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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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
