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This is a summary of Peru so far.
Breakfast in the hotel leaves a bit to be desired but when it´s free and the fruit is fresh you can´t really complain. The hotel is lovely and has some great views but Matthew is pretty sure that walking up and down all those scary steps is going to force his heart to give up.
We went around the shops for a day or two just buying alpaca stuff to keep us warm in the hotel and when we head up Machu Picchu. Hats, gloves, jumpers and socks were all on the list and Lisa has been looking at some trousers but decided not to buy them so far. We´re getting quite good at bargaining with the vendors but because everything is so much cheaper it´s hard to know how much is a fair amount. We´ve kind of guilty about some things but not really when we get ripped off somewhere else.
We went horse riding yesterday which was an adventure because Lisa is terrified of horses and Matthew of heights so when you´re on horseback going down what is essentially a mountain things don´t look too good. We saw the Inkan ruins at Q´enqo where they performed human sacrifice. We went to Tambomachay which is a well preserved military structure of some kind. Pukapukara which we´re not entirely sure about and Saqsayhuaman which is pronounced ´Sexy Woman´. The ruins were incredible and the fact that they´re so well preserved is amazing.
We booked a tour around the Sacred Valley for tomorrow which should be exciting because it´s a lot of stuff we both really want to see with an included lunch woo. Today we also booked a trip into the jungle for a few days instead of the inca trail. We had been deliberating for months whether the company we had booked the inca trail through was dodgy or not, the guy who we booked it through had asked us to show up a ´meeting place´ with the money and we had´t found evidence that the tour company existed by asking people in cusco or on the internet. It has worked out for the best as Matthew is suffering quite a bit with the altitude and the jungle trip sounds brilliant. It involves a flight and then hiking and boat trips to places such as monkey island. The minimum temperature is 27 degrees, the maximum 40 which will be difficult but we are really looking forward to it.
In the afternoon we had lunch and managed to buy coke off a person with no eyes and a bracelet off a little girl with boils up and down her arms. We had to get money exchanged and were given a 100 dollar note which was ever so slightly ripped. Apparently this decreases the value by about 30 percent in Peru so we had to go back later and get it swapped. We were prepared for a fight which made it disapointing when the woman just handed over another note.
We plan to head now to tnt to get a load of stuff posted home. Don´t have any more plans for the day, for the past few nights we have had a fire lit in our room and ordered tea up as room service which was nice. Because of the festival music can be heard from the main square which is a 10 minute walk away. A few nights ago we thought it was the people in the room above us with their music on and Matthew was half way up the stairs to complain before we realised.
Talk soon
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