Up until now I havent really mentioned much about the group I have been travelling with...or more accurately our tour leader. He was a complete prat (polite version of what I really thought) and our journey to La Paz really topped off the whole episode.We returned from our visit to Lake Titicata to discover that rather than spending the night in Puno we needed to pack our bags and leave immediately for La Paz. Apparently the teachers in Peru had decided a strike ...

Our visit to Lake Titicata started with a day long bus ride to Puno. We had hired some private as there had a few problems over previous days with protests and road blockades. In fact there had been no buses or trains running at all, so we were a little dubious about what lay ahead. But fortunately we got straight through with only one small scare...when our driver got pulled over by the police and then taken away for questioning. But after a exchange of words, a...

After the inca trail a few days relaxation in Cusco was just what I needed...and Cusco was the perfect place to chill out. It is apparently South Americas oldest continuously inhabited city and has a culture very different to modern 20th century life. They city is surrounded by more inca ruin sights, but you really dont need to stumble much further than the beautiful cobbled streets of the city itself to apprecaite the history, tradition and legend.To be fair I w...

So the day had finally arrived, I was about to start the famous inca trail and I was definitely nervous about lied ahead. The four day trek is reknowned for being physically demanding, not so much for the distance (40km), but more for the three demanding high passes you need to conquer, the highest being at 4,200m above sea level.On the first morning we took a bus to the starting point at kilometre 82 where we handed over our belongings to the porters who would c...

There was one final day of training before I started the Inca Trail and that was in the Sacred Valley if the Incas. It's a lush agricutlural area that supplies surrounding towns with most of it's produce. Our first stop was a small village/community reknowned for its womens weaving project. We were talked through the whole process from taking the wool from the roaming llamas in the village, to spinning it onto a loom, then dying it with all sorts of wierd and wo...