Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Volunteering at the hostel in Cusco was incredibly fun, and gave me a certain routine. Having a homebase and a steady friend circle of people that were also volunteering or staying a longer time felt comfortable. I couldn’t (and shouldn’t) stay too long however, since it wasn’t real life, and was almost too comfortable that…

On Wednesday very early in the morning my Inca trail started.  The Inca trail is a 50km hike through the mountains towards the well known Inca site of Machu Picchu. It is not the only Inca trail, there are thousands of kilometers of paths created by the Inca all throughout South-America, but this is the…

So as I mentioned in the previous post, I had made the decision to explore Peru instead of staying in Cusco to learn Spanish.  The hop-on-hop-off bus had only been running for a few months but it was a really nice company. It went from Lima to Cusco in 7 days and then ran from…

Since I had planned to start Spanish classes in Cusco around Monday, I left Lima saturday on a 22 hour busride through to Andean mountains to get to Cusco. I had read about altitude sickness but I had no idea what it would be like and if I would suffer from it. Turns out going…

Getting to my next country wasn’t the easiest task. I did not realize how insane the Sao Paulo traffic would get and calculating to be 3 hours in advance for a 40 minute trip to the airport was apparently not enough time, so I ended up missing my flight. I arrived 10 minutes late for…