On wednesday we took a private tour with a friendly tour guide, Renato. We were supposed to be doing an organised tour to the sacred valley but this was cancelled due to the problems at machu picchu. So we organised our personal tour instead, which turned out better as we got to pick where we went. First we headed to Morray Inca ruins. Huge circular terraces which were amazing to see from above. We also hiked down into the bottom, which was good as we were the only ones there. However, it was hard work climbing back up in the hot sunshine. Next stop was the bizzare salt flats of Maras. The side of the mountain covered in pools of white water, all from a natural salt water spring. We can confirm from tasting this warm water that it is very salty!! It was great as we got to walk right into the centre of all the ledges and see how the salt is produced. Our tour took us through some beautiful scenery, with snow capped mountains in the distance, granite mountain, fields of maize and pretty wild flowers. Throughout the day Renato kept trying to teach us Spanish, proof a bull is torro, good is muy bien! Impressed? No! We also passed through several villages, all with Adobe (mud bricks) houses with typical old inca women sat outside, plus wild pigs and dogs runniing round and a cow tied up just for good measure. We found out it is custome in Peru for each family to have 4 or 5 dogs, hence why they are running all over the place! We stopped for lunch in a town called Urbamba for some authentic peruvian food, mmmmmm. We tried some of the local sweetcorn which looked more like it was genetically modified than local grown as each piece was huge. It was white rather than yellow, and certainly wasnt sweet or tasty. Then we had some local squeeky / rubbery cheese. After lunch we went to the Inca ruins at Ollayantaytambo, this was bigger than expected, with lots of terraces and impressive stone work. A good taster for Machu Picchu. It also has a face carved into the mountain opposite. The last stop was a local market for some purchases. We have already bought an extra rucksack which is now full, and craig is looking like a gorilla with his knuckles dragging on the floor from carrying all the heavy bags. We had a really good day and felt we had got a good flavour of peru.