This article was written while I was on holiday in California and was inspired by the many great travel businesses I encountered throughout America.

When creating a website within the tourism industry it’s important to keep a strong focus on the needs of travellers. The website ideaologies applying to travel also apply to a broad number of websites selling single products online.

It is much easier to maintain this focus if you have a clear idea of your target demographic. Many businesses fall into the trap of believing anyone can stay in their hotel, or take their tour, but the reality is each product will only appeal to a subset of the travellers visiting any region.

Tourism providers who’ve been in the industry for some time will tell you that the internet dramatically changed the booking habits of travellers and it’s important to realise why this is so.

Why A Traveller Uses the Web

The primary reason a traveller will visit your website is to gather information about tourism product. This means more information then the brochure displays or a travel agent might know. Travellers are frequently disappointed when a website contains scant information or fails to answer even their most basic questions.

Essential Website Parts

For a traveller the most important page of a website is your home page. Research suggests most people will visit at least 10 different product websites before making a purchasing decision, and much of their decision to delve further into your website is based on the professionalism and information on your home page.

Your home page should be a three or four paragraph summary of your product which addresses questions about location, rates and sells your products major benefits over your competitors. In addition you should ensure your home page does not load slowly, and avoid flash animations as they rarely display the information required to entice your visitor to go further.

Within the information on your home page, ensure there is appropriate linked text where visitors can find out further information. This is particularly important with rates and calls to action.

The rates themselves should be clearly displayed in a neat table with the fine print or pricing conditions close by. A visitor needs to be able to quickly figure out how much your product costs, so avoid making them fill out a form with their dates and number of people as this is likely to annoy them and generally results in them studying your competitors rates page instead.

A strong call to action leading your visitor to book, enquire or phone should be near the rates data and is nearly always forgotten by less savvy website owners. Be clear about what your potential customer should do next.

Most often a visitor will contact you before booking if your website does not have an automated availability and booking form. You can make this process easy for them by having separate booking and enquiry forms.

Hire a professional photographer and include your most spectacular shots on your home page, and then scatter the rest generously through your website. Include talent from your target market demographic in the photos. This allows people to put themselves in the picture having an enjoyable experience.

Hindrances To Conversions

As the web becomes increasingly automated the time it takes for a visitor to gather the information they require from a tourism product provider will determine which provider makes the sale. For this reason consider investing in a web-based reservation system to allow customers to make decisions instantly. Customers will get frustrated if they need to wait for responses to their reservations and book a competitive product.

Many web users attest their biggest annoyance about websites is not being able to find the information they require to answer their questions. Think about the most common questions your customers ask and answer everyone of them.
The question all customers need answered is the one of prices. Some products mistakenly leave their prices off their website hoping someone will contact them to ask, but this strategy will sooner send your customers to a competitor which does display their prices. Just as bad as having no rates is having confusing rates, so keep them simple.

When a customer has an enquiry request ensure your enquiry form is short and sweet and only asks the absolutely necessary details you need to respond to the customer. Long enquiry forms will put customers off and they may choose not to bother asking.

Be careful with the photos you include as bad photography with small grainy pictures or old shots devalues your product and puts customers off. Avoid including anything blurry, out of focus, or where the photo has too many subjects.

Resources Travellers Use

Think about the online resources travellers use to find product, and ensure you have strong representation.

The first and most important is the search engines, especially Google. If you don’t have good rankings, consider purchasing advertising with Google AdWords to ensure you have good visibility.

Travellers often review prominent, high ranking information sites containing general information about the area. Look into advertising on these sites for more exposure to travellers who have not yet decided their precisie itineraries.

Big for international travellers are review and comparison websites like Trip Advisor (www.tripadvisor.com). These sites give customers an unbiased view of a number of products in an area, and rates them by popularity. Customers trust the reviews on Trip Advisor so encourage your customers to write something about your product.

Similarly travel forums like Lonely Planet’s The Thorn Tree allow travellers to explore destinations and their products through discussion with other travellers. Especially tour product will benefit by participating in online forum discussions and passively promoting their products aand services direct to potential customers. Seek out localised travel forums and ensure you follow the accepted ettiquette for product promotion.

The prominence of travel blogs have seen an increase in product providers being featured in personal stories from customers who have experienced that product. These are powerful reccommendations, and travel providers should consider asking customers if they have a travel blog and encourage their product’s favourable inclusion if so.

Travel websites are by large all about your customer. They need to cut through competition by doing a great job of answering your customer’s questions and being well organised with spectacular photography.

I spent my birthday in Paris, which was wet, miserable and cold. But, I’m used to the crazy weather now. In fact, I’ve concluded the weather is Paris is why French ladies always look great.

First of all, there’s something just perfect about the humidity. Every day was a perfect hair day, even without my GHD. Make up stays in place, and lasts longer somehow. Since it’s really cold a spring in your step is necessary to keep warm.

We stayed in a hotel near the Louvre, which was great because we walked all over. The taxi to get to our hotel was 55 euro though, so about $70! It seems the airport is far out of town.

It’s weird to see that the Parisian equivalent of our Holdens and Fords are Mercedez. Both taxis we caught were seriously plush and luxurious vehicles with all sorts of great gadgetry like headlight washers and ipod docks.

The shopping in Paris is obviously a great drawcards, and there was soldes everywhere. Just about every second shop is a shoe shop. Control was therefore difficult, and I was pleased for the first time that my bags were already full because I could have fulled an entire suitcase with adorable boots. However, not that practical at home.

During the day the streets are abuzz with local folk buying food and going about their business. There are lots of people walking around with breadsticks, so the movies are all true. The food is amazing though, all the stuff I crave at French restaurants was readily available everywhere.

We ate fois gras first night at a cute little restaurant, and I thought it’d be a midget little portion like at home, but now, we got two huge slabs of the stuff! While we were slowly making way through our entree, I didn’t care how they brought up the bird because the result was spectacular. We should all try force feeding more geese. So at the airport I bought some to bring home, since it’s canned quarantine shouldn’t take issue. I hope. It costs a fortune.

Things generally are fairly pricey, perhaps people here earn more. I’m not really sure. The exchange rate was ordinary too. Weirdly, champagne was cheaper at BevMo in the USA, so I should have stocked up there. Even the vintage champas was cheaper at BevMo. Jill… we need a BevMo in Cairns.

Nicky at Napoleon’s House

The Louvre was great, just like it is in the Da Vinci movie. We saw loads of paintings and got really sore feet walking around all day. The building itself was really spectacular as well, and that surprised me as I wasn’t expecting it to be an attraction in itself. I loved the Napoleonic Apartments the best, which are a recreation of how Napoleon lived in the same rooms that he originally slept in. They were opulent and in some places garish.

I’ve enjoyed Paris because it seems glamourous, but it has a lonely and grumpy feel to the place.

There are so many weird things about the USA. They mostly seem weird because I came from a Spanish speaking nation where you expect things to be different, but when everyone around you speaks English you sort of expect things to be the same.

First thing that’s different is Americans know the meaning of customer service. They’re seriously good brown-nosers! They’re chatty, friendly, full of personality and absolutely ready to give you ketchup with anything you please. Of course, it’s because they get paid like shit and they’re hoping you’ll tip them during the translation, so they put on a good show. We have much to learn by their vibrancy and enthusiasm for service. My glass was never empty, coffee is always flowing, they’re intuitive about cutlery and napkins and I never once had to ask for the dessert menu. But then, I didn’t eat one dessert in the US and this brings me to my second weird thing.

Portion size. It seems American restaurants believe they should not only be serving you dinner but also plenty for breakfast and lunch the next day. The serving sizes are ridiculous. I never finished a single meal, and I learnt quickly not to order entrees. Of course they also give you mounds of free bread, and often you’ll get free soup and salads as well. It seemed absolutely crazy to me!

Bacon is a different breed here. I always buy shortcut bacon, which has that big round bit with no grease on it. Well.. It seems the Americans have bred that bit out of the pig, because I’ve looked in 3 supermarkets for shortcut bacon and I can find is the evil fatty bit that I usually throw away. I am desperately looking forward to bacon and eggs at home.

While here I stayed with friends in Sacramento, Jillian and Brad, who very kindly put up with my curiosity and constant badgering about odd food and customs. They were both great sports and very fun to be around. They even laughed at most of my jokes, but perhaps they were just being polite. They’re a unique pair because Jill is a fiercely independent girl who is almost completely blind and Brad is a tall lanky black geek who is remarkably similar to Kaj in an absent-minded professor and metrosexual kind of way. According to Jill, Brad is the whitest black man alive, and I tend to agree.

Brad gave me a driving lesson in his car so I could drive to the Napa Valley and go wine tasting in a rental car the next day. He was a great sport because I almost scraped the passenger side of his car against another car twice as I had troubles with the wrong side of the road thing. Our Napa adventure largely went without incident, just on the way back I missed the exit and ended up in downtown Sacramento on the way to Reno.

Jill and Brad took me to the Jelly Belly factory which is near their house and we were able to tour the factory and see all the beans being made. It was really awesome, and at the end you could taste them all! You could even taste the new Harry Potter series with flavours like vomit, dirt, grass, soap, earwax and sardines. I almost chucked my lunch on the earwax one, it was awful. I found a great gem there though; belly flops. These are the not-so-perfect beans, so I bought a few huge packets for our not-so-perfect office!

I especially loved the time in the USA, and will really miss it. Out of all the places I’ve visited in the last 7 weeks this is the only one where I actually thought I could enjoy living. There is an amazing variety of product for sale, and producers, service providers and store owners seem to try that little bit harder than at home. It was incredibly helpful to be staying with some great locals who could teach me the way of the land too.

Milk

There’s no fresh milk here. Or at least if there is, I haven’t seen it. Everyone uses evaporated milk, and although it’s hard to believe it actually froths to make good foam for a cappucino. Tastes like crap though.

Domesticated Animals

… are everywhere. Pigs, dogs, cows, llamas, cats, chickens and ducks line the streets of villages eerywhere. They’re often roped to something near the road, but it’s not uncommon to see a few cows leisurely crossing the street. We saw two large pigs roaming a service station last week. In Cusco, a city of 800,000 people, I saw a llama in the middle of a roundabout chomping on grass.

Hawkers

Frequently people approach you in the street to sell you stuf, which is usually crap. Sometimes it’s children doing the selling, and they’re a bit more forward. They poke your arms and tug at your clothes. Coral yelled at one once here in Cusco. In the last two days I’ve been asked to buy yellow confetti, massages, restaurant meals, finger puppets and lollies. Kaj was asked to buy marijuana and cocaine. He get’s all the luck.

Dot Matrix Printers

Evidently Peru is where all our old dot matrix printers have ended up. Just about every business has one, and very few have inkjet or laser printers. I hear that song in my head everytime a printer goes… you know, the dot matrix song?

Independant Thought

Peru excepts its citizens of independant thought. The only helpful people we’ve encountered are non-Peruvians. This includes staff at hotels, airlines and shops. Maybe some of this are issues lost in translation, but it’s been particularly noticable in dealing with the staff at Lan. Problems get fixed if I call Lan in Miami, and people just give me blank looks here. There have been countless occasions of dealing with local people and they just can’t string together concepts.

Seat Belts

Nobody needs to wear them, and most cars are not fitted with seat belts in the back. Drivers sometimes wear them, but it’s definitely a seat belt optional country. Which is an interesting concept because there also seems to be few speed limits. Luckily the roads are often so bad you can’t go fast on them anyhow.

Breakfast

Unfortunately the breakfasts are really ordinary. You usually get a couple of flat and tasteless bread rolls with butter (again, made from evaporated milk) and memolada, usually strawberry flavoured. You’re often served orange juice which is freshly squeezed from green oranges, so it tastes more like lemon juice. I am so looking forward to bacon and eggs, scrambled eggs with truffle oil, tomato tartlets, omelettes, pancakes and all the other breakfast goodies I make at home. Someone needs to revolutionise Peruvian breakfast.

Bread

In general, the bread is bad. Maybe they don’t have yeast here, but there’s no bread like we would know bread, so toast isn’t an option. You only ever get flat round rolls, or occasionally a good bread at a posh restaurant. I’m looking forward to a vegemite on toast - or anything on toast.

Toilet Habits

Erick, skip this bit. You don’t flush your toilet paper, apparently the system can’t handle it. So, there’s always a bin next to the toilet which hopefully the housekeepers empty every day. Otherwise it gets a bit whiffy.

Kaj and I are still in Cusco but are happily not suffering from altitude issues any longer. Last night was New Years Eve, and it´s interesting how people celebrate when they don´t have so many regulations like we do.

In the morning Kaj and I walked around the city and discovered a very strange looking market. Mostly local people were at this market, and we soon figured the things being sold were for the New Years celebrations in the evening.

Yellow is a good luck colour here and Cusco has this really odd tradition where people don yellow underpants on the outside of their clothing and run around the main square. So, one of the commonly sold items at the markets were yellow underpants. In Australia I´m not sure you´d see too many pairs of yellow knickers, but here there must be a lot of manufacturers that prepare specially for this day. There were little bitty lacy ones, man sized ones and even children´s editions. I have never seen so many yellow underwear!

Just about everything for the celebrations was yellow. There were plastic flower necklaces, streamers, bags of confetti, clickers and crazy flouro yellow glasses that had ´2008´written on them. Kaj noted they´ll have difficulty in 2010 as to 00 is for your eyes to see through. We didn´t buy any of these crazy things, but they were funny to look at.

We had tickets to an exclusive club here, Fallen Angel, which is famous for it´s New Years parties. We had dinner at the club, and then at about 10pm the staff moved all the tables out. The dinner had 150 people, and 600 folk had tickets for after dinner. I had no idea where 600 people would fit in this establishment, as in Australia they´d probably have approval for 100 people at the most. Needless to say, it was a dramatic fire hazard and we were sardines by 11pm.

Upon arrival at the party we were given a plastic bag filled with yellow goodies we´d seen at the markets earlier in the day, and a pair of silver wings and a halo. Since everyone was wearing white to the party, the whole place looked like a bunch of crazy angels with wings and halos.

At about 11:30pm, the owner of the club, who is an overtly gay man, got onto the microphone and started blurting gayness in Spanish. Then, he proceeded to throw yellow underpants into the crowd. The people cheered and scrambled for the yellow pants, which prompted him to tell everyone he had a pair for every person. Unfortunately for me the pair I recieved had a stain on the crotch, but I believe it was a passing smoker who came in contact with my yellow knickers. They were also branded with Fallen Angel 2008.

So then just before midnight everyone has their knickers, yellow goodies and halos and wings, and we´re ordered to clear out of the club and head to the main square which is about one block away. As everyone is leaving the club there are a collection of Fallen Angel staff at the front door handing everyone a bottle of bubbly.

There is a little mini square outside the club, and most partygoers had collected there with their bottles of bubbly. Then, at about 5 mins to midnight everybody started shaking their bottles and spraying their friends. It´s 4C and I´m breathing fog and I am so damn grateful the only friend we had at this party was Gonzalo our tour guide, as I had absolutely no intention of getting bubbly drenched in the freezing cold! It was bad enough I couldn´t feel any of my fingers.

Suddenly some major fireworks exploded above our little square, and they´re the closest I´ve ever been to exploding fireworks! Gonzalo knows the owner of this club quite well, and discovered that these fireworks were organised especially for the Fallen Angel party people. These were the only fireworks of the evening, as here they don´t have a big public display like we do at home.

Kaj and I still had full bottles of bubbly and collectively decidied we should dump them on Gonzalo since he was in the party mood. After we sprayed him I threw yellow confetti all over him, which stuck beautifully.

The whole party then marched together into the main square, and the street parted to let us through as if we were celebrities. Everyone was looking and gawking to see where we´d come from! We had drummers at the front of our procession, and a whole bunch of men scattered through the crowd letting off firecrackers above our heads.

Once inside the square we caught up with Gonzalo´s friends, many of whom we´d already met through our gourmet food travels. People were very celebratory and happy. The square was filled with a couple thousand people, and at least a couple hundred were letting off their own firecrackers. Loud booms often went off near us, and every couple of seconds there would be screaming fireworks shot into the sky.

Every now and then a hawker would approach Kaj and I to buy things. So I´d throw confetti on them and say ´Happy New Years´, and they´d soon go away.

At about 2am a whole bunch of riot police entered the main square, and that´s when Kaj and I decided it was time to head to bed. Seeing riot police in person are actually a bit scary.

Today is the last day of our gourmet food tour, and we´re looking forward to the finale dinner at the MAP restaurant inside the museum here. After that we take a train to Puno which is on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigatable lake in the world. Bolivia, a completely landlocked country, run their navy on the lake. This seems like a dramatic waste of money to me. We´re here for 2 days then head to the USA on 5th January.

At Erick´s request I´m not going to write any more details about my gastro issues, but you´ll all be pleased to know that for New Years Eve I may actually be well enough to consume alcohol. It´s now 2008 in Australia, we´ve got another 13 hours before our spectacular event.

For all those who rolled their eyes and groaned when I said we were taking a gourmet food tour, I can now confidently say the food here is spectacular when you know where to look.

Our tour started with a cooking lesson at a little restaurant in Ollantaytambo called Mayupata with Chef Oscar Morello. It had a lovely big pizza oven like at Rattle & Hum, which also doubled as a heater for keeping the restaurant warm! We donned aprons - yes! Kaj wore an apron! - and set about cooking 2 entrees, 2 mains and a dessert.

Something I love about the cuisine here is that it follows a routine I´ve always dreamed Australian restaurants would. That is, to only cook with seasonal local ingredients. Here it´s the distance and infrastructure issues that prevent otherwise, but the results are tasty food using ingredients in their prime.

At the moment corn is being harvested, and it´s not corn like we have at home. We were using this giant corn, which is only pale yellow, and isn´t as sweet as our corn, so it has more practical uses in savoury food. Still tastes divine with lots of salt though.

Chef Oscar guided us through our first dish which was using a grainy yellow potato and serving it with a delicious yellow sauce. Potatoes are actually natively Peruvian, and were originally poisionous. Many civilisations cross-bred them with other things to produce their edible form we have today, but amazingly Peru still grows 3000 different types of potatoes!

The dish was delicious, and although the chance of us finding the Peruvian yellow potato at home is slim, I´m sure a different potato will substitude just fine. A kifler might actually do a better job!

In the sauce, and in many other things we made, we used a small capsicum/chilli creature called a rocoto. It has a beautiful orange colour, and is used for both the slight spicy flavour, and the divine colour.

The most exciting thing we made in the class was the roasted trout. Gonzalo our tour guide and Oscar had visited the trout farm that morning and picked us a beautiful trout to cook with. It´s a rainbow trout which is farmed in clear and fresh mountainous water, and the flavour is just spectacular. Some Tetusya junkies might realise this is the same fish Tets uses as his signature dish, the Ocean Trout Confit. Just in Tets case the fish are caught in Tasmanian freshwater streams where the water starts to meet the ocean. Hence the name, Ocean Trout.

The trout had already been gutted, which was great because I don´t think Kaj had the stomach to do it. The rainbow trout is also an awesome fish because it has no scales! We put some rosemary where his gizzards used to be, and then covered him with salt mined in the mountains nearby. The salt had a mineral in it which gave it a slight pink hue, much like our Murray River salt at home. Then a little sprinkle of water and into the pizza oven for 30 minutes.

When it emerged we needed to tap the salt away as it had developed a hard outer crust. The trout underneath was beautifully cooked, and we ate it with a little Peruvian lemon. I must try this one at home.

Tonight we´re off to a famous New Years Eve party held by one of the first gay men un Peru to come out. Gay folk are still largely in the closet here as this is a strong Catholic nation with little acceptance of things they don´t understand. We´re looking forward to the party, we need to wear all white so I´ll be donning my melted snowman costume again. Kaj bought white jeans and is afraid of being molested at the party as he believes they make him look too gay.

See you all in 2008!

Kaj made it to South America with all his luggage and flights intact. How do I get all the bad luck? We met on a plane in Cusco on our way to the jungle from Puerto Maldonado which is almost on the Bolivian border of Peru. Kaj didn´t recognise me at first, his excuse was that he was watching all the people get on the plane. I was however the 3rd person on the plane, so it was a crap excuse. He was instead taking delight watching a little bitty airline hostess struggling to put a large suitcase in the overhead lockers. No, he didn´t get up and offer to help.

On arrival in Puerto Maldonado we were taken to the office of our lodge company, and asked to remove anything from our luggage that we wouldn´t need. So, out came all our cold weather gear, since it was about 30C and extremely humid.

I was glad to be at sea level and breathing in a good amount of oxygen and my Cuscian altitude headache was slowly fading. Kaj however was really under the weather after being in the air for 27h, and hadn´t slept a wink. He was dreading the 45min bus trip to the river, and the successive 4h boat ride to the lodge.

The bus trip was an interesting experience. The road can´t really be called a road by our standards. It was a dirt track, barely wide enough for our bus with dodgy bridges and potholes big enough to swallow Mum´s new Hyundai Getz. It was muddy as it´s wet season here too, and I was worried at any moment the bus would get bogged and all the American tourists in their clean adventure gear were going to get real muddy while we all pushed the bus out of a former pothole - now a small lake.

But no, we make it intact to the boat departure, and it was a pleasant journey along the river. Kaj was even able to keep all his lunch intact, and the further upstream we went, the more bird life we saw.

Our lodge, Refugio Amazonas was a 16 room log cabin structure with a thatched roof. Our room had two beds (note to self: when in South America, don´t ask for a double room if you want to sleep with your partner. You require a matrimonial room) and one wall was completely open to the jungle. We were warned to keep our important documentation and any lollies in the safety deposit box as creatures sometimes enter the rooms while we sleep.

The only creatures we could tell that came in were the mosquitos. Not nearly as many as in Iquitos, but it did require us to sleep under mosquito nets. They´re not nearly as romantic as they look!

First night in both Kaj and I came down with gastro problems, and that had me totally out of action for the first day. The second day wasn´t much better. Kaj´s condition improved enough for him to take a jungle walk to a canopy tower 36m high where he sat watching macaws fly past.

3rd night we were transferred to the second lodge, the Tambopata Research Centre, which is a further 5h upstream. Although the boat ride was gruelling, upon arrival a family of 6 red howler monkeys greeted us as we hopped off the boat.

We observed the monkeys for about 2 minutes, when the big one came down from higher in the tree and stood above us and started to pee. He didn´t get me, but an American researcher was more lucky! Then, all the monkeys started to pee. It was raining monkey pee! We assumed they didn´t want us at the base of their tree, so we carried on to the lodge.

Every time we entered the jungle at this lodge we saw something spectacular. We saw so many monkey species, but the real highlight was visiting the macaw clay lick.

We needed to rise at 3:30am to get to the location before the birds did, and suddenly about 300 parrots and macaws descended on the location. They was so noisy, but their colours were amazing.

Not many ate clay that morning, most of them just sat in the trees like a bunch of women gossiping.

We´re now in Ollantaytambo again on our gourmet food tour, and will write more when we have a moment.

Thanks for all the comments - so nice to be loved!

If anyone is reading my posts, please send me a comment. I´m feeling unloved. You just click on the little comments link at the bottom of the article.

The last 3 days I´ve been in the area famous for Machu Picchu, which is as amazing as it´s described. It was the one area I wasn´t looking forward to visiting because it´s so touristy, but it was really worth the visit.

It´s up high in the mountains, and although Machu Picchu itself is a little lower in altitude, I´m in Cusco at the moment and it´s 3,000m above sea level, and I´ve had a nasty headache all night. I think it´s a touch of altitude sickness. I have some tablets from my doctor to combat this, and so now I´ve taken them. They´re diuretics and they´re making me pee more than I knew I could.

This morning I meet up with Kaj as he´s flying into Cusco from Lima, and we´re heading into the jungle for 7 days. More mosquitos, humidity and cold water showers. Yay. I´ve bought a silly Peruvian hat to meet him with, and some rainbow gay gloves too. It´s cold enough to wear these items in Cusco! See the hat on the right - well mine is a bit more colourful than this!

Our first day into the area was in a charming town hardly anyone goes to called Ollantaytambo. Coral and I both really loved this town. We walked into the Plaza de Armas for dinner and found a little restaurant run by a couple. After we´d ordered the man walked out of the restaurant with a small animal that looked like a baby wombat. It was a satoni. I can´t find any images of this on the web, so it´s great we took lots of pics. It was only two months old, and Coral and I cuddled it the whole time we were at the restaurant. It was cold, so loved cuddles!

We took a train from here 1.5h to the town of Aguas Calientés which is also known as Machu Picchu town. We stayed at a cute hostel there called Rupa Wasi which was fantastic with the exception of the massive steps to get up to the hostel. We only did the steps twice. This hostel only had 4 rooms, so we had a lot of personal attention. A nice boy from the hostel named Orlando picked us up at the train station and carried all our bags to the hostel, including up the stairs. This was great because Coral and I could barely make it up the stairs. He got a big tip when he also brought our luggage back to the train station next day for our departure!

From Aguas Calientés it´s a 30min bus ride to Machu Picchu, which I was really worried about because of the switchbacks. I was certain I was going to see my desayuno (breakfast) again. On the right is a pic of the road from the top of the mountain. Luckily the drivers go really slow around the corners and I didn´t have anything to worry about.

First day in Machu Picchu we explored the main ruins and marveled at the architecture. The Peruvian governement are doing a fair bit of restoration too, so there are a couple of buildings that have thatches roofs using the original stone structure.

There are sooo many llamas here. Heaps. I thought we´d be lucky to see them, but no, they´re all over the ruins. In fact, I believe it´s how the grass stays nicely trimmed as they´re great lawn mowers. We were lucky enough to watch a baby llama frolicking with it´s mum, it was only 2 days old and snowy white. The mum was trying to coax it up some steps, but the baby just wouldn´t go.

Second day at the ruins Coral and I took a long walk up to the solar gate which is a 2 hour uphill walk on rocky paths. We also happened to take this walk in the rain, so had to go slowly because the path was trecherous. Once we got to the top the views would have been gorgeous if it wasn´t for all the cloud cover. All we could see in all directions was white fluffy cloud, but the walk itself was lovely. It was hard though, we ascended 1000ft during the walk, and I even took a pic of the sign to prove I´d been there!

On the way back downhill the cloud began to lift and we enjoyed great glimpses of the whole of Machu Picchu. It looked spectacular from the height we were at. This pic is similar to the occasional views through cloud cover we recieved.

I got great joy in telling hikers on the way down how far they were, as there is no signage or information telling you where you are on the track. I told one couple they were about one sixteenth of the way, and the first part of the track are hideously steep steps. I referred to them as a ladder, not steps at all. I also met the first Australians I´d met in South America on this track, one from the Gold Coast and two from Canberra. The Canberran couple said that being from Cairns I should be able to handle this humidity… it was about 10C and I´m shivering. There was NO WAY I could feel any humidity!

The train trip back to Cusco is 5 hours, and was beautiful because you get a slow look through villages and ruins on the sides of mountains. The villages are particularly interesting because people are dressed funny, and they wear amazingly colourful clothes for farmers. The ladies have a big backpack rug thing that they carry everything in; maize, coca leaves, straw, children.

Well off to the airport now to fly out to Puerto Maldonado. Won´t be near a computer for a week.

 

Today, I believe it’s Sunday, is our last day in Northern Peru, which is sad because the last 3 days have been great. This is an area of Peru few turistas visit, which made it feel a little exclusive. The people have been much friendlier, they still gawk at us but don’t run after us poking our arms to buy their crappy souvenirs.

We’re currently in Trujillo, known as La Ciudad de la Eterna Primavera, (The City of Eternal Spring), because of its very sunny and supposedly pleasant weather year-round. It’s 15C right now, and I’m not sure how any self-respecting tropical girl could considerthat pleasant. Amazingly, this is Latitide 8 and Cairns is Latitude 17, so 15C in summer is rather strange to me so much closer to the equator than Cairns.

Trujillo is the most important economic center of northern Peru and an inland commercial and transport centre for the surrounding farmland. In 1800, the city of Trujillo greatly expanded due to extensive irrigated agriculture, fueled primarily by the sugarcane industry. Today asparagus, rice and shoes are the area’s main products. Among the internationally known products of Trujillo, asparagus is exported to neighboring countries, Europe and the United States. The areas around Trujillo are among the largest exporters of white asparagus in the world.

This morning we went to the Moche ruins of Huaca del Sol y Huaca de la Luna (Temples of the Sun and the Moon). The Moche people are pre-Incan, and the two temples stand in front of a white hill. The Huaca de la Luna, though it is the smaller of the two huacas at the site, yields the most archaeological information. The Huaca del Sol was partially destroyed and looted by the Spanish in the 17th century, while the Huaca de la Luna was left relatively untouched.

We didn’t go into the Huaca del Sol, as it is not open for entry. The Huaca de la Luna was spectacular, especially all the vibrant wall murals. Coral and I really enjoyed this place.

We also visited a great ancient city today called Chan Chan. It’s been one of the great highlights of the trip so far. Chan Chan is the largest Pre-Columbian city in South America, and covers 20 km² of adobe brick mud city.

It was founded by the Chimor people in 850AD, who eventually left the city when they were conquered by the Incas in 1470AD. It is believed that 30,000 people lived in the city.

There are 10 separate sections to the city, which are refered to as citadels. They had all sorts of rooms for burial chambers, temples, plazas, water supplies and houses. Each of the 10 have huge walls on the exterior, and the construction is amazing.

They first used adobe brick, which seemed to be made of mud/clay, with small stones and sometimes feathers and straw. Then, the walls are all rendered to make them smooth. This rendering alone must have been a massive job - it costs a fortune to render a house today because of the time it takes! Little holes were also left in various parts of the wall to act as expansion joints in times of eathquakes, which are reasonably common here.

 

After the rendering lots of intricate designs were carved onto the walls. Because the city is just 1500m from the beach, the styles carved are predictable. Lots of fish and birds, particularly pelicans, and other small mammals. Many of the walls are covered with a fishing net design, which looks stunning.

The city is severely threatened by erosion rain and flooding. We visited just one of the citadels, the Tschudi Complex, as this is the only one significantly excavated.

We’re off to Lima, and then Cusco tomorrow. Exploring the Sacred Valley, and then Machu Picchu.

I can´t tell you how nice it is to get off a plane and see my luggage on the baggage carousel, and so started my love affair with Chiclayo. Then, our tour guides had a plaque with our name on it. It was looking good.

The city is much more modern than Iquitos - maybe by about 100 years. No river canoes with bunches of plantain.. it was cars, shopping centres and normal looking people. Had a lovely church in the Plaza, like most cities in Peru.

Our guide was a charming 21 year old called Orlando, who knew way more than he should about history for a lad of his age. Our driver Luis didn´t speak any Inglés, but we still managed to converse gently.

The two boys were very good with us, and obviously quite experienced in their work. We never opened our own car door, or carried our own luggage. It was 5 star service.

We stayed at the Gran Hotel, which according to Orlando is the best hotel in Chiclayo. We had a security guard out the front, and two restaurants. But, like many things Peruvian, it´s just pretty on the outside. Our toilet had a flushing issue, the paint was cracked on the walls and things were a bit grubby in some places. Coral and I didn´t really mind though, we were really happy for a hot shower and a laundry service.

Next day we toured 3 of Chiclayo´s fantastic museums. One of them is Peru´s best museum according to Orlando, and was certainly the best museum I´ve ever been in.

The Lords of Sipán are chiefs of a city which are assumed to by dynastical of the Moche people, a civilation which is pre-Inca. The first Lord´s tomb is the richest burial site discovered in the Western Hemisphere and the site was just a few miles east of the Chiclayo.

The Lords were buried with amazing stuff, and tonnes of it! Finely crafted gold artifacts and ceramics recovered from these tombs are display at the Museum of the Royal Tombs, which is the first museum we visited in Chiclayo.

The second museum was the showstopper though, The Museum of Sican. The three-story, six-million-dollar museum, contains by far the greatest intact discovery of gold artifacts in the Americas, is shaped like the pre-Columbian pyramid under which Peruvian archaeologists discovered this amazing tomb in 1987. No steps, just ramps!

This museum initially made me quite nervous because you cannot take cameras or bags into the museum, and there was no way I was locking into the car, since it´s not insured in a locked car. They have a checking room, but that made me nervous too. The theory is they don´t want people photographing the security installations, and if you do manage to break into an exhibit, they don´t want you carting it out in a bag. We were also checked over for weapons by two security guards.

It was mostly very dark inside, all the walls are painted black and the lights are focussed on each piece.

Descending through the galleries, we were able to see all the objects the Lords were buried with in the same sequence as the archeologists did. The archeologists did a fantastic job of piecing everything together too, because many of the works required significant restoration. 

There were hammered-gold sheets that cradled the lord’s head and rested on his eyes, nose, mouth and chin: bracelets strung with hundreds of turquoise, shell, and gold beads; a gold-and-silver scepter depieting a warrior and his nude prisoner; gold-and silver backflaps (sheets the Moche suspended from the back of their belts) inlaid with shell and semiprecious stones, depicting a figure with a large, ganged mouth holding a human head by the hair and a tumi, a sacrificial knife. Each object or jewel displays exquisite artistry and craftsmanship. Here are some things we saw:

    

Of course, these aren’t my photos, since I couldn’t take a camera in. 

The museum is is also a mausoleum. Both Lord’s remains, as well as those of two other excavated figures – an ancestor of the lord and a high priest – are in a wooden coffin as the final exhibit. The skeletons are surrounded by ceramics found in their tombs.

What is amazing is that the later skeleton is in worse condition than the earlier one. The later Lord also got lots more treasures in his grave. It is believed that as the civilation became more advanced, they also carried around the Lord a lot more, and he needed to do very little exercise. This meant that his bones weren´t as strong, and they´ve been crushed over time.