Up at 5:30am to take a taxi to the Inka Express Bus terminal. Still raining in Cuzco! The bus left at 7am towards Lake Titicaca and I enjoyed yesterday´s train snacks for breakfast. The bus had a guide who spoke clear spanish and good english, and a hostess who brought us a drink after each stop. The whole day was very touristic, but interesting and comfortable, and contrary to our usual nightbuses, we actually got to experience all the sights on the way. First...

After a ridiculously short sleep we all got ourselves downstairs for our pick up time of 5:20am... over an hour of waiting (while I could have been in bed) later our bus finally arrived and we set off towards Ollantayambo. It took 2 hours to arrive at the rather striking town nestled in a valley with incan ruins on the mountainsides. Here we had breakfast and met our guides David and Janet, and the rest of our group - 16 in total: Fellow Brits Paul (from Cheltenh...

Day 100 - Our centenary! We arrived at Cuzco at 6:30am on a very sunny morning, and after some confusion over who had the luggage tickets (I turned out to be right) we took a taxi to Niños hotel, which is really, really nice and is set up to support local children. We sat in the courtyard and had a really good breakfast before taking another taxi to the Peru treks office and paying for our Inca Trail trek that starts on Friday. After a run down of the trek and...

When we arrived back at the bus station in Arequipa we asked a taxi driver to take us to our hotel and he said no because there was a procession on. A bit miffed we asked him exactly how we would get there if a taxi couldn´t take us, and he said we needed a smaller car (his was a Focus)... we are still not sure how that would help us. Luckily another taxi driver in an equally sized car took us. Back at the hotel we had another scare as neither mine nor Alex´s ...

We returned to the bus station again in the morning to catch the 8:30am bus to Cabanaconde. The journey took 6 hours with no official toilet stops. So at the control gate into the Colca Canyon the bus stopped and I took the opportunity (along with a few others) to look for a toilet. No toilet. Everyone dispersed to look for a spot to squat with dignity. The bus started moving off before I was back aboard, but luckily it headed in the direction of where I was so h...