Sunny Cuzco - hostal Quipu

So I have spent the morning drinking mate de coca in a sunny courtyard in Cuzco. This post is again from Nina as Glenn is not well - probably a mixture of a cold and altitude sickness - but he is still snoring in the room.

We arrived yesterday and were picked up from the airport by this lovely woman called Lida who runs the hostal (hostal Quipu -www.quipu-cusco.com) which glenn picked as it was pretty cheap and recommended on trip advisor. Really nice sweet hostel, very simple rooms, but friendly staff. I think Lida is used to speaking to English people as she speaks in very slow simple spanish to which i mostly reply ´buena, bonita, si...´all very rudimentary but at least I feel i am speaking the language.

Lovely food last night at a place called Baco - but bit more expensive than we will be able to afford normally. We heard about this place which does 3 course lunch for 1 USD so we will try to go there today (assuming I can get glenn up).

Mate de Coca is the local tea and is used for energy - the leaves are from the coca plant same as is used in the drug but I am assured that it is perfectly normal and totally not the same...

Had a shower this morning and used my shampoo soap for the first time which worked really well. Unfortunately I also used a small travel pot of leave in conditioner - now my hair just looks greasy.. great.

Anyway, am going to go and see if i can wake glenn up now. Bye!

So we made it to Lima, in Peru, finally! This post is from Nina cos Glenn has crashed early.

It was a bit of a random flight cos glenn was upgraded, but I wasn´t (don´t ask) which I am totally gonna milk for the rest of the journey (guess who gets to carry all the bags for the next 3 months). Really good flight, but think I am turning into mum as found out all about the guy i was sitting next to on the flight (works for an asparagus company, apparently Peru is the second biggest producer of asparagus in the world after China who knew?).

We are only staying in Lima for one night at this really nice hostal called hostal Victor. I have used my rudimentary spanish briefly, but the proprietor speaks really good english (thank god). We are catching an internal flight up to Cuzco tomorrow and the plan is to stay there for a few days before doing the inca trail. We have already met a couple of other travellers who have been round south america and are heading home soon. They gave us plenty of tips.

Generally, pretty excited and can´t wait to get up to cuzco!

Only a week to go....

Hi everyone

We are going to use this blog to keep everyone up to date on our travels....

This is our first foray into the world of blogging, so it will be kept fairly simple but hopefully interesting!

We set off in one week and still have tons to do before we go. The most important thing for me will be to heed everyone's warning about not packing too much!