Hello again my avid readers! As you might have realised by this stage, my blog entries are slowly becoming more out of date... The current lag time is almost 2 weeks, but hopefully that won't ruin the story for you :o) So I'm just about to leave La Paz, Bolivia, but here goes for Cusco...

Walking through Cusco was the most unreal experience: while I knew that Peru had long been colonised by the Spaniards, the centre of Cusco could well have been a cute village lifted out of Europe... And oh, the green! It was such a breath of fresh air to be rid (for a while) of the severe dry Arequipan climate. Once again, Cusco features marvellous plazas, but the real draw card here was the balcony-top cafés from which we could loftily watch the plaza bustle whilst sipping hot chocolate.

Cusco is the hip place to be. It is packed to brimming with world class cafés, bars and discos; I have never seen so many arty chill-out spaces in one city before!! And we stayed with a university student during her holidays. So we saw lots of bars :o) It was in these that I fell in love with Cusceña Malta: the local dark beer. I'm a fan of dark beers (I love a Guiness, except in Cusco where it costs more than it does in Adelaide...), and this one was certainly addictive with its smooth fruity undertones. I hope they have it in Australia. And, yes, once again I took to the dance floor in discos that make Adelaide's look tired and dying... This city hits fever pitch in the wee hours of the morning!

And as for the food: in a little town called Pisaq in the nearby Sacred Valley (and with craft markets to die for), can be found a garden café that serves up the tastiest Lomo Saltado to be had. This dish is simply stir fried steak served with rice and chips, but with a South American twist. And here, the meat was perfect: succulent pieces of meat waiting to explode in your mouth with an intensity akin to that found in the rich koftas of the middle east. But for something with deep-rooted South American origins, I had to try alpaca steak and also cuy, a highly nutritive domesticated herbivorous rodent (as described in one museum). Cuy is perhaps better translated as guinea pig, and yes, those cute furry animals certainly are tasty and grow conveniently fast! Finally, it was also in Cusco that we became well and truly addicted to a dark chocolate made in Arequipa. I've never tasted so much depth in chocolate before...

The primary reason most tourists put Cusco on their itinerary is the collection of mountain top Inca ruins that are scattered through the region around this city that was once the centre of the Inca empire. Their buildings have foundations of oddly shaped stone blocks that all lock together like they are from some warped tetris game. And time has proven their puzzle-solving genius: When the occasional earthquake rears its head, it is the Spanish buildings that are brought to their knees and the Inca structures that stand proud. In the sacred valley set slightly North of Cusco, we visited some magnificent Inca ruins. What struck me most were the numerous foundations set into slopes with precipitous drops down into the valley below. The sheer scale of the moutains in the Andes is staggering, yet the Incas were not to be thwarted of a good view...

And after what felt like the most expensive train ride in the world, we descended close to a kilometre from the sacred valley into a rainforest that holds South America's most famous attraction: Machu Picchu. Our early morning trip up to this mysterious lost city took us up the mountain on which the city is perched, and was made all the more mysterious (and disappointing) by the dense fog that clung to the peak. Determined not to let the considerable sums of money spent go to waste, we made our pilgrimage up Huayna Picchu, the peak that presides over the city in all the famous photographs. So in the damp and fog, we made the taxing climb up the track from which numerous unlucky tourists have met an untimely end. And after our heroic climb, we were met with a spectacular view of cloud! But this was all part of the plan, for the blankets of white that coated the hill slowly lifted, revealing Machu Picchu in all its glory as if by magic. A moment I will never forget.

Next up: Lake Titicaca and Tranquillity.