Trail to Peak: The Adventurous Path
Hiking, Exploring, Travel & Adventure
Category: Salkantay Trek
At Long Last: Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu has been on my life bucket list for as long as I can remember. I recall sitting in my grandmother’s basement, flipping through back issues of Nat Geo, dreaming of being a National Geographic photographer, trekking around the world after amazing animals… Continue Reading “At Long Last: Machu Picchu”
Salkantay Trek Day 4: Hiking Through the Jungle to Machu Picchu
Excerpt: “Let me tell you, this was one inspiring group! The smaller of two groups of 29 and 17 students from Warwick University, they were in Peru, doing a version of the Salkantay Trek to raise funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. They were bright, youthful, and enthusiastic: a terrifically positive group, energized by the task they’d taken on. Animated by their cause, they were seriously motivated by what they were doing.”
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From Bean to Brew
Excerpt: “So how does that morning cup ‘o Joe, so prized in Europe and North America, go from being a red berry that is a parrot’s favourite treat, to the dark brown sludge that forms the basis of a heavenly morning treat??? Follow along and I’ll explain…”
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Jungle Stories
Excerpt: “But this is part of the Peruvian cultural landscape, part of the societal landscape, and part of the travelling experience. And it makes the point I was trying to explain at the beginning of this post: trekking slowly, spending long periods of time getting to know people in the country in which you are travelling, gives you insight into the true way of life of the people there. It is eye opening and enlightening. This story, equal parts lightheartedly humorous and heart wrenchingly sad, lets you see the complexity of this way of life.”
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Salkantay Trek Days 2 & 3: Trekking From the High Andean Mountains to the High Jungle
Excerpt: “Our day and a half spent getting down from the lofty heigths of the Salkantay Mountain, through the cloud forest and into the high rainforest were beautiful and enlightening. Representing about 30km of our overall trek, the days were long, but we experienced some spectacular terrain came away with a new understanding of ‘farming.'”
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Salkantay Trek Day 2: The 4630m Pass
Excerpt: “We were going to be experiencing a landscape unlike anything we’d experienced before in our lives. It was a landscape that dominated unlike any other: with an exceptionally tall, snow-peaked mountain that positively soared over you and the trail; a harsh, rocky environment with little plant and animal life; and a walk through a boulder field where the rough rock chunks scattered about the landscape towered over us, and yet were pebbles when compared to the rocky cliff from which they’d fallen. It was going to be an incredible day.”
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Salkantay Trek Day 1- Getting into the High Andean Mountains
Excerpt: “The lip of the moraine was like a razor’s edge: incredibly dramatic, sharpened by the wind over time, it launched itself into the sky as a sharp, jagged, sawtoothed, peaked ridge. Whatever the colours are there, we just don’t have them in our mountains: there are combinations of black, gold, green and brown, combined with the haze of the altitude and the brightness and intensity of the light, it was like nothing we’ve seen before.”
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An Overview of the Salkantay Trek
Excerpt: “There isn’t just one Inca Trail. The entire country of Peru is crisscrossed with 40,000 to 60,000 km of Inca trails (the number depends on what guide you are talking to) that were built throughout the country in the time of the Incas. These roads lead from Cusco, the centre of the Incan Empire, to the 4 corners of the realm. The Incans were, in this respect, the Romans of South America.”
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Trail to Peak: The Adventurous Path 