Damn it. Having had half my masculinity demolished by porters on the Inca trail, last night I lost the other half. No, it wasn´t too chilly out on the Bolivian salt flats, rather I was beaten by a cow. Well, most of a cow. Literally. Muggins here ordered a grande´ steak on his first night in Argentina... you can perhaps see where this is going. Overhanging all sides of my 12 inch dinner plate and well over 2 inches thick, it was always going to be a challenging meal, but I saw no reason why I couldn´t push through over 50oz of bovine goodness. And good it was. The cooking was sublime, leaving just enough juice and blood to mop up with chips, the salad was
excellent, providing some much-missed greenery, the $1 beer cooled my stomach to aid digestion and the $2.50 bottle of red Mendozan genius lubricated everything nicely. But there´s no getting away from the fact I failed. I withstood some vicious meat sweats in the 45mins of almost uninterrupted chomping, I´d come prepared in shorts with an elasticated waist, I even drew breath in between declaring the slab in
front of me to be one of the finest ends a cow has ever met. In short I did everything right. My years of Edwards training were put into action through pure muscle memory. But there´s no hiding that I´m out of practice and shape for taking on such a task and the last 6oz or so were left on the table. Argentina one, England nil point. A rigorous training program awaits and I´ll be back for a rematch. In the
meantime, my head will remain low in shame. I mean at least Claire managed half of her 32oz ´pequeño´ for crying out loud.

So, as you´ve likely gathered, we´re in Argentina. Weren´t we still in mid-Peru on the last blog? Indeed we were, so there´s a bit of catching up to do. We´ve done a fair bit, including ´nailing´ Bolivia in a week, so bear with me and I´ll try to spread it half logically over a couple of blogs.

We left Peru with mixed emotions, somewhat later than planned. The Inca trail was as expected phenomenal, we thoroughly enjoyed Lima and Lake Titicaca was awesome. We´re told the Colca Canyon´s very impressive, but sadly we didn´t get to see it. We´d booked a tour, but sadly having ensured I crawled into Maccu Picchu, Cusco food then felled Claire with another massive bacterial stomach infection, which
left her in bed for 4 days in Arequipa. The doctor was impressed she wasn´t a hell of a lot more ill, given her white blood cell count was 3 times normal levels, but that was hardly consolation when in the same breath he handed down a verdict and sentenced her to 7 days of the by now horribly familiar ´chicken, bread and water´ diet I´d finished a matter of hours before. We managed one whole meal of
semi-normal food together before we were back to sympathising with the other for being limited to Ritz crackers and chicken broth for the depressing-th day in a row.

On the bright side, Holly (and undoubtedly several other lovers of all things small and fluffy) will be pleased that Peruvian bacteria ensured I didn´t carry out my threat to sample some local cuy (guinea pig for the uninitiated). But I did manage to munch some llama. A mid-point between chicken and pork I concluded and definitely not unpleasant.

So whilst Arequipa wasn´t ideal in some ways, we nevertheless enjoyed it as best we could. Prior to puke-a-thon ´09, we visited the Santa Catalina Nunnery, which is a 6 hectare site that´s withstood many an earthquake in the middle of the city since the 1500s. Very impressive it was too. I´ll let Claire´s photo work cover the rest. Also
Arequipa´s weather is rather nice - the sun shines 360 days a year, it rarely gets above 25C but nor does it really get below about 15C - for my pasty British skin´s money, perfect. And the start of our run of almost a month without seeing rain... as usual, we´re not expecting masses of sympathy.

The drive from Arequipa to Puno on the Peruvian shore of Lake Atilan was cracking - unbroken blue skies contrasted rather well with endless empty desert up on the altiplano. In all we spent nearly a month at least 2500m above sea level and the scenery in general never failed to impress. Puno was less of a visual treat, but then no one really goes there for the town, us included, so we jumped out on the world´s
highest navigable lake as soon as we could. For the record, I´m not sure what the world´s highest un-navigable lake is either.

The photos, as ever, won´t do Lake Atilan justice, but Claire´s handy work should give you some idea - it was stunning. We started out on the Uros islands - which float on the lake, made entirely of the reeds that grow in the shallower waters. Quite who first thought it would be a good idea to make an island our of reeds and anchor it a couple of miles offshore is beyond us, but they were great novelty value -
imagine jumping around on a giant pile of grass clippings 200m across and you´ll get the idea. Literally everything is made of reeds - the houses, the tat they try and sell you, the boats that take you between islands, the lot. But the people are lovely, we suspected this anyway, but when all the women gathered to sing us off the island, you couldn´t help but be touched by a spot of warmth among the capitalism. Naturally, the traditional song and clapping was followed with a rendition of ´trinkle trinkle, little star´ and whilst the warmth didn´t necessarily dissipate, it was hard to keep a straight face.

Next up on the lake was Tanquille island. The sky perfectly reflected the blue of the lake by this point and the setting was idyllic. Steep cliffs running down into almost endless water, very reminiscent of a Greek island. We lunched, drank in the scenery, and again skipped the purchases of tat and the handicraft centre. We were very relived to see the sign outside the door though - our guide´s pronunciation had
concerned us slightly that we off to visit a handicap centre, which did seem a touch at odds with the painfully touristic itinerary...

The lake ticked off though, we had time to make up, so it was straight for the bus to Bolivia.