Copacabana to Cusco

From Copacabana we boarded a coach along with two other people, a gift of the gab (blatantly gay) guy from Essex with his Korean wife who does musical theatre in Korea. A funny couple. So the four of us, on the otherwise empty bus, headed towards the Peruvian border. The border crossing was easy again and within a few minutes of entering Peru we noticed the scenery was such a lush green colour. There were many different greens. Pine, mint, avocado you name it - a B&Q paint strip collectors heaven! As well as a truck containing a load of dead sheep strapped to the top in a pile.

We stopped in Puno to change buses and where our new friends told us they were scared of travelling after being held up and robbed at knife point in Buenos Aires. We told them not to be scared.

Our bus from Puno slowly made it's way in the rain through run down areas with half-finished abandoned building constructions. Then the bus stopped, a man ran into a garage, returned with a tyre and began changing a wheel just as the rain turned into a thunderstorm. Kerri's face was a picture, she hates storms and was already sketched out from the general nature of the bus.

Then three women got on the bus with their bright fabric bundles, came upstairs, unwrapped the bundle at the top of the stairwell to reveal brown paper and inside that the bloody carcass of an animal. She produced a meat cleaver and began hacking it to bits with theatrical butchering movements. At this, nobody really batted an eyelid, expect me who was staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the spectacle in disbelief and amazement.

She threw the bits into bags and added a potato or two and sold them to passengers, giving them a bit of toilet roll for their sticky fingers.

If you didn't fancy that, you could buy a WHEEL of cheese.

When the brightly coloured butchers had got off, the slightly hills-have-eyes man who loads the luggage into the bus came round to check our tickets. He had a piece of toilet roll stuffed up one nostril. When the tickets had been checked he stood at the top of the stairs and sang a song which had about four different words and then came round collecting money for his performance. We gave him some soles because he had stopped singing.

Then we looked behind us and there was a man who had a bag of animal horns so Ken got it into her head that he was going to murder us with the horns.

We finally got to Cusco about 10.30pm and by this point Ken was feeling really I'll and just wanted a nice quiet hostel so we checked into the Wild Rover, notorious Irish party hostel.

Kerri went to bed and I went to the bar to get a glass of milk as we had had no dinner, saw the boys at the bar wearing about 6 different hats between the two of them because it was Monday night crazy hat party, of course, and had a baby Guinness or ten instead.