13/6/09 We left everything we wouldn't need for the Inca Trail at the hotel, and left for Ollantaytambo with our duffle bags and daybags at 11.40 am. For the rest of the day until we got to Ollantaytambo we explored the Sacred Valley. We visited a very well preserved Inca site at Pisaq, used as an astronomical site, and stopped at another little village where GAP's charity, Planeterra, have provided jobs for the local men as Inca Trail porters and paid for alpaca...

9/6/09 Today we travelled in a local bus to Cusco. The trip was lot better than the one to La Paz. Locals who couldn't afford to pay for a seat stood in the aisle, and Tanya ended up having a 6 or 7 year old girl on her lap the entire way! She didn't mind, though, and in fact she and some of the others tried to speak to her in Spanish and made her laugh, and had a good time in all. We only stopped once in about 6 hours at a place where there was a toilet and a sm...

6/6/09 We left La Paz early and crossed the border into Peru by Lake Titicaca, having stopped for lunch just before that at the Bolivian village of Copacabana. This is from where the beach at Rio got its name, from a statue of the Virgin Mary which was brought to Rio from Copacabana in the 19th century. Copacabana is famous for its church, which has an incredibly beautiful golden carved shrine to the Virgin inside. Dave and I had a look inside - as well as this s...

4/6/09 Angela had told us the night before that if the strike didn't end in Uyuni like expected the next day, then she would wake us up at 4.30am and we would travel to La Paz by sneaking out in the trucks (some of the others had flights to catch in La Paz later the same day), but if it did end then she would let us sleep in (apart from those people with flights to catch, who would travel out in the early morning whether or not the strike ended), because the buse...

31/05/09 Potosi to Uyuni. The journey took six hours, but I was glued to the window almost the entire time; the scenery was so endlessly diverting that there wasn't a chance of getting bored. A journey of only six hours is a piece of cake for us now in any case, at this stage of our travels! The Bolivian altiplano really is extremely beautiful. We passed by mountain peaks with snow on, narrow sparkling streams, grassy hills, dusty plains, red rocky outcrops, tiny...