Hello from south america, after the flight from hell from LA to Sal Salvador then onto Lima we booked into a hostel and treid to catch up on some sleep afetr a quick walk around the city and a bite to eat, Lima has a beautiful square plaza in the centre of town with big old buildings surrounding it,this part was very nice the rest of what we saw around lima however was a bit shabby, peru is such a poor country the peolple are broke and live literally a lot of the time in s***!!! Next day we met our group and group leader carmen who we will be spending the next couple of months with so i was on hte look out for potential dickheads in the first group meeting but to be fair we were really lucky and got a really nice group, 16 of us in total us 2 english the always present one token irish and then 13 bloody australians who are all really nice just means theres going to be a lot of mickey taking going on which started instantly, to shut the ozzies up i wore my all blacks shirt the next day just to see how it went down after the initial shock of it to them they settled down and we headed out the next day we had a long bus journey to Pisco on the coast we got there in the afternoon and had a look around town, this place is a sad story there was a massive earthquake here the previous year which killed hundreds of people and the city is still looking like a bomb site, international countries gave millions to help them try and rebuild the place but the peruvian government being as corrupt as it is pocketed the money and left pisco literally in the gutter, they are trying to rebuild it but theres no work or money so they drink a lot and live in shany towns!!! That evening we havd a really nice group dinner and had a little peruvian fella come up and play his panpipes while we were eating it felt very south american now!Next day we visited the ballesteas islands just off the coast of pisco, they call them the peruvian gallapogos, and to be fair ive never seen as much wildlife in then same place all at once before, it was mostly birds, millions of them, so we were advised to wear caps as people quite regularly get s*** on!!! I advised erin that maybe to leave her cap off as the bird poo if it landed on her bulbus head mat act as a sort of fertiliser and create some kind of hair regrowth, she was unlucky tho all poo seemed to avoid her!! The island was full of boobies, now i know what ur thinking its not like mat to take such a keen interest and so many pictures od boobies but these ones are sea birds, there was also penguins cormorants loads of huge pelicans and the main draw were the sea lions, hundreds of them everywhere the male ones were massive we felt like we were in some sort of david attenborough documentry!!! After this we headed by taxi for 2 hours to huacachina in the desert, as u can see in the pictures this place is an oasis town in the middle of complete desert its crazy,we were here to go out onto these huge sandunes but unlike pathetic ols lawrence of arabia and his rubbish cammel we were taking monster sand dune buggy's these things were beasts just pure power, we basically had some nutcase driver speeding us round the dunes for a couple of hours jumping us off the tops of the big ones at full speed and going down sheer drops it was class we all loved it, along the way we stopped off at a few big dunes and tried our hand at sand boarding itslike snow boarding but on hot sand it was a wicked laugh!! Nazca thsat evening, this is the place famous for the nasca lines thought to be made by either the incas or maybe spacemen to be quite honest with you who cares they are pretty rubbish we wernt really interested n them, some people paid extra to fly over them in a manky old peruvian plane and just ended up chucking there guts up for half an hour, we did a tour of an ancient inca cemetery in the afernoon that was pretty cool they were all found 12 years ago still preserved by the dry desert sand, they were buried in cotton baskets in a fetal position and there was also some baby found with there heads missing after they had been sacrificed to the gods, some still had a full head of hair which made erin pretty jealous, i had to hold her back from trying to nick some off one of the incas, he had a sort of elton john style hairpeice and i didnt think it would suit her!! THat night we caught the dredded 10 hour overnight bus to arequipa its a beautiful city all old spanish style buildings lots of shops and restaurants and bars so i reckon tonight we could have a few sherberts, Thats all for now amigo's will update again soon!!