Peru
Peru was always on my bucket list - it should be on yours too! I got lucky when I had to spend a fortnight in a chemical plant and making sure that it was run safely and with regard to the environment. Setting out in January I wore a raincoat but when I was greeted at Lima airport there were hysterics - it hadn`t rained there for 10 years!. But I had the last laugh because whilst I was there we had a shower. First task on these jobs was always to take $5 off the local team by asking if they had leak tested the plant and betting them it would leak. The first batch - water - always found some leaks!! The factory manager, Ing Alfredo Garcia Llosa was very excited by a new "American" singer he had just discovered - Shirley Bassey. I had to explain that she was from Tiger Bay near Cardiff. In Lima I first tasted lucuma ice cream - in my opinion the best tasting ice cream I have ever had. There`s a picture of lucuma fruits in the gallery - they look like avocadoes but taste amazing. Sadly they don`tseem to be grown anywhere except on the slopes of the Andes. The other unusual food was when the plant manager took me home to have `Sunday lunch` with her family - roasted cuy (guinea pig to you!) with a ground peanut, garlic and cheese sauce. Cuy is a major protein source for the inhabitants of the Andes region. Fresh sea scallops served as a starter was also a regular feature of my stay
Lima has a fabulous gold museum dating back to pre-Spanish Conquest as my gallery illustrates. The Incas and previous civilisations were heavily into ceramics and woven fabrics - many of them erotic in nature. Much of Peru, apart from the Andes/Amazon regions are longstanding deserts and it`s possible to just pick up woven fabrics which have lain for centuries hardly deteriorating. Also there are amazing massive patterns laid out on the desert floor by a past civilisation in the Nazca region which really you can only see properly from above! Further afield Peru borders Bolivia up in the Andes where the two share Lake Titicaca with its reed boats and floating population. Also the four South American members of the camel family live in the area - llama, alpaca, guanaco and vicuna. I bought small metal models of them to bring home but one has gone missing along the way. Towards the end of the first week he explained that normally he would have taken me to Cusco/Machu Picchu for the weekend but it was his daughter`s christening - would I be prepared to go on my own if the company paid!!! I had already decided I was going there under my own steam so that question was a no-brainer.
During the approach to Cusco we overflew what looked a bit like a green Stonehenge high on one of the mountaintops but there was no time to investigate over the weekend - check out the image below though - looks interesting. On landing in Cusco you go to your hotel, get issued with a cup of hot `coca tea` (yes using the leaves which cocaine is extracted from) and lay down with a warm fire in your bedroom until you have got used to the altitude or altitude sickness hammers your brain. A wander around Cusco took me to a bookshop where I found a great local book in Spanish on how to set up a 60 thousan guniea pig/cuy breeding farm for meat production The a trip higher up to Sacsayhuamán Inca fortress which is at 3,700 metres/12,000+ feet There`s a monochrome picture of the there in the gallery. The stones were all carved by hand and the tightness of the fit is amazing. On the way back to Cusco we stopped by the roadside and I bought an alpaca poncho for daughter Jacky althoughn she always found it too warm to wear in the UK. Next morning bright and early onto a small train heading DOWNhill through the Urubamba river valley towards the headwaters of the Amazon to Macchu Piccu. Shuttle buses ferried us up a long series of hairpins up to the city which Hiram Bingham found buried in the jungle in 1911 and the rest is history as they say. My first wildlife encounter there was the biggest millipede I have ever seen - at least a foot long.
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