Hello people,

We are currently 15 days into our south america trip, so far we have been in santiago for 3 days where we went up part of the andes where it juts into the middle of the city and had a great view of the city even though it was quite smoggy!! Up there was also a statue of the virgin mary which looks over the city! In addition to this we had a couple of amusing trip to shop to buy the simplest of items with a maximum amount of trouble purely because our spanish is soo poor and there is english is not much better! So it ended up being a bit of a relief to leave santiago and head to lima to meet our group for our trip!

That night we met our group we have 4 scots, 1 aussie, 3 other brits a german and a hungarian. One of the other brits ended up being a TV presenter of Soccer AM which for those that dont know is a football programe on sky 1 on a saturday morning so it was awesome to find out that he was on our trip for 45 days for his summer break! Whilst we have been on the trip we have been sandboarding and buggying which was awesome, went to see an island which was inhabited by a wide variety of animals including penguins, sea lions, birds as well as many of things, with people going there to harvest the bird poo becasue it is such a good fertilizer. In addition to this we have seen the NASCA lines, went to one of the deepest canyons in the worlds, went to see condors which flew literally meters from us and the best so far the inca trail and machu pichu.

We came back from the inca trail yesterday. All together it lasted 4 days with the first day being an easy 5 hour day quite flat but really hot. The next day we got up knowing that it was going to be the hardest day becasue we had to climb 1250 meters up to an altitude of 4250m and then down 750 meters all in a day. It was very hard going and in all it took us about 7 hours, it was extremely hot during the day but everyone in the group managed it and we were chuffed after we had completed it. It was hard enough for us carrying 5kgs on our backs let alone the porters who were carrying 25kg on there backs as well as packing up camp after we left and then rushing past to set up the nexts night camp and have the food ready for us when we arrived. The thrid day was going to be quite tough as well due to us having to cover 17km although large parts of it were down hill which made it easier. Unfortuantly it was very cloudy which meant we missed out of many of the great views that you usually get but we managed it in about 9 hours having got up at 5am to start trecking and then have breakfast halfway through! The last day was then the easy bit 2 hours treck to Machu Pichu we arrived there the first group from the Inca trail to Machu Pichu beacuse me nath and the aussie ran the last 45 minutes to make sure we got good pics before it got to croweded. It was an amazing site and as a bonus we got to climb up Wanyupichu which is the mountian in the background of Machu Pichu, there are only 400 tickets given out each day and although we werent there early enough to get on (the lazy people getting to train get there about an hour earlier than the treckers) 2 of our group memebers couldnt get on the inca trail because the pases had sold out so one of their friends from there treck had an extra 2 tickets so me and nath snapped them up. The view from the top was amazing and although extremely tiring it was well worth it. The food during the trail was amazing considering where we were most meals we had soup and then chicken and rice and then tea. Altogether we trecked 42 km in 4 days and it was an amazing trip.

I am now a bit ill in Cuzco and nath has slightly loose bowls but we shall survive and the trip was well worth it. The altitude wasnt a problem which we were worried about. Now we have a couple of days to recover before we get a 14 hours bus (it was suposed to be 7 hours but because of some strikes going on we have to do a major detour) to Puno

Hope all is good back home

Lots of love the lots boys xxx