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After the amazing trek we take a combi van down a hellish road that climbs to a pass at over 5000 metres and then descents a verticle cliff face on about 36 switchbacks, you look out of the van window and can´t see the road underneath you just a vertical drop... pounding reggaeton and coca leaves keeping the driver awake on the 4 hour descent.. scary stuff.
Then we travelled south through Peru to get to Lima. Peru is a beautiful country. a lot of it seems to be completely empty and wild, massive tracts of desert, grassy paramo that goes on forever in every direction, populated only by occasional llamas and farmer women with minature hats and enormous bottoms wandering around in the middle of nowhere with a baby on their back. Huge spiky snowy mountains always in the background. Just so beautiful.
Lima seems a cool city, nice dodgy air to it.. lots of traffic pollution, psycho bus drivers and run down buildings, and little bars set in crumbling colonial buildings. we wandered around and found an entire street with ancient antiquated printing presses parked on the pavement where boys were busy churning out photocopies by hand using the greasy cranky machines, another street full of men sat at 1960´s sewing machines that could fix anything you could bring them. And lots of people selling tripe soup out of buckets on the street, very south american.
SO then we decide to do the inevitable and visit Machu Pichu... Its outrageously expensive to get there on the train so we tried to do it independently and spent 2 whole days on the bus and wandering along train lines to save 80 quid which was good fun. involved driving down some of the most dodgy cliff face roads I´ve ever seen, with landslides and collapsed road and all that..
Machu Pichu itself is very impressive. what a stupid place to buld a city though. its stunning but a complete tourist trap.
On the way out of Peru we were stopped at a protest blockade. local farmers had covered 150km of highway with rocks and sand to protest about their potato crop failing so we were stuck in this for ages, and when we finally found a way through we got stuck driving through a river. the driver dug us out and then we had to drive 2 hours more along the rubble strewn highway at night, a proper obstacle course as he swerved to avoid the rocks. All very scary..
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