Ha. Ash is back. I had managed to hold off all ails until we reached Cuzco (or more appropriately 'Quz'qo' I think) where upon a batch of sleepless nights, dodgy planes, altitude sickness and who knows what else culminated in a case of the flu like I've never had before. I've spent my first two days here in bed :/ But it's been worth it. Cuzco is amazing. (yeah yeah, no more b****** posts like I made for Uruguay and Lima). Well, I'll say this -- if B.A is a tasty Big Mac and Lima the mouldy snot on the pavement outside, Cuzco is a full five star five course meal complete with a barrel of your favourite beer. Cuzco is beautiful beyond description, the people are (generally) far more welcoming than Sydneysiders, and the mixture of ancient buildings with modern resconstruction has made it an amiable tourist mecca, but not in a bad way. There are plenty of americans here (one came into this cafe just now and asked for a PC that had an English keyboard...) but it's not, at this time of year, submeged in clueless tourists ('touristas'). That said, Cuzco survives only because of tourism. It has no real exports, bar alpaca meat and wool, and as we've come to find out -- guinea pig -- the meat of which you can eat in most restaurants. I'm all for trying new things (alpaca meat is nice ... no, it doesn't taste like chicken) but I just can't cross that pet-eating line when it comes to guinea pig. I have to mention Ruben, a Peruvian chap with Inca ancestry we met at the airport and operates a tour company. He's gone out of his way to look after us, doing things like meetng us for breakfast just to say hi, and calling me up while I was sick in bed and offering to take me to a clinic. For the first couple of days we all kept looking for the catch, what's in it for him? We can only assume he makes enough on the tour bookings, as we booked one through him. Not because of his presence though, but because we wanted to do it anyway. We've finally given up our cynicism and just accepted that perhaps, while he has an angenda to do buisness, he's just a really nice bloke. I even got him to teach me some Inca words -- he can speak the language, as well as Spanish and very good English. 'Shoolmpií'(sp) is 'Thankyou'while 'Muarmy wami'is 'beautiful woman'. I didn't venture so far as to ask what 'pain in the arse girls'and 'where's the free beer?'were, because I was already getting dodgy looks from the girls. The views of the mountains are spectacular. Carved in one is a huge 'VIVA PERU'and in others Inca patterns. The locals have steadily built lodgings up the mountainsides so at night the horizon sparkles like a hundred stars and makes the nighttime view as beautiful as the day. Constant hasslings by kids trying to sell you postcards and dogs rooting in every second street aside, Cuzco has a wonderful charm. And I've only seen parts of the city. Tomorrow we trek the Inca trail, and going by what I've seen here I think it's going to stunning. I'm also going to learn the true meaning of excercise (which, in my vocab, can be readily interchanged with 'painful excertion'). It's not just about a four day hike, it's doing it uphill and at altitudes as high as 4000 meters. YAY! Anyway, we've seen and done far more than a few blog entries can relay, but I hope Amanda's pictures give you a sense of this beautiful city. Ash