Macchu Picchu

Ok.......OK, I think I have worked out this blogging thing. Here goes............

I had a really good day yesterday. It started like every other day, jet lag woke me at some ugodly hour. This time it was at 11pm, I lay in bed exploring the dark recesses of my mind until 5:30 am when the alarm went off to go to Macchu Picchu! It was a four hour train ride through the mountains and it was stunning, really stunning. I love travelling by train; but to see the country side in this way was perfect. A camera can´t capture the height of these mountains taking up all of your peripheral vision, and you can´t see the sky because the mountains go right through the clouds, and we followed the Ollytambo river, (which I think eventually turns into the Amazon River). We would pass these small farming communities in the middle of nowhere somehow making a life for themselves and their families. Some living in small mud brick houses, others a small shack with a bit of foliage for a roof.

Macchu Picchu was great, an Incan city on top of a mountain. Beautiful and impressive, a stone city made to house 700 people. It was only populated for 120 years but the detail and effort put into it was amazing. I have trouble constructing sturdy leggo houses, but all this time ago they had temples built out of perfectly tight fitting rock. No mortar or clay, nothing to hold them together exept that they were carved for each other. We were generally quite lucky as the weather was sunny....mostly. There were a couple of heavy showers, but us prepared folk bought ponchos off the locals before we left. But instead of being in the tour group of like poncho minded people we were in the group that spent that extra dollar at home and got themselves some snazzy water resistant parkas. So out came our plastic, noisy bright yellow and orange ponchas, (nice colour choice Dave!!!)I felt like fricking Big Bird. Dave, (bless his cotton socks) found it difficult to hear our tour guide in the plastic hood, so resorted to tucking his hood behind his ears. I couldn´t stop laughing because he looked like a suspended head with stick out ears, a little reminiscent of Dopey from Disneys Snow White.

I must be off, we just found the best place in Cusco. A bar that you choose DVD´s to watch, all you have to do is buy some drinks. We just watched I am Legend and CHarlie Wilsons War. Yes, I have discovered heaven.

xoxo
Sim