As soon as we got off the bus we had caught from Arequipa (read previous entry) to Tacna, on the Peruvian side of the Peru-Chile border, a taxi driver offered to take us to Arica, Chile. We got there after it was dark, and needed a place to sleep for the night then get a bus the next morning. This caused some controversy, as Will claimed that we should either stay a further night in Arica, due to its status as a fairly interesting city that is used as a sea side ...

Having seen Machu Picchu, we had more or less done everything big that we had planned in South America, and so needed to get down to Santiago for our flight to Sydney by the 9th of April. We left Cuzco on the evening of the 2nd, and arrived in Arequipa the next morning, very early (it was still dark). Arequipa is the launch-off city for Colca Canyon, like the Grand Canyon but also with condors or something, so it seemed like a good idea to go on a 1 or 2 day tour...

The bus from Puno was about 7 hours and we got to Cuzco pretty late. We met up with 4 guys from Emanuel School, South London who were on the same coach as us which was pretty strange especiallly as Will knew one of them. We booked onto a four day tour to Machu Pichu, though will wanted to take the train as he is lazy. So we wasted three days in Cuzco waiting for our tour to start, it was quite fun as we went out with the guys from Emanuel and met lots o...

So, we had arrived at Lake Titicaca from La Paz (read re-write of previous entry) and gone to this very nice looking and cheap (2 pounds 50 a night each) hotel in Copacabana, the name of the town. We went to get some brunch after taking out some money, as Will had lost his card and Pete had none, when we found out that we couldn't get the 100 quid in Pete's account cos there was only one, visa only, ATM in the whole town, so Pete's card didn't wor...

We arrived in Rio on the wednesday after Iguassu, i think. On everyones advice we decided to stay in Ipanema. The poshest and most expensive part of Rio but also the nicest by far. The prices in rio were a bit of a shock after Argentina and so on, and we both felt pretty broke when we left. The first day we spent on Ipanema beach which is the one next to Copacabana, as we were tired after our bus ride from Iguassu. Copacabana is now too crowded and a bit seedy so...