On our last full day in Arequipa, we decided to spend the morning exploring one of the city’s best known attractions, the Santa Catalina Monastery. Flanked by high walls and taking up the equivalent of several city blocks, the monastery appeared pretty unassuming from the outside, but upon setting foot inside, it was as if…
Month: August 2013
Condor Sightings in Colca Canyon
It just seems as though our mornings keep getting earlier and earlier. In order to jam in all the sights of the Colca Canyon in one day’s time, we had to leave Arequipa in the middle of the night. Our bus picked us up at 3:30am, and along with about 18 others, we embarked on…
Discovering the White City
As soon as the Inca Trail was over, it was onto the next stop, Arequipa. With only 11 days to work with for this trip (2 of which were spent in transit), having already spent 2 days in Cusco, we were ready to see another part of Peru. We long debated whether to go to…
Inca Trail Day 4: Six Upper West Siders Discover Machu Picchu! (102 years too late)
In order to make it by the Machu Picchu checkpoint by the time it opened at 5:30am, we had an extremely early wake up call of 3:30am this morning. We had to get all of our stuff packed up and ready to go so the porters could drop it off at Aguas Calientes before they…
Huayna Picchu: the 1,180 foot ascent
Huayna Picchu ended up being amazing. In theory, however, it was not a good idea at all. Our knees were aching from the “Tourist Killer” steps from the previous day, and the steep climb up was supposedly not for anyone afraid of heights (aka me). Not to mention the steps were wet from the morning’s…
Inca Trail Day 3: The Beautiful Day
This is what Francisco coined Day 3 because we saw some of the most spectacular scenery and ruins during what would be our longest day of hiking, going 10 total miles. Somehow it didn’t seem so painful or long when you’re surrounded by so much natural beauty. We woke up at 6am yet again, and…
Inca Trail Day 2: Summitting Dead Woman’s Pass
As promised, Francisco and the porters knocked on our tent door on cue at 6am with “room service” aka warm water to wash with and hot coca tea. I surprisingly had a sound night’s sleep, unlike the rest of Team UWS. Since it was a full moon out last night, the stray dogs went into…
Inca Trail Day 1: The Warmup
5:15am – wake up call. What the hell vacation is this?! I digress…yes yes it was all worth it. At 6am, our Pachamama shuttle was outside waiting for us, along with Francisco, our tour guide. After multiple stops to pick up the other 4 hikers, several porters, and a key stop at the outer Pachamama…
Six Upper West Siders…
During our orientation the previous day, we had the pleasure of meeting the rest of our “Inca Trail Dream Team.” Because I received the paperwork for the group when we registered, I knew we were in a group with 4 other people around our same age from the US. Doug and I were both worried…
Marathon Sightseeing in Cusco
Though we could’ve easily kept sleeping, we had to get up at 8:30am in order to squeeze in breakfast and a shower before our 10am orientation meeting with our group and guide. This was where we met our fearless leader, Francisco, along with our 4 companions for the next 4 days, more on that later….
Exploring (and being locked out of) Cusco
After 4 sleepless hours in the Lima airport and a super early flight to Cusco, we finally landed in our final destination at 7:15am. First order of business: get to the hotel for a shower and real bed. After nearly another disaster situation with our taxi driver, who tried dropping us off at a Kokopelli…
Nine Hours in Bogota
Before we could embark on our Inca Trail adventure, Doug and I first had to suffer through 24 hours of transit, including 9 hours in Bogota and 4.5 hours overnight in Lima. It all started at JFK circa 6am, when we thought we were smooth sailing until we got caught in the extremely long line…
breakingintobusch 