Short blog: In the morning we were confronted with Lolo, the 35 year old tortoise that lives in the hotel garden! First job of the day was to return to the same bus station we arrived at earlier in the morning to book tickets to the Colca Canyon for the next day. While we were there we saw lots of loaves of bread with faces on them strung up in the shops (you will see a demonstration of this in a subsequent blog). Then we went to the Santa Catalina convent in th...

Our nightbus woke us up and took our blankets away at 4:20am, and we arrived in Lima a good 30 minutes later. We took a taxi to the hotel that Mum had booked for the 3 of us, which is far nicer than anywhere that we have stayed before (save the Aida Maria of course). Obviously they didn´t yet have a room ready for us, but asked if we wanted to to sit on the sofa by the restaurant until later... we interpreted this as "would you like to sleep on the sofa until 10...

Arrived in Huaraz at 5am and took a taxi to our pre-booked hostel Alpes (although we were a day late). Preparing ourselves for a midday check-in, we were really excited to be taken straight into a dorm. It had 3 bunks and was pitch black... and when we turned on our headlamps to determine which beds didn´t have a person sleeping in them, the light illuminated an entire floor of mess and a mostly empty bottle of tequila on the table! Slept until 10am, when we wok...

On our first day in Peru we found ourselves fleeced out of $50 and stuck in some random bus stop at 10pm hoping all our belongings would be kindly returned to us... The night bus across the border was easy - we were woken up at 3am for immigration, but some clever person thought that it might be more effective to have both Ecuadorian and Peruvian immigration in the same building, so it was nice and quick. After our pizza breakfast (and a nazi movie on a bus full...