Cuzco to Arequipa

Hannah finds potential wedding (or bridesmaid?) dress!

Inti Rami, the festival we were in Cuzco for, was entertaining and very colourful. Various historic scenes were re-enacted, as it was all in Quechua we could only enjoy the music and atmosphere, which was enough for us.

That evening we headed back to Ollantaytambo to take command of our Hostel, Chaska Wasi (House of Stars in Quechua), for the next few days. Bloody hell, what a shock, working that is...if you´re ever thinking of running a hostel, hotel or whatever, don´t your life will end. When we offered our services, the hostel only had us and 2 others in it so we thought it would be a breeze, and had a massive smack in the face when finding out that the coming days would be uberbusy with night 2 being a full house of 40 beds! In the desperation to find space for guests I was even moving beds from room to room (thanks Phillipe). Hannah was mainly on bed making duty, luckily the sheets were so thin they dried in half an hour as there weren´t spares laying around, and I was on toilet cleaning duties, nice. As we were close to the train station for Machupichu we would have to let people out at 5am for the first train departure and stay awake till the 11pm last train arrival. On top of that we had Trevor the dog (see pic of him licking his balls behind H´s back) who I taught to sing, Chaska the cat (who was subjected to wearing a bright orange and green jacket) who would make a right racket when she was hungry and 5 Guinea pigs one of which lived under the kitchen cupboards (apparently they were too old to eat). We did do a good juice for breakfast though, the best being orange, papaya and banana, and even offered brown bread.
I´m now looking forward to another 9 months off work.

As you can image we were very pleased when Katty the hostel owner returned home (with a copy of the Telegraph and a tin of quality street), and were able to enjoy Ollanta Rami, another festival much like the one in Cuzco, but had to run home half way though to watch Spain win the Eurocopa. That evening we had a BBQ and played frogger, which the Ozzies´ won having been the only ones to actually get the golden coins in the frog´s gob.

Back in Cuzco, we visited the Inca museum which had displays of the tools used to create the massive structures we´ve been visiting.

And a selection of weapons, which were atached to sticks, seems they were the orignal creators of the french tickler.

In the evening we met up for a meal with the Australians who'd been staying at the hostel. Thinking about it all the guests we had were sound. Then we headed for our bus to Arequipa, I´ve included a pic here so you can get an idea of the standard of buses if you look carefully you we see the leg rests which fold out and later we were given blankets and they popped a movie on with English subtitles, having just eaten I had to eat Hannah's spaghetti dish as well as my own, not bad for $12.

After a day in Arequipa getting our camping supplies together we made our way to the Colca Canyon, apparently twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and whilst the views were great I doubt it´s quite as impressive. After a night in Cabanaconde we headed off on a 3 day hike.

Day 1 walk down 1200m to the Canyon floor, get blisters everywhere and fall over on slippy dusty marbles, alot. (the lines in the middle pic are from the pre inca terracing)

Day 2 wake up to find that we were sharing our tent with a posionous scorpion , and head down the canyon to the Oasis to cool down in the ice cool pools, note sharing of camping ground with not so friendly Alpaca.

Day 3 hike back up before the sun gets too hot, this pics doesn´t really do justice to how hard it was , and to add injury to insult a peruvian guy comes the other way carrying a matress on his head. My shoes are now even offensive to myself, I still haven´t washed my hair though.

Back Arequipa, and a set lunch for $6 consisting of soup, alpaca steak cooked on hot rock, and fruit salad. This isn´t the cheapest we´ve had yet, Cuzco takes that title at $2.

See you in Nazca, where Indihannah and I will be mostly grave digging.