Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail. Day 1 Day 1 of my number 1 reason to visit Peru started at 5am... Just as anything worth doing in this country seems to!  We waited with trepidation and annoyance for the bus to collect us, an hour late.  This disappeared the second we saw our guides beaming smile and heard her gentle voice acoust us onto the warm bus for a quick nap as we drove to our breakfast stop. It wasn't the best breakfast of my travels but the company...

Manu National Park Manu National Park is almost 2 million hectares of pristine rainforest, from cloudforest streams and waterfalls to wide slow moving rivers and dense low-land jungle. It is stunning, and home to vast quantities of flora and fauna, with it's only permant inhabitants it's wildlife and a few virtually uncontacted native groups who have split off from their major tribal units. It took an age to get to - 6 hours by bus and we reached the edge ...

White Water Rafting Having driven along side a pretty flat looking stretch of river for about 10 miles, I wasn't overwhelmed by the prospect of kayaking along it, let alone rafting. It was, as the canoe club would call it, a rocky scrape. Fortunately, we didn't paddle that section, but instead we stopped at the get-off, got changed and then drove another 30 minutes up river, where I couldn't see the river at all so I had no idea what to expect. Once I manage...

Cusco Cusco is 3500m above sea level. I did not appreciate before we got here what that really meant. It means that a 2.5 hour walk left me feeling like I'd climbed a mountain or gone for a long, hard run. Its gorgeous though. We've stayed in two hotels so far (after the awful nights sleep we'd had on a coach and in a single bed in Lima we felt it was worth spending a little more than we had budgeted for for the first two nights, but now its back to reality) and...

Hola! Buenos dias! The journey to Nazca was long but gorgeous. Miles of flat desert encased by enormous mountains - completely baron and devoid of life but at the same time breathtaking. After 9 hours on a coach, comfortable though it was, we were grateful to get off, where we were besieged by touts vying for our custom. Rhys had the idea of trying to get a flight ASAP and then leaving again on the night bus so that's exactly what we did. There was literally...