Peru, the second.

24/10/2016: We're flying out of Cuba tomorrow, so today is like Christmas eve or, if you hate Christmas (as one half of this couple does), the day before you win a game of poker, or the day before they announce Brexit was all just a cruel joke: it's essentially the eve of a great day. Although our experience has improved massively over the last week, we're down to our last few dollars (let's say dollars as the Cuban money lingo is stupidly complicated and I can't be bothered getting into it) and just this morning we paid four bucks (not sure if I can get away with saying bucks. Nope, I can't. We paid $4) for a pair of coffees we had accepted in the mistaken belief they were free (part of the taxi service we'd paid for back to Havana). But that's Cuba: you're dandering along trying not to fall in a pot hole, get hit by a bike taxi or choke on car fumes and suddenly, through your own stupid politeness, you're giving someone more money than you expected for a product or service you don't remember asking for and you're left feeling like a (literally) poor fool. By now we should be used to it. We've spent more than twice as much per day as we've been spending until now on accommodation, experiences, food and drink (the most important, and - beerwise - least good) which are in no way superior to what we'd found elsewhere and which we'll probably remember less fondly due to the bad mood Cuba put us in the day we arrived and has gently nudged us back into whenever we've started to relax and think it's not all that bad.

As I'm on the subject of grumbling, allow me to grumble about a delightfully shit experience we had in Puno (Peru / Perah, depending on where you're from). Being on a much lower budget than the elders, we insisted on staying in hostels, where we could get beds for around 6€ and Al and pops could pay twice as much for the luxury of a door with a key and an absence of roommates. Now, after leaving Arequipa I left a (completely honest) review on hostelworld of the place we'd stayed and immediately received an email from the owner asking me to delete it, in which he made shit excuses in poor English to explain the state of his dilapidated hostel. "We are in works, that's why there was no roof on your room." "Some guests prefer to not shower by private. That is why no shower curtain," and so on, so you can imagine how much I was hoping the next place would be at least cockroach free. Pól (to a certain extent) and I (more so) can deal with the hardships of shit hostels, but we felt embarrassed to be inflicting these hardships on two members of the older generation, whose complaints about the guest houses (Guest Houses, not hostels) they'd stayed in thus far was that the breakfast was only served until ten and didn't have enough fresh fruit (I'm exaggerating of course: my dad and aunt are calm, humble, lovely people with a lot of patience and few demands. But as we arrived in Puno, which is even more of a shithole than Chivay had been, this is how I felt).

The hostel seemed decent, so we dumped our stuff and went for a mosey round town. Most south American towns and cities seem to be ordered by the local council to leave around 50% of the buildings unfinished: the ground floor completed and the first floor both window and roofless (never the other way round, weirdly) and Puno is no exception. The guidebook helped us find a company which ran tours on Lago (Lake) Titikaka (Titicaca) and we booked ourselves in for a trip the next day. We even paid more for a fast boat because sometimes we get the mistaken idea that we have enough money to do things like that. We then got half drunk in the bar next door and a second half drunk in a nearby restaurant with a live show. A fucking show. A troupe of dancers frolicked in traditional Peruvian dress on the little stage around which five guys in ponchos played the panpipes and tiny guitar and tables of tourists ate guinea pig and drank wine before stumbling home feeling embarrassed about the whole thing.

When we opened the door to our room the smell of a family of suicidal cabbages which (who?) had ended it all by drowning themselves in a bowl of shit smacked us in the face and we both threw up on the carpet. The smell was so bad and so strong that there was no way we could sleep in the room and I flounced downstairs in my sozzled state to tell the guy in the office just that. The problem was this: he didn't care. It took us half an hour and three different members of the hostel staff (I can only assume they're family; that kind of shitheadedness has to be hereditary) before they admitted there was a problem. Grandpa shithead told us the problem was that we'd been using the air freshener too much and shithead junior told me I was wrong in the head when I insisted that no air freshener smells like rotting vegetables and drains.

By the time they changed our room we were exhausted,still  drunk, angry, and in need of a lovely day on a the highest navigable lake in the world, which is fortunately what we got.

Our tour started at 7:30 and we went first to the floating islands of Uros. These are (over 200) platforms, out on the lake and which were made by their inhabitants using the reeds that grow nearby. The islands are inhabited by around 6,000 people, some of whom are seventh-day Adventists. I have no idea why. We hung out with some of the residents and took a shufty in their homes, in which everything is made entirely out of reeds, including the TV (I didn't see the bathroom) before hot footing it over to Taquile, which is another island, further out towards the Bolivian half of the lake (and where their navy is docked due to their lack of seaports. Teehee). On Taquile there are no cars, no llamas, and the incest in some of the families is beginning to manifest itself in some members of the population. We met Brian, whose lack of diversity in his genes meant he spoke with difficulty and had trouble walking due to his limbs being all different lengths. Taquile a beautiful, tranquil place where people dress traditionally, weave by hand using frames of wood and animal bone, almost all the men know how to knit, but they're in desperate need of immigration. It's a lot like Wales really. We had a little lunch, had a little dance on Brian’s behest (tourists can be made to do anything- I wonder if anyone is exploiting that) and walked the long way back to the boat.

A lot of tourists take a tour of Titikaka and then complain that it's too touristy, which is like climbing a mountain and then complaining about being on top of a mountain. I loved it, and I didn't feel like a dick for prying into the locals' lives: they welcomed us, fed us and tried to sell us stuff, so what if they were only friendly because they wanted my money; I enjoy being smiled at and buying pillow cases I don't need.

Apart from the lake there's not much going on in Puno, so we wrote a fittingly stinky review of our digs on hostelworld and buggered off to Cusco, ancient capital of the Inkan empire and home to more tat stores than any other city in South America. Cusco's outskirts have their fair share of half-finished buildings (course they do, it's mandatory) but the centre is really beautiful: lots of colonial architecture built on the ruins of an ancient imperial capital. The fountain in the centre of the main square has a golden statue of an Inka king (apparently Inka means king, technically a statue of an Inka) and the surrounding streets are full of cathedrals, monasteries and shops selling wares of the finest alpaca fluff.

Our hostel was at the top of a steep, narrow, one-way street, which Pól and I navigated my chauffeur father to the top of before realising there was no way of getting the car back down. I blame the fact that we're poor impoverished backpackers unused to having to think about the logistics of a private motor vehicle and not that we're a pair of stubborn idiots. Anyways, it all worked out OK as this was an awesome hostel with (in order of importance): a friendly dog, a friendly cat, towel rails on the bunkbeds, interesting wall art, a hammock. Pops and Al liked it so much they booked themselves in to stay again after Machu Picchu and I liked it so much I gave it a good review.

Cusco is all about the Inka(s?), I'm not sure of the plural, and the ruins the Spaniards didn't completely destroy. There are quite a few left (or barely any, depending on how you look at it) and we visited Saqsaywaman and Pisac. You could be completely uninterested in American history, you could not give a crap about what went down in the different buildings, in the caves, along the paths of these ruins, but you can't not be impressed by them. Saqsaywaman is a row of three layers (like a wedding cake) of zig zagged walls made of stones cut so precisely they fit together like multi-tonne, multiple-sided Lego bricks. Here was the site of a major attack by the massively outnumbered Spaniards against the Inkas who, as my dad so delicately put it "must have been seriously stupid to get beaten by such a tiny army (there were under 300 Spaniards and hundreds of thousands of Inkas) just because they'd never seen a horse before." But beaten they were and what's left of the fortress is a testament to the hard work and ingenuity of a people who were flummoxed by the sight of Mr Ed.

Speaking of horses, allow me to somewhat clunkily link to the ruins at Pisac, about an hour north of Cusco by car and horse related due to the "saddle shape of the mountains on which sits the hitching post of the sun", (quotation from my memory of the Lonely Planet). Given that we had a rental car and three of the four of us have bad knees (the only problem with my knees is that they are too close to the ground) we drove to the entrance instead of hiking up from the town.  Beyond the first collection of buildings we could see a path leading around a hill and out of sight, but no sign of the hitching post. "We'll not go that far today," said pops, referring to the path, but with an out-of-characterly energetic Pól leading the way, we were soon around the hill and out of sight, in search of the hitching post. We were high up on a hillside and below us were terraces once used for farming (terraces are where the hillside has been cut into many horizontal layers so you can grow crops / keep llamas / play tig on them), the path was easy and as we still hadn't found anything resembling a hitching post (and to be fair, didn’t really know what we were looking for) we continued. For a while. Eventually we saw the saddle shaped hill described in the guidebook; the accuracy of the description surprised us somewhat because the descriptions in Lonely Planet often seem to have been written by someone who's heard of the place, but never actually been there. The saddle was covered in classic Inka ruins: roofless buildings with trapezoid doors, water flowing through gutters cut into the rock and right in the centre there was a rounded black stone with what we could only describe as a nubbin on top. The idea I had of a hitching post evidently differs greatly from the idea the Inkas had of a hitching post, but then theirs was used to keep the sun in orbit and they'd never seen a horse, so I suppose it all makes perfect sense. We had a little rest, took a couple of thousand photos and realised that the walk back was going to be tough on six of eight already heavily aching knees, but we made it and it was worth it (for them, I made no sacrifice and felt no pain): Pisac had the coolest ruins we'd seen so far.

At our next stop, Ollantaytambo (I don't think one of us pronounced it right the entire time we were in Peru), there were some more ruins which were ruiny, but not as cool as the others. I started to worry we were going to overdose on history and so we gave ourselves an unhealthy dollop of the present state of the world by watching the second presidential debate. Fortunately we chose a bar frequented by Americans who support Clinton and so we weren't banished to a corner for our FuckYouDonald flags and t-shirts. Even the elders, who aren't following the election, enjoyed the show. They said it had the comedy of a Monty Python sketch, the morbid pull of a car crash, the charm of Theresa May and during the duration of the debate we all ran out of ways to finish the sentence "he's such a fecking ..."

Our (mine and Pól's, Al and pops were staying on) antepenultimate day in Peru was scheduled to be spent at Machu Picchu. I say scheduled because this part of the trip has to be locked down: trains have to be booked, tickets printed, passport numbers entered correctly, months before. When I planned it (back in the 90's) I got so stressed and worried that I was going to balls up that I drank the best part of a bottle of wine before I'd even entered my credit card number on the first website, thus increasing my chances of ballsing up. I then drank the worst part of the bottle of wine. And I was at work at the time. Miraculously, however, it all fit together: we left the car at our B&B (actually, just B, there was no brekkie), caught the Machu Picchu Express (I don't think it's really called that) to Aguas Calientes and found we were booked into our hostel for that night, and not the night before or the following one (go Nicola!) Aguas Calientes is the town at the bottom of the mountain on which the ruins perch and the train journey over there was spectacular. We were running through the bottom of the Sacred Valley (the Sacred f-ing Valley!!) alongside the Urubamba river and the landscape changed suddenly from meh, kinda-nice, to woh-holy-shit-look-at-all-those-mountains-covered-in-jungle-nice! The town is small and, although it's only function actually isn't to serve Machu Picchu-bound travellers (it has a football pitch, a school, a medical centre...) you would never guess it. I haven't met anyone who gives Machu Picchu Pueblo (Town), as it's now known, a positive review and it really is like a hundred and fifty restaurants and bars have been vomited into the valley by the restaurant-eating Inka god Ikmaul (who I just made up), but I loved it. There was an excitement in the air, like in a Disney hotel (I imagine, can someone who can afford to stay there let me know?); everyone was going to see something they'd seen in photos hundreds of times, thousands of times, but instead of saying ah, some day I'll go there, they'd say hurrah! I made it. Or maybe that was just me. Either way, I was so excited that when my alarm went off about twenty minutes after I'd gone to sleep the night before, I jumped out of bunk, into my leggings (I've changed, and not for the better) and slid down the bannister to wait for the others. We got to the bus line a long time before the buses even started running, and that's when it started raining. When we finally got into the park, the rain had stopped, the mist was slightly less thick than soup, and as we peeled off our ponchos we saw her: Waynapicchu the mountain we were destined (doomed) to climb.

"Pops, you wanna climb Waynapicchu?"

"What's Waynapicchu?"

"It's the big mountain you see behind the ruins at Machu Picchu. It's about 360 metres to the top, a thousand steps, and it will probably almost kill you, especially if you have a burger for dinner the night before," is how the conversation between my dad and me could have gone the day before I bought the tickets, but it didn't and so, after a hefty cow burger the night before (in the case of the omnivores), by 8:30 we were half way up and pops was suffering. It's a hard climb to the top if you're not a hiker, and none of us are hikers, but we're all gunners and we all made it just as the mist lifted and we could see down to the ruins and far, far below, the river. It was like sitting on top of the world. I ate the sandwich from my packed lunch and couldn't have felt happier. It was a really good sandwich, had avocado and everything.

Inkan terrace farms in.... somewhere in Peru.

We climbed that mothafucka!

At that point we parted company from the baby boomers and embarked upon a three hour hike which would take us up and down another four thousand steps, but we didn't know that then and so we waltzed off feeling smug in our newly-bought hiking boots (we saw a girl start the trek in wedge heels. I think she's dead now). The hike was exhausting and jungly with it had ladders and caves. Fortunately we had enough packed lunch to get us through. We then had to exit the site to come back in again and go up to the top of a smaller hill to get the classic view of Machu Picchu, and in real life it's just incredible. We were hungry and ready to leave around 14:00 and, given the fact that the line for the bus was so long and we were still wearing the magical knee-strengthening, energy-giving hiking boots, we decided to walk down the mountain, back to town, the hostel, and possibly the most well-deserved beer I've ever drunk.

The train journey back to Ollantaytambo was boring: everyone fell asleep except me as, in a cruel twist from the gods, my knees were killing me. After another night in the same B we'd stayed in before, we drove sadly back to Cusco for one last night before generation Y buggered off to Cuba. As we'd been so good and well behaved over the last two weeks pops took us for a delicious and fancy dinner in, fittingly named, Pacha Papa (father earth) where I ended my Peru jaunt the way I'd started it, by drinking too much wine.

Although we were sad to be leaving Peru and our travel buddies, we were super excited to go to Cuba and blissfully ignorant of the, let's say difficulties, that lay in store.