Peru and Pachamama

We arrived in the North of Peru, which again is a quite different country than its neighbour. The first exiting moment came right when our taxidriver gave Sebastian his keys to drive us all to our destination in the middle of Chiclayo. There we went through the streets with hundreds of motorcycles and almost non existent traffic rules. But at least we arrived pretty awake at our hostel after this ride in the morning.

Chiclayo was a really nice and modern city with a nice and big cinema complex where we watched our first movie completly in Spanish.

And of course we followed the game Germany vs. Spain full of hope that we can watch Germany in the final again in Lima, where they had public viewing for all the games.
(Since this did not work out too good we changed our plans later and skipped Lima instead)

Our next Stop was a little fishing village named Huanchaco, where fishermen still traditionally fished in their little boats made out of straw. They also have the tradition to treat criminals that harm tourists in a special way, drowning them with stoneweights in the ocean.

This made us feel really safe!

We continued our trip going south to Huancachina which is basically a little oasis in between large

sanddunes. This was only a shortbreak to enjoy some sandboarding and a harakiri drive with a doom-buggy. From there a quick 18 hour drive up and down the Andes along dangerous roads brought us to Cusco, the starting point of the famous Machu Picchu ruins.

We quickly symphathized with a bunch of real nice guys from Holland that shared the same loss against Spain. All together we went on the Salkantay trail where we walked all the way up to an altitude of 4600m. In these 4 days we first walked through mountain landscapes and glaciers, and as we walked further down we came through green cloud forests. The last day was just for climbing up to Machu Picchu that we started already at 3 am in the morning.

It was a really great adventure with astonishing views and a lot of fun with our group.

The only bad thing was that we ate bad food the night before the trip, which made Anna feel really sick the first days. But with half of the group beeing sick of the altitude she was not the only one feeling bad.

"It is all in your mind!" said our guide to poor Anna and another Dutch guy that had high temperature :-)

With loads of amazing impressions and the experience that Anna + Mountains + Alpaca meat from the street is a deadly combination we left Peru and went to Lake Titicaka in Bolivia.