The Libertador Hotel in Cusco...Inca, colonial and modern architecture...

Llama with Huayana Picchu in the background

Lori's famous heel-click...at Machu Picchu

Amazing Peru - Fabled Machu Picchu - One of the 7 wonders of the world

Niether pictures nor words give justice to fabled Machu Picchu. The magnitude of the setting, hundreds of feet above a winding jungle river gorge, sheer rock cliffs trimmed in foilage and a landscape of ancient ruins so finely constructed, the whole scene seems a work of virtual fiction...The site is still shrouded in mystery even after its discovery in 1911 after evading detection by the occupying Spaniards and most native Peruvians alike for over 400 years! (And that estimate is conservative. The site may have been created hundreds or even thousands of years earlier and reoccupied by the Inca later) You must see the clouds hovering over the green peaks, the finely-fitted grey, Inca stone walls, the verdent green terraces that served as mountain fields for ancient inhabitants, to believe the site truely is real. Our concern with travelers we lead here is that the build-up and anticipation become so great that the experience is anti-climatic. But that has never been a problem. In the case of Machu Picchu, the real thing always evokes trademark Adventure Walkers "awe and wonder" of the highest order even without all the far-fetched, mystic connotations sometimes attributed to the site.

All mysticism aside, Machu Picchu is awe-inspiring as it stands, evoking wonder from everyone who steps foot there. And there are many. Reservations were so hard to get on the train going to the foot of the site that we were compelled to send half our group halfway by bus. Guides spoke of the possibility of the ruin itself being closed to on-site walk-throughs in the near future due to the pressure of tourism. Though May is not considered high tourist season, the venue was packed and the bus to the mountain-top filled with a polyglot bunch speaking English, German, French, Japanese, Chinese, Polish and other languages we didn't recognize.

A spider monkey who is tired of it all...

Snakes Alive! Chris with Jake Worthen and...Anaconda friends

Amazing Peru -- The Amazon

Just returned from Peru, helping Marlan and Colleen Walker with the second of two waves of travelers on a walking adventure that took us to the Peruvian Amazon, the teaming city of Lima on the costal plains and to the fabulous, colonial Cusco, former Inca capital, the Inca Sacred Valley of the andes and exotic Machu Picchu.

The Amazon
It is surprising to find that almost 60 percent of Peru lies in the famous Amazon basin and is composed of largely untraveled and seldom-visited jungle.

The El Dorado plaza of Iquitos rang with the primitive music of tropical Peru outside our hotel as a young girl in grass skirt and halter danced around a relatively small, six-foot boa snake for tips from onlookers just outside the hotel. The music was underscored by the stacato sounds of small motorbikes (moto-taxis or moto-carros) three wheeled contraptions with a wooden, rear bench seat, scurring past as townspeople wrapped up the tasks of the day.

A dinner of Paiche, an Amazon River fish that grows larger than a man, and "lagarto", litterally, "lizard" in Spanish, the local name for an Amazon-sized version of the Alligator, topped off an amazining day near Iquitios, a city of 500,000 people where seeing an automobile is uncommon. (The only way in or out is on the river or by plane.)

A ride up the Maroa River, an Amazon tributary, on large wooden "launchas" with thatched roofs for shade, took us for some true walking Amazon adventure.

First came a visit with the Bora Indian tribe where we were conducted to a thatched roof pavillion to witness, then participate in dances with these gentle ancestors of native Amazon people. The children were bright-eyed. The teen-aged girls shy and covered modestly unlike the older women who, like the men, wore only traditional grass skirts and shell jewelery around their necks in the oppressive tropical heat. There followed a frenzy of purchases of simple seed and shell jewelry and popular jungle "blow guns" by the travelers.

Next came a rustic (picture wooden shanties on stilts and a few chicken-wire enclosures), river-side serpentarium where the more couragous handled 20-foot-long Anaconda snakes. These giant water serpents that populate amazon waterways were as thick as my thigh and rippling with muscular power. And the ones we handled were relatively smaller specimins. Others held land Boas that were equally intimidating, though smaller at 13 to 15 feet long. There were brillant jungle parrots, Tucans, baby monkeys, gigantic prehistoric turtles and jaguar or puma "kittens" (It was hard to tell since at their young age, the rosette markings typical of jaguars are not yet obvious) twice the size of large house cats, and the lovable jungle sloths, or "osos perizosos", literally, "lazy bears" too.

El Salvador Wanderings

...Then we drove a mountain road through
the thick greenery shrouded with a thin veil
of mist, a place that seemed lost in time and
appeared to be distant from the most remote 
vestiges of civilization.  Were it not for
the people that appeared like phantoms on 
the roadside from the misted greenery--a 
woman with a pot balanced on her head; an 
old man with a machete and a small bundle
of firewood; or a child with a small, black
dog in his arms--we could have been in the 
heart of the deepest wilderness...The 
vibrant city of San Salvador, teaming 
with traffic was only 45 minutes ahead...