Peru

Another beautiful day in this beautiful city. Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians: all competed for Arequipenan souls and built churches to stake their claim.

The Plan: To make a journey of roughly 4,500 kms around southern Peru travelling in a 4WD vehicle. My aim is to visit and photograph as many of the key cities, historical sites and Inca ruins as I can along the way but also to absorb as much of the local culture, attitudes, way of life and environment in which they live.

Luck can play a major part in exploration. The combination of circumstances without which the explorer would have failed; the chance remark of a local followed up on a whim; serendipity at moments when all seemed lost; these are themes which recur in the writings of the successful. Of course, those who did not succeed will usually have a different tale to tell. Their luck is often that they escaped with their lives.

In Cusco, the Inca capital, the ancient masonry is so supple you'd swear that the stones were woven. We leave it one frost-fanged morning on the six a.m. train for our destination, Machu Picchu. The old pistons wheeze out an eponymous pant - "machu-picchu-machu-picchu" - as the train inches up a series of switch-backs towards the lip of Cusco Valley, then ramps off into the bright Andean sky.

Marco Aragon, our guide, wringed his hands slowly before projecting a cupped paw over the cloud soaked ruins beneath us: “I believe Machu Picchu was a university,” he said purposefully, “but if you come here on 100 days, with 100 guides, you will hear 100 different stories. The truth is, we just don’t know.”

Every Sunday morning a van leaves Ollantaytambo in Peru's Urubamba Valley and climbs a stony, switchback track into the high Andes. The van is packed with pots and pans, dried goods, assorted farm implements and bruised polystyrene coolers filled with strawberry ice cream.

'Mula, carajo, mula!" is what Peruvian muleteers shout to drive their beasts up and down the Andean mountains of the Vilcabamba region. No English expression quite captures the fricative force of "carajo", but "damn you, mule" is about right.

Everybody loves a good record. There's something about a ‘highest, longest, furthest, lowest, smallest, biggest' tag that immediately lends cachet and class to a person or a place. Discovery Channel has a series called ‘The 10 most…', magazines run endless lists of ‘The Top 10' whatevers, and then there's the Guinness Book of Records. So, if I tell you that the Cotahuasi Canyon in southern Peru is 1,850 metres (6,000 ft) deeper than the Grand Canyon, you're no doubt surpr...

The site is probably the most familiar symbol of the Inca Empire, due to its unique location, its geological features, and its late discovery in 1911.

From marveling at the Inca and Spanish architecture in the highland capital of Cusco and sunning on the white sand beaches of Northern Peru to mountain biking through Colca Canyon and trekking to lost cities in the northern cloud forest, Moon Handbooks Peru guides you through a truly personal experience, on or off the beaten path.