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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Lowther" data-source="post: 1639000" data-attributes="member: 9107">Wow,i've spent a month in peru, come home and tom still hasn't finished this trip report!!:-Ojust a little note here to say that although the start of the royal cinclodes trail is as Tom says impossible to miss, if you are an imbecile it is quite easy to take a wrong turn on the way..before you get up to the ridge there is a second information board. If you want to get to the (supposedly) cinclodes-containing polylepis grove, carry straight on here along the path demarcated by parallel rows of stones. From this point on it's easy, and if you're reasonably fit there's no reason not to come back this way too.DO NOT follow the path to the left indicated by an arrow and a little painting of a bird on a rock (you can see how i was fooled), as although it starts out nicely enough eventually it degenerates into a precipitous alpaca trail which brings you out miles down the valley (below the farmstead), necessitating an Edmund Hillary-esque slog back up to the cinclodes spot, by which time they've buggered off!On the plus side this route does take you through some nice polylepis where i saw ash-breasted tit-tyrant, 2 x tit-spinetails, puna tapaculo, giant conebill, red-rumped bush tanager, blue-mantled thornbill, line-fronted canastero etc., not all of which i saw back in "the right place". This is the forest "at the same level" as described in Valqui, but if you do want to make a side visit here, i'd recommend turning back when you reach a little mirador with a stone bench.still an amazing site even if you spend the whole time panicking at the prospect of joining the ranks of the ice mummies!Jamesp.s. Tom, I managed to string some of those annoying female seedeaters at Aguas Calientes into dull-coloured grassquits (greyish heads, small bicolored bills), and if you read your Schulenberg carefully it seems they could be expected to occur there!</blockquote>

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