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 reeds which have small communities living on them. The islands are made from binding the reeds together layer on layer and adding new layers as the bottom layers decompose. The photos (when I get them up) pretty much explain it. After that we had a bite to eat and started the overnight trip to Cusco. Cusco is one of the most beautiful cities I've seen in South America thanks to the enourmous amount of tourism that nearby Machu Pichu generates. Although the city looks great, it's also got all the usual problems that come with tourism. You can't walk down a street without a dozen restuarants etc. grabbing you to come in for some food (everyone seems to know the usual annoying English phrases to get tourists attention). There's a number of Incan ruins surrounding Cusco and we spent the first few days exploring a few of those and some local markets. After that we got a few buses to a town with more ruins and a train that takes you up to Machu Pichu. We climbed a few hills and had a look around before getting the train to Agaus Callientes (at the base of Machu Pichu). As expected, everything was EXPENSIVE. The next day we got up at 4am and started the walk up to the ruins (you can get a bus up there, but not before sunrise). After an hour and a half of steep climbing we got there and watched as the sun rose to show up the misty ruins. There was very few people there at that hour (we were the first few people in). The ruins were amazing and even 200 Americans on 'vaccation' couldn't take away the atmosphere of this place during the day (although they did their best). The size of the city is huge and you need at least a day to explore the whole place. The walking is tough in some places and after being the first there and some of the last to leave I had walked over almost all of the city and taken nearly 150 photos. After waking up pretty sore from the last few days it was straight to the hot baths to relax the next morning, before heading back to Cusco. I'm heading to Nazca tommorow afternoon (14 hours on a bus) which has some crazy ruins called the Nazca Lines which I'm told you need to get a flight over to see. I don't have much detail about it yet, but I'll see when I get there. After that it's on to Lima to hopefully confirm my changed flight leaving from Lima instead of Quito, and then off to Spain on the 14th June.