19. And so to bed.

Why on earth did we ever think a tourist bus would be a good idea?

Well there is a reason. We wanted to see more of Peru than the fleeting glimpse we so far had, but didn’t really have the time. Replacing the 5 hour bus journey from Cuzco back to Puno with the 10-hour tourist version seemed sensible enough at the time.

This was indeed the same bus we tried to take in the opposite direction, back when we got robbed a few blog entries ago. That warning should have put us in our places really.

Tour guides suck. Who wants to shuffle around in a group of idiots whilst some bored guide rattles off little speeches? We ended up abandoning our group and exploring the various stops by ourselves. We saw some interesting ruins and structures, but didn’t really know what they were. Can’t win them all, I guess.

The most interesting stop was in a little town that must have survived off the money the tourists on the bus spent there. Mud brick houses lined the streets where children begged. One child sat with one hand stretched out and the other ravaged by gangrene. He had lost 3 fingers, and the terrible curse was chewing eagerly at the rest of his hand. We felt awful and shovelled money into his palm.

The next stop was a funny farm, where scores of morbidly obese guinea pigs made the curiously ridiculous noises that guinea pigs make. We made friends with two cats in a massive jar, and a tiny black puppy.

Those two questionable experiences were the highlight of the tour. Apart from Laura vomiting, but she didn’t think that was funny.

We thought we had our timing right for making it back to Rio smoothly, but Laura’s illness went from bad to worse and we were holed up in Puno, of all places, for a few days. Puno isn’t fantastic.

When we realised that we had 10 days to travel some 2,000 miles, we got a taxi from Puno to the Bolivian border, and a bus to La Paz. There we booked a last minute flight to Santa Cruz and hurried straight on to Corumbá.

Corumbá was having a tough time. There had been an illegal forest fire across the river raging for 5 days. The smoky cloud cover was trapping in the heat both from the sun and the fire itself. The air was sweltering, well into the 40s, and the air was thick with flying ash. Where visible, the sky was a dark orange, the sun a ball of vivid blood red.

We arrived on a Sunday and couldn’t find a way out of town. We were forced to wait overnight, and consoled ourselves with mountains of ice-cream. As we sat in the cool shop, a hummingbird buzzed by, investigating each table in turn.

We got a little bit overwhelmed by the prospect of a 36-hour bus journey to Rio, and instead decided to fly back. A budgetary error to be sure, but it gave us a few extra days of relaxation at the other end so we bit the bullet and went for it.

We landed in Sao Paulo. The airport was on the outskirts of the city and we arrived at night. We didn’t have the energy to find out way in to town so aimed for the hotels on the other side of the street.

The first hotel we tried didn’t understand what we wanted. We staggered out and tried the next place.

We pulled ourselves up the stairs to reception, and were greeted by three old ladies with pupils like black holes. They staggered and giggled as I tried to communicate. Laura tugged on my arm and pointed to a sign which read “1 hour: 10R” This was not the place for us.

Desperate, we continued down the street, seeing only the luxury ibis hotel, or some other similar chain. We got something to eat and were met by the ladies from the last ‘hotel’ again. They blurred some words in our direction before we convinced them that we would be back to their place asap.

A skinny man was making a fuss outside the door of the fast-food place we were in and we watched to see what his problem was. He muttered in a rapid voice, pacing backwards and forwards. He turned sharply on his heel and thrust his t-shirt over his head and off his body. He paced around a few times before putting it back on just as viciously. We watched for a couple of minutes before we decided that we were going to stay in the ibis regardless of what it cost us, and were going there right now before anything else started happening.

In the end it was ‘only’ £30 for the both of us, and the hot shower was worth the money alone. Neither of us could remember the last hot shower we had had, at least not one that lasted long enough to both lather us and wash the soap off.

We had ten showers and slept for ten hours.

We couldn’t be bothered to give Sao Paolo a fair trail, and headed out first thing the next morning for Paraty.

As luck would have it we arrived during a thunderstorm. We found a bed for the night, but the rain continued unabated all the next day. Checking the weather online we saw a two-day gap of good weather, and decided to spend it on the nearby Illha Grande.

Illha Grande is beautiful. It is faultless Brazil. We spent our days there on the beach and in the sea. I hired a kayak and paddled out to a nearby island. I explored the dense jungle for a good while before the possible dangers occurred to me. Snakes and biting things. Storm clouds started to droop and spill into the valley nearby so I jumped back in my kayak, after rescuing it from the sea, and put a coconut I had found in between my legs as a souvenir. The water was a lot rougher on the way back, but I was doing fine until I felt a pain in my thigh. Ow. More pain. The pain started to spread to my private areas. I paddled as fast as I could to the shore and jumped out. Ants! The coconut was full of biting ants! I soaked the affected area in the sea whilst cursing all living things and tempting looking large nuts. Damnit!

Another day we hiked to a beautiful stretch of beach. We had hired a body board and took it out for a spin. After battling some big waves for fun, one taught us a lesson. The body board string snapped. Composing myself I saw Laura with panic on her face. “Look how far out we are!” she screeched. She wasn’t joking, we were a long way out, and had no float.
“Well, OK, let’s...”
Laura rudely interrupted with a piercing scream.
“What’s the problem?”
“WE’RE GOING TO DIE WHY IS NOBODY HELPING???”
Being the hero that I am I tucked the screaming woman under my arms and bravely one-arm crawled to shore. It took a good fifteen minutes, and Laura has never been the same since. There may be a lesson to be learned there… something to do with not panicking because it’s a pain in the arse.

From Illha Grande we made it back to Rio and spent a day or two on Copacabana beach, staying with Robby again. And that was it, that was our adventure. We flew home and went back to university.


Since then we have been on a number of small trips to various European countries, including six weeks in Spain. Travelling continues to be a learning experience like to other, and an unrivalled personality-building adventure.
The rest of our adventures will eventually find their way on to this blog. But for now I must stop typing. The rushed nature of the last few entries reflects my current time constraints. In 8 hours we will both be on a train to the airport, where we will fly to Kuala Lumpur. There starts 5 months of exploration and excitement. After that starts a 12-month contract teaching in Japan. More stories are on the way, stay tuned!

18. Cuzco.

The train back to Cuzco was unbearably hot. Whether it was the midday heat or the ventilation of the train we weren’t sure; but we sat in our private little puddles for the entire journey. The German teenager whom we had seen in various places on our trip, including Foz, La Paz and Machu Picchu, lay squirming and apparently hallucinating into his mother’s lap a few seats down. Serves him right for being so odd.

I saw the same child with his face pressed up against a ‘prayer rock’ at Machu Picchu, eyes closed, arms flat against the stone like some kind of anime soothsayer. Don’t you just hate people like that? I knew a guy at university who insisted on walking around town barefoot and painted flowers and trees on his face. Nice idea, until your house is full of muddy footprints and pot-smoking dropouts, and your verrucas have shards of glass stuck in them. He also invented his own religion involving the interconnecting paths of objects and people. Why?

Back in Cuzco we had a think about our options for the remainder of our holiday. Cuzco is full of Incan ruins and Laura loves horses, so we logically decided to do the horseback trek of the Cuzco Incan ruins. I liked the idea of white-water rafting, so we signed up for that too. Two more days in Peru couldn’t put too much of a spanner in the works, we thought.

The meeting point/ranch was great. Makeshift walls made from old doors and wood contained a paddy, and chicken-coop fashioned from an old bus.

The horse riding was slightly disappointing. In the Pantanal we had galloped along on horseback having the time of our lives. But in this instance we sat atop overweight old horses with no passion for carrying tourists around local roads.

The ruins themselves were impressive, even after the sights of Aguas Calientes. We were taken to four sites. Three Incan and one Wari. The Wari place was something of a tamed stream, labelled as an Incan bath. It was still being excavated but was a curiosity in its fountain-like construction. A crowd of Peruvian children sat laughing and playing in colourful outfits, but there was little else to maintain a crowd. It was a shame, but our guide had no English, so our understanding of what he was showing us was mainly random words and body language.

The second was a large Incan fort, though the remains were not substantial. Llamas roamed free which is always a good laugh. Funny animals.

The third was a fascinating temple carved into the rock. The inside must have been used as some kind of worship or sacrificial site, and featured various sacred shapes carved into the stone and doorways. A hole in the roof allowed the passage of the light of the full moon to illuminate a particular spot, and another allowed the sun to do something similar.

I found myself thinking how much of a pain in the arse all the pomp and ceremony must have been. Getting out to the temple in the cold night, getting all your worshippers or slaves together and waiting for the moonlight to shine through just right. Keeping the people well behaved and putting up with bad weather. Forget that.

Then I fell off my horse, much to the amusement of Laura and our guide. Whatever. I only fell a little bit. I was trying to get off and got tangled up in one of my stirrups. To me just one in a line of slightly embarrassing incidents; to Laura one of the greatest things that has ever happened, which must constantly be relived to all willing to listen. Women.

Moving on, one of the great things about photography in hot countries is the illumination of the sun. The light is so even and intense that even silly objects look impressively fluid and complete. Even the worst photographer comes away with great pictures. It was something of a surprise to find a film-crew at the forth site, and even more so to see their elaborate light reflecting shields positioned all around.




It seemed they were filming an advertisement of some kind, featuring a young boy in casual clothes, a very young girl in traditional clothes, a cholita and a llama. There’s always a llama.

The site was Sacsayhuamàn, an immensely large series of walls with no obvious use. Some say fort, some say decoration – viewed from above, the city of Cuzco forms the shape of a puma (a sacred animal to the Incas) and Sacsayhuamàn creates the head. Whatever its purpose the stonework was exemplary. I get sick of people banging on about stones with X number of sides fitting together perfectly, but this site was something else. Massive blocks sat amongst massive blocks amongst massive blocks. There were thousands of them. Apparently 80% had been removed to build houses in the town, which made the whole thing vicariously more impressive somehow.







Opposite the walls was a huge mound of volcanic rock. I scrambled to the top, leaving a rather poorly and sun-stricken Laura by the toilets. The panorama of Cuzco in the distance, and the walls stretching across my whole field of vision was an exemplary image of Peruvian Incas.

I sat thinking about leaving this fascinating country, and indeed continent, behind.



Goodbyes are rubbish. No matter how many new friends we make and depart from on our travels, it’s still horrible to have to make that break from the short-term bond. Travelling is the worst occupation for people who dislike goodbyes.

During the last couple of months of writing up this series of blogs we have lost two members of our immediate family. When that happens one inevitably ends up thinking that so much more time should have been devoted to that person. So many emotions should have been verbalised and problems wrung out. But life doesn’t give allowances for all that you want. Life doesn’t make oneself and situation as easy as that. There’s a spanner to be thrown into everything.

One of the big emotional problems we face is the balance of our own desires for freedom and independence, and our family ties. We both love our families, as we should, but I like to think that if they love us as much as we love them, they want us to sacrifice part of our relationship with them to explore the world on our own – to work through our own experiences.

But that doesn’t stop the guilt. It doesn’t stop the nagging feeling every now and again that we’re doing something wrong, and should be into a life-long routine by now.

But a routine doesn’t work for me. It never has and the idea of it brings down a cloud of depression. To be predictable, to be tied to the tracks waiting for the train, is to say goodbye to oneself.

I like to think that it is through our own individuality that we honour our families. We stand up for what we want, and we do what we set out to do. Hooray for us!

I drifted down from my lofty plain and clambered back down the rocky hill to my ill girlfriend.

The guide had taken his horses and gone home, and the annoying American girl whom had been with on the tour and not known the difference between a sheep and a llama had buggered off somewhere. We walked back to find some energy food.

The rafting the next day was a blast. Most of the trip downstream was pretty tame, but the rapids at the end were worth all the previous effort. We bounced around madly, giggling and dripping wet. At the end another British guy and I splashed about a bit in the stream before jumping off a nearby bridge. “Is it safe?” asked The Guy whose name I forget.
“Si, yes”
“OK” Splash. “Ahh! Dom. Watch out there are sharp rocks, watch your back.”
Drama queen. I recklessly jumped and victoriously survived unscathed. The Guy’s back bled and I felt, not for the first time this trip, that I really should be more careful sometimes.

The biting cold air sliced at our skin as we changed out of our wetsuits and lifejackets, and we sat around violated as we munched our crappy ham and cheese rolls.

We really wanted the company pictures from the trip, but we missed the office opening times. We gave our tour agent a bunch of money to get the CD of images and send it to us in the vague hope that he would. His hungry bulging eyes looked down at the cash in his hands. Our hunch proved correct, and we never got the disc. Curses!

17. Machu Picchu.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Machu Picchu is in Cuzco. Much travel literature and writing makes out that it is. In fact, the ruins are a considerable walk from a village called Aguas Calientes, itself a good few hours by train from Cuzco.

When a hostal is in the guide book, the prices reflect the fame. So-called Gringo Bob’s featured even in the 11 year out-dated guidebook we bought to replace the one we had stolen. It was $40 a night, whilst literally just around the corner we found a place for less than half that for the both of us. After Bolivia, even that seemed like an incredible amount to pay for a room.

The following day was to be our Machu Picchu day, as we wanted to climb up the beautiful mountain trail that led there and see the site in the morning mist. Our bones creaked as we wandered around town, playing with local dogs and avoid the overly commercialised hot-springs. A huge and charming market operated seemingly 24 hours near the train station, and we spent our money on pretty trinkets and materials.

The morning after we awoke at 4am and set off on the hike to the ruins. The exhausting walk lasted some 3-4 hours, and was littered with human faeces. Not ideal. We left in pitch-black, barely navigating our way through the town and to the bottom of the mountain, but it was worth it. The walk gave sumptuous views over nearby mountains during sunrise.

Other backpackers stormed past us as we stumbled in a mixture of awe and physical anguish. We had tried so hard to do so much in the past two months that our bodies were literally destroying themselves. We must have walked 8-10 hours per day, every day, and we were near breaking point.

But when we reached the top, paid the fee and climbed to the Watchman’s Hut, we turned around and caught a glimpse of the grey roofless village below, through the mist. We said nothing, and sat for an hour or more watching the mist push through the ruins. Perfectly preserved buildings and temples tentatively poked out from the clouds and then stood bravely in front of us. The view slowly cleared and then all the structure were visible, and the postcard mountain of Huayna Picchu stood behind solemnly shadowing the deserted town.

It was a view we had seen many times in print, but to be there, and then to descent into the midst of the ruins themselves was extraordinary. The seamless stonework and precarious situ almost defied belief. The end of a path and corridor of houses would lead to a sharp drop and curiously thin path leading downwards to some place of worship.




The scale was the most impressive thing. The tiny little Incan people who made the city must have been governed by some awe-inspiring ideas and ball-breaking confidence. And that it remained in such good and complete condition after all this time was a miracle. We had fantastic visions of being the explorer who rediscovered the ruins one day, completely overgrown. What a terrific day that must have been.



Comic relief was provided by llamas; poking out from unexpected places with their ridiculous features and staring unflinchingly in our direction, before sauntering off across the ruins to be photographed by someone else.



We spent all day exploring the site, and still didn’t have enough time to climb Huayna Picchu or do any of the short treks of the area. We should have gone back the next day, but again our time budget was running out, as well as our money.

It seems a shame to condense such a stupendous experience into such a short blog, but we leave for Malaysia tomorrow. To have any chance of finishing this series of blogs, we must move swiftly on.

16. Puno and the Thief.

With time not on our side we decided to take a tour bus to Cuzco. The idea behind the bus is to take large groups of tourists to a destination, with several stops along the way at sites of note. The advertisements boasted all kinds of Incan and pre-Incan ruins that it was otherwise difficult and/or time consuming to get to.

We knew it was a bad idea from the start.

We were directed by our tour agent to wait for the bus at 6.30am the following day, ‘near a market’. She said it would be easy to find, but in the end we didn’t find it until it was too late. We wandered around for a while before sitting down to stare hard at our map.

As we did so, a Scandinavian couple turned up with a duckling. Where they got such a thing and for what purpose was a mystery. They sat down next to us and played with it whilst we became more and more stressed about our tour.

During our head-scratching, a couple of people approached us. The first forced a business card for a hostel in Bolivia into our hands despite our polite refusal. The next enthusiastically asked the time, grabbing my hand to examine my watch after apparently not understanding me.

When we got up and decided to move on, we discovered that one of our day bags was missing. We had two. One had documents we would need on the bus such as passports, our camera and other important things; and the other had my iPod, our guidebook, a handbag Laura had just bought the day before and a pair of gloves. Luckily, the missing one was the latter.

One or both distractions must have had something to do with the theft. We really should have been more careful, but had to thank our lucky stars that we hadn’t lost anything of much importance (though Laura is adamant that her handbag was important). Money belts are a good idea and all the important stuff should really be in there, but they’re so uncomfortable, especially in boiling heat. From then on passports etc were strapped tightly to my groin at all times, regardless.

The day of tacky tourism turned out to be a day in the police station filing a report for our insurance company. And things had gone so smoothly so far. Still, we were incredibly fortunate not to have lost our passports. Sorting that out would have been an arduous process.

Somehow I managed to fall over in front of a policeman, which Laura thought, and still does, was the funniest thing ever. Peruvian drop-curbs are very smooth, you see. My sandals had very little grip on them, and the combination of the two elements led to apparent hilarity. The armed officer did his best to keep his stoic straightness, but made some odd sounds and let his mouth twitch all the same. Why does this stuff always happen to me? I have so many tales of falling over motorway barriers, or off horses or cutting my foot open on old tent pegs, yet Laura manages to escape with only the pain of uncontrollable laughter.

We still got to Cuzco, but on a regular bus leaving that evening.