Day 21

Monday 22^nd November 2010

Despite waking up at 5am we ignored our pre-programmed body clocks and managed to get back to sleep til 8am – what a lie in!!!

We bumped into the rest of the gang at Jack’s where we all congregated for a beautiful and leisurely breakfast with amazing juice and coffee. Today was a free day in Cusco to do as you pleased and generally try to recover from the Inca Trail.

We opted to do as little as possible! Laundry was being taken care of by the hotel – all 6 stinking kilos that we had brought back from the trail. So we camped out in a café bar to catch up with what had been going on in the world of football in our absence and skype the parents so they knew we weren’t dead!!! After overstaying our welcome in the first café we moved cafés to a much nicer establishment with much a much faster internet connection where we spent a lovely afternoon drinking beer, trying to get the blog up to date and chatting with Tracey and Jos – a couple from our group.

We did some shopping for essentials – namely toiletries and provisions for the following day’s bus journey – 7 hours to Puno with no lunch stop!

Then we met up with the gang for a curry at the imaginatively named ‘Indian restaurant’.

An all you can eat buffet for less than £4 each!!! Brendan was leaving the tour so it was his last night with the gang. So, feeling in the party spirit and thinking we had got the altitude thing nailed we headed off to a bar for a NIGHT OUT!!!!!! - our first proper night out of the honeymoon. To make things even better there appeared to be some never ending happy hour on at Mushroom bar with cocktails on 2-4-1 – it seemed rude not to take advantage of this offer.

We stumbled home at 12.30am on Tuesday – the first time we had made it past midnight in Peru! We didn’t turn into pumpkins or anything!

We reached our hotel room which looked like a bomb site and I was sobered by the reality that we had a 7am start again in the morning and the contents of all our bags were splayed liberally across the room. Franky decided he’d like another shower. We had no towels and as he was already naked in preparation I went down to reception to request towels. On my return I found him still bollock naked but now fast asleep curled up amongst the carnage of the room.



As he was unrousable this left me with no choice but to pack all the bags up to the dulcet tones of the guy in the room across from us who was definitely getting his sleep as his snoring was like a series of small earthquakes. As I zipped up the last bag at 2am Franky opened one eye and said ‘Thanks for packing, I love you!’…… I thought that’s all well and good but I still have to get up in 4 hours! Grrrrr!