Make yourselves comfortable, this may take some time

As long as I can bear this keyboard, I am in a very basic internet cafe in Cusco, Peru, and most of the keys are so worn I can't see alot of the letters, I'm going to make a valiant effort to recall our adventures since Santiago (and maybe some flashbacks from before). So it may be a long blog today - hope you don't mind.

A quick aside - if in Buenos Aires visit the "Casa de Empanadas" on Hipolyte Yrigoyen - it's only open during the day, but does every variety of empanada you could hope for and you order in quantity!

So, we left a slightly damp Santiago and headed down to the bus station to hop on the bus to Arica on the Chile-Peru border. The bus trip itself was fairly uneventful, 30 hours of strange 'in-flight' food (cold chicken & rice, bread rolls, biscuits, tepid beef with rice etc) videos, mainly in Spanish, but it's surprising how little of the dialogue you actually have to understand when you are watching most of them, horrible music (eg the Grease soundtrack) and dodgy heavy metal blokes taking our photos with their phone cameras - doubtless they wanted to send my death stare to their pals. Some of the videos were of Chilean comedy, no doubt very amusing, but if it was anything like the sketch of the man who had to take all his clothes off to get a picture on his new tv, maybe it wasn´t. Anyway, we arrived in Arica at about 2pm and headed off to the hostel we had emailed to reserve a room. This was pleasant enough little place run by a French-Chilean couple quite near the centre of town, who cheerfully told us that they had no rooms available because there was a conference on. In fact there were no rooms available anywhere in Arica. I guess we must have looked a little distraught because they took pity on us and let us stay in one of their 'spare' rooms. We celebrated by going out and scoffing ice-cream, pizza, beer & pisco sours (local brew combined with lemon juice & sugar), suffice to say we both were a little merry - on our return to the hotel Jo cheerfully announced her pisco consumption to the hoteliers and they were most concerned for her welfare the next morning!

We left Arica and headed across the border to Tacna, having been sold a ticket that would take us to Arequipa and then onto Cusco, and got on yet another bus. This time we had movies, snacks & on bus bingo (?!?!). Of course we arrived in Arequipa a little late, 2 hours over schedule, but that left us 30 minutes before our bus to Cusco. Or so we thought...Turns out we, along with 12 other passengers, had been told there was no bus to Cusco because the road was closed, or that was the story the man from the bus company was sticking to. After much argument he gave us all our money back and we booked ourselves on a different bus that was leaving for Cusco at 8.45am the next morning, which would get us there in time for the Inca festival of Inti Raymi. This meant we all spent the night in the hostel that was built into the bus station. I´ll keep it brief - no hot water, station announcements starting at 6am, and windows that looked over the ticket desks...and to make it worse they played 'Lady in Red´twice in a row - once in English & then in Spanish! Thanks.

But we made it onto the Cusco bus. Jo & I had seats that seemed to have some kind of suspension system that involved them being not quite attached to the floor, not that anyone else had. We then discovered that the reason our previous bus had been cancelled was because the main road to Cusco had been blocked (literally, with big rocks) by local strikers, so we took the 'other' road. This consisted of 8 hours on a dirt road full of potholes, and was possibly one of the most bone-shaking experiences of my life. Let´s hope it works like one of those slendertone machines eh? We were also sitting behind a Peruvian American family whose kids didn´t stop whining the whole way, had a dad who insisted on waving at everyone we went past (they generally stared at him like he was a bit simple), and, when he took off his baseball cap, gave us a close up of his scabby sunburnt baldy head. And I developed a cracker of a headache thanks to the altitude, constant jiggling and diesel fumes. At least I didn´t barf like one of our fellow strandees, Sven, but that may have been caused by him sitting next to one of the annoying kids. We saw him this morning and he seems alot better. Oh and the on board loo turned into something like "The Perfect Storm" on the bumpy road, providing a serious risk of a backwash bidet if you were fool enough to use it. It really was a test of the thigh muscles!

Finally reached Cusco at 9pm last night, found our hostel (who have accidentally given us a big room with double bed as they thought I was going to be a bloke - don't even bother with the obvious jokes), had some coca tea & crashed out. This morning it was up & at 'em for Inti Raymi, a huge festival of dancers etc pretending to be Incas, which starts in the main square & then heads up to the nearby Inca ruins (apparently pronounced "sexywoman", I kid you not) where they do much of the same except they also light some fires and sacrifice a llama (guess what they´ll be having for tea tonight? BBq´d llama anyone?). The place was absolutely heaving and we stood on some stone steps for free rather than cough up the US$120 they wanted for a crappy plastic seat. This also meant we got to leave when we´d had enough of their llama frolicking and head back into town for tea & a piece of lemon pie (which tasted strangely of seafood). So the rest of tonight will be spent having a decent meal, dealing with our pink sunburnt faces and drinking more coca tea to get rid of the headaches.

But I´d still rather be here than at work! Ho ho ho!

Hope you are all okay, and you in the UK are enjoying the sunny weather. Thank you for all the emails!

S & J