Peru!

Sorry its been a while. I´m now going to attempt to do my best to update you on a very busy 3 weeks.
In Lima me and Sam started a 21 day tour through Peru and then into La Paz in Bolivia.
Our first stop was in the town of Pisco, which is also the name of the local drink, which is pretty nasty, but can be mixed with lemons and egg white to make something even nastier. Pisco was a pretty poor city which was 90% flattened by a massive earthquake in 2007. Pretty much everyone in the city knew someone who died in it, our taxi driver was telling us he lost his wife and 4 children in the Cathedral when it collapsed during Mass, the road was still full of holes where water pipes burst and most of the streets were still lined with parts of buildings that hadn´t been cleaned up yet. And the day after that we walked around the coastline and found amongst the rubble a lovely brand new Hilton Hotel being built. Was a bizzare place to be and within seconds we had a man in tracky b´s and a Kappa jacket running towards us waving a pistol. Turns out he was the ´security guard´and offered to give us a tour of the building sight if we paid him. We said thank you, declined, and moved on.
After this we went to the town of Nasca, home to some pre-Incan burial sights and mountain engravings called the ´Nasca Lines´which apparently feature in the new Indiana Jones film if anyones been so lucky to see it. There was the option of flying over the lines in a light aircraft, most of the group did but I was feeling a bit tight on that day and declined the cost, but most people said it was a bit average so I wasn´t too upset.
After this was a bus ride to Arequipa, Peru´s second most important city, but much cleaner and better organsied than Lima, fewer Hotel-Casinos and generally much nicer. Not staying long here, just a quick look at an old Catholic monastery and a frozen girl called ´Juanita´(she´s famous) we then headed off to the Colca Canyon.
The bus journey to the Canyon stopped plenty of times for us to buy things from locals, whether we wanted to or not, and also at the highest point on our trip at 5000m above sea-level, where it is nearly impossible to walk up 5 steps unless you have a little while to aclimatise, but all the wild Llamas and Alpacas seemed to be doing just fine. That night we stayed in a tiny little town called Chivay, just outside the Colca Canyon, which didn´t even have roads, but still managed to have broadband internet. Here we went on a tiny little practice hike before Machu Pichu to try and get used to walking up hills at altitude. We walked for about an hour to find at the top of this valley an old Incan cemetery complete with skulls littered all about the mountain side and various bones underfoot as it had been raided a few decades earlier by locals who wanted to sell the artefacts they found.
A couple of days after this was the Inca Trail. 4 days of walking, around 40km in total, beautiful scenery, burning hot sunshine, a whole day of drizzle, and for the final day, a perfect view of Machu Pichu at sunrise. All the boxes ticked.
After the Inca Trail we went to a town called Aguascalientes (sp) which is the owner of the worlds most disgusting hot springs, complete with fat locals washing their bits in them, pubic hair and toe-nail clippings, me and a few others braved it for about 20 minutes but then left in fear of many diseases.
After the hiking we had 4 days of leasure in Cusco, the old Incan capital city, some amazing archetecture, but nearly all Spanish, as one of the first things they did when they arrived as pull down the Incan Temples and build Cathedrals on top.
To round off the 21 day trip, bringing me pretty much up to present day, we had an overnight homestay with an island family on Amantani Island in the middle of Lake Titicaca. The people there speak very little Spanish, so it was pretty hard to get by. The speak the Incan language Kechuan, which we were taught a few words of but soon forgot. We played 5-a-side football against the local team, which at 4000m above sea-level is a different game entirely, managed to beat the local team, just, then nearly collapsed from lack of oxygen, then had to do an hour and a half of dancing whilst wearing a poncho and a hat. All slightly bizzare but very entertaining.
And thats more or less it up until today, where I am in an internet cafe in La Paz, Bolivia, paying about 30p an hour to be on the computer. Fantastic!

Santiago and Lima

After about 3 days of travelling, we ended up in Santiago, which wasn´t originally on the cards when we booked all our flights, but somewhere we had to go to to get from Hong Kong to Lima.
We only initially planned on staying in Santiago for a couple of nights, this gave us time to find the bus station, book the tickets (we couldn´t do it online because we couldn´t read spanish) and then manage to leave. It turns out we had as much chance of doing it online as none of the people at the bus company could speak english, so we did a lot of charades and pointing at calenders, and we eventually got the result we wanted, a cheap bus (55,000 Peso, about 60 GBP) to Lima.
After booking the bus, which only leaves on Tuesdays, we found out we had a bit more time to kill in Santiago, so we got talking to someone who worked at the hostel who then showed us around the city, and got a bit of a taste for the Chilean night life, which doesn´t really start until about 1am, and goes right on through until about 9 the next morning.
So after this night out, we had a quiet day the next, then had a 2 day long bus journey to look forward to.
We got to the bus station with plenty of time, about 45 minutes until the bus left, but the bus hadn´t even arrived yet. Half an hour later it turns up, we can start loading our luggage on, confirming our tickets etc. But then it turns out our tickets aren´t valid as we didn´t have our passports with us when we booked them, so we had to go back to the place we bought them...about 2 tube stations away... and register them with our passports. We didn´t understand because he was talking in Spanish, all we knew was that we couldn´t get on the bus. Eventually, with about 2 minutes to spare and after 10 minutes of running, finding someone who can translate, and then 10 minutes of more running, we found out that we could get on the bus after all, and only had to supply the bus driver with our passport numbers, the other man got it wrong. Panic over.
The next two days are easy to explain. 56 hours on a bus, 50 of them with just desert to look at, a few burned out, battered car wrecks that had tumbled down ravines, 3 stops of about 2 hours in total, a stolen i-pod, and on the last day, only having half a pack of biscuits to get me through until dinner