Lots Of Stuff Happened!

Ola! Since my last blog I have done a lot - for my readers convenience, I will write about my experiences in chronological order. Here goes:

La Paz¨;
Day 29, Thursday 11th Novemeber, Woke up at 8am and made our way to death road. Death road my friends, is the most dangerous road in the world in terms of people dying on it by car accidents as the road winds down a very high cliff edge at 4700m high altitude.... so why not cycle down it we thought! Below is a link to a video of some people doing what we did... one wrong twist or turn and we would be dead but after a whole day of cycling down with some breaks to take in the scenary  we made it down safely and it was one of the best things I have ever done. Once back at the hostel, we ordered a 2 and a half foot pizza to share between 5 people. It was absolutely MASSIVE!!
(death road vid;   http://bit.ly/gcjGoZ )

Other stuff we did in La Paz, went to San Pedro Prison for an illegal tour. San Pedro Prison is a prison run entirely by the inmates. Criminals can live with their families in there, and no guards or policemen are allowed inside, much like Sonar prison from prison break. Basically, what you do is you go to near where the prison is and you get approached by one of the wives of the inmates who you pay to get you inside, and inside, you are greeted by a guide. Ours was named Gabriel and was inside for 2 years for smuggling cocaine) All details can be found here = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pedro_prison to save me some time but the tour was incredible and for a while we almost forgot that we were inside a jail with rapists and murderers and no police protection - fantastico.

Oscar ate some fish food for a dare.

The Pampas
From LaPaz, we headed with Jack and Oscar, or Joscar as they are now affectionately known, towards The Pampas, which is an area at the start of the jungle which lies next to a large long winding river and is filled with wildlife, humidity and vegetation. To get their we got a tiny plane, no bigger than a mouse at a guess. Upon arrival, our tour guide didnt really tell us much for 3 days, for example, we only discovered his name on the last day! During our pampas tour, we saw aligators a plenty, did an annoconda search for 5 hours only to find one tiny snake hiding in a tree, swimming with dolphins which was in fact sitting in a boat and seeing a dead dolphin and an alive dolphin half under water and also went fishing..... slash..... tried to catch a fish but only David caught a tiny catfish and didnt know what to do with it so Oscar beat it to death with the paddle!!! Our hostel or lodge was basic to say the very least....and there was pretty much no way of seeing light after 7pm so we had 2 nights of going to bed at 8pm and taking sleeping pills to deal with the ridiculous heat and uncomfortableness. Highlights of the Pampas were generally the banter between our group and also Oscar having a weird reaction to mixing his malaria and sleeping pills which made him feel drunk and cold despite the hottest weather ever! Lowlight was the 3 hour bumpy dusty jeep journey with the random korean woman in our jeep with far too many people in.


Isla Del Sol
Bussed, walked, boated and skipped our way to Isla del Sol, Island of the Sun, which sits on Lake Titikaka in between Bolivia and Peru. The island is extremely basic with a population of about 2000 people and a handful of restaurants and hostels. Also, its pretty much built on a mountain so getting to our hostel with a backpack on consisted of walking up 100s of steps at a ridiculous altitude and making you want to die when you reached the top! Highlights of Isla Del Sol == Sunbathing....next to a pig. The view from our hostel over the lake. The thick duvet. Sitting 3 to a computer in the only internet cafe watching spurs vs arsenal on bbc live update and manually refreshing the page every minute to see us go 2 goals down then have to leave to catch a boat then get 3 texts from dad saying spurs has got 1 back, got an equaliser, then won the damn match with a few minutes to go and then seeing Michaels little big head and face turn rather sour and celebrating mentally with Dan! Oooo and also paying a random local called Moses quite a lot of money to take us in his motorboat which didnt really work to another part of the island which was actually awesome but only spending an hour there because Moses has said he wants to go back now. good times!

Other things about Bolivia.... general lack of toilet seats, and toilet paper.

Michael telling Dan how to say "we only have 1 hour to eat before our bus arrives" in spanish and dan repeating this to the waitress at the restaurant, however, what Michael really told him to repeat was "I have a very small Penis!!"


Cusco, Peru
Went out a lot. Tried to get a taxi driver to take us to Columbia.Failed. Went out some more. great Israeli restaurant. Went out some more. Stole some road signs, love life, hated life, love life, then went out some more! Stayed in Loki Hostel. Reunited with Joscar. Said Goodbye to Joscar again. Booked Inca treck to Machupicchu.


Salkantay treck to Machupicchu
4 day treck. One of the hardest things I have ever done, getting up at 4am each morning to walk between 8 and 10 hours. Now for any normal human climbing mountains at this altitude would be hard. But now please spare a thought for me and my tiny 6 week premature underdeveloped lungs!! It was mighty hard but we had a great group consisting of our guide, Peruvian Jorje, A czech, a spaniard, a german, an American and South Korean named Lee who was 39 but looked 18 and was probably the nicest man alive, as well as our group and also our new friend... Ned. Many things happened along the way, the most difficult perhaps was night 2... or Tsunami night as it is known when the heavy flooding meant that my tent as well as Michael/Dans Tent leaked covering all of our stuff in water.... our sleeping bags were drenched inside out and we were pretty much the only sufferers as the other tents had been constructed correctly! Damp, Cold and seeking restbite....we meandered our way to a small hut with 3 walls and a roof  (no fourth wall so it was still very cold!) and found a couple of sheep skin matts to lie on, used a tablecloth as a cover and froze our way through the night until morning arrived where we huddled to keep warm! We arrived at Macchupicchu on the fourth day of our treck and despite having a hungover tourguide, and me losing my ticket to climb one particular mountain there, was pretty special. Turns out the Inca´s were a clever bunch of people really, building a community hidden from the spanish in 1400ad with temples, houses farms etc out of massive pieces of stone cut using the most basic of materials. Again, my description is probably not doing these places justice so get yourselves down to google and wikipedia then look at my future photos for more of an insight.

Ica, Huacachina
Next off, we headed to Ica, and more specifically, Huachachina which is a tiny resort next to a lagoon in the middle of the desert. We relaxed here before getting a crazy sandbuggy, driven by a man called smiley, to the top of the sand dunes where here, we sandboarded down them which was SICK. I Must mention that David was very confident going up to the top as he claimed that he skied as gracefully as a swan. I must also point out that David was rubbish at Sandboarding.... and volleyball for that matter... and he complains a lot about a wrist injury that he sufffered when he fell over on the street standing near a motorbike.

Arequipa
We are now in Arequipa and I dont really know why we are here... but apparantly there is stuff to do such as seeing stuff and whatnot so should be interesting!

Elsewhere, No Shave Novemeber is now over and myself and senor Rhodes are sporting wonderful Moustaches (probably just for a day or two before we are babyfaced again, and the others have yet to shave their lovely beards off.... oh the tough life of a traveller!

Until next time..... BYEEEEEEEEEEE xxxxxxxx