Dead bodies and bath time

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Six hour bus ride to Cajamarca so of course by the time we got there all we could do was find a hostal (the owner of which seemed quite surprised we wanted to stay there) and then go out for ice-cream. According to the all-knowing Lonely Planet the best ice-cream in the north of Peru. All very nice but no-where near as good as Ecuadorian ice-cream. Decided we were the worst travellers in the world in that we can never be bothered to do anything so hailed a passing mini-bus and headed 8km out of the city to the 'Ventanillas de Otuzco'. These are more pre-Incan structures made up of hundreds of funerary niches built into the hillside. Basically, a lot of holes cut into a rock face. Not quite sure how they fitted the bodies in even if they were, as our charming teenage guide said, 'smashed up and folded'(!) Caught another public mini-bus (which are definitely not designed for anyone over the height of five foot) back to the town of Cajamarca for dinner.

Decided to go to the Baños del Inca the next morning. Had an interesting bus ride there with a female driver who kept complaining how her son who worked the door kept letting too many people in and had broken two floors, how the roads were too narrow for her bus and decided half-way through to get us out of the bus and put us in the front seat as it was too squished for us in the back (I'm normally ok but Lou generally sits with her knees up to her chest - hazard of being tall I guess.) The door fell off thanks to her son being rather enthusiastic with it but he managed to fix that without too much trouble. Then the gear-box managed to fall out which was less easily fixed and meant we had to walk the last few blocks to the Baños. Not quite what we had expected as the public ones just looked like a swimming pool (must be exactly the same as when the Incas used it I'm sure!) We decided to go for a private bath which turned out to be an entire complex with massages and various different options of baths. We just randomly picked one that we could pronounce and ended up in a little room each with a sunken bath with the natural spring water piped in. Slightly strange as the locals actually just seemed to use them as baths and to wash their hair but very relaxing after lugging our rucksacks around.

Headed to Trujillo after lunch and checked into Casa de Clara where the owner told us to sit down and watch Cassanova while he got our room ready and then ended up watching it with us, making terrible jokes and Monty Python references. Got to love the English!

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