Before our arrival in Cusco we had already decided we were going to go and check out the Choco Museo, and hopefully do a chocolate making course. We’d heard rave reviews and decided even if it was a little more expensive we’d do it, where else were we gonna make chocolate?

We dropped by the museum on our second day in Cusco and booked in for the afternoon class. It cost 70 Soles, which isn’t cheap, especially by Peruvian standards, however it was worth every penny.

The class was led by a super happy guy called Pedro. He wore a Choco apron, a matching chef’s hat and the worlds cheekiest grin.

The 2 hour course begun with history of cacao, and how we actually get chocolate. We learnt about the 3 different kinds of Cacao fruits and the countries that produce and also eat the most chocolate. 

FUN FACT: Switzerland eats the most chocolate per year, at a whopping 119 100g bars per person!! Wow! 
(Australia was 59 bars per person, still a staggering amount!)

Also the Ivory Coast produces roughly a third of the whole worlds cacao per year, but this is arguably of a lower quality than that produced in the americas where the cacao plant is native to.

After enjoying the drinks we moved on to the best stage, preparing our own chocolates. 

As it takes around 24 hours to mix chocolate until there is the right moisture content for a bar to set, obviously we didn’t follow the same mix all the way through. However we were explained the next steps and were shown some chocolate mixing before being given a “here’s one we prepared earlier” batch.

We each got to choose a mould to make our chocolates in and were given more than 20 different ingredients we could add to our chocolates. 

I opted for a mould with 16 small chocolates on it so that I could make a variety of flavours. To spice up my chocolates I made some with marshmallows, coconut, m & m’s, cinnamon, almonds, raisins, 100’s & 1000’s , quinoa and more. Not all in the one chocolate might I add. 

We each completed our trays, poured our desired chocolate over the top (milk or dark) and set them in the fridge to cool. We had to come back an hour after the class to pick them up.

We had an awesome class and the chocolates were (and are) delicious, I’m eating some now. 

We would HIGHLY recommend splurging and doing the chocolate workshop. Pedro made it lots of fun and the fact that you get to take home a lot of chocolate only sweetens the deal.

Next we’re heading to the Sacred Valley to visit various ruins and a few little towns!

From Puno we headed to Arequipa, the 2nd largest city in Peru.

Arequipa is known as the white city as many of it’s colonial buildings are built from local volcanic rock and sparkle in the sun. 
The city is beautiful and on a clear day from the roof top of our hostel, Mercarderes Backpackers, we could see 2 volcanoes near town. Pretty amazing view for eating breakfast.

On our first day we did a free walking tour. We got taken around the city, shown the sites and given few tasty testers of the local cuisine. Specialties include chichi, pisco sours, fried fish with chilli sauce and queso helado (cheese ice-cream). Yes that’s right, cheese ice-cream. HOWEVER, it’s important for me to note here that there is no cheese in said ice-cream, it’s cinnamon, sugar, milk, etc.. and delicious. It purely has the name because it LOOKS like cheese.

6 hours outside of Arequipa is the Colca Canyon and valley, arguably the worlds 2nd deepest canyon (depending on where you get your information from).This was the main reason we came to visit this city.

Now we were faced with an important decision to make, would we trek the Colca Canyon by ourselves (and save some $$$’s) or take the easy way out and do a tour?

We eventually decided on doing a tour, for no reason other than when we worked it our money wise it wasn’t going to be super different and we wouldn’t have to organise our own transport, accommodation and meals. So it was easier. I’m not saying this is what everyone should do but we were all happy with the decision and since doing the trek, we’ve still got no regrets.

We did a 2 day,1 night trek with Peru Schweiz. The tour cost 120 Peruvian nuevo soles (roughly $50 AUD) and included meals, accommodation and transport to and from the canyon. All we had to do was walk, at whatever pace we wanted.

Here is a super QUICK overview of of 2 day Colca Canyon trek. Read on for more information.

First day
3:30 a.m. Hostel pick up and leave for Chivay.
6:30 a.m. Arrive to Chivay and have breakfast.
8:30 a.m. Arrive at Cruz del Condor (the Condor Cross) to observe canyon and hopefully condors
10:00 a.m. Arrive at San Miguel and start our descent into the canyon.
1:00 p.m. Arrive at San Juan de Chuccho for lunch and a break
2:30 p.m. Continue the walk via villages of Cosñirhua and Malata before beginning descent to Sangalle known as the Oasis.
5:00 p.m. We arrive to the Oasis, swim (if sun and group makes it in time) and settle in to accommodation
7:30 p.m. Dinner and overnight.

Second day
5:00 a.m. We ascend the canyon from the oasis to Cabanaconde.
8:30 am Breakfast and rest legs in Cabanaconde before heading off for rest of days activities in the van.
- Hot springs
- Lunch (buffet)
- View point
- National Reserve
6:00 pm Arrive back in Arequipa ready to sleep forever


DAY 1:

We were picked up at 3:30am from our hostel and taken to Chivay for breakfast. From here we headed on to Cruz del Condor. WHERE WE ACTUALLY SAW A CONDOR! It was beautiful.. and huge! With a wingspan of 3m it is one of the largest flying birds in the world. As it’s the wet season in this part of Peru currently we were not expecting to see anything as they’re known to hide during rain and cloudy conditions. However luckily for us hit was a beautiful day, and we got to see a huge andean condor fly right over our heads several times, and land on a rocky outcrop for some awesome photo opportunities.

From here we continued on in the van to San Miguel, where we were dropped off to begin our trek.

Day 1 consisted of 19 kilometres of walking. A tough on the knees 5km downhill start to the bottom of the canyon, followed by roughly 14km of up, down and flat terrain. Whilst it sounds like a lot, there was plenty of time for breaks and snacks along the way.

After the first downhill section we crossed a bridge at the bottom of the canyon and headed upward for roughly 20 minutes before stopping for lunch in San Juan de Chuccho. After a break and a tasty meal - alpaca, salad and rice - we headed onwards to Sangalle where we would spend the night at a well known hostel, The Oasis.

The Oasis is a series of small shacks with beds surrounding a much needed and refreshing pool. We had dinner and a couple of cheap mojitios before passing out early, ready for our pre 5am wake up. 

Day 2:

We got up before dawn for a planned 5am start to trek up out of the Canyon to Cabanaconde. We got up in the dark and set off with out breakfast. We only needed torches for the first 20 minutes or so before first light, and the rest of the time we could just concentrate on walking

I’m not going to lie - the walk was hard. Not the toughest thing I have ever done, but far from the easiest. We climbed from about 2200m altitude at the base of the canyon to 3300m altitude at the top in just under 2 hours. However the scenery was absolutely amazing the entire time, and when we reached the top drenched in sweat just after the sun peaked over the horizon, we were treated to one of the most memorable views I have seen in my entire life. We got to hang around at the top for around an hour waiting for the rest of our group to complete the trek, and eating our own weight in bananas for sale by the lady at the edge of the canyon.

When the remainder of the group made it to the top, we set off again for another 20 minutes to a local restaurant in Cabanaconde for some well deserved breakkie. Plain scrambled eggs and nescafe had never tasted so good. 

The rest of the day consisted of a visit to Chacapi thermal baths, a stop off at a national reserve to see some cheeky llamas and vicunas and lots of sleeping on the bus.

We got back to our hostel exhausted, bed at 8pm? Yes please.

We’ve got a few more days in Arequipa before we head onwards to Cusco where we’ll spend about a week before we do our Inca trail to Macchu Piccu!

After a 3 hour bus from Copacabana we arrived in Puno, Peru, still situated on Lake Titicaca.

We were staying in San Antonio Suites, a hotel pretty close to the Plaza de Armas and the centre of town. The first night we got in pretty late, so we just went for a walk around town and (somehow) managed avoiding being attacked by all the maniac kids in the streets with carnival silly string. We got a tasty dinner and a free pisco sour each and had a relatively early night.

The next morning we got picked up at about 6:30am for a tour to the Uros floating islands and Tacquile Island on the lake. 

The Uros floating islands are completely made from the totora reeds and their roots, which grow in the lake around Puno. The islands are literally floating (we got shown the anchor ropes). The Uru people have been living on the lake as fisherman and hunters since before the time of the Incas, and their lives completely revolve around the totora reeds. They use the reeds to make a new island every 25 or so years, but as the islands are compressed by foot traffic they are constantly being added to. The reeds are also eaten, used as fuel for cooking stoves and turned into boats.

Next stop - Taquile Island. 

The Taquile people live primarily as farmers growing maize, beans and other crops on the island, as well as farming sheep and cattle. The men in the community also have an interesting history as knitters. Everyone on the island always wears traditional colonial dress, with the men’s clothes kind of making them look like matadors and the women wearing multiple skirts and long black shawls over their heads. 

Their clothing and it’s decoration also represents their marital status - men wear different coloured hats and women have different sized and coloured pompoms on their shawls depending if they are married or single. They also sell plenty of these awesome coloured hats, scarves and belts at a communal store set up on the Plaza de Armas in the centre of the island. 

We got a delicious trout lunch on Tacquile and went for a walk around the beautiful island for an hour or so before getting on the boat back to Puno. 

It was an interesting day out on the lake and certainly worth the stop at both places if you are in Puno. 

The next morning we checked out and got on a 6 hour bus to the next stop - Arequipa and the Colca Cañon.

Friday morning we woke up and jumped on the super slow 1.5 hour ferry from Copacabana to Isla Del Sol. First impressions on approaching the island were something along the lines of "Am I in a postcard?" Seriously though, steep, green, terraced cliffs with stone paths winding around crops and flowers, all surrounded by the blue waters of Lake Titicaca. What's not to like?

After disembarking and a confusing 15 minutes of spanglish with some locals about where we had to go and who would show us, we eventually found Diego the owner of our hostel and one of his 4 legged friends. 

Now I have to say here that for the last 3 months we have both carried every ounce of our increasingly heavy backpacks at all times without asking for or needing help. However after hearing that the walk to Hostel Del Sol from the dock was around 40 minutes of steep uphill slog, added to the fact we had only spent 4 continuous days at altitude and Lake Titicaca is about 3800m above sea level, we though it would be smart to accept some help when it was offered.

Help in this case was in the form of one of Diego's llamas - pictured below. After Diego got our our 2 bags strapped to the back of the little fella, we started off on the climb to the hostel. And about 5 minutes into the climb our new llama acquaintance decided that maybe we had bought a few too many heavy souvenirs and called it quits. He seriously couldn't be budged despite Diego's best efforts. Ah well, worth trying. We unloaded our junk from the now happy llama and ended up finishing the remainder of the trek carrying our own junk. In the end it wasn't nearly as bad as we feared, and you could quickly forget how much your lungs were burning from the climb by turning around and taking in the view.

After we reached the hostel and checked in, we took about 10 minutes to recover before making the most of the weather and setting off on a south to north island trek. We were staying on the south of the island, and the roughly 10km walk to the north of the island took about 2.5 hours and had some of the most amazing scenery we have seen in not just Bolivia, but the whole continent thus far. Everything was super green due to the nightly rains in the current Bolivian wet season, and plenty of shepherds were out all over the island leading their flocks around the fresh grass. It was beautiful.

We eventually reached the little town in the north extremely hungry and pretty tired, but managed to find some delicious sandwiches down by the water that we refuelled on before setting off on the return journey. We returned to the hostel with about 25km in total under our belts for the day, and had a tasty pizza dinner before crashing satisfied into bed.

The next day we were still pretty sore from the day before, and just cruised around the town of Yumani (in the south of the island). Oh and Sammy and I went for an extremely short swim in the lake in the afternoon. We got a bottle of wine and some pringles and climbed up the hill above our hostel to watch the sunset. 

Next stop... Peru! 

After spending enough time in the concrete jungle of La Paz we headed north west for Lake Titicaca, and the small town of Copacabana perched on it's shores. 

Here we would spend 2 nights before visiting Isla del Sol for 2 nights and then heading onwards to Peru.

We arrived to Copacabana on Wednesday around lunch time. We found our hostel, Hostel Las Brisas and dropped our things before setting off for lunch.

We got the standard (and cheap) almuerzo. Almuerzo in Bolivia consists of a starter soup (often vegetables and quinoa), a main dish with meat of your choosing accompanied by rice, potato fries and salad or vegetables, followed by the postre (dessert) generally a pudding or yoghurt with fruit. Yum.

As well as eating delicious, cheap lunches in Copacabana we explored the town and climbed/walked/crawled to two amazing lookouts, boasting views over the entire town and far out over the lake.

The 2 different viewpoints are Horca del Inca and Cerro Calvario. Whilst we have been acclimatising to altitude again (after Rurrenabaque) for nearly a week now, these hills still made us all feel like 90somethings with chronic emphysema. However, all the huffing and puffing was certainly worth it for the jaw dropping view of the lake.
 Both are definitely worth a look at when in Copa. 

Tomorrow we're off to Isla del Sol, it's meant to be beautiful... and cold at night. Very cold. 

From our hostel in Rurrenabaque were picked up by Mashaquipe tours at 8am and taken to town to gather the necessary supplies, food, water, toilet paper, our guide and cook etc..

From town we headed off to the Pampas and on to the river we were staying on. 

The car trip took around 3 hours on some pretty bumpy roads, but we had several breaks to spot wildlife, get something to drink and eat some wild local fruits and berries.

Along the way we saw a sloth, a capybara and a jabiru. A sloth is obviously the best animal ever and self explanatory, however a capybara is a giant rodent, like I'm talking big.  It looks a lot like a wombat with long legs, and is found near the water in the pampas and the jungle. The jabiru is a really, really tall stork that amazingly hunts and eats anacondas. 

As most of the road was through farmland, there were plenty of cows and horses blocking the road at various times. At one point we even saw a dead cow on the side of the road getting picked clean by about 100 black vultures. Oh, and also due to the wet season there were huge sections of road completely flooded with water going well over the wheel arches of our non-4WD taxi.

The next 2 days involved plenty of boat trips in the little wooden canoe, heading up and down the river to see various animals. We also took the odd walk through the mud with some supplied gumboots. Despite the fact that it was the wet season and plenty of animals normally hide out during the rain, we still saw so many critters. We even saw a few that surprised the guide by showing themselves at this time of year.

During our 3 day trip we saw night monkeys, howler monkeys, capuchin monkeys, turtles and amazing variety of birdlife. We also went swimming with pink dolphins, ate breakfast with squirrel monkeys, caught and released pirañas, got woken up by feeding caíman, and shared our backyard with a family of capybaras. 

This is another one of those trips where it was so amazing, that to retell every tiny detail is again beyond my vocabulary and patience so I’m going to let the pictures tell most of the story.

After lunch on the 3rd day we headed back to Rurrenabaque. This was much more interesting than the trip into the Pampas as the water had risen another few feet over the 3 days and flooded the road we came in on. Eventually we made it out of the wetlands after our guides cut some fencing beside the river and took our canoe out over some flooded cow paddocks. 

After a bumpy drive back to Rurre and a crappy night sleep, we jumped on a plane back to La Paz. From 30 degrees at sea level to 10 degrees at 3600m altitude was quite a shock to the system, but much needed in preparation for our journey further north in the Andes.

Next stop - Copacabana and Lake Titicaca.

We booked a Pampas tour whilst in La Paz for two reasons, to fill in time before our Inca Trail trek and also to see some cool and different animals. 

In the pampas you can see a huge variety of animals including, but not limited to, caiman (like an alligator), piranhas, pink dolphins, monkeys, birds, capybaras, sloths, snakes, bugs and if you're really lucky the great anaconda.



As it was the wet season we didn't like our odds of seeing all the animals, but none the less we booked a trip.

We booked our tour with Mashaquipe. It is definitely a lot more expensive than many of the other tour companies, like twice the price.. However after reading other company's reviews on Tripadviaor about how their staff treated the animals and the environment we decided to go with the more expensive option and booked with Mashaquipe. 

Mashaquipe is great as it is run solely by individuals who grew up in small jungle communities and really respect and look after the animals and their surroundings. It is a large family owned business running tours in the pampas and the jungle. 

We left La Paz Thursday midday via a plane bound for Rurrenabaque, locates in the Bolivian Amazon basin. 

We were all a little worse for wear (why did we decide to drink last night...) and extremely tired. After our plane was delayed for almost 2 hours we were taken to it. We all walked across the runway and couldn't help but laugh. We were flying in a plane no bigger than a standard 4 bed dorm w/ ensuite.... Except the plane didn't have an ensuite, and we weren't even able to stand up inside. 

We took our respective seats, the 3 across the back row. It was just like a bus.... but way smaller. The journey was roughly an hour, and the view from the window was pretty amazing going from the snow capped Andes to the green jungle below. Once resigned to the fact that we (probably) wouldn't die, and there was nothing we could personally do about it anyway, the journey was okay. And much better than a 24-48 hour bus ride along landslide affected roads.

We landed, roughly, and were taken from the runway into town via a bus from the airline Amazonas. The bus dropped us at our hostel, where we had a swim before walking into town for lunch. 

We're leaving for our 3 day/2 night Pampas tour with Mashaquipe tomorrow. Hopefully we see lots of animals!

Sunday morning we headed to Plaza Murillo to meet for one of the many advertised city walking tours that apparently was apparently still running. We headed here with our new friend from the States, Andrew (Hi Andrew). Upon waiting for 30 minutes past the walking tour's starting time we decided it was cancelled, or just plain didn't exist.

As we were new to La Paz and still wanted to explore and understand the city we decided that we would do our own walking tour.

From Plaza Murillo we checked out the various government buildings surrounding the plaza and then headed into the art museum, that was currently under construction, and resultantly had free entry.

After that we headed to a church nearby, where we bought some carne salteñas and headed up to the Yungas Markets. The Yungas markets is a huge local fruit, meat and vegetable market, and everything iss ridiculously cheap. 

At the markets we bought some apples, bananas and a bag of juice. Yes, a bag of juice. 

From the produce markets we headed towards the large central park, located in the heart of the city. And to our luck there was a huge market on. 

The market had stalls selling everything from chocolate covered strawberries and fairy floss, to fresh juices and hamburgers, to offerings to the Pacha mama, and even side show alley games. There was everything.

After spending an hour or so in the huge markets we headed to San Pedro Plaza, home of San Pedro prison, made infamous by Rusty Young's book, Marching Powder. After lurking around for a little bit we headed onwards to the witches market. 

At the witches market you can buy everything from coca leaf sweets, to relationship, travel and friendship talismans, to horny goat weed (or bulls penis powder) and finally to llama foetuses. Yes, llama foetuses. And I'm not talking a tiny foetus, or something in a jar, I'm talking some that was potentially within a week of full term and has been miscarried. It was definitely different. 

The llama foetuses are bought and placed under the foundations of a new home or building as an offer to Pacha Mama (mother earth) for good luck and safety of it's occupants. The size of the llama foetus needed depends on the size of the structure. You can get a tiny llama foetus (from very early on in pregnancy) for a small home and a large llama foetus (like in the picture below) for a large multi story complex. 

From the markets we wandered onwards, Sammy bought a beanie, I bought a diary and Sean bought a brownie. We reached our hostel exhausted from the days self guided tour.

The next few days were spent doing english lessons with Pico Verde, these were great and helped us to progress a little bit more with our spanish.

Tomorrow we’re headed to Rurrenabaque to visit the Pampas and hopefully spot some amazing animals.

We’ll report back on how it all goes.

Adios!