Wow...this seems so long ago now but have not had a chance to catch up on our blog for a week or so....last time we wrote we were just heading to Cusco....

Our journey from Arequipa to Cusco was, to say the least, a complete diaster!! Was supposed to leave Arequipa at 9pm on Wednesday 10th June, to arrive in Cusco the next morning and have Thursday and Friday chilling out before starting our inca tour on the Saturday.

Got to Arequipa bus station....no buses were running to Cusco due to a strike and road blocks between the two cities. So had to re-arrange our bus tickets for the next evening and spend an extra night/day in Arequipa.

Arrived at the bus station Thursday and buses were running fine. Got our bus ok and had been on it for about 9 hours when all traffic stopped (about 150km from Cusco). The road blocks still hadn´t been cleared and we were going to have to wait on the bus for hours until the police supposedly arrived to clear them. So we decided (along with 5 other english speaking people on the bus) to get off and walk!!!

So we trudged along this road with our massive bags at 6am in the morning for about an hour or so, before we eventually managed to hail down a kind of tuctuc vehicle. We persuaded the driver to take one of us and all our big bags to the next town while we carried on walking. Lee however, had marched ahead at this point still with his bag, so we wern´t sure how far ahead he had gone. The rest of the group managed to then hitchhike a ride on an ambulance to the next town, looking out for Lee on the way! We never came across him so presumed he had managed to jump on the tuctuc with the other girl from our group, who had actually gone onto the town after......so in the first town we had to hitchhike another lift to the town after, arrived about 15minutes later, met the girl on the tuctuc.....but no Lee!!!

We had been accompanied by a Peruvian guy the whole time who also needed to get to Cusco, so he very kindly let Jess use his phone to ring Lee to find out where he was! Lee was still in the previous town, and we had somehow missed him when we arrived there, so we gave him the name of the town we were at and 20minutes later Lee arrived with all his bags, on the back of a motorbike!!!

From there we had to walk another half hour or so through the town before eventually finding a minibus which could take a whole big group of us onto Cusco.

We arrived in Cusco eventually at about 2pm....so only about 8hours later than planned!!

Cusco was a lovely city, surrounded by mountains and a bright blue sky! The days were very warm but nights were freezing, especially in our hostel which had corridors that were partly outside!! We stayed Friday night in the hostel, then moved to a lovely hotel (which was included as part of our inca tour). It was nice to have a bit of luxury, if only for a night!! The next day was the start of our inca tour......