Perú
Peru is a stunning country. Mountains, Coastline, Jungle. It's unreal. Jim and I went down for a two week backpacking trip and it was not nearly long enough. We opted to start in the countains, do a trek and then head down to the coast so we could really get a feel for Peru, it's landscape and it's culture.
Trekking to Machu Picchu on the Salkantay trail was a humbling and difficult experience. Both Jim and I suffered from altitude sickness at different points during the journey, but even that couldn't distract us from the raw beauty and vastness of this Andean trail. We opted to do the 4 day trek as part of a group, sleeping in tents along the way. The weather would go to a breezy 15 celcius to below freezing and hail in a matter of minutes. One such moment can be seen in the image below, There's a storm rolling in from the left, which hit just before we were able to make camp.
We climbed over Salkantay mountain, (a name meaning savage or invincible in Quechua) down into lush mountain jungle, before climbing once again the 1600 steps for a sunrise on Machu Picchu.
