After
Tim and Tamsin´s Travels in South America
An account of our travels in South America (October 2004 - May 2005). Click on the photos to ENLARGE.
La Paz
La Paz is the highest capital in the world. The highlight for us in La Paz was our visit to the Valle de la Luna - a lunar landscape etched out of the soft rock by the weather. We went quad biking in the mountains nearby.
Puno and Lake Titicaca
Puno is at the Peruvian end of Lake Titicaca the highest navigable lake in the world.
It's a nice enough place but the beautiful lake is what makes it. We've just returned from spending two nights with local families at a village called Llachon (for a map of the lake click here) and on the nearby island of Amantani.
At Llachon we sat on the beach and watched the sun go down which was beautiful. Tamsin met a 6 year old Peruvian girl on the beach collecting seaweed.
Together they drew some pictures, did some sums and laughed at Tamsin's Spanish. Her name is Mariella and she is an orphan who goes to school for two hour a day - she is one of the lucky ones.
We watched the community make and put a reed roof on a small house they were building together. We also enjoyed playing cards with the children of the family we stayed with. (The nine year old, Hector, was a right little cheat!).
On Amantani, Tim climbed to the top of the ruins of Pachatata with Adriano our host for an awesome 360 degree panorama of the lake with the surrounding mountains, you could see for 100 miles in every direction.
The people were very welcoming and friendly and the setting extremely tranquil. However in these two rural communities people are very poor. Neither family we stayed with had running water and the family in Amantani had no electricity.
It's a nice enough place but the beautiful lake is what makes it. We've just returned from spending two nights with local families at a village called Llachon (for a map of the lake click here) and on the nearby island of Amantani.
At Llachon we sat on the beach and watched the sun go down which was beautiful. Tamsin met a 6 year old Peruvian girl on the beach collecting seaweed.
Together they drew some pictures, did some sums and laughed at Tamsin's Spanish. Her name is Mariella and she is an orphan who goes to school for two hour a day - she is one of the lucky ones.
We watched the community make and put a reed roof on a small house they were building together. We also enjoyed playing cards with the children of the family we stayed with. (The nine year old, Hector, was a right little cheat!).
On Amantani, Tim climbed to the top of the ruins of Pachatata with Adriano our host for an awesome 360 degree panorama of the lake with the surrounding mountains, you could see for 100 miles in every direction.
The people were very welcoming and friendly and the setting extremely tranquil. However in these two rural communities people are very poor. Neither family we stayed with had running water and the family in Amantani had no electricity.
Arequipa
Arequipa is Peru's second city. Unlike Lima it's really nice!!! It is very sunny, 2 hours from the Pacific and surrounded by volcanic mountains.
The highlights for us were:
The highlights for us were:
- Visiting the nearby Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world, twice the depth of the grand canyon and watching Condors circling on the thermals.
- The convent, a massive and beautiful complex in the city (a small town in it's own right) which had 500 nuns at it's height. It's still active today but the community numbers 28.
- Mountain biking around the surrounding countryside and part way up one of the volcanic mountains with, I kid you not, Aldo the Peruvian National Mountain Biking champion, who is a professional guide. He struggled to keep up but we went easy on him.
