We jumped on a train down to Valencia to pick up our little car which we've rented for 4 weeks. It turned out to be a brand new Citroen with CD, A/C etc. The drive down the coast was horrid to begin with as we passed the enourmous developments and tasteless towns that run along the south coast. We're camping most of the time which is not as cheap as you'd expect. The Alhambra at Granada was impressive despite the 42 degree heat (similar to Melbourne right now...

We headed over to Venice for 5 days (officially so Sarah could go to a conference). Firstly, Italy is sooooo expensive. After South America it made me feel a little ill. But Venice is magic and if you can find a corner without 1,000 cruiseboat tourists it is pretty special. It's easy to get lost (which I did and was nearly 2 hours late meeting Sarah) in the 1,000's of cool streets. After living in Melbourne I new what to expect in Italy and nothing is differ...

I finally organised my changed flight from Lima on the morning it left and got a plane to Madrid. Flying was such luxury after all the bus trips and it was great to see a movie in English at last. Sarah was waiting for me at the airport and we got a taxi into Madrid. Driving in and seeing the clean beautiful city while sitting in my clean Mercedes cab (with a sane driver) I realized South America is a long way away. We had 3 days in Madrid before heading to V...

From Cusco I took an overnight bus (14 hours) to Nazca where the mysterious Nazca Lines are. This was (thankfully) my last crossing of the Andes and unlike the Bolivian buses, it stayed just above 0 degrees in the bus. I awoke just before the bus got to Nazca and when I got off was completely overtaken with people pushing hotels etc. This was the worst I've had in SA (although Peru has been pretty bad) and they even decided to follow me to a restaurant for bre...

We got up the morning after all the excitement and got a taxi to the Bolivia/Peru border. Once accross into Peru we got a bus to Puno where the famous floating markets are located. This involved passing through Ilave (now with a new mayor I guess) which proved to be no problem thankfully. Puno is an ugly city so we booked a bus out of there that evening for Cusco. In the afternoon we got a boat out to the floating markets. These are huge islands made of reed...