Little and Large

Wed 19 We arrived in Arequipa and checked into the Wild Rover hostel (our third of the trip). We would have stayed somewhere a bit different, but i wanted the free t-shirt you get if you stay in all three. I wanted it bad. After checking in, we simply chilled out by the side of the pool in the sunshine and sipped on some ice cold beer and for some reason, one of the songs from Ferris Bueller's day off was stuck in my head. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG_6CopW9GQ ...OOOOOOH Yeahhhhh. Thu 20 Early morning pickup for our Colca Canyon tour and suprisingly they managed to actually pick us up this time! (always a bonus). We piled in a minivan that was populated soley by tourists, wonderful stuff. The van drove for around half the day, stopping every hour ... read more

Cusco sat 8 First thing we did in the morning was go into the Bamba office and have a briefing about our Machupicchu tour we had booked through them. It was with a guy called Darwin, who seemed friendly enough. We had booked our Machupicchu ticket and tour way back in England before we left and thought everything was sorted. However, we had booked student tickets and Darwin was adament that we needed an ISIC student card to go into Machupicchu, which of course we didn't have! This meant we had to purchase Machupicchu tickets again! this time at non-student prices. Darwin said Bamba would give us back the money we had already spent on the tickets and we chose to spend it on a Zipline activity. We asked if we could use one of their ... read more

We had to wake up at some ridiculous hour in order to get our transfer from La Paz to Copacabana, our final destination in Bolivia. We got picked up in a little minivan along with two other Irish girls from our hostel and were taken about 5 minutes around the corner where a larger minivan was waiting for us, complete with French Canadian tourist group inside! Along the 3 hour drive to Copacabana the tourist group proceeded to take pictures constantly out of the windows of the bus and all got extremely excited at the sight of a llama! One of the men explained to me that they were on a guided tour around Peru for 2 weeks and had pretty much everything down to their toilet breaks neatly scheduled in for them and they simply ... read more

Tue 27th We arrived in Sucre and checked in Gringo´s Rincon hostel. It was run by a crazy crazy german called Mike. He insisted on showing us around his hostel so we could see which room we would like to pick. The first room he opened was a big 8 bed dorm, to which Mike said "This is an 8 bed dorm". We walked upstairs and he opened another door which was another 8 bed dorm, to which Mike said again "This is an 8 bed dorm". We moved on and he opened a door to a room with 4 beds in it. Feeling that i had a firm grip of what was going on here i said to Mike "...and this is the 4 bed dorm". Mike turned to me, scoffed loudly and quiped "Well ... read more

Our first day in Uyuni we had a really lazy day as there isnt really much to do there except for the salt flats tours so we got up really late, went and had breakfast and then went shopping for Alpaca. Ben has been going on and on about buying some alpaca jumpers pretty much since we arrived in South America so I knew I was in for the long haul. We went into a little shop, with a little old lady and Ben and Steve tried on basically every jumper in the shop before settling on some very fancy numbers...Ben got a kind of orangey/red one and steve got a grey one with a little tie up bit. I got a hat, socks and gloves in preperation for the salt flats which had heard get ... read more