Since we last blogged we had been eating ice-cream in the very pleasant Cusco plaza de armas and just checked into our hostel, called Loki, a dangerous place. They gave us a little tour when we arrived, our room, on-suite and a bed with duvets! Amazing. The on-site bar with egg and bacon breakfast served all day! Woohoo. The bar doesn´t have a till, great I thought free drinks, no, it has a pc which takes your name and room number and tabs up everything you eat and drink. We were planning on staying for 10 days, this was going to be dangerously expensive.

So x-mas eve arrived and in the afternoon we wandered into the hostel bar at around 2. Meet some friendly Irish and Yanks playing cards who invited us to sit down for a game and a beer. Before we realize it the city erupts into a huge explosion as fireworks go off everywhere as the city celebrated the arrival of x-mas day. It was amazing to see as our hostel was on top of a hill over looking the city. Time for bed.

X-mas day and boxing day were all very social affairs, one night in the hostel bar and you get to know everyone staying. We are planning out our time in Argentina, Chile and Brazil over this week, have 8 weeks to spend but the distances are measured in how many thousand km´s it takes to get there, so need to be a little selective, to keep our sanity. hahaha
New years eve and we head down to the Plaza de Armas, the town centre, to celebrate with the locals. Its good luck to wear yellow and then run around the town centre in a sort of Pamplona bull run scenario, So the whole town looked like a bunch of bananas being chased by an invisible bull! Got a great photo of it all, and then some other enterprising scallywag decided they wanted the photo and popped their hand in my pocket to help themselves to our 300 quid digital camera! I didn´t realise it at the time, but some sticky fingered git had nicked our camera!

So for the time being there will be no amazing, challenging and provocative photos coming from us till we have sorted the problem out, you will have to rely on our illuminating and entertaining writing skills. It also now appears the 367 pounds I thought we ´wasted´ on an insurance policy is actually going to be useful. Looks like I´m going to have to eat my words, well, I can´t take a picture of them! hahaha.

We visited the police station to file a theft report, wrote a clear statement saying it was stolen by a pickpocket and were asked to come back the next day to collect the printed report. When we returned, the next day, I signed for the statement and later on asked a Spanish friend to translate the Spanish report into English. It turns out the useless, incompetent, imbeciles at the police station had decided to write i had lost the camera and couldn´t find it! NOT the sort of police report you want to give to an insurance company!

Off to sunny Chile later today so looking forward to drinking some good wine.

Cooper Out to the vineyards

Love Dan & Kat