Posts Tagged ‘hiking’

We got up early again – around 6am – to depart for our walking safari which started at 7:15 and was to last 3 hours.  Fortunately the chefs at the Waterfront opened the restaurant early (sweet!) and we were able to eat before loading up on the safari vehicle.  It was our first safari 4×4 – seemingly a converted pickup truck with 4 rows of 3 seats in the back.  They very considerately provided poncho-like blankets for the drive to the park, which was fairly cold in an open-air vehicle early in the morning.

En Route to Safari

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Everything we’d heard about Slovenia told us that we should not just stick to Ljubljana – we needed to get out to the countryside. So, on the recommendation of a fellow hosteler, we set our sights on the small country town of Bohinj, a 2 hour bus ride from the capital.  The direction we headed (NNW for the crossword puzzle geeks out there) took us into the Julian Alps section of Slovenia, a mountainous paradise with lakes and hiking and everything you could want!

Bled Lake and Castle

In fact, on the way to Bohinj we passed another retreat town well-known to Slovenians called Bled.  There is a rather large lake with a super castle perched on a rocky overlook on the lake.  Unfortunately we had to pick one or the other but we will leave Bled to another trip.  It appeared much more built-up and touristy than our final destination: Bohinj!

The View from our Hotel

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After seeing Edinburgh for a little bit, we decided to see my old college friend who now lives in Oban.  This is a small port town north of Glasgow on the west coast of Scotland, and not far from all the famed Scottish isles.  It’s a beautiful place!

Oban's Coastline

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So sorry to be so far behind in our adventures. We’ve had a wonderful time seeing friends and family and haven’t had much time for blogging. But, that does mean that we have lots of wonderful days to post about!

We arrived in Edinburgh after one of the nicest (read: least bumpy) flights ever. There was one slight mishap on the getting to the airport in Madrid. I woke up, in a panic that I had slept through my alarm, roused Justin and very sleepily hustled us out of the hostel, only to find out that my alarm hadn’t even gone off yet! We were about two hours earlier to the airport than we needed to be. But I suppose that’s better than two hours late.

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Because Hazel wasn’t feeling well during our hiking around Machu Picchu, I went up the mountain nearby myself. This was a really amazing hike – not only do you get great aerial views of Machu Picchu, but you also see tons of flora just not found elsewhere on the site.  I’ll leave the talking up to the following pictures.  I have tons of others in the Best and Rest albums as well!

Orchids found low on Montaña Machu Picchu

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Perhaps appropriately, it is not as easy as you would think to get to Machu Picchu.  This is good for a couple of reasons – keeps crowds down (a little), brings in money to keep things nice there, and makes it feel like a real adventure when you finally make it.  We did plenty of research about getting to the site.  Turns out, it is not accessible by road alone.  You basically have three choices about how to get there and then within those choices are lots of variations.  The main methods are:  hike, take a long bus ride and a short train ride and a short bus ride, or take a shortish bus or taxi ride, medium length train ride and a short bus ride.  We went for the last option since it is generally considered the easiest and the safest.

We set off the day after we got back from the jungle and headed for a minivan taxi thing.  They leave as they fill up and take you to Ollyantaytambo, a town about half of the way to Machu Picchu where you can get the train the rest of the way.  We met a new friend in the van, a really nice guy from Helsinki, and had lunch together in Ollyantaytambo before catching the train.  As we were walking from lunch to the train I got a horrible churning in my stomach and just knew that I was getting sick.  Not convenient considering we had a 1.5 hour train ride ahead of us and were going somewhere fairly remote and not accessible by road!

Well, I survived the train ride.  The train itself was really nice, leather seats, windows in the roof so you could see the views, snack served.  And the ride was scenic.  Really beautiful in fact.

Peru Rail Train to Machu Picchu

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Since I’m so incredibly behind on these blog posts this tour may not get quite as much attention as deserved.  However, Justin has already put up our wildlife report and I’ll sketch out a few of the tour details.

Firstly, we went to the Manu National Park Cultural Zone with Amazon Trails Peru and would absolutely recommend this company.  Since we only had a short time in Peru we did the shortest tour that got us close to the wildlife reserve.  We had been a little concerned that if we didn’t make it all the way into the reserve we wouldn’t see very much.  This turned out to not be a problem though and for the short amount of time we had we saw so, so much.

We also need to give a lot of credit to our guide, Carlos.  He was excellent – knew all the birds, found us all kinds of things to look at that we would have missed, and could tell us all about the plants and how they are used by the people who live in the jungle.  He also carried about 80 pounds of wildlife reference books (including one he had put together with his friends) and spent lots of time helping us record what we saw.  Awesome!

The tour was 4 days and 3 nights.  We started in Cusco and had a very long van ride out to the jungle.  On the way we stopped at some pre-Incan burial ruins.

Pre-Incan burial towers

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Hazel and I just got back from our trip to the rainforest! We had a blast, and that will be explained in another post, but we also saw and photographed TONS of wildlife! In this post I’ll introduce you to most of the species we saw by name and picture!

We couldn’t have done this without the great help of our guide Carlos, who was working for Amazon Trails Peru our tour operator. He did a really spectacular job!

Even though this post has a TON of pictures, there are many more on SmugMug. Check out our BEST photos, and the REST of them!

Reptiles and Amphibians

I saw each of these on my second night walk in the jungle, except the last two which we found during a daytime walk:

• Phyllomedusa Palliata
• Phyllomedusa Tomopterna
• Oreobates Quixensis
• Poison Dart Frog
• Juvenile White Cayman!

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The bus to Cusco was a pretty smooth ride. Well, except that the kph monitor was malfunctioning and beeped periodcally throughout the night. At least Hazel got to sleep!

Cusco Cathedral

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