Peru and Machu Picchu

I told the owner of this dog that maybe putting it in a cardboard box and then stuffing it in the luggage compartment was probably not the safest way to transport the animal. They listened! So they took the dog onto the bus. and it proceeded to wee all over a group a travellers hand luggage. They weren't so impressed with it all and with hindsight maybe the fluffy cute little thing would have been better off suffocating above the engine, rammed in with everyone's rucksac.

In Cusco they put wigs on the statues of saints. Which I liked.

Rather extraordinarily they put a firework show on for our arrival. I can see no reason why this wouldn't be the case. Whispers of it being Easter I disregarded as mere rumour.

This statue of a donkey playing football was outside the National College of Science.

I'd like to tell a good story about this but I cant, I took it by accident when showing a mate my camera. I was slightly surprised to have caught such an expression up on reviewing my files.

On the way to the train to Machu Picchu at a rather remote petrol station.

You get on this train yer, the only train to Machu Picchu, on the only line up there, and there is an announcement in about 35 languages thanking you for choosing Peru Rail.

Okay, so apologies for the below seeing as a great many people have been there, there are some excellent excellent photographers who have stalked the hills taking wonderfully professional photos, scribes with more poetry than bones have cast forth verse to the glory of the place, books, documentaries, every tourist shop in Peru bangs on about it but Machu Picchu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu) took me by surprise. I thought it would be massively overrated tourist trap, but they've done a really good job. It's pristine, clean, nobody tries to sell you anything in there (although expensive to enter). It's truly is amazing and worth the hype that surrounds it. The way the clouds part from morning time to reveal the deeply historical cradle of pre-European south American civilisation is a joy to behol... blah blah poeticcrap blah. It's shit hot, basically.

The steps were at the top of Wayna Picchu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huayna_Picchu, which we had to leg it up to get into as they only let the first 400 people on the site a day enter this part), and below them there was something like a 1000m drop. There were no guide ropes, there were no people saying stay away or even be careful. You could just clamber all over the place. I'm surprised no-one dies

Stalker zoom!

Really bloody steep.

and yer, that might look like the worst sunburn ever, but actually it was because of the light in the cafe.

And what type of crazy fule likes white water rafting? Don't even know if you can raft down this but I bloody well wouldn't.