Baggot’s on Tour 2025

A quick trip to a beachside town, Paracas,  before heading to Lima, our final stop. Paracas is known as the ‘poor man’s Galapagos’ which is what enticed us to the area.  Our love and appreciation for nature has definitely grown during our trip, and we couldn’t miss an opportunity to see the local sea life. We did succumb to a tourist boat to reach the ‘Islas de la Ballestas’ as we had mo choice but to take a tour with this one, so off we went with the American OAPS to observe the humboldt penguin, sea lions, chilean flamingo, inca turns, Peruvian pelicans, black skimmer, red-legged cormorants, blue footed boobies ☺️. And what a damn fine trip it was, which I think the OAPs filmed the entire trip, poor grandchildren 🤣. The nature spotting was fantastic and definitely worth the trip but sadly, after the mass mortality of many birds and sea lions back in 2023 due to bird-flu, the reserve was much depleted.  We then visited the Paracas nature reserve, an enormous ...

Our penultimate destination on our trip, Ica. We arrived in Ica from Arequipa after a very long but luxurious night bus; to put it this way, if you flew in this kind of comfort you’d have probably have had to remortgage your house!! The final descent from the Andes in the emerging daylight was once again incredible, vast, very baron and lunar-like until we arrived at Ica, where the harsh rocky mountainous suddenly gave way to enormous sand-dunes appearing out of nowhere. Huacachina desert will be our playground for the next few days. A few hours play with the football high in the dunes in the afternoon was exhausting. The gambit being the closest kick to the dune peak won, too close ran the risk of the ball rolling down the other side where the kicker would need to retrieve it, no small challenge at over 100m vertical and the way back up was of course a case of 2 steps forward 1 step back - great fun. We sat and watched the dune buggies race around us the noise of their V8 engines and ...

Arequipa to the Colca Canyon: All part of the ‘gringo trail’ is a visit to the Colca Canyon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and home to the largest of birds, the Condor. Our options are, take a tour; pick up at 3am and be taken to the photo op locations or do it proper over a few days. Either way, the journey to the heart of the canyon from Arequipa was 6hrs! So we boarded with 1/2 a plan of where we mights stay to break the journey and braced ready for numb bums! Soon after leaving the city, the landscape was once again spectacular and an utter contrast to what we had seen in and around Cusco. We were aiming to reach a mountain town at the entrance to the canyon until the driver persuaded us to go all the way to a tiny rural village of Cabanconde where all the trekking starts and more importantly the tour buses don’t get to. Gaining altitude to barren areas of permafrost in an utterly barren ‘moon-like’ landscape ringed with snow-capped mountains, it was spectacular! Our faces pinn...