Ancient Mountain, Jungle Mountain

A lot has happened since I last wrote; here is a brief summary of my time in Huancayo:

Spanish Lessons - 3 hours a day, I now know how to conjugate about 20 verbs in past present and future. And how to talk about the weather. Hurrah!

I stayed in a really nice hostel that was more homely than the one I stayed in in Lima, which was more of a party hostel. Casa de la Abuela had home cooked meals every night, a dog, two cats, 3 kittens and a parrot. The only other guests were about 14 or 15 truly mad people who were waiting to take part in a Moto-Taxi junket. A moto-taxi is a motorised rickshaw basically - and they were taking part in a charity event which was driving a moto-taxi from Peru to Paraguay. Except moto-taxis only go at about 50kph, and they definitely can´t go uphill without a lot of encouragement, and they break down all the time, and most of the people taking part had no mechanical knowledge whatsoever and a lot of them also didn´t speak Spanish. So an adventure indeed... an adventure doomed to failure! Things kept going wrong with paperwork and insurance, so they were supposd to leave on Wednesday but were still waiting when I left on Friday night. But from what I hear, they´ve all finally left and no one has died yet. Which is good, because they were all very nice people.

So yes, I left for Lima on Friday night, planning to hop straight on the next bus to Cusco, the city nearest to Machu Picchu. Except I got really really sick on the bus there (oh what fun, running to a bus toilet once every hour, vomitting whilst being thrown around every time the bus went round a corner..). Thusly, I decided to rest for a day in Lima - return to the Flying Dog Hostel, to greet my old friends and celebrate halloween dressed as a lion (see facebook for more photos).

And on Sunday, finally, I headed to Cusco. It was a 20 hour bus journey, enlivened by the movie Twlight in spanish (yes ayesha, moody silences and weird eye contact is the same in Spanish as English). Arriving on Monday - I promptly bumped into two australian guys, Nathan and Kaia, that I knew from Flying Dog. This happens a lot whilst travelling, because a lot of people do the same route without realising. I spent the day booking a 3 day hike to Machu Picchu (YAY!!) and buying things for the trip, like hiring walking boots, then packed and went to bed early.

Tuesday - up at 7am, eventually picked up by tour guide at 9sh - off to go mountain biking! (I say 3 day hike... it ws one day biking, one day hiking and the next day hiking to and wandering around Machu Picchu). By chance and fortuituous circumstance (of which there is a lot in this particular post) Nathan and Kaia were on the same tour. The mountain biking was awesome. All downhill, luckily, as I´ve never done mountain biking before, and dislike cycling at the best of times. But it was beautiful. So so so beautiful. I can´t do justice with words or pictures, but here´s a couple