Early on Friday morning, I flew out of New York at sunrise to Lima, Peru, on my first visit to South America. The plane stopped off on the way at Bogota in Columbia and I managed to get a window seat for the second half of the journey, gladly so, as this bit was over the Amazon with views across the dense rainforest and muddy rivers.
Amazingly so, I arrived in Lima seven minutes after my friends had arrived from Heathrow! Great timing indeed! We got our transfer to our Lima hotel and the journey from the airport took us through the dusty, busy and colourful streets of Lima as well as the along Peru coastline whilst the sun set beautifully over the Pacific Ocean.
It was great looking across the ocean in the direction of Fiji, one of the best places I have ever been to. So near, yet so far!
At the hotel we met our tour group and had an introduction from the tour leader, then sampled some Peruvian beer over a nice meal in the main square of Lima.
The next morning we had some time free so we checked out a bit more of Lima and then joined our tour group to fly across Peru to Juliaca in the south west near Bolivia.
So our flight took us from sea level in Lima to a place 3,825 metres above sea level. This is the highest I´ve ever been and air is certainly thinner here! Moreover, we are going to stay at this altitude for the next week! Our real destination here was Lake Titicaca so we headed to Puno for the night, a city next to the one of the highest lakes in the world and the largest in South America. We boarded a boat early on Sunday morning after being wizzed through Puno down to the port on taxi-tricycles!
Our boat took us to a few islands and one of which we spent the night at with no cars, limited electricity and any of the modern pleasures all of us have taken for granted. This is certainly not New York. Talk about one extreme to the other! If that wasn´t enough, we also dressed up in traditional Peruvian dress (me with a poncho!) and had a bit of a party with the locals in the village hall!
In all my life I have never seen a night sky as good as last night, we saw stars that we had never seen before and even the clearly outlined milky way, which is a bit more distinctive in the remote parts of the world! This morning we returned back to Puno via the floating islands of Lake Titicaca where a whole community live on islands made of floating reeds. This has to be one of the most amazing things I have seen and it was great spending part of this morning on one of the islands with the inhabitants and their colourful clothing.
Tomorrow we head for Cusco, just before we head on the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu, one of the new seven modern wonders of the world. Read all about it here!
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