mountain man
Guest
Here is the 1st part of our trip to Peru (Cusco, Manu, Colca Canyon and the Islas Ballestas). It was a bit good, to say the least.
Many thanks to all those who offered advice, especially Rasmus Boegh and Tim Allwood.
We racked up a nice big list, the total of which I'm still not certain about (those Tyrant flycatchers are a God damn nightmare!) as I still haven't had a chance to consult Ridgley+Tudor and I have a few sound recordings that don't quite match up with anything!
Travel logistics are included in the report. Only the most attractive/rare things are listed with specific sites, and there's nothing in it that you can't find elsewhere, especially in Thomas Valqui's fantastic site guide.
We took the Clements & Shany field guide, which is of a vastly mixed quality. The illustrations range from superb life-like representations to childish scribbles. The text is limited, to put it politely! However, you can't go without it. We backed this up with the brilliant Ridgely & Greenfield Ecuador field guide. Along with commercial recordings from Bolivia and Ecuador, we also downloaded loads of songs and calls off the fantastic http://www.xeno-canto.org website, which is perhaps the greatest thing ever. This was all packed onto an mp3 player which we used with a small Sony speaker for some sensible and moderate use of playback.
And finally, Peru is economically on the up. It appeared to us that things are improving for the people at a strikingly fast rate. With this you can expect things to change, and unfortunately for the birding it may be changing for the worse. Already unprotected sites that were good for birding just two years ago have been ruined by logging. Manu is currently totally protected, but for how long?
So trust me on this: go there now!
Cusco
It’s quite a long way to Peru. Especially when you start off by going in the wrong direction. However, Gina the travel agent assured me that going to Lima via Paris was the cheapest way to do it. “Just keep your fingers crossed and hope that you don’t get kidnapped in Bogota,” she jokingly said. Sorry, where? Bogota? Isn’t that where all those people keep getting killed and kidnapped, Gina? Again she assured me that going to Lima via Paris and Bogota was the cheapest way to do it.
Next was how to get to Cusco. I wasn’t particularly taken by the idea of going into Lima, afterall I live in a big crap city as it is, so why would I want to spend vast amounts of money going to another? So I booked an internal flight with LAN airlines from Lima to Cusco in advance through the wonderful internet. This would mean a 5 hour wait at Lima airport to catch our connecting flight to Cusco. The flight was cancelled. We were put onto another flight later in the morning. Our 5 hour wait was stretched to 9 hours. At least there was a McDonald’s.
Altogether it took 38.5 hours from closing our front door in Blighty to touching down in Cusco. Of this, only 16.5 hours was actually spent in the air. The rest was spent working out how to flush toilets (go to the toilets in Bogota airport and you’ll see what I mean).
At Cusco airport we were met by a group of “authentic indigenous musicians” in the baggage reclaim playing pan pipes, guitars and drums. I sincerely hoped that this would be the only time I had to cope with this crap. Over the next month my hopes were to be dashed on a number of occasions.
Our first few nights were spent in comfort at the Amaru II Hostal. This was basic but quite beautiful, with neat little rooms built around a flower-filled open courtyard and fantastic views over the whole of Cusco. In the tiny garden my first Peruvian bird was Rufous-collared Sparrow. Nice. Well they were nice at first , then by the time of the 272nd they became a bit annoying. By the 5,126th it was time to scream and rip your eyeballs out. Second bird was a Chiguanco Thrush. The same process as above was repeated. Third bird was a female Greenish Yellow-Finch, which unfortunately I found difficult to appreciate even the first.
After an hour or so of fun and frolicks I started to feel odd. Someone had decided to attach a G-clamp to the middle of my head and violently tighten it. I also felt sick. I was suffering from altitude sickness. I’ve always thought of wussy things like altitude sickness to be lame excuses for illnesses, kind of like flu and herpes, but I guess it’s acceptable when you’ve just travelled from 13m to 3,300m in just over an hour. I tried to climb some stairs, turned green and almost passed out. So I slept for an hour or two, or possibly four, then woke up feeling ill. Great start. Still feeling ill, we battled through the tiny cobbled streets - dodging maniac taxi drivers and crippled, rabid dogs (much more to come about them!) - and eventually wound our way down to the Plaza de Armas. What a place! Cusco is probably the most visited tourist destination in Peru, and you don’t need a PhD in brain science to work out why. It is stunning. I don’t really do buildings and history and stuff, but you’d have to be one seriously uncultured, heathen brute not to be won over by this place.
After sitting in the square in the hot sun for over an hour just watching stuff happening, we set off to finalise our travel arrangements for Manu and then sampled our first Cusquena lager in the legendary Cross Keys pub, where I was amazed to see a Stoke City football shirt hung up on the wall. Up the Potters! (which means “come on Stoke, win something for the first time ever!”) And then it was time to try Mate de Coca, a tea made out of coca leaves. Basically it’s a mug of boiling water with a handful of green coca leaves stuffed in it. It looks far worse than it tastes, and it sorts out your altitude sickness quite nicely as well.
Huacarpay Lake
Pronounced Wacar-pie, Huacarpay is easily reached from Cusco by taxi or bus. Puna Ibis and American Kestrels are common along the way. We took a taxi from Cusco straight to the Urpicancha restaurant and then walked clockwise around the lake through the village of Lucre and then around to Huacarpay town where we drank Inca Kola in a filthy shack and then caught one of the combi buses back for a ludicrously cheap fare. In Cusco the buses go from Avenida de la Cultura. If you can’t find it then just ask for the buses to Urcos. We spent about 4 hours walking all the way around the lake in the strong sun and stupidly didn’t take water or sun cream, so deservedly suffered accordingly.
The birding was easy and a great taste of what was to come. Unfortunately, and I’m not quite sure how this happened, we totally missed Bearded Mountaineer (a rather pretty hummingbird, not Brian Blessed). I blame the altitude. However, we had excellent views of the endemic Rusty-fronted Canastero by the ruins, a stupendously stupendous Giant Hummingbird (my first ever hummer and the World’s largest to boot), quite a few Plumbeous Rails, Black-chested Buzzard-Eagle, Cinereous Harrier, 3 species of Ground-Tyrant (Rufous-naped, Spot-billed and good scope views of what had to be a Taczanowski’s - which I think is a pretty good record for Huacarpay?), 3 Andean Negritos, Bar-winged Cinclodes, 2 Andean Swifts, plus all of the common passerine stuff and also all of the expected high-Andean water birds. Oh yeah, and loads of Moorhens. Also lots of rabid dogs.
Next day was a walk up to the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, nestled precariously high over the city and once a magnificent Inca fortress, but now just a load of big bricks after the Spanish invaders knocked it down. It’s a shortish walk from Cusco centre that climbs up through a gorge where we had a male Green-tailed Trainbearer, Black-throated Flowerpiercer, White-browed Chat-Tyrant, quite a few Bare-faced Ground-Doves, sack fulls of Cinereous Conebills and, best of all, sensational views of a pair of Aplomado Falcons soaring above the gorge. At the ruins themselves we found hundreds of European tourists alongside very tame Andean Lapwings, Band-tailed Seedeaters, American Ketrels and Ash-breasted Sierra-Finches (of which the females took us about 8 years to work out, thanks to the field guide!).
That afternoon we waited for 4 hours to buy our train tickets to Machu Picchu at the Huanchac train station (this place is Hell, absolute Hell I tell you), and then Miss Cole became violently ill with food poisoning throughout the night: I know exactly what the food was and exactly why it made her ill! The next day we were supposed to catch a bus to Ollantaytambo, but Miss Cole was still feeling so ill that she couldn’t even stand up, let alone haul a 5 ton pack through crowded streets, so we totally copped out and hailed a cab from outside the hostal to take us on the three hour journey. I managed to hail the worst cab in Cusco - and that really is saying something - a tiny Daewoo Tico with a totally shattered windscreen and a dodgy passenger door that would swing open as we took corners. On the way I discussed the woes of Brazilian World Cup footballing disappointment and Wayne Rooney’s red card in pidgin Spanish with our taxi driver, who, for some reason, kept giving signs of the cross on his chest. I later discovered it was because his brakes weren’t working properly.
The next part will have more birds in!
Many thanks to all those who offered advice, especially Rasmus Boegh and Tim Allwood.
We racked up a nice big list, the total of which I'm still not certain about (those Tyrant flycatchers are a God damn nightmare!) as I still haven't had a chance to consult Ridgley+Tudor and I have a few sound recordings that don't quite match up with anything!
Travel logistics are included in the report. Only the most attractive/rare things are listed with specific sites, and there's nothing in it that you can't find elsewhere, especially in Thomas Valqui's fantastic site guide.
We took the Clements & Shany field guide, which is of a vastly mixed quality. The illustrations range from superb life-like representations to childish scribbles. The text is limited, to put it politely! However, you can't go without it. We backed this up with the brilliant Ridgely & Greenfield Ecuador field guide. Along with commercial recordings from Bolivia and Ecuador, we also downloaded loads of songs and calls off the fantastic http://www.xeno-canto.org website, which is perhaps the greatest thing ever. This was all packed onto an mp3 player which we used with a small Sony speaker for some sensible and moderate use of playback.
And finally, Peru is economically on the up. It appeared to us that things are improving for the people at a strikingly fast rate. With this you can expect things to change, and unfortunately for the birding it may be changing for the worse. Already unprotected sites that were good for birding just two years ago have been ruined by logging. Manu is currently totally protected, but for how long?
So trust me on this: go there now!
Cusco
It’s quite a long way to Peru. Especially when you start off by going in the wrong direction. However, Gina the travel agent assured me that going to Lima via Paris was the cheapest way to do it. “Just keep your fingers crossed and hope that you don’t get kidnapped in Bogota,” she jokingly said. Sorry, where? Bogota? Isn’t that where all those people keep getting killed and kidnapped, Gina? Again she assured me that going to Lima via Paris and Bogota was the cheapest way to do it.
Next was how to get to Cusco. I wasn’t particularly taken by the idea of going into Lima, afterall I live in a big crap city as it is, so why would I want to spend vast amounts of money going to another? So I booked an internal flight with LAN airlines from Lima to Cusco in advance through the wonderful internet. This would mean a 5 hour wait at Lima airport to catch our connecting flight to Cusco. The flight was cancelled. We were put onto another flight later in the morning. Our 5 hour wait was stretched to 9 hours. At least there was a McDonald’s.
Altogether it took 38.5 hours from closing our front door in Blighty to touching down in Cusco. Of this, only 16.5 hours was actually spent in the air. The rest was spent working out how to flush toilets (go to the toilets in Bogota airport and you’ll see what I mean).
At Cusco airport we were met by a group of “authentic indigenous musicians” in the baggage reclaim playing pan pipes, guitars and drums. I sincerely hoped that this would be the only time I had to cope with this crap. Over the next month my hopes were to be dashed on a number of occasions.
Our first few nights were spent in comfort at the Amaru II Hostal. This was basic but quite beautiful, with neat little rooms built around a flower-filled open courtyard and fantastic views over the whole of Cusco. In the tiny garden my first Peruvian bird was Rufous-collared Sparrow. Nice. Well they were nice at first , then by the time of the 272nd they became a bit annoying. By the 5,126th it was time to scream and rip your eyeballs out. Second bird was a Chiguanco Thrush. The same process as above was repeated. Third bird was a female Greenish Yellow-Finch, which unfortunately I found difficult to appreciate even the first.
After an hour or so of fun and frolicks I started to feel odd. Someone had decided to attach a G-clamp to the middle of my head and violently tighten it. I also felt sick. I was suffering from altitude sickness. I’ve always thought of wussy things like altitude sickness to be lame excuses for illnesses, kind of like flu and herpes, but I guess it’s acceptable when you’ve just travelled from 13m to 3,300m in just over an hour. I tried to climb some stairs, turned green and almost passed out. So I slept for an hour or two, or possibly four, then woke up feeling ill. Great start. Still feeling ill, we battled through the tiny cobbled streets - dodging maniac taxi drivers and crippled, rabid dogs (much more to come about them!) - and eventually wound our way down to the Plaza de Armas. What a place! Cusco is probably the most visited tourist destination in Peru, and you don’t need a PhD in brain science to work out why. It is stunning. I don’t really do buildings and history and stuff, but you’d have to be one seriously uncultured, heathen brute not to be won over by this place.
After sitting in the square in the hot sun for over an hour just watching stuff happening, we set off to finalise our travel arrangements for Manu and then sampled our first Cusquena lager in the legendary Cross Keys pub, where I was amazed to see a Stoke City football shirt hung up on the wall. Up the Potters! (which means “come on Stoke, win something for the first time ever!”) And then it was time to try Mate de Coca, a tea made out of coca leaves. Basically it’s a mug of boiling water with a handful of green coca leaves stuffed in it. It looks far worse than it tastes, and it sorts out your altitude sickness quite nicely as well.
Huacarpay Lake
Pronounced Wacar-pie, Huacarpay is easily reached from Cusco by taxi or bus. Puna Ibis and American Kestrels are common along the way. We took a taxi from Cusco straight to the Urpicancha restaurant and then walked clockwise around the lake through the village of Lucre and then around to Huacarpay town where we drank Inca Kola in a filthy shack and then caught one of the combi buses back for a ludicrously cheap fare. In Cusco the buses go from Avenida de la Cultura. If you can’t find it then just ask for the buses to Urcos. We spent about 4 hours walking all the way around the lake in the strong sun and stupidly didn’t take water or sun cream, so deservedly suffered accordingly.
The birding was easy and a great taste of what was to come. Unfortunately, and I’m not quite sure how this happened, we totally missed Bearded Mountaineer (a rather pretty hummingbird, not Brian Blessed). I blame the altitude. However, we had excellent views of the endemic Rusty-fronted Canastero by the ruins, a stupendously stupendous Giant Hummingbird (my first ever hummer and the World’s largest to boot), quite a few Plumbeous Rails, Black-chested Buzzard-Eagle, Cinereous Harrier, 3 species of Ground-Tyrant (Rufous-naped, Spot-billed and good scope views of what had to be a Taczanowski’s - which I think is a pretty good record for Huacarpay?), 3 Andean Negritos, Bar-winged Cinclodes, 2 Andean Swifts, plus all of the common passerine stuff and also all of the expected high-Andean water birds. Oh yeah, and loads of Moorhens. Also lots of rabid dogs.
Next day was a walk up to the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, nestled precariously high over the city and once a magnificent Inca fortress, but now just a load of big bricks after the Spanish invaders knocked it down. It’s a shortish walk from Cusco centre that climbs up through a gorge where we had a male Green-tailed Trainbearer, Black-throated Flowerpiercer, White-browed Chat-Tyrant, quite a few Bare-faced Ground-Doves, sack fulls of Cinereous Conebills and, best of all, sensational views of a pair of Aplomado Falcons soaring above the gorge. At the ruins themselves we found hundreds of European tourists alongside very tame Andean Lapwings, Band-tailed Seedeaters, American Ketrels and Ash-breasted Sierra-Finches (of which the females took us about 8 years to work out, thanks to the field guide!).
That afternoon we waited for 4 hours to buy our train tickets to Machu Picchu at the Huanchac train station (this place is Hell, absolute Hell I tell you), and then Miss Cole became violently ill with food poisoning throughout the night: I know exactly what the food was and exactly why it made her ill! The next day we were supposed to catch a bus to Ollantaytambo, but Miss Cole was still feeling so ill that she couldn’t even stand up, let alone haul a 5 ton pack through crowded streets, so we totally copped out and hailed a cab from outside the hostal to take us on the three hour journey. I managed to hail the worst cab in Cusco - and that really is saying something - a tiny Daewoo Tico with a totally shattered windscreen and a dodgy passenger door that would swing open as we took corners. On the way I discussed the woes of Brazilian World Cup footballing disappointment and Wayne Rooney’s red card in pidgin Spanish with our taxi driver, who, for some reason, kept giving signs of the cross on his chest. I later discovered it was because his brakes weren’t working properly.
The next part will have more birds in!
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