Sunday 19th September - Santiago - Lima - Cuzco
Onboard our 12 .30am flight we were served up pasta at about 1.30am - our eyes were weary now and though Derek dozed off Sue managed to stay awake to watch ´Shrek 2´ on the video screen. We landed in Lima at about 3am local time - our bags had followed us despite us changing our flight in Santiago. Lima airport turned out to be a grim place to be so we were glad we weren´t staying long. LAN Peru who we were flying with to Cuzco seemed to be totally disorgainsed behind the check-in desk - despite there being 25 people in the vicinity it took the couple in front of us about 20 minutes to check-in. In the airport lounge everyone was looking very keen to ´trek´ with new boots abound. The Japanese were doing their usual thing of snapping everything that moved or didn´t move. We took off at 6am, had our 2nd breakfast of the day and landed in between the mountain peaks in the town of Cuzco. We saw our names on a board with a bloke we´d provisionally booked through in Lima airport. The man who spoke to us smelled of garlic and looked a bit like a walrus! He soon had us in a van with our ´guide´ . The place we´d originally picked from the brochure turned out to be under reconstruction so we moved swiftly on. After looking at 2 or 3 more with our ´guide´ we chose our favourite and collapsed in some chairs where we were served the ´local brew´ which is supposed to be good for altitude adjusting - we drank it swiftly and went to bed for a few hours (after 30 hours awake practically). We woke about 4pm and only had the energy to seek out some dinner before going back home to wathc some TV and fall asleep once more. Though we hadn´t much real taste of Cuzco yet we really like what we saw up to now.

Monday 20th September - Cuzco
We were awake early as our bodies and brains got used to the last 2 days of knackering travelling schedules, high altitude and erratic eating patterns. Just getting out of bed can make us feel slightly dizzy and weak. We don´t plan to do much hectic activity for another 3 or 4 days luckily enough. Our hostal/hotel is great with friendly staff and quaint, comfortable rooms . We have the best satellite TV station selection yet in South America with plenty of movie and news channels. We had a late brunch of a local version of a fry-up (it comes with salad!), pancakes, fruit salad and local bread which is quite sweet and seems to have a hint of garlic. Fried sweet corn kernels and cheese were also provided - the corn was very tasty and like a mix of peanuts and popcorn. Cuzco itself is a very quaint place with cobbled streets and colonial building, much like you might expect a South American town to be like perhaps. We spent the afternoon sussing out our journey to Macchu Picchu later this week. After checking with 2 or 3 travel agents and getting duff information from the ´students´ at the official tourist agency, we will do it all under our own steam and catch the train and bus and stay overnight close to the site so we can avoid th crowds by going early in the morning.