Up at 4.30am today. We headed off on a walk to the canopy tower. We saw some of the leaf cutter ants that we'd seen the night before still hard at work. Our guide William said he felt something moving inside his boot - he took it off and found a tarantula in there!The canopy tower was a metal structure 30 meters high, and a little wobbly... From the top we could had an excellent view of the forest, the river and the mist drifting over the landscape. Saw the t...

4am(!) wake up call this morning. After donning our wellies we left the lodge just after 5. We walked down through the jungle to the river where we boarded our boat. After a short journey we disembarked and walked to an oxbow lake where we boarded a catamaran for a cruise around the lake. We didn't get to see the giant otters which we'd been told about, but we did get to see parrots flying above us (well, we were told they were parrots, but we could just ...

A relatively late start today – 7:30am. Caught the plane to Puerto Maldonado in the Amazon jungle. Packing for the trip was fun as Andy couldn´t bear to be parted from his Inca trail walking stick; for 5Sol they were wrapped in newpaper and plastic in the airport and checked into the hold. The view from the plane was fantastic as we were coming into land – a great sea of broccoli florets stretching as far as the eye could see!  Very ho...

Today was our free day in Cusco. So we thought about maybe having a lie in given all the early mornings we’d been having. No such luck! Bells ringing and someone hammering nearby woke us up at some ungodly hour. Still we had a lazy start to the day then wandered to Jack’s café for breakfast; we highly recommend the ´Gordo´, a very good (and big!) English breakfast containing French toast, eggs, bacon, sausage, fried potatos, beans, ...

Back to a 5am wake up call for us today. We got the bus back up to Macchu Picchu for a 2 hour tour around. Our guide Jose told us lots of interesting things, both on the tourand on the previous days on the trail.We got the bus back down to Agua Calientes and had a wander around the shops. We bought a couple of pin badges for our rucksacks. We sat in the square for a while, then went to have lunch (pizza - mmm!) at a restaurant right beside the train tracks that r...