E'llooo! Our time in Peru is getting to and end. In few hours we're getting on a train/taxi/bus and tomorrow midday we should be in our house at Titicaca Lake. But let's start from the beginning....

The trip on the night bus from Ayacucho to Lima went alright. We got way more fun on our flight Lima to Cusco. A funny plane from the 80's was awaiting us on the runway. Immediately  after ignition the cabin was filled with a sound of an old double decker climbing up to Alexandra Palace and the card with safety instructions was from Boeing 737-200 (not our flying carpet) therefore as useful in case of unplanned touchdown as a condom dealer in Vatican City. The flight would rank amongst the least boring in my not so short flying career. The only person enjoying the frequent turbulences was Mort, happily jumping up and down saying he loves roller-coasters. The landing could only be described as a tarmac abruptly stopping our swift descent. Not surprisingly all passengers started cheering and clapping hands as soon as the plane went to halt.

Before we left Lima's airport we managed to book a reasonably priced hotel so as we got through the baggage reclaim we saw a geezer holding a sign 'Mr Lukas'(posh VIPs), who took us to our hotel in a lovely quarter overlooking the centre. We were a bit taken aback by his hospitality and servility and we started to smell something fishy. Soon we found out what was rotten in the Danish Kingdom. He took us upstairs on the terrace for a cup of Mate de Coca and started offering his services. After his jaw dropping rip-off offers, we made him drop the price from $400 to $240. But we were still not willing to accept his price. After we told him that we are going the town first he almost broke into tears, jumped off the chair like his buttocks was on fire and with a thin trail of smoke disappeared. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. At least the tea was for free :)
After some exploring of the city we had to agree with a world known rule. The more gringos in the town the higher the prices. The Cusco area with no doubt the most expensive part of Peru and visiting Machu Picchu can't be done cheaper than $140. This was a torturing 7 hours journey there and back in a crappy bus. So we haggled ourselves a deal and for $170 we got taxi, train and hostel in Aguas Calientes and a bus from Cusco to Copacabana. Still, it's the same money we managed to survived on the past  week!

The same day we saw some festival on the street and joined parade. It was a festival in honor of the Almundera Church and colorful garbs and fantastic masks entertained us for several hours. I couldn't resist and got my camera out and Mort has to get a lot of credit for looking after my safety. As soon as some dodgy individual turned up to close, Jan put on his work stare (btw., even Conan the Barbarian would wet his waist cloth under that stare) and we had our personal safety zone  again... :)

Yesterday was transit to a small village Aguas Calientes. It's the nearest settlement from world's famous archaeological site Machu Picchu. It is approx. 100km from Cusco and you can take either a train (3.5 hours) or a bus (7 hours). We opted for an ingenious option, taxi (1.5 hours) and a train (1.5 hours). Because our taxi driver was a local Nikki Lauda, he managet to get us to the train station in 45 minutes (120km/h through towns and villages,etc.) with tires squeaking the whole way. The train finished the F1 driver's job and we entered Aguas Calientes. You can tell that before a yank Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Picchu and showed it to the world some 100 years ago, the name of the village could have been Barearseville. Today everything is different and local mini-stinky-spa, about 101% of it's inhabitants work in tourist industry.

Machu Picchu itself is simply amazing. Obviously Peruvians know, that they can charge you $50 entry fee and even for every fart you do (air pollution) and still have enough tourists. A bit surprising was a fact that these pre-columbian ruins are lower than Cusco (capital of a province with the same name), almost 1000 metres. Even though, it's about 500m above the village, so we decided to save the energy for exploration of ruins and took a bus at 5.45am.  As soon as we arrived, the morning mist lifted and flaming globe of sun slowly rose above the hilltops. Incredible sunrise. The light was perfect so I left Mort with our guide to get some info on the ruins and went to shoot some snaps on my own. We met up after several hours and poor Jan had to repeat everything he heard. Quite interesting fact is that the place was  most likely sort of Inca's Oxford University and not a classic town as I thought. The town is divided in two parts. Urban and agricultural. It was inhabited for only 40 years and Incas never actually finished the constructions. The town was abandoned when Spanish got to Cusco and Inca people took their possessions and gold and fled to jungle hideouts. Because they left, Spanish never found the place. Another bonus was some Bollywood production, music clip that was being shot on the hill above the town, so I stole few shots of the extras.

Few pieces of knowledge:
- Ooh Hot Shower, be blessed a million times!! Ayacucho was great, but red taps were unheard of :(
- High altitude is no problem for us so far. The only indicator is correlation between increasing altitude and the frequency of Jan's farting capability :)
- We got to honor an old saying 'Life if not a sleep on bed of roses' and while we were haggling prices, fighting for our seats or demanding return of all our clothes from the laundry, one fact remains undeniable, lazy tongue equals pure disaster...

- translated by Mort.