Eric and I are back from Peru, and aside from a little post-travel stomach bug/amazon bug bites we had a blast! Peru is such a beautiful country and I feel so thankful to have had the chance to travel there. I couldn't possibly cram all of our adventures into a single blog post, so I'm going to break everything up by day to try and give all the juicy details of our trip.

Our cheap deal on flight tickets meant a long layover, and a few delayed flights meant about 24 hours of travel time to get to Cusco! It was such a relief when we finally touched down in our destination where the weather was perfect, and connected with our driver so we could finally start our vacation! If you know me, you know I tend to organize our trips entirely around nature and animals. Naturally, this meant our first stop was at an animal sanctuary just outside of Cusco. 

The animal sanctuary was pretty special since it took in a lot of native species that had been injured or abused, so it was a great way to see everything up close–and it was free! One of the coolest animals there were the Peruvian condors, which were HUGE. While watching the seven-foot-wingspan birds fly over us was cool, my favorite was the Peruvian Hairless dog that lazily hung out by the entrance :)

Our next stop was at a llama farm just down the road. It was a total tourist trap, but a lot of fun to hand feed the alpacas. And I just wish I had bought some of that alpaca wool! Doesn't it look so beautiful all collected together?

A short distance from the llama farm we caught our first glimpse of the Andes. The first few mountains weren't even as impressive as ones we saw later in the trip, but after we were hanging out of the car snapping pictures for a couple miles, our driver was nice enough to pull over and let us catch a couple non-blurry photos :)

Pisac, a small town in the Sacred Valley, was our final stop of the day before heading to our cottage. We had some amazing veggie sandwiches and our first Pisco Sours at Ulrike's Cafe, which had the best rooftop view of the surrounding mountains. The town is known for it's weekend markets, so while I think it would have been another busy tourist trap had we gone a day or two later, the town was pretty much empty and we enjoyed peacefully walking down the streets by ourselves.