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16 August 2012

A Vacation Jewel: Patagonia And Peru Adventures

By Eve Briner


Patagonia And Peru adventures make excellent vacation options for the adventure minded tourist. Mother Nature has provided this South American destination with great variety, including rain forests but also snow-capped mountain peaks, rivers, and beaches. Each option is fully developed from the standpoint of sporting tourism.

Here we find the snow-capped Andean Callejon de Huaylas mountain range, "the Switzerland of South America". Among the high-altitude peaks of this range an adventurer can come upon clear blue lagoons and even lakes. Below, in the Amazon jungle, is the Allpahahayo Mishana and Pacaya Samiria, jungles famed for their tourist-friendly aboriginal peoples as well as for their exotic wildlife, flora and fauna.

A great abundance of water sport is available to the adventurous tourist, including deep sea diving, scuba diving, and wind surfing. The Ballestas Islands offer splendid sightseeing, as they are frequented by seals and sea lions, one hundred and fifty bird species including penguins, and many other seafaring creatures. The islands are known as "The Little Galapagos" for a good reason.

The same waters have been world famous for sport fishing since long before frequent visitor Ernest Hemingway made it so in his novel, "The Old Man and the Sea". The catch can be grand, and the current world record holding black marlin was caught in Peruvian waters. Other game fish include sea bass, tuna, flounder, grunt, drums and Pacific croaker.

Another adventurer might favor the urban night life of Lima. With a population of eight and a half million, and the fifth largest metropolis in all Latin America, Lima is a much more significant city than most North American or European tourists might expect. It is also an older city which has been an important cultural center for longer than anyone can remember, home to the oldest university in either of the Americas. Finally, Lima has the advantage of being centrally located, so tourists who set themselves up in a Lima hotel will have ready access to all of the country's treasures, however remote.

The heritage of colonial Spain still leaves a deep imprint on the country, which still has numerous well preserved colonial style towns, as well as picturesque old neighborhoods tucked into more modern cities. However, Spanish colonialism doesn't take one very far back into Peruvian history. The landscape is still interlaced with twenty-three thousand kilometers of walking trails left behind by the Incas. Archaeological sites date back as far as the Chavin de Huantar Complex, which was built around 1100 BCE, and is famed for its courtyard, decorated with carved heads.

Of all tourist destinations, none has the legendary aura of the Citadel of Machu Picchu. It was lost beneath the deep Cusco jungle till the early years of the twentieth century, and even today requires a hike along a forty three kilometer trail to reach it. Once, it was the spiritual center of the entire Inca civilization. Up to ten thousand people inhabited the complex. To this day, no one knows how the Inca managed to move the enormous limestone bricks through dense jungle then up the face of the mountain. The immense Intihuatana solar observatory block must have been a particular chore to move.

Peru possesses the sort of range, both in terms of geography and biology, one might expect only in a much larger country. It possesses an ancient history, traces of which are still plentiful. It is no surprise that so many tourists are discovering Patagonia And Peru adventures.




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