Peru 1

As some of you will know, I flew to Peru on 19 February, and will be here until 4 May. So far I've been in the Cusco region, seeing various ruins including Machu Picchu. On 28 February I flew to Puerto Maldonado, and reached my destination in the lowland Amazon on 1 March, where I will be staying for 2 months.

Hopefully while I'm away I'll be able to post images, so will do that mostly on my Facebook page. Click here to go straight to it! Here are a few images I've taken in the first week.

This is a Sparkling Violetear, taken on my second day in the gardens of a temple in Cusco.

This was taken the next day, in Ollantaytambo, and is a Green-tailed Trainbearer.

After this I went to Machu Picchu. I had my camera with me and couldn't resist spending some time with these Viscachas which were fairly tame sitting on the rocks around the ruins.

In the town below Machu Picchu I spent some time birding along the train tracks that run into Aguas Calientes, where I was delighted to see Peru's national bird, the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock. Unfortunately no photos, but I did manage to photograph this Roadside Hawk perched on a tree by the river.

The following day I visited a couple of lakes half an hour's drive from Cusco. Unfortunately the sun meant that the light became extremely harsh fairly quickly, but I did manage a few images.

That was my last day in Cusco before heading into the Amazon, where I am now. I'll try and blog fairly regularly while I'm here but the WiFi is certainly not quick; it took me half an hour just to upload these images!