my altitude problem seemed cured by a couple of coca leaf teas at a bar on Calle Lima.

In the morning, there was an impressive theatrical procession of the Incas. Legend has it that the Inca empire was founded by a couple that was born from Lake Titicaca. The royal couple comes back from the lake on Puno Day, carried on a platform by young men and throwing potatoes out to a large crowd.

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Tags: Southern Peru Field Trip / Peru Travel / Mineral Baths / Thermal Baths / Bus Travel / → All Tags

Put Out to Pasture (In a Good Way) in Chivay

All this week, Nathan Paluck will be filling us in on "The Real Peru" outside the capital city of Lima. Any questions or suggestions, send 'em to us here.

When I arrived at dawn to the bus station in Arequipa to leave for El Cañon del Colca, tickets were sold-out for the 6 a.m. departure and there was already a crowd buying spots for the 9 a.m.

A woman and I went to the bus anyway and eventually convinced the driver to let us stand in the middle. Seriously. But as we learned, there seems to be a lot of local commuting between Arequipa and the villages along the canyon, so we recommend buying a ticket beforehand.

The ride to the canyon is five hours long and passes through a protected reserve, home to vicuñas, the wild, skinny cousins of the llama.

I ending up stopping in Chivay, a small town full of hostels. A couple miles out of town there are mineral-rich thermal baths, which I later walked to. Beyond the baths houses, cow paths lead to small parcels of pasture and farmland. I caught up with a man and daughter walking with two dozen head of cattle.

Marlene, the 25-year-old cowgirl pictured above, and her father Emiliano turned out to be extremely friendly and didn't mind the company and questions from a gringo (although the cows were wary). I helped Marlene get the cows into their stone wall enclosure and left thinking I might actually deserve the dip in the thermal baths.

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Tags: Southern Peru Field Trip / Peru Travel / Cathedrals / Food Travel / Monasteries / → All Tags

Eat, Pray and Eat Some More in Arequipa

All this week, Nathan Paluck will be filling us in on "The Real Peru" outside the capital city of Lima. Any questions or suggestions, send 'em to us here.

After sandboarding in Huacachina, I head out to Arequipa, a cozy city with an attractive colonial center and views of three nearby active volcanoes.

I arrived at 5 a.m. from an overnight bus ride. At that hour the volcanic stone used in old Arequipa buildings, called sillar, appears cold and gray. In the afternoon the sillar glows white, and at dusk it's golden brown.

Many use Arequipa – itself at 2,300 meters above sea level – as a base for hikes into the surrounding rugged territory. The volcanoes Chachani (6075 meters) and El Misti (5833 meters) beckon climbers.

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Tags: Southern Peru Field Trip / Peru Travel / Sandboarding / Musica Criolla / → All Tags

Dancing in El Carmen and Sandboarding in Huacachina

All this week, Nathan Paluck will be filling us in on "The Real Peru" outside the capital city of Lima. Any questions or suggestions, send 'em to us here.

People here told me that to see the real Peru, I needed to travel outside of Lima, the capital city and home to 30 percent of the country's population.

Getting off the bus in Chincha, a coastal city two hours south of Lima, I knew I must have entered the so-called real Peru. Chincha smelled of pueblo dust and burning trash. Three-wheeled mototaxi traffic buzzed around street stands selling cheap wine from local vineyards.

I chose Chincha to begin travels in southern Peru on an invitation from Lima friends. There was to be a peña that night, a big party to celebrate October 31, Peru's day to celebrate música criolla. The genre is instilled with African rhythms, and Chincha is considered the heart of the country's small but culturally significant Afro-Peruvian community.

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Tags: Educational Travel / Smithsonian / Museum Travel / Package Tours / Peru Travel / → All Tags

Smithsonian Offers More Than Just A Night At The Museum With New Expeditions

If you've always wanted to make the hike to Machu Picchu to see the Incan ruins, or snorkel alongside the fish at the Great Barrier Reef, Smithsonian Journeys is foaming at the mouth with the desire to plan your trip. Journeys—the official travel program of the granddaddy of all museums, the Smithsonian—launched a new blog series and photo gallery focusing on UNESCO World Heritage sites, those places around the planet that the group deems to have "outstanding value to humanity."

Of course, both the blog and the photo gallery are a way for Journeys to entice you to take its educational tours. But the blog does offer mini history lessons (what do you expect, it's the Smithsonian) for each featured site. For example, one post discusses how shifting commercial routes helped preserve the traditional Vietnamese trading town of Hoi An. And to ensure you're learning something, the Smithsonian enlisted historians, scientists and travel experts to do the blogging.

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Tags: Summer-Vacations-With-An-Edge / Active Travel / Desert Travel / Peru Travel / Green Travel / → All Tags

Summer Vacations With an Edge: Sandboarding In Peru

It turns out that the highest sand dune in the world is Peru's Cerro Blanco, which rises more than 2,000m above the ground and more or less resembles a mountain. It also turns out that if you want to sandboard down the side of it, Peru Adventure Tours is more than willing to put together a package for you, drive you out there in a sand buggy, and watch as you indulge in one of the world's most extreme sports.

Sandboarding is an all-season sport, one of the upshots of basing an activity out of a desert. Sandboarders either stand on snowboard-like boards or lie down on mats for "trayboarding," and try to pull off the same tricks that snowboarders do. That means catching air, doing tricks, and carving up the ground. Instead of kicking up snow, though, these athletes shred grainy sand. And instead of getting to ride sky lifts up picturesque mountains, they have to access some of the most unforgiving environments in the world.

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Tags: Adventure Travel / Safaris / Discovery Channel / Luxury Travel / Africa Travel / Peru Travel / Mexico Travel / Historical Travel / Tour Packages / → All Tags

The Very Rich Can Hop On Discovery Channel's New Hardcore Adventures

Is this the recession or what? Guess not: Discovery Communications is teaming up with travel provider G.A.P Adventures to launch dozens of luxury trips based on Discovery Channel programming. With prices starting at $2,000 per person for trips ranging from 3 to 24 days, these are not for the faint of wallet.

Locations range from common tourist destinations like the USA and Mexico to places like Botswana, where you'll probably always need a guide. All of the packages come with their share of intriguingly esoteric Discovery Channel twists; one of the USA tours revolves around historic parks in the Southwest. What travelers will see on the 12 day tour, though, ranges from rock formations to deserts to dwellings abandoned thousands of years ago.

The other USA destination is even more nature-oriented, taking travelers all the way up north to Alaska. Adventurers spend 10 days observing wildlife in their habitat, which can be both mindblowingly fascinating and straightforward deadly.

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Tags: Summer-Signature-Cocktails-Map / Drinking Travel / Peru Travel / South America / → All Tags

Double The Pisco Sour In Peru, Double The Fun

While the summer is at its peak and you're no doubt tired of chugging bottled water under the sun at tourist sites, we're going to hit some of the world's best watering holes and down their famous summer cocktails. Bottoms up!

For many, a trip down to Peru means some serious Macchu Picchu trekking, but we're frankly more interested in chasing down the best of the country's official drink: The Pisco Sour. Although Chile also lays claim to this tart concoction, the master of the double-sized, or Catedral, Pisco Sour is definitely in the center of Lima at the Hotel Bolivar.

A member of the classic grand dame hotels of the world, the Bolivar was a home-away-from-home for dignitaries and Hollywood stars like Ava Gardner, who was known to favor the Catedral Pisco Sours of the bar. We'll also freely admit to salivating at the mere mention of any "sour" cocktails, so Lima it is. No need to stay the night at the Gran Hotel Bolivar however, as only the bar and the building's architecture remember the golden days; the rooms leave something to be desired.

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Tags: Peru Travel / World Heritage Sites / → All Tags

Nazca Lines Get Colored In By Rains

Travelers to Peru at the moment might be a bit disappointed that the famed Nazca Lines are not looking quite the same as usual. These dramatic two-thousand-year-old drawings are a bit worse for wear because heavy rains have "changed" them a bit.

The rains have left a layer of white clay over several of the geoglyphs. This layer's hanging around despite this confident but obviously wrong sentence in the Wikipedia entry on the Nazca Lines:

The dry, windless, stable climate of the plateau has preserved the lines to this day.

Oops. Presumably someone'll edit that soon to say almost preserved the lines. The good news is that local archaeologists say the changes are reversible, so we might get the old Nazca Lines back sometime.

Related Stories:
· Heavy Rains Alter Peru's Famed Nazca Lines [Jaunted]
· Volunteer Travel: Experience the Real Peru [Jaunted]
· Peruvian Pyramid Discovered Using Satellite Data [Jaunted]

[Photo: Scubaben]

Tags: Peru Travel / Peru Earthquake / Travel News / Earthquakes / → All Tags

Latest News on the Peru Earthquake

More news is rolling in from Peru after a 8.0 magnitude earthquake shook the country's southern coastal areas. (Early reports of the quake's magnitude have been revised.) Already online are a Wikipedia page and photos on Flickr, documenting the disaster that killed hundreds, injured many more and even damaged buildings in Lima, 165 miles away. The quake was so powerful that scientists predict an 8-inch-high tsunami will wash up in Japan. Tomorrow.

The hardest hit area, closest to the epicenter, is Ica Region, south of the nation's capital. Government officials say more than half of Pisco--famous for its namesake grape brandy--has been destroyed. Buildings throughout the region have collapsed and there are widespread power outages. With roads destroyed, getting around, for tourists, locals and rescuers will be problematic at best.

Related Stories:
· Peru Quake coverage [CNN]
· Rescuers Struggle to Aid Hundreds of Peru Earthquake Victims [VOA]

[Photo: Franco Mena]