Rio de Janeiro

A horrendous set of flights took us from French Guiana to Rio. We left Cayenne at 5:30pm in order to spend 8 hours in the airport in the northern Brazilian city of Belém. We left there at 3am for Belo Horizonte before a final, hour long, flight to our destination. It seems that this is common in Brazil - our later journey to Foz do Iguaçu would also require three flights.

Rio from Corcovado

Rio is a beautiful city, best seen from its many heights. Or from its beaches. Or from street level. We shared our time between all of these, hitting all of the major sights - Sugarloaf Mountain, Christ the Redeemer, Copacabana, Ipanema... It's strange to be in a place where you already know all of the names and sights, but this doesn't detract from the experience at all.

Copacabana Beach

Half of the city is set along Guanabara Bay and the rest along the Atlantic coast. We walked down from the hilly Santa Teresa area, where we were staying, to Flamengo beach where we received our first view of the classic Rio scenery. A long, lively beach filled with people playing beach volleyball and football, sloping down to the bay and the distinctive hills on the other side. Around the corner is Copacabana beach, and we climbed the hill at the end to Leme fort. There were great views of the sweep of the beach, but also to Sugarloaf on the other side. Copacabana is separated from Ipanema beach by a headland, and we spent several evenings sitting on the bare rock here to enjoy the sunset.

Sunset over Ipanema Beach

Although we enjoy walking, it's not possible to get to the top of Sugarloaf without rock climbing or taking the cable car. We took the cable car, first to the accompanying hill Morro de Urca, then to the top of Sugarloaf itself. Unfortunately, we'd picked a day when the top was covered in cloud. No matter - the sunset views from Urca over Botafogo and Guanabara Bay were spectacular, and Sugarloaf was lit beautifully.

The cable car to Sugarloaf Mountain

Most people ascend Corcovado to visit the iconic art deco statue of Jesus by train or minibus, but we'd heard that it's possible to walk up. We started in Parque Lage and made our way up the 700m ascent, which got gradually steeper and slipperier. At one point we had to use a chain pinned to the cliff to get up a particularly precarious part. The effort was worth it - the views at the top over the whole of the city are unmissable. We took the train down.

Worshipping at Christ the Redeemer

Rio is currently preparing to host the Olympics and, therefore, is busy building and renovating everything. From what we saw, there will be plenty that is pushed right up to the wire. There are some new trams being prepared in the city centre, but the tracks are still being laid; and some buildings (the National Library, for example) were receiving facelifts, but political infighting has led to all work being stopped. This has left important parts of the city's architecture covered in scaffolding and sheets for one of its biggest events.

Olympic City sign next to Rio's newest museum, the 'Museum of the Future'

On many of the hills, and integrated with the rest of the city, are the favelas - inner city slums. There are lots of companies offering tours in many shapes and forms, but we decided against any of them. We're sure that many of the companies operate very ethically, but there are plenty that don't as well. Because of the tight integration of the poorer areas, Rio can be quite a dangerous city. We were followed by some assumably unsavoury characters after leaving a bank (ironically which hadn't worked with our card), but we shook them off by wandering around a supermarket for a while. We also heard a lot of firecrackers going off, which are often used as signals by the drug gangs. These were the only times when we felt unsafe, though.

Sunset from the Morro de Urca over Botofogo

We've now left Rio on our second batch of Brazilian flights to Foz do Iguaçu, to see the Iguazu Falls. They have been on top of my list of things to visit for a long time, so I'm excited to finally make it there.

Cusco - Historic Inca Capital (And Tourist Capital Of South America)

We took a nightbus from Arequipa to Cusco, where we've spent the last five days. Although best known as the tourist hub for the thousands of visitors that flock to Machu Picchu each year, it is also a fascinating place in its own right, with some amazing Inca sites to check out in the city and surrounding area.

Inca walls in Cusco

Cusco was the capital of the Inca empire, founded in the 13th century. It's now a world heritage site and is an interesting mix of Incan and colonial architecture. Inca walls built with huge blocks of stone line many of the streets; the blocks, despite being all shapes and sizes (one is 12 sided!), fit together like a jigsaw so well that you cannot see any sign of mortar holding them together. Alongside the Inca features, you see plenty of evidence of the Spanish conquest - the main square with its Catholic cathedral and Jesuit church, for example. Despite being full of tourists, it's a beautiful city and we've enjoyed exploring it.

The cathedral in Cusco's main square

On our second day here, we met up with our German friends from the Colca Canyon and took a bus out to Tambomachay, one of four Inca sites within a few km of the city. We walked back, taking in all the other sites and managing to avoid tour groups in the main. The largest of these sites is Sachsaywaman ('sexy woman' is the best way to remember the name!), which was an enormous fortress guarding Cusco. Some of the stone blocks here were simply gigantic - the largest weighed around 300 tons. It's hard to imagine how such might could have fallen to a Spanish force of around 50 horsemen.  

The Inca ruins of Sachsaywaman

Other Incan ruins around Cusco include those at Pisac, an insanely touristy town nearby. We took a taxi up to the ruins from the town centre and were dismayed to find at least twenty tour buses outside, while inside were umbrella carrying tour guides and megaphones galore. Fortunately most groups seemed to be on their way out, so within an hour or so we had the place almost to ourselves. The site is a citadel and small town, with impressive agricultural terraces carved out of the steep hillside right down into the valley.

Inca terraces at Pisac

We saw more agricultural terraces at Moray, another Inca site nearby. The terraces here are unusual in that they are deep and circular - very striking. Research has shown a temperature variation of 15°C or more between the top and bottom, and it seems that the Incas used the area as a kind of laboratory to test the effects of different microclimates on crops.

Circular agricultural terraces at Moray

Perhaps my favourite of all the sites we visited here was the salt pans or Salinas near the village of Maras. This is a set of several hundred rectangular ponds on several levels, into which salt water flows from a subterranean source and evaporates to form salt. The view from above is quite stunning - a patchwork of rectangles, punctuated by local people harvesting the salt in buckets and bags. The pans vary in colour depending on how long they've been evaporating, from brown to sparkling white. You can walk across the whitest ones, which reminded us of the salt flats in Bolivia.

The Salinas (salt pans) near Maras

While in Cusco we've met up with several friends from the last couple of weeks in Peru. It's been lovely catching up over craft beer and pisco sours. Most of these have already visited Machu Picchu, but we have decided not to rush things... Instead we have booked ourselves on an epic 9 day trek to get there! We leave tomorrow and trek first to Choquequirao, another Inca city, before heading onto Machu Picchu. We look forward to telling you all about it in ten days time...

Valparaíso

Houses showing off their bright colours

We have spent the last few days in Valparaíso,
Chile's second city and, also, its capital of culture. It's not a place with a long list of things to see and do; more somewhere for strolling around and enjoying getting lost. It's situated on the coast, adjacent to Viña del Mar, and its 42 hills are a maze of streets, stairways and passages.

Valparaíso rose to prominence in the mid-1800s, as a convenient stop for ships travelling to the Californian gold rush from Europe. Many of the immigrants built their houses on the slopes out of adobe, then lined the walls with the iron carried in the ships as ballast for their arduous journey around Cape Horn at the south of the continent. To stop the iron rusting, leftover paint from the fishing boats was used to coat the houses, giving the city its characteristic multicoloured patchwork appearance.

Nowadays, the city is a haven for street art. Everywhere you look, you will find walls covered in murals of all shapes, sizes and themes, from the (very) weird to the wonderful. Although street art is technically illegal, many people commission artists to paint their walls to avoid someone scrawling a tag on them.

Street art

To get around the city, several of the hills are served by small ascensors, or funicular railways. Many of these are relics from the 1800s but are maintained as part of the city's UNESCO status. We used one to get to another of Pablo Neruda's houses, La Sebastiana. The day we visited was the national Cultural Heritage day, so it was free to get in but was thronged with people. It had magnificent views over the city and the harbour, but we missed the depth of information that was given by the audioguide at La Chascona, Neruda's house in Santiago.

More (rather phallic) street art

We're continuing next to La Serena - further north and close to the Elqui Valley, where they make the ubiquitous pisco.