Today we had a lie in - 5.30am... We breakfasted on pancakes with 'GAP' (the name of our tour company) written on them in a kind of caramel syrup (well, Andy ate mine too). Compared to yesterday, today's walk was relatively easy. We started with a 150m fairly easy climb. This part of the trail has it's own subtropical mirco climate with lots of interesting plants and trees. Then we had to descend 900m down wet and slippery stone steps. This bit wa...

We were woken at 5am after spending a comfortable night in our tent. We had porridge with little pieces of apple in for brekky - very nice!After breakfast we set off for the 900m climb up to 'Dead Woman's pass' - 4200m above sea level - the highest we'd been. As a reference, Snowdon in Wales is 1085m above sea level, Mount Everest is 8850m above sea level, so we were almost halfway up Everest...The first part of the climb was in the shade of the t...

Wake up call today was 5am for the start of the Inca Trail. Our bus took us to km82, the start of the 47km (about 29 miles) 3 day hike to Machu Picchu. We had our passport stamped to say we´d started the trail. We started walking before 7am... The start of the trail was different to what we´d expected. Instead of the block pathing it was a gravel track with lot of plants and animals along the way. There were small houses and the usual donkeys, pigs, s...

As the porters on the Inca Trail (the men who carry the majority of our gear on the Inca Trail) are limited by the amount they can carry, we had to pack the stuff we needed for the next five days into small duffel bags supplied by our tour company. We were restricted to 5kgs in weight in them. Today we were given a tour of the ´Sacred Valley´, a valley in the mountains held to be sacred by a variety of civilisations. We visited a small rural village...

Wake up call today was 6.30am. We boarded a bus outside our hotel in Puno to get the 8am bus to Cusco. We´d already been told that this was a 7 hour bus ride on a local bus. Both of us were expecting a ramshackle vehicle complete with cows, pigs and chickens crammed on board, but we were pleasantly suprised to find it was a rather nice shiny coach with an on board toilet.The journey passed quite nicely for Andy - Andrea´s sure he was asleep for most o...