We arrived in Santiago on Thursday after the longest journey - EVER! We left Arequipa on Tuesday at 10.30am, after sorting out a minor problem where we managed to get our bank card swallowed into the ATM, very clever! We took a 7 hour bus to Tacna which is on the Peru/Chile border. From there against our better judgement we agreed to go with a guy in his collectivo, a big old American style car, across the border to Arica in Chile. The border crossing was the s...

We arrived in Arequipa very early on Friday with lots that we wanted to do in a very short space of time, so we had to crack on! First we spent some time checking out Arequipa town centre, which is mainly based around the Plaza de Armas, which was very busy with locals sunning themselves and children feeding the pigeons, we could have been in Trafalgar Square! It is beautiful weather here, really hot and sunny in the day and not too cold at night. Arequipa is qu...

The journey here was great, burning through the desert in our Chevvy!! We saw some damage on the outskirts of Ica, some houses and streets had been completely levelled, really very sad to see but also very difficult to help with the now limited time we have left in South America, only 9 days! As we came into Huacachina on the only road into the town we were struck by how beautiful the place is, it could be somewhere in the middle-east or a Disney movie!! We fou...

After descending about 4000m in about 2 hours at the end of the bus journey from Cusco we got into Nazca early on Monday morning with ears popping!! We found our hostel and booked onto a trip to a pre Inca cemetery called Chauchilla to occupy us for the afternoon. This was pretty interesting but very touristy, the graves and bones are genuine but have been moved about quite a lot and the best examples have been moved to the front. We then got taken to a pottery...

We have spent a total of six days in Cuzco, three prior to the Inca Trail and three after and we have not really done a great deal apart from chilling out in the day and partying at night! Before the Inca Trail we were preparing all our stuff for the trail and generally partying, celebrating my birthday and after the Inca Trail we have been recovering from colds and again partying! It has been a nice change from sight seeing and a good chance to really let our h...