Week 4: My trip to Peru

A year and a half ago I and a few of my friends  visited Peru for 3 weeks. Equipped with backpacks and both way tickets we left Warsaw in the middle of September 2011. But everything started a few months earlier when one of us during a meeting threw an idea about visiting Peru. Immediately we started to look for cheap flight tickets from Warsaw to Lima, the capital of Peru. Unfortunately there were no direct cheap flights, so we needed to find a combined one. After a week or two we bought very cheap tickets from Warsaw, via Dusseldorf, Frankfurt to final destination in South America, Bogota –the  capital of Columbia. From Bogota we had the next day a flight to Leticia, a small village located at the point where Columbia, Peru and Brazil come together in an area called Tres Fronteras.

We had been preparing for this trip for about 3 months, making different versions of plans with places we wanted to visit. So it started in Bogota, Columbia, which for me is the best known from narcotics, especially cocaine and the kidnapping of white people for money. And actually it is true – Columbia has one of the highest rates of kidnappings in the world. Knowing that, we were quite frightened about spending 1 night there before reaching our final destination. After all it wasn’t so bad for us.

But the main adventure started in Leticia a village situated at the Amazon River. We stayed there for a few days before going further into the country. Most clearly from this place I remember a trip to the Amazon jungle which was guided by a local guy.

 

I was totally amazed how the Amazon jungle looks like and what kind of animals live there. Quite obvious for me was to expect snakes or parrots but it was really nice and unexpected to meet a toucan.

 

Just after enjoyable stay in Leticia – a city without road access from outside – we moved to Iquitos, which is the largest city in the Peruvian rainforest. We were quite surprised by meeting a lot of white people (gringos) there. Quite soon we found out that Iquitos has the largest gringo enclave in Peru. We stayed there for a few days making small trips, from which I remember most a meeting with sloth and its baby.

While we were following the Amazon River we saw also non touristic, very poor places like the one presented in the photo below:

Next on our list was Lima, where we rented a car and started visiting the country using our new way of transport. Quite fascinating was the island named Ballestas, with many caves and arches which provide shelter for tens of thousands of seabirds and sea-lions. It's really interesting how Peruvians two centuries ago used "guano" (birds droppings) produced by seabirds - they exported the product to Europe for use as a fertilizer.

Particularly I was very keen on visiting Nazca lines. We bought tickets to fly over lines, in a small plane. It was an amazing experience.

Later we visited more places, but worth mentioning was for sure the Lake Titicaca, located above 3800 meters above the sea level. Being just a few days on that kind of height gave us huge headaches and problems with breathing.

 Of course we wanted to see the very best known place in Peru - Machu Picchu. Unfortunately our rented car failed to go there, however we managed to visit a few other ancient cities with breathtaking stone architecture.

Questions:

1. Do you like far away journeys ? Which is your favourite country/region?

2. Have you ever been to Peru or would you like to visit this country ? What do you know about Peru?

3. Are you afraid to travel abroad on your own ?