travel – The Nature Bloggist

Guess What, We’re Going to Peru

Some time around the end of February, 2019, Haley spotted an Interjet fare from San Antonio to Lima, Peru that was a really great deal. I had vacation hours built work, so we booked it and then started quickly learning about Peru.

Our approach to visiting places around the globe has been driven a lot by keeping an eye out for travel deals, mistake fares, etc. Haley is the master architect, who can find ways to plan trips to various fascinating place on the globe and is a fan of deals.

We’ve jumped on mistake fares and other one-offs that are far enough out to schedule a trip as well as using point and miles and things to keep things as cheap as possible. The place to go to learn about this stuff is http://flyertalk.com, and to follow some Twitter accounts that announce mistake fares/deals, and check big international airports nearby if you can get a cheap domestic hop.

We flew to Oslo on a mistake fare and saw a spring migration there, then hopped to Paris then Rome. We flew to Australia on a mistake fare that into an amazing trip. We also use things like Southwest’s companion pass once they opened routes to San Jose, Costa Rica.

This Lima flight was an Interjet deal from San Antonio to Lima that was cheap for getting to South America. Once Haley booked that we started to learn more about Peru. Peru is a large country, full of a lot of really unique places and wildlife, with a coastal desert that meets an ocean full of life, the Andes have an amazing cultural and historic heritage from the Incas and other pre-hispanic cultures as well as being home to interesting and really unique wildlife. And across the Andes to the east is the Amazon basin, so Peru’s partly Amazon rainforest.

We both worked together to read up on the places we could visit and deciding which ones we thought were critical, which we wanted to try to work in, and which we could skip. At the top of the list for me was Paracas and the Ballesta islands. Flamingos and penguins! And we found an Air B&B deal staying on the beach that sounded really cool.

We talked about it and both felt we were obliged to go to Machu Picchu. Archaeological sites truly are interesting, but we really tend to enjoy ecotourism more. On a vacation in Greece we were reading epigraphy off Hellenic and Hellenistic and Roman monuments in Greece when my Greek and Latin was still fresh enough that I could read a lot and I knew much of the history as we visited Delphi and the Acropolis and things. Also we visited a Byzantine monastery near Sparta that was incredibly ancient with pieces of it built from ancient Greek and Roman structures, and still in use. This was perhaps too cool. Even Pompeii was not quite as cool.

So we both worried we might be too archaeology spoiled, but also we were in some way obligated to see Machu Picchu.

Everything we read about Arequipa made it sound like a beautiful place to be and it’s near lake Titicaca, which sounds like a really unusual and fascinating place with floating villages and the really odd biome of a high altitude lake at the feet of the Andes. Jacques Cousteau did a program on Lake Titicaca and even with a name that made all of third grade giggle, I remembered Cousteau showing the lake and odd frogs and interesting and unique habitats, but we didn’t have time.

We were okay with skipping the Nasca Lines. They’re interesting and once of those things that has some interesting mysteries, but to really see them you have to get a flight over them, and also they’re in the middle of a dry desert and distant from other things. We were also okay with just using Cusco for an airport stop and not spending time there.

We’ve found it’s usually better to spend more time in a few amazing places than to try to hit everything where you wind up spending a lot of time time traveling between brief visits with amazing places. I like to learn the calls of local birds and wildlife since for me it adds to the enjoyment of the habitat when I’m more in touch with its richness through sound. Over time we’ve worked out our style of fewer places and more time, and it works for us.

Due to booking requirements we had eight days in Peru. Peru is a very large country, and distances between many lot of points of interest are often large. It is a very long trip from arriving in Lima to reaching the Amazon.

So we cut Manu/the Amazon, Arequipa, lake Titicaca, and other things. Our focus was getting to Machu Picchu, then getting time in Paracas/Pisco area, then on to Lima which has really cool birding esp in the beaches and wetlands to the south, fascinating culture, and is a beautiful and interesting old city, and a large oasis built up on the dry cliffs over the Pacific.

The cuts to fewer sites felt rough when we were planning, but getting more time into exploring areas and spending less in transit was really worth it.

We had visited Precision Camera (happy to support a great local business we know and trust, and we like being able to visit a camera store where we can look at models in person) a few times to get the D500 cleaned, and to look & eventually buy a P900. While there we wound up talking to a guy with a D7500 and a lot of great bird photos who lived in Costa Rica. We talked for a while about Costa Rica, and mentioned we were prepping for a trip to Peru. He mentioned that Ollantaytambo was really cool to visit and mentioned a couple other things about Peru that were really helpful for planning.

Eventually hard choices were made and we had an itinerary:

San Antonio-Mexico City

(long layover here with hotel booked on points for eve, and chance to visit the Archaeology Museum or some other museum)

Mexico City-Lima flight booked

Lima-Cusco domestic flight on LatAm booked

Cusco-Ollantaytambo – complicated but worst case we hire a taxi in Cusco, AirB&B room booked

Ollantaytambo-Aguas Calientes – train tickets booked online

Aguas Calientes-Machu Picchu – bus ticket only bookable in person at ticket office

Machu Picchu-Aguas Calientes – return bus on round trip

Aguas Calientes-Ollantaytambo – return train on round trip

Ollantaytambo-Cusco – plan to hire a taxi

Cusco-Pisco – LatAm domestic flight

Pisco-Paracas – worked out ride via Air B&B

Paracas-Lima – local Peru greyhound-style bus, 5 hour ride to Lima, hotel booked in Lima

Lima-Mexico City – booked

(another long layover, plan to visit some museum)

Mexico City-San Antonio – booked

San Antonio-Austin – long drive home after landing in SA

The plan hit a few small hiccups but mostly worked quite well.

next: Packing and Prep

Introducing The Nature Bloggist

Neotropical cormorants on the coast of Paracas National Park

This is our blog, which is mostly about a pair of naturalists wandering around in various habitats hyperfocusing on them.

We’ll touch on travel, photography, nature, new species we find, cool habitats, cultures of the areas we visit, seeing what indigenous culture and traditions carry on, and also many bird facts sharing trip reports/travel stories about our ecotourism trips, tips, and whatever other excuses we can find to post bird photos and talk about the ecosystems we visit. Even if it’s fun for no one else, it’s me getting to ramble about things I like to ramble about.

We have a flickr photostream here we post highlights to with cool photos. If you are a fan of cool photos you should check it out.

We’re a big fan of citizen science and working at becoming a better citizen scientist. We should be better about posting to iNaturalist, but our iNaturalist account is here.

The general but flexible idea behind this blog is to focus on travel, nature and wildlife photography, amateur naturalism/citizen science, biology, birding, and related things. Over time we’ve worked out ways to travel cheap (enough) and keep things affordable (enough) on the ground to visit amazing natural spaces around the globe. We take a lot of nature photos, and will be posting many photos of cool birds and wildlife we find out in nature. We’re based in Austin and have traveled around the US & the world visiting the many ecosystems that make up our world.

Our cast:

Steven: nerd, bird obsessive, researcher, photographer, porter, driver, speaks some Spanish, primary blog author

Haley: nerd, researcher, master of finding cheap flights and working out bookings, photographer, navigator, speaks very little Spanish, blog editor and contributor

We work together as a team pretty well. Driving in a foreign country is much easier with a navigator. Steven’s knowledge of Spanish opens up a lot of opportunities, Haley’s abilities in planning the details of a trip for travel and lodging while keeping things cheap/affordable are amazing.

One of the keys to affordable ecotourism is using points and miles to work out deals on airfare, lodging, rental cars, and related things. One of the best is to grab mistake fares to destinations that sound interesting and then learn about them and take a trip there. We aren’t likely go into a ton of detail on these things but you can learn about them at the FlyerTalk Miles and Points forums. This also means we’re not doing tours or packages and are sparing in hiring guides.

We also both like going out and seeing birds and wildlife in their natural habitats. We love being in nature in general and especially look for places with a lot of wildlife. Getting to go hiking around exploring the worlds parks and protected habitats is great fun. Finding and learning about interesting plants, wildlife, and natural phenomena is a great hobby.

One of the highlights of our travel so far, for both of us, was (carefully and respectfully) seeing the Olive Ridley sea turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs. It was awesome In the original sense of that word.

Olive ridley sea turtles laying eggs in Nosara, Costa Rica

Over time we’ve traveled a fair amount visiting natural habitats and finding wildlife around the globe. We visited Oslo during spring migration, took a trip to Australia, visited Costa Rica, Norway, Greece, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere around the world checking out nature and wildlife. We love getting to see the variety of species of creatures on the Earth in person, and trying to understand the biogeography, natural history, and other things that shape the many different ecosystems around the world. On our blog we’ll be sharing our time visiting the amazing natural places on our planet.

We’re more naturalists than birders. Like a lot of folks, we like to seek out and admire the amazing things in nature and learn about nature. Birds are the ultra-successful inheritors of the legacy of dinosaurs. They’re managed to find a way to live and thrive on every continent in diverse habitats all over the Earth so they’re easy to find and fun to see and learn about, but other animals are always a wonder to see, and the plants and the ecosystem are all really interesting as well.

Red-eyed tree frog in CR

We’re a casual naturalist in the sense that we don’t keep carefully curated lists of each species we’ve seen. We’re not going out trying to find rare animals, the common ones are interesting and when uncommon and rare things show up they’re great, but our goal is to enjoy time spent in the wild looking around at wildlife. We don’t keep our bird life list counts up to date. We really do want to use eBird more to contribute to the project but we’re not there yet.

This also applies to photography. We like taking photos of birds and wildlife, and like seeing them as reminders of the different wonderful and sometimes amazing things we’ve seen, and it’s really cool having a way to share the things we find, but the photos aren’t the goal.

There’s a lot of amazing wildlife out there. The following is a probably far too-long collection of some of our favorite photos we’ve taken of wildlife in nature.