Peru, the first.

19/10/2016 : In the last six days I've had access to just over ten minutes of internet, and that was four days ago. It's horrible. I feel like I'm coming off heroin, or cigarettes, or both at the same time, only in this godawful situation I'm not adding years onto my life. Who knows what delights Trump has gifted us since last Thursday? He could have said it's OK to sodomize your pet as long as your children are OK with it, and I have no idea. I have no idea where I can eat ("here people don't really understand vegetarian food. Do you eat lobster?") how to get to our next destination, or where our next destination should be for that matter. The reason for this WiFi-deprived, fumbling-in-the-dark, more-clueless-than-normal existence I'm leading at the moment is called Cuba. The reason I know I've had access to just ten minutes over the last six days is that the internet card we bought with the 62-digit access code told us we had used 43 minutes when we last logged on and remember I've shared those 43 minutes with Pól. We've since lost the card. That's not true: I've lost the card, struggled to buy a new one, only to find that the internet's down today and I just spent $12 on a 62-digit code to four hours of fuck all.

People who leave their phone in their suitcase when they're on holiday (namely my mother) are nuts. Ma, are you never suddenly struck by an unnecessary yet insatiable desire to find out the weather in Angola? Or read about whatever happened to the guy from Honey I Shrunk the Kids? Or which / how many small countries / teenaged girls Donald Trump has insulted / sexually assaulted in the last 24 hours? I'm trapped in my own pitiful knowledge (times tables and European capitals get very boring very fast) at the moment and if my mind were a spare bedroom, what I do know were wallpaper and my unanswered  questions were patches of mould, the inside of my head would resemble the bedroom in which Ewan McGregor goes cold turkey in Trainspotting, which is incidentally exactly how I feel. That awful metaphor shows just how badly my brain is working at the moment.

But enough of my whining. Let me tell you about happier times, like our time in Peru, for example. Where Cuba has been a succession (domino effect?) of disappointments, Peru fulfilled our expectations perfectly. I'd almost go as far as to say our expectations were surpassed, but I kind of thought that would happen so it wouldn't be entirely accurate, or make sense. After arriving in the south of the country from (neighbouring) Chile, via Beirut, and meeting up with our grownups: father and aunt (in-law, in the case of Pól), we napped for half a day and then got the kind of drunk you get when you haven't seen your family in a long time. This usually happens at Christmas and so you get away with it, but there was no down-day scheduled in my dad's agenda and so the next morning we dutifully traipsed back to one of the bars we'd been in the night before, as it happened to be the starting point of a free walking tour around the city of Arequipa. The (for tips) tour was given by a girl whose confidence in using English was second only to her inability to speak it, which meant we learned virtually nothing about the churches, squares and market stalls we visited. But she was very pleasant and enthusiastic, and she let Pól try the local tipple (Chicha) so dutifully we tipped her and just as dutifully, showed our interest by asking questions. We wanted to know more about the dried llama foetuses we'd seen in the market and I think she told us that they act as sacrifices, for families about to embark upon a new endeavour, to the gods who will thank the family for the crispy llama abortion by bestowing good luck on the upcoming wedding / birth / lottery ticket purchase. I'm pretty sure that was her answer: either that or they're real tasty in a stew, it was hard to tell. 

Arequipa also has a monastery, where lots of nuns used to live and some nuns still do live, and we made the mistake of visiting it. We even paid for the privilege to do so (maybe the catholic god will see the 10€ and four hours we spent there as a kind of llama foetus and I'll win my ten quid back on that scratch card). That evening we ate some of the most delicious food I've ever tried. It was a fusion (sorry pops, a mix) of Japanese and Peruvian cuisine (sorry again pops, food) and included ceviche (coldfishlimejuice), sushi (fishrolls), and noodles (spaghettioftheorient). All of these dishes were vegetarian (even the ceviche) and served by possibly the most polite waiter I've ever met. Even more polite than the waiters in Spain (joke, in that country they're mostly rude dicks). 

We decided to cut our Arequipa stay to two nights and drive north a few hours to Chivay, on the mouth of the Colca Canyon, and I'm so glad we did. Arequipa was nice, but two days there was enough. Chivay was a construction site; two minutes there was enough. We had a hard time getting there too, one of those days when you're swimming upstream: the clowns at the garage where we'd left the car parked had left a door open or a light on, and managed to flatten the car battery, leaving us way behind schedule. The navigator fell asleep on the job (I'd like to say that wasn't me, like to, but can't), causing a wrong turn and costing another hour. Dad almost had a heart attack when he saw a flock (gaggle? school?) of coots (coots are birds), nearly killed us as he flung the car off the side of the road and himself as he darted from one side of the road to the other between the different types of ducks, like a kid in a sweet shop (or Donald Trump in a Youth Club) costing us a further 49 hours. When we finally arrived in Chivay we all felt carsick as well as physically sick when we were charged 140 soles to get into the town and adjoining (abutting?) canyon (massively worth it though, for reasons yet to come), and a misunderstanding led Pól to believe a bag with my swimming trunks inside was a bag of rubbish. It was only after lunch when we discovered the mistake and as we dragged ourselves up to the local hot springs, one of us smelt like a public bin and all of us wondered why the hell we were here. A good soak in warm, sulphur-smelling water in a pool surrounded by mountains as big as Wales (I mean each mountain was the size of Wales, not that thy matched the Welsh mountains: that's not that hard) sorted us out and by dinnertime we'd started to like Chivay. Besides, almost falling into freshly-dug trenches was worth it  for the morning we spent in (or rather above) Colca Canyon.

My father has been a bird watcher since the day he was born and I've been a bird watcher's daughter since roughly 31 years later. For that reason I've traipsed through woods in search of woodpeckers, hidden in bushes waiting for bushpeckers, listened carefully for the sound of a rusty gate in the middle of a deserted field (this really happened) and all the while thinking that if the man promising lunch and driving the car weren't my father, I'd be backing away slowly, like the nurse of a mental patient who's just decided it's all a bit much. As a child, there's only so many times you can go hungry while your legal guardian sings happy birthday to a flamingo in its own flamingo language.

That morning, in Colca Canyon, we'd risen at 4am to be on the road for 4:15. Alice (aunt) and Pól (new guardian, once pops coughs up the dowry) were in the same shoes as me and as we arrived at the condor viewing point (CVP) the sun began to rise and the rest of the tourists back in town began to stir, cursing their decision to go on such an early tour. 

We were on the north (or possibly south, who cares?) side of the canyon, looking down and across and along it and I honestly don't think I've ever seen anything so incredible before in my life. Almost literally miles below was the river that had somehow carved this massive fissure and across the way were rocky, foresty cliffs and mountainsides, frozen waterfalls, liquid waterfalls and paths crisscrossing the almost vertical slopes.

31 years finally pay off.

Pops' lesson on buttresses: flying and normal.

We wandered around, sat on walls, saw a hummingbird, and started wondering whether or not we should buy a snickers. Suddenly, Alice shouted "condor!" and pointed down into the canyon because, not surprisingly, given what she'd shouted, she'd just seen a condor, and it was indeed below us. Alice won the Condor Spotting Prize that day (CSP), much to pa's chagrin. What they do, these condors, is use the warm morning air to gain height, then drift away on a thermal updraft, in search of a carcass they can rip apart. Their main concerns seem to be eating and expending as little energy as possible, not unlike a person from Texas. The condor, however, is far more beautiful than your average Texan, and with a wingspan of around three metres, they have similar problems fitting through the average door. About half an hour after the first one appeared there were twenty-five or so hungry dinosaurs circling above our heads (I say dinosaur so as not to repeat condor, and birds are kind of dinosaurs anyway) and about thirty times as many hungry tourists circling around us pointing at the sky, their snickers having been dropped in a flurry to turn on the camera. We stayed for almost three hours watching the winged beasts (again, trying to avoid repetition of condor. It would be boring if I kept saying condor. Condor) and I, amazingly, didn't get bored, or hungry. Even with my shitty phone camera I took some photos which could rival images produced if National Geographic procreated with Instagram; what we were seeing was Just That Awesome. I realised for the first time why my pops travels all over the world and sits in bushes: birds are really fecking cool (don't tell him I said that).

We eventually left CVP and pootled back to the construction site, as much as you can pootle in a road made of broken rocks and horse poo, and where every twenty metres there's a viewpoint with a slightly more arresting view into the valley than the one twenty metres before.

Peru was rising high on our list of BestCountriesWhatWeSeen and we hadn't even seen the big one yet, ol' grandaddy of sites, Old Mountain, Montaña Vieja: Machu Picchu.