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Published: August 8th 2008
Sorry we haven´t been in touch for a while, we´ve been mountain climbing, camping in romote villages and going out on team meals as soon as we arrive anywhere new.
Just arrived in La Paz, Boliva and it´s snowing outside.......can you believe it.....some summer holiday. Only joking we´ve been really lucky with the weather up until now and Lau managed to get sun stroke in 30 degree heat on Machu Pichu.
So to recap on the last week or so, we set off from Cusco visiting various Inca ruins along the way. It started pretty tamely but we soon realised we probably hadn´t done enough fitness training when we climbed to 4,200m as a training day!!! Laura was finding it difficult to walk and breath at this point but luckily we didn´t suffer from any altitude sickness.
Day 2 was the major climb and a few of the party dropped out. Myself and Lau carried on and it was well worth the effort. This wasn´t the classic Inca trail but we climbed to 4,800m and the views were truely amazing. Dragoman have named this route as the community Inca trail, you still get all the history but you camp in the villages and help them with projects. My dry stone walling experience came in very handy!!
The guides and crew were unbelieveable, we left them packing up and within an hour they were running passed us on the cliff side. They do have 20% more red blood cells though.
Day 2 ended in another community project which I didn´t take part in due to a lack of brushes!! Instead the lads took on the guides in a game of football while Laura painted a school in clay. We lost 7-8 but we had a dodgie keeper (one of the bagage crew who was scared of the ball).
Anyway, day 3 was pretty much downhill all the way, which was a nice change and we were all looking forward to the next day which was Machu Pichu and a shower.
Machu Pichu was amazing but unbelieveably hot. We got lucky though as it was completely clouded over the day before. It reached 30 degrees at midday and that our signal to head down for food, beer and lots of mozzy bites.
After Machu we headed back to Cusco for a recovery day and then onto Puno to see the floating islands. Basically man made islands made of reeds that float on Lake Titikaka....pretty impressive stuff. Laura couldn´t resist dressing up in some local clothing and befriended a local woman called Olga.
After a couple of days on the truck we´ve arrived in La Paz via Copacabana. Luckily we´ve managed to arrive in the middle of a refarendum (no idea if that´s spelt correctly) which might be interesting viewing.
We´ve here for a couple of days and half the group will be leaving. So that´s gonna leave 12 - 13 of us to continue towards Rio. It´s a shame as they´re all really nice people but it´s gonna be nice having a bit more room on the truck.
Thanks for all the messages and keep them coming.....off the explore La Paz in the snow now. We´ll be logging on again before we set off.xxx
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Richard Hallas
non-member comment
All sounds fantastic but losing at football dave come on, you need to get up a few more mountains and improve that fitness for when you come back at least your getting match practice mate, enjoy yourself and say hi to laura xxx