Well...
After months of planning for the Inca Trail (and $400 each), a local Italian decided to give me food poisoning! Consuquently, instead of trekking for four days, seeing loads of ancient Inca ruins and taking many a great picture (i´m sure), I was puking into a bin and James was bored out of his mind in Cuzco...what a disappointment :-(
However, once recovered (ish) we caught the train/bus to Agus Caliente (the town to the bottom of Machu Picchu) and still got to see the famous lost city of the Incas. The day we arrived we decided to climb Mount Putucusi, a 2hr trek up and an hour down...although all was not what it seemed! We climbed for about 10 minutes and then were faced with, well, a ladder...not the conventional ladder you find in Homebase (oh, no!), but one made out of slippery and slightly rotten twigs - somehow (this scared me the most), attached to a sheer rockface with a 30m drop to the ground to certain death (have I mentioned i´m scared of heights?!). But, we made it! The views over MP were camazing (this is the new word I have just invented, meaning both amazing to take photos of...get it??) - if a little chilly! Then of course, this was us after all, it started to bucket it down just as we reached the ladders on the way down...joy!
On Thursday we pulled ourselves up at 5am, got up to MP for 6am and after wandering around for 2 hours, somehow managed to find our tired tour group, fresh from doing the 4 day trek. I won´t bore you with the details of our 2hr tour of MP - but check out the camazing photos of the place - its huge, and weird, and i´d kind of like to live there!! Ha!
We were treated to a ride in the luxury `vistadome`train on the way back to Ollataytombo, and they even had a fashion show of the finest Peruvian Alpaca garments onboard! Love it!
That evening we met up with our `very gay` friend Christian for the final time, he boringly told us that this was the fifth country we´ve seen him in (seriously, WHY do we meet such boring people?!) - we managed to bully him into letting us come to his 30th (or was it 40th....?) next year, haha - the jokes on you Chris!!!! He also goes home in three weeks....ahhhh!!
We are now sitting in Lima Airport, we did venture into the city for a couple of hours, but it was...Jakarta minus Pizzahut, so we soon caught a taxi back to the airport, where they have a friendly Pappa Johns!! We have pestered the AA desk for a good two hours (but amazingly actually managed to get somewhere this time!! A big cheer for American!!!). Now waiting for our flight which is in exactly 12hrs10mins....not long now!!
