There’s always something a little surreal about coming home from traveling abroad.  To go from someplace so different to someplace so familiar in such a short time makes it almost hard to believe in the reality of either.  Part of the magic lies in the flip that occurs:  The foreignness that I lived for the […]

The bulk of our afternoon in Lima was spent at the Cathedral and Archbishop’s Palace on the Plaza de Armas.  There isn’t a ton to say about them that isn’t said in the pictures.  They were definitely worth the visit. Cathedral Cathedral Francisco Pizarro’s tomb Box that Pizarro’s head was in Detail of choir stalls Lineage […]

This is the last day of our trip and we decided to take it easy.  We slept in until 10am — the latest we’ve slept on this entire trip (our more habitual rising time has been sometime between 5am and 7am).  Boy did we need that extra sleep! We used the rest of the morning […]

I have a tradition of seeing (usually) bad American blockbusters in foreign cities.  I started with the Charlies Angels remake in Paris and brought Amanda into it with Transformers in Istanbul.  That would have been reason enough for us to see Transformers 3 in Lima.  But there’s an additional reason, too:  We were in Chicago last summer […]

We got back from our trip to the Colca Canyon at around 5pm on Tuesday and, three hours later, jumped on an 18-hour bus ride to Lima.  During those three hours of non-travel time, we managed to work a little miracle.  As you’ll recall, I hadn’t showered the previous day due to lack of warm water […]

The Colca Valley leads into the Colca Canyon, the head of which is about 1.5 hours from Chivay.  The valley had been a prehistoric lake (similar to Lake Bonneville in Utah), and when the natural dam burst, the water drained through the Colca Canyon.  As I mentioned before, the Colca Canyon is one of the […]

From Patapampa Pass we dropped down into the Colca Valley, to the town of Chivay.  We didn’t drop very far, though.  Chivay is still at 12,894 ft above sea level.  The Colca Valley has been inhabited for centuries, first by pre-Inca groups and then by the Incas themselves.  The pre-Incans had terraced an enormous percentage of […]

After about another hour or so of driving from the point where we saw the vicunas and alpacas, we reached the Patapampa Pass, which is the highest point between Arequipa and Chivay (the town where we would stay in the Colca valley).  It was surreally high:  4,910 meters translates into 16,109 feet above sea level.  […]

Peru boasts two of the world’s deepest canyons, both of which are within a day’s drive from Arequipa. Of the two, Colca Canyon is the deepest (it measures 4,160 meters in depth; the third deepest in the world after canyons in China and Nepal, and more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon). It […]