Our night bus arrived in the town of Puno at 5:30 in the morning and by 6am we were on another bus out of there for the Bolivian town of Copacabana. The view from the bus window of lake Titicaca was fantastic but the sun was really powerful and started to slowly cook us. All along the lake shore were little rural communities and beautiful farms (but it must be hard work in the sun at nearly 4,000 metres). After just over 2 hours we arrived at the tranquil borde...

After our exhausting exploits to Machu Picchu, particularly for me (Katy) we had a day of chilling out on the Sunday before our Spanish lessons began on the Monday. We pretty much did nothing apart from venture out for lunch, dinner and hot chocolate. Spanish lessons began at 8.30 on Monday, for four hours each morning for five days with our individual teachers. My teacher was Renzo who is a similar age to me and was a good teacher. As conversation is my weakest...

We set our alarm clocks for 4:10am with the aim of walking up the hill/cliff to Machu Picchu before the 6am opening. But at 4:10 Katy didn't think she could do it because her cold had given her a sleepless night. So we had an extra 20 minutes in bed and then got up to get in the queue for the bus. Again we felt that we were being ripped off for the return bus ticket - $18 for a total of 60 minutes, when all other hour bus rides in Peru cost $1. We were on the sec...

We left our main bags in Cusco and took our small bags to explore the Sacred Valley over 3 days and 2 nights. We caught a nice short, 45 minute, bus down into the valley (down from 3,300 to 2,700 metres) to the small town of Pisac. We found a good friendly place to stay, left our bags and headed out to explore the town's market. For the size of the town the market is massive but is supported by the coach loads of tours that arrive from Cusco... and us. It's small...

After all our searching for a day bus to Cusco, we were really glad we found one as the scenery on the journey was magnificent. The bus was less luxurious than most in Peru and when they played two of the same movies twice in a row (one literally back to back), we did start to lose patience a bit! We drove through stunning Andean countryside, through mountains and past lakes. On some lakes we even saw flamingos which we really weren't expecting! We also saw more ...