The trek to Machu Picchu and beyond

Our big trip for this year was Peru. We were there for three weeks in August. We spent the first ten days in Cusco and the Valley of the Incas plus three nights and four days hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.  If you are interested in hiking to Machu Picchu, we highly recommend the trekking outfit we used, Culturas Peru (www.culturasperu.com). It is Peruvian owned and operated. We were fortunate to have one of the owners, Marco Antonio Palomino, as our lead guide on our trek, but I'm sure the other guides Culturas Peru uses are equally good. Even though we were backpacking (Quechua porters carried most of our stuff), the food was outstanding. The chef even prepared a birthday cake on the trail.

As stunning as Machu Picchu is, I have to say that coming into it was a bit anticlimactic after the vistas and rigors of the trek through the Andes at 14,000 feet. The only thing I regret is not spending a few days after the trek resting up in the Incan town of Ollantaytambo. There is a really fine hotel there, Hotel Pakaritampu (www.pakaritampu.com), that would be a great place to hole up for a few days to explore this lovely ancient town in the Andes.

On our way back to Cusco we visited a lovely traditional farmhouse. While there I spotted some very interesting baskets made from the stumps of dead agave plants. The baskets are used to store dried corn. We bought most of what the owner had and shipped them back to the gallery. For those of you who love baskets like I do they are worth checking out.

After the trek we met up with our guide for the rest of our journey, Eva Diaz Valenzuela. Evita wears a lot of hats. She runs a Spanish immersion school in Huancayo, is a partner in a pizza restaurant there, is trained as an anthropologist and is now branching out into guiding foreigners around her fascinating country. We were her first clients. She did a wonderful job and was very sensitive to our needs. Evita can be reached at evaedu@hotmail.com.

We had planned an overly ambitious itinerary and decided to postpone the Amazon portion for our next visit. We did go to Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, but frankly I don't think it's worth valuable travel time. The lake around Puno (the main city on the lake) is covered with algae and the famous floating islands made from reeds are a bit too touristy for our taste. Puno is famous for its Carnival. In fact, there is an entire industry built around making masks and costumes for Carnival. Evita managed to take us to many of the shops where this work is done and we were able to buy some very interesting masks, including some children's carnival masks that have been "danced." My husband Noel says they look like "Wonder Warthog" but they're really "viejitos," old people.

One highlight of the trip was flying over the Nazca lines. They are basically multiple football field size drawings in the desert that were made over several centuries starting around 200 AD. The lines are located near Ica and Pisco (Peru's wine country). A major earthquake occurred there the day after we had returned to Lima. Both towns suffered devastating damage and over 300 people perished. The gods must have been guiding us.

One of the ongoing delights of traveling in Peru is the quality of the cuisine, including cuy, better known in this country as guinea pigs, bony little devils but yummy. I have never seen so many different varieties of potatoes and Peruvian wine is very good.

So if Europe is too expensive because of the weak dollar, try travel in this half of the world. The airfare is high, but once there it is very affordable. We loved Peru and will go again in a few years. And then there's Argentina and Chile and Bolivia and . . .

Holiday Harpies and other assorted ornaments

Once again we are carrying Dean Hacker's harpies for the holidays. According to Dean's version of the Greek legend, the harpies were beautiful maidens who were given the task by Zeus to bring evil doers to justice, but because of their beauty they had no credibility. So they transformed themselves into old hags and got the credibility they needed. Alas, if only the real world were so simple! At any rate, they are wonderful to hang in your kitchen window or elsewhere to keep good spirits in the home and bad ones out.

We are also fortunate to have Danny Mansmith's wonderful wrapped dolls. For those of you who don't know Danny, he's a fiber artist working in Chicago who makes clothing and soft sculpture from scraps of textiles. We will be featuring his work along with three other artists in a fiber arts show in May. So if you want ornaments outside of the mainstream, stop by to see Dean and Danny's figures. We're only calling them "ornaments" because it's the holiday season. They're really sensational soft sculptures that are designed to be suspended in a window or a neglected corner of your home.

We are also offering more traditional ornaments as well, such as lovely ceramic Nativity scenes inside carved gourds from Peru and antique ornaments from Mexico that were originally designed as embellishments for large ceramic vases.