Introduction

I will be taking a bit longer holiday this summer :)

Dates of the trip
The longest time I could figure out are 5 weeks that are in a row without any responsiblities. There are no longer gaps in year 2007 at all: school till June, one wedding to attend to in July, being the head official on a competition in August and then school in September again. Finally the dates ended up being 12th of June till 19th of July.

Destinations
There were 2 main purposes of my long trip:
1. visiting my 2 best friends in US
2. having some quality vacation in a country I've never been to
First point was easy, second one was a bit more difficult. By then I had decided that I will be going alone. I tried to arrange schedules with friends, just impossible. The ones who have free schedules don't have the finances and so on. So I'll go alone :) What is the worst that can happen :) I'll be fine.

So where should I go to? I was very keen to go to India, but the route did not suite at all. It would mean that I'd go to other side of the world to the west and then coming back the same route and then travelling to the east. So no go with that, Australia and Asia are out for that reason as well. I've been to Thailand so Asia can wait for a bit as well. Africa, well, I'd rather not take that up by myself :) So I had to find something that is "close enough" to US:
- Canada: not interesting and exotic enough
- US: been there done that (although it is a huge country, but still, not interesting enough)
- Mexico: well, not too interested in it, maybe some other time
- Nicaragua and the rest of the Central America: too dangerous to go alone

Then it started to get interesting :) I did some research about Columbia and Ecuador, but somehow it did not look too tempting. Can't even remember why, perhaps the sentence in some web pages that if you don't speak Spanish then there is no point to go there. So I kept looking. Brazil: well I want to go there someday, but this can be done anytime, I want something special :) After asking around a bit, I got it!!! PERU!!! WEHEEE! Somehow everything looked just right about that country. After doing some initial research I found out about the famous Inca Trail. After reading 2 web pages about it I booked the 4 day tour, that was in the beginning of January. So it was all decided. By the end of February I had all the plane tickets bought for the whole trip.