Gay Flags & Guinea Pigs Just had my first solo breakfast for a while listening to a loud American next to me complain that her college fees were $53000 per year for her 6 year medical course. I chuckled. Had a superb couple of days on Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca before I left Bolivia. A gorgeous small island that was good to trek around and soak up some rays. Nice mix of backpackers and locals from the small villages on the island. Strange being on an island at 4000m though and very cold at night. Wasn´t particularly looking forward to moving onto Peru as I hadn't heard that it was a clot more commercial, especially compared to Bolivia. After a nondescript night in Puno I has to barter for the first time since Africa and got on a gringo sight seeing bus which took me to Cusco. My head needs examining. What I imagined this would be I'm not quite sure. I joined 50 overfed over 50's with their socks pulled high and their newly purchased wide rimmed hats at the ready. Together with the other 5 buses doing the same route we got led around many Inca sights by our guide who liked to keep a very tight schedule. I saw some interesting things that day but I cannot tell you much about them as the brain had no need to function due to the 'queue up and hold my hand'. mentality of the guide. Mental note - no tours. Arrived in Cusco and suddenly the brain had to function again, some dodgy parts to the city. That said it is a truly beautiful place with some stunning buildings from the Renaissance buildings and plenty of Inca walls still surviving. Boring architecture moment. The stones were so perfectly crafted that they needed no mortar in the walls, the stones just slotted together like a dry stone wall without any gaps. Geeky amazing. Also around the town flew many rainbow flags which I got quite excited about only to find out that this is also the Inca flag. Stayed at a great hostel and bumped into a few people I knew from Argentina. Also met a couple of German lads I ended up travelling the whole of Peru with - Sebastian and Niels, top lads. I am going to have a rethink about my stereotype of Germans. We ended up booking our trip to Machu Pichu together. There are many ways of doing this trip from Cusco nowadays, the well known one is the Inca trail, but this gets booked up months in advance and I didn't fancy doing it with the other 499 people allowed along the trail each day. Instead we approached from a different direction and did some mountain biking and rafting together with some hiking. A brilliant 4 days. Started off with the downhill mountain biking, some more amazing views and speeds going down rivalling the Bolivian Death Road experience. We then did the white water rafting. I cockily proclaimed that I had done the grade 5s in the Zambezi when asked if I had done it before. Grade 3s would be a piece of piss. Yes, guess who got thrown out first and got trapped under the boat and battered on the rocks. The guide and company had had only been operating for a couple of weeks which made for an exciting ride, some of which was in the dark. Well that was my excuse anyway. We finally made it up to Machu Picchu at sunrise on the last day, what can I say? was expecting to be disappointed after all of the hype around this must see place in South America. I was not, it simply was amazing how the Incas built a place in such a difficult place to get to. Stunning views on a great day and many architecture 'moments' which I won't go into on here. Check out the pics. A few hours away from Cuzco is the Colca Canyon which fortunately not as many Gringos get to. I read that it was the deepest canyon in the world descending 3kms! Bulls***, they measure from the top of the surrounding mountains down to the valley! The actual vertical bit of the canyon is a mere 1.2kms deep. Needless to say still pretty impressive. We hiked down it to stay in a fantastic little huts at the bottom of the valley in a village with no roads or electricity, just the track up the side of the canyon. Really did feel out in the middle of nowhere. Some superb exploring the next day walking along the canyon finding remote little villages selling cactus pears (delicious). We got lost in a cactus plantation, Niels hadn't taken well to the previous dinner, I'm not sure how many cactus spikes he had to pull form his arse. Eventually we found the track again and headed up on a hot hot slog back up the side of the canyon back to normality to the town at the top. After a night in another stunning city called Areiquipa getting drunk with the students we headed on another long journey to Huacachina on the coast. The buses in Peru are superb again and have adopted the Argentinian luxury travel idea of huge reclining sofas to get a good nights sleep on. Have been spoilt rotten on the buses in South America I have to admit. Long may it continue. I was really looking forward to getting down from altitude as I'd had over 4 weeks up around 2500-4000m. The coastline of Peru is drab grey with lots of nothingness punctuated with the occasional industrial complex. This disappointment was somewhat offset by the best nights sleep I've had without the need to mouth breath which made for am crust free mouth in the morning. Simple pleasures. Huacachina is an oasis in the middle of some huge sand dunes. The primary attraction here was more sandboarding on these scorching dunes, but better than that we got transported on these buggies that rip roared up the dunes in an adrenaline filled drive. Luckily the metal roll cage was not needed. Onto Lima. Forever grey, drizzly, drab, boring city. s*** you might say. We had to go to the very north of Peru to find a beach with some sunshine - Mancora. A surf spot where a lot of backpackers collect. Found a great hostel complete with beach side location and swimming pool, it was like being in an apartment complex in Spain but with pikey backpackers instead of the rosey beer guts from Grimsby. Great fun for a few nights mainly centred around drinking, a proper holiday spirit which was nice for a change. The Germans und I peeled off in different directions after Mancora. I found out that my trip had been extended until the end of the year due to an uncertain work outlook back in the UK and so celebrated the fact by heading to the Galapagos Islands, a notoriously expensive place. Perfect logic. There is something wrong eating a guinea pig with a small pepper stuffed in it's mouth.