Peru — the Lares Trek & Machu Picchu

Peru with Katia in 2008, before the kids — the second half of one long trip through Latin America that began in El Salvador.

We walked the Lares Trek — three days over the Andes above the Sacred Valley, organised with a Peruvian crew, sleeping in tents with donkeys carrying the food and the gear. It begins at the hot springs at Lares and climbs over passes above 4,000 meters, past glacial lakes and Quechua villages where alpaca and llama graze. From the end of the trail we went on to Aguas Calientes, and took the bus up the switchbacks to Machu Picchu.

We also hiked the Tambomachay Inca ruins outside Cusco, wandered the old stone streets and the twelve-angled stone, and took in colonial Lima and the desert oasis at Ica.

(The route drawn is the Lares trek corridor — the hot springs, over the passes, down to Ollantaytambo — traced from its named waypoints rather than a recorded GPS track. The train and the bus that followed aren't drawn: this is the part we walked.)