Hola gente!
My third week in South America just started, but it feels like i have been here forever...
The group has grown together like a huge family (we're 30 people) and I can talk to locals and easily find the way in every bigger city. I even told my taxi driver in lima the way back, for I had forgotten the name of the hotel.
We have a few canadians in our group, some swiss and 4 guys from London itself. But 60% of the people of our group are from australia. Young guys, pretty funny, pretty ordinary, and pretty touchy, exactly as I remember my friend from down under (actually a kiwi). It doesn't pass very often a day, where your crotch doesn't get devastaded by someone. David, I'm afraid after these 5 months there will be nothing more left for you...
We've been doing lots of excursions, so one day we just had our sleeping bags with us, and after some insane dune buggying and sandboarding, we slept between the dunes of the desert near Nazca. The very next day we put up our tent round about 30m from the pacific ocean. Some people think, that the sound of the waves is hypnotizing and relaxing. Well, after that night I don't anymore. Magari è solo rilassante per quelle che vivono sott'acqua..
The last four days we've been on the Inka Trek, the spiritual path through the mountains to get to Machu Picchu. Dead Woman's Pass is at 4200m, so we did enjoy a small amount of inka steps. And since mountains were sacred to them and they couldn't carve them in order to make the paths more accessible and easier to walk, the trail went up and down continuosly. On the last day we got up at 3:00 am to make sure, that the fastest from our group were the first in line at the control station from Wiñaywayna. We walked in complete darkness (just our headlights) to the gates which opened at 5:30. It was a rainy morning and the visibility was about 35-40m because of the fog which is pretty common in the rain forest.
Luckily we didn't see nothing on our way up to Sungate (Intipunku) and neither the whole way down to Machu Picchu, so we didn't have to stop to take pictures. We were the first ones on the trail and we knew that Every minute counted, in order to get to Machu Picchu in time to get one of the 200 daily tickets to Waynapicchu Mountain. The fastest group ran the whole time (45min.) on the wet rocks and steep paths through the jungle, but only 6 of us arrived just in time for the tickets. While holding that precious piece of paper in our hands, we eventually looked around us and asked ourselfs: is this Machu Picchu?
The fog and the fact, that we couldn't take our eyes from the ground in order to concentrate on every single step of ours, made it impossible for us, to realize, that we've been running through the ruins for a while.

We'll be staying another 2 days in Cuzco, just before heading to Titicaca Lake and then to La Paz. Passing the boarder to Bolivia is supposed to take 10h. Plenty of time to play Werewolf on the truck. On Christmas eve we're chasing each other down the death road wich mountain bikes, starting in the snow, and ending 73km further on in the rain forest. We're supposed to be in the capital Sucre for New Year.
Merry Christmas to you all and a happy new year!! I hope you'll all enjoy it and have a beautiful and cheerful time!
Hugs and kisses

mEo