We spent the morning on the phone to the insurance company and trying to plan an emergency plan B, as Peru was just too hard to travel in with this many injuries. Within a couple of hours, with some advice from the Fraser travel agency ;) I had it all sorted - LA to Chicago for 5 days, then down to San Diego for another 5 days!

That sorted, we headed out to enjoy a bit of Cusco tourism. I've said how beautiful and colonial it is, and we really enjoyed wandering around. They have so many remnants of inca times there too, like the incredible stone walls that stack together like perfect odd shaped lego pieces with no mortar in sight, see pics.

We went on a tour of the cathedral, which was built on the site of an Inca building. They won't let you take pictures in most of the buildings, but it was amazing, so big and detailed. It was the cathedral for the whole Spanish colony in South America at one point, so you can imagine how incredible it was. And there was so much gold and silver. It even held the first cross brought to South America by the Spanish.

One thing we found interesting was how they had tried to ingratiate the inca traditions into Christianity there to get the locals on board. We'd already noticed they painted saints in inverted v shapes, to reflect mountains, which had been considered powerful and sacred, and used mirrors a lot, considered vain in Europe, but in South America reflected light. We noticed in there they also had a painting very similar to Leonardo da Vinci's Last supper... in which they were serving roast guinea pig, a local delicacy!

We then spent some time milling around the beautiful old squares, which strangely had a lot of armed soldiers around. This happened most days, although on most days we also saw parades, more like celebrations than protests. We assumed they must be connected, although the soldiers didn't follow any of the parades, so maybe they were just there to protect the main square.

After we went to a convent type building that had been the Inca Temple of the Sun. The beautiful old walls were the same lego type, all perfectly put together, and the gardens were lovely. After I treated myself to a pedicure

That evening, as it was our last in South America, we went out to a nice restaurant for dinner, where we had some lovely wine, and tried guinea pig! Fortunately it didn't come roasted on a skewer as we had seen... it wasn't massively flavourful, just like chicken really, and there wasn't very much meat!