LEAVING CUZCO'S NEVER EASY

Ah, Bolivia, what a great place; the friendly people, the floating islands on Lake Titicaca, La Paz (one of the highest cities in the world) and the famous salt lakes. Sadly, we never got to see these great sights as getting to Bolivia proved to be impossible for us as some pesky Peruvian protesters were blocking the road between Cuzco and Puno (near Lake Titicaca and the Bolivian border). This was pretty disappointing in itself but even more so as we had finally managed to summon up enough energy to drag ourselves out of bed after days of feeling ill and stomach (ho ho) the thought of a long bus journey. But we weren't to be defeated and managed to get ourselves on one of the few buses leaving Cuzco that day bound for Nazca.

In a way it seemed right that Team West were heading West again rather than South. After a few weeks of breaking ourselves in gently by flying around the continent, a nice long bus journey combined with a stomach bug made it feel like we were proper travellers now. After 16 hours of negotiating a never-ending series of tight hairpin bends, a route that should really appear in the next series of 'Top Gear', we made it to Nazca. To take passengers' minds off the prospect of not making it to their destination in one piece the driver helpfully distracted us by showing an incredibly violent Chinese film dubbed into Spanish, only interspersed by regular stops during which local women piled onto the bus trying to flog us enormous but tasty corn on the cob.

We decided to go to Nazca, not just because it was the only way we could leave Cuzco, but because we were keen to see the famous lines and shapes drawn into the desert near to the city. Emma, however, wasn't too thrilled at the prospect of seeing them from one of the tiny planes that fly over the lines which are notorious for making tourists sick from the many turns they make (oh, and one of them crashed earlier this year killing all on board). Instead we had a tour of the lines from the ground which was surprisingly interesting and revealed a lot more about the history of the shapes and the Nazca people than we had expected.