It's Peru, Baby.

Cuzco is amazing. After tour of Sacsayhuaman and various other Inka ruins, the Cathedral and the city centre yesterday and a 'Sacred Valley' (Pisaq, Urubamba, Ollantaytambo and Chinchero) tour today I'm knackered, but happy. The city centre is historic and charming, the Inka ruins are incredibly mysterious, and the mountainous countryside is literally the most breathtaking I've ever seen. This is picture postcard Peru at it's best - llamas hanging around everywhere with their traditionally attired owners, little villages full of charmingly rustic mud-brick dwellings, icey mountain tops, winding cobbled city streets lined with white-washed houses, Inca fields stretching up the hillsides... you get it. It ain't cheap to get to, it ain't easy to get to, but you've got to get here. The food's great, the hotels are very cheap, and there's loads of nice new bars and pubs. And the shopping - I can't even talk about it, as I simply don't have any space in my suitcase for an alpaca sweater, nor a Baroque-style framed oil painting of the Cuzco school, nor striking black and white pottery pieces, nada. It's painful, but I know that we'll come back, preferably when we actually have jobs, and a place to live! Anyways, it's Machu Picchu tomorrow, very exciting!