Hi Everyone!!!

Sorry its been so long but its been another crazy couple of weeks!!

So heres the update from my end.

We went white water rafting in Cusco in the Sacred Valley, it was amazing!! We did up to a grade 4!! I fell out onto a rock with some great pictures!! And sally fell out and went half way down the river, luckily there were loads of our team in cancoes to save her! That evening we went to our hotel and found out all the details of our Inca Trail.

I won´t bore you with the place names of everywhere we went on the Inca Trail, but I shall sum up :-)

The 1st day we went on a bus tour around the Sacred Valley, we went to 3 different Inca Sites, and learnt all about the difference between inca and pre inca ruins. We visited one which was the shape of a condor and they had actually bothered to place it under whether the condor is in the milky way!! Amazing the amount of effort they went to. So we learnt lots all about Incas and their way of life, and during the whole trip we drank loads of Coca Tea and ate coca leaves for energy like the incas did!!

We stayed in a town and had a nice dinner and met everybody else in our group, we had a range of people all ages and nationalities which was nice :-)

Then the next day we started the trail, it was a nice day and not too hard going, and we finsihed hiking at about 2pm which was nice, it poured with rain but that was all the more fun! We saw loads of ruins, and again learnt alot :-)

The 2nd day was the hard day!! We climbed over 1000m and up hill nearly all day, its one of the hardest things Ive ever done, not physically, but mostly because of the altitude it was just hard to breath!!! We climbed to the top of dead womans pass (it looks like a dead lady when you start going down the otherside!) and then we had a shot of rum and a sublime chocolate bar, and threw rum on the floor to give to mother earth and machu pichu! :-D Then it was downhill all the way to our campsite!

Day 3 was the long day, hiking for about 12 hours, but we saw loads of inca sites this day, in the shape of suns and moons, and loads of farming terraces. We had 2 guides, one at the front and one at the back, we hung out with the guide at the back Victor, he was a legend and told us about loads of old inca stories which is how some of the orchids are named :-) We had another early night and card games in our dinning room tent (complete with dining table and chairs!) The food was amzing it was all carried up by our porters and cooked by our chefs who made omletes and stuff for us!! they were loads of tiny men who ran up the hills carrying 20 kilo bags, we had a go, it was so heavy!!!

Hmmm this is not written in a very good order... sorry its kinda hard to explain.... ask me when I get back!

Day 4! We woke up at 4am, had our last breakfast and got in the queue for machu pichu, it was amazing, it appeared from clouds and it was amazing, it was a huge inca site and looked like all the pictures!! We hiked over to it and looked round and learnt about all the different sections and temples that were there. We were luckily enough to be able to climb wayna Pichu the massive hill next to machu pichu and we got a great arieal view of the whoel site.

We got the train back to cusco and crashed!! It was such an amazing experience, just hard for me to put into words really.. Hopefully I willl be able to put up some pics soon.

The next day we had a lazy day, washed all our disguisting clothes, looked around the main square and did some souvienir shopping and had a night out with some of the people from our trekking group.

The next day was a lazy day again, we found a chill out bar type place where you could watch films and having nice cold drinks. A couple of days were needed to recharge after the inca trail!!

We got a bus to ica that evening, another 17 hour bus jounrey but it went quickly! From Ica we went to Hwakachina (thats not how you spell it) anyways its an oasis in the middle of a desert. We spent 2 days there in an amaizing hostel with a pool surrouded by sanddunes. We went sandboarding twice and it was amazing!! Its like snowboarding but on sanddunes, it was so much fun we got taken out in a buggy and they drove over all the dunes and bumped us around! Sandboarding was fun both lying down on the board and great if you got the hang of going down standing up! It was nice cause if you fell it didnt really hurt. We learnt on some smaller ones then kept going to bigger and bigger, maybe up to 150m kinda hard to tell... Then we drove back in the buggy in the dark and got some great overhead views of the oasis.

Then there was a bit of a problem, Kat jumped in the pool in our hostel, landed on her foot and was unable to walk. We got a bus that night to Arequipa hopeing it may have just been sprained, but the next day it was no better so we called a doctor had an xray and she´d got a fracture in her foot, shes now in a cast for at least the next 4 weeks with crutches :-S But we´re all being helpful and keeping her happy with lots of chocolate and icecream! :-)

Me paul and sally went to colca canyon in arequipa which is actually the worlds biggest canyon (who´d have known???) it was really amazing and we got to see all the condors flying over the canyon. We decided against trekking up and down the canyon, (too many long bus journeys overnight instead of sleeping in hostels was starting to catch up)

We arrived in Puno today desptie some bus troubles all in one peice, tomorrow we´re goping to explore the floating staw islands and other islands in lake titticaca and stay with local families on the isalnds. We have to stay in puno a couple of extra days than we wanted because theres some bus strikes in the area, but it will be nice to have some time to relax before we start volunteering in a week or so!!!

So thats it from me!!

Here´s a couple of random notes that you may or may not know.

1) My phone doesn´t work in south america, I´m not being rude, I´ve had no signal for the whoel time ive been here, so emailing is the only way to contact me

2) if you fancy getting an email every time I write a blog write your email as a comment on this blog and I´ll add you to the list.

ADDIOS!!! xx