Downhill mountain biking We won a raffle at a pub quiz whilst we were doing our volunteer work and the prize was to have one free day with the adventure agency, Galaxia Expeditions. We visited their office and decided we would do a free day of downhill mountain biking. We arrived at 9am and slowly but surely were decked out with elbow and knee pads and a helmet each. Next our bikes were loaded into the back and onto the roof of a taxi and Andrew, myself and th...

Day three, down the valley After we went to bed, Sarah had trouble getting warm inside her sleeping bag, fleece liner and silk liner. After a while she wakes me up to see if I'm cold. We are at 4250m sleeping in a tent, and it's below zero outside before windchill. I'm not and after a while she came to the conclusion my sleeping bag is better. We swap, and i got out of a hot sleeping bag to jump in a really cold sleeping bag. Therefore it was not doing any heati...

Day two, up through the pass We set off for the hardest day of the trek, 6 hours and just under 900m up. It was a climb from 3870m to 4750m and back down to 4250 to camp. It was up then gentle up, up then gentle up, up then.... you get the point. Just incase you don't remember, altitude starts affecting you over 3000m. We set off and like yesterday it was a reasonably slow pace. We walked over a makeshift fence designed to stop the donkeys from walking home in...

Day one We were picked up outside Churrup hostel just after 6:30am and after a couple more stops around town we we were on our way into the mountains to start the 4 day Santa Cruz trek with Quehuandes. Our group consisted of 8 hikers; Andrew and I, Dave (UK) and Jana (Germany), Frank and Frank (France) and Tony and Natalie (Germany). We also had our guide, Carlos, and our cook, Pancha. We drove out of Huaraz towards the town of Yungay. After a couple of hours ...

Our last day at school We picked up all our items for school and headed off with a big 'to do' list. Helped in the kitchen with apples and ripping up bread (for a Peruvian dish ajo de gallena), big poster for our fair well, games, kiss a doll somewhere different, balloon around the circle, first two out played statues, then two more rounds with 2 pairs of dancing, Clarita was cheating by using the reflection from her screen to stop the music, both times Sarah a...