Advice from the foriegn office

From the Peru foreign office travel advice:

Since late June 2007, there has been civil unrest, with widespread strikes, in the departments of Ucayali and Puno. A State of Emergency has been declared in the province of Coronel Portillo, Ucayali (including the tourist jungle town of Pucallpa) until mid July 2007. There have also been severe disruptions to road and rail services between Puno and Cusco. You are strongly advised to check with your travel company or airline before travelling to the area.

Well we just travelled through all this. We couldn't take the train from Puno as planned and there were some problems with buses: Delays, never getting the tourist one you paid for, and constantly having to change between local buses. But we made it through and are now in Cusco.

One of the other volunteers still at the school in Lima told me that one of the reasons for the strikes was that the Government had decided to give all the teachers a literacy test which might result in a third or them being laid off. And then the miners, with a different grievance decided to join in too, and then everyone has to. In Peru, a strike doesn’t just mean not going to work – it means putting up road blocks and preventing everyone from travelling – to the extent that on some days stones were hurled at any taxis in operation.

Machu Picchu here we come. It just got voted into the new 7 Wonders of the World. There's been enough hype about this in the last few weeks in Peru, to encourage people to vote. It obviously paid off.