Well after leaving San Pedro its been a bit hit and miss really including some very long and uncomfortable bus journeys!

Our first stop was the city of Iquique in Chile, in our guide book it said Iquique was gunning to be Chile´s best beach resort and including activities such as handgliding and surfing, when we arrived we were sorely disapointed, the place was run down with not much going on, it was busy and seemed quite dangerous so we chilled out in our hostel for the evening which was pretty cool as it right by the Cathedral. The following day we hoped to check out the surfing so we walked for about an hour to the beach and again to our disapointment the water was covered in pollution theres no way we were surfing in that! Not many other people were either. We spent the rest of the day walking around the not very impressive city, the best bit however was a a street called Baquedano which had wooden pavements and a nice little market where the locals were selling crazy stuff like pipes made out of bones and stuff like that. We spent one more night there then got on the bus to Arica which is where we would cross the border into Peru!

Arica was pretty similar to Iquique unfortunately but we were only there for one night, we booked our train ticket to Peru which was for eight o´clock in the morning. We awoke after a good sleep ready for our journey to Peru which was only a couple of hours. We went to the station to find the train had been cancelled! We had to make our way to the bus station, this was an experience, as soon as we arrived loads of taxi drivers charged towards us to offer to take us over the border, we eventually fought through the crowd and got on an old ricketey bus that was a lot cheaper, this was proper travelling! The border was interesting too, as I didn´t have the right slip the guy had to call up imigration and everything; we got over eventually. We arrived in a place called Tacna just over the border. This was the start of our journey of death!

We asked at a bus company and they said there was a bus at seven this evening, so we booked on. For the follwong 8 hours we just had to pass time in the city until our bus was set to leave. This was ok, we sampled some crazy Peruvian food called Ceviche, which is raw fish mixed with onions, some sweet potatoes and sweetcorn! We didn´t know it was raw fish when we ordered it, but it was good, although we were slightly aprehensive about how our bellies would take it espeically as we were just about to embark on a 20 hour bus journey!

It turned out our bellies were just fine! We got on our bus and lets just say the buses in Chile and far, far, far superior. We had no legroom the seats didn´t recline much and we had to sit in this position for twenty hours. The Peruvians thought it was a good idea to bring all their Worldly goods with them so the bus was crammed full. The guy opposite me brought bin bags full of what can only be described as stale bread and attempted to sell them to people on board! Then we had some guy get up and make a really long speach in Spanish and then tried to sell sweets to us, no thanks mate! This was going to be hell! And it was, the bus stopped every ten minutes for ages, it didnt have a working toilet on board so people just got out and did their business at the side of the road, I got no sleep, felt ill, and didn´t have enough water and they didn´t stop for food! It felt like we´d never got there but eventually we did! Twenty hours later! We got off in cusco and a driver took us to our hostel, we were absolutely knackered so freshened up, had some food and water then went to bed for 15 hours!

I feel a lot better now and the Inca trail starts in 4 days, can´t wait!