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 where the people are all farmers and live a simple life. They gave us a demonstration of how they turn the raw alpaca ´fur´into colourful wool for all their handicrafts. They use natural resources such as plants and insects to dye the wool in to the many different bright colours that they use.

We visited an alapaca and llama park. Andrea delighted in taking far too many photos of them - they were very cute!

We drove on to another village where we visited a ´tipical´bakery (as the sign outside proudly declared!). We ate freshly baked bread rolls which had been stuffed with cheese, tomato and onion for 1 soles each (about 16p). Very tasty!

We boarded the bus again and stopped at the Pisac ruins. These are Inca ruins built on a mountain top. The stonework was amazing - huge flat, smooth stones fitted together perfectly (they didn´t use any kind of mortar!). The Inca´s didn´t have many tools, in order to get the stones so flat they used sand to grind them. It rained on the steep uphill walk back to the bus - good practice for the upcoming Inca Trail!

We had lunch back at the village where we´d been to the bakery. We had stuffed peppers and tried the local cocktail Pisco Sour - very tasty!

We drove on to our final destination for the day - Ollantaytambo. We visited the Inca ruins there - again they were up a steep hill with terracing for growing crops. We stayed in a lovely hotel and our tour guide Gladys had left a bottle of wine in our room with a happy honeymoon message for us.