machu pichu and puno...

so i went to machu pichu, clambered around it at six in the morning, and it was breath taking and beautiful. we were the first people there and nilo our guide was just fantastic telling us stories about the site and the people who lived there. it was so serene and beautiful. the fact that the whole site was built by hand is just amazing.

anyway, i spent two hours just walking around inside the site being absolutely awestruck and then the colarado girls announce that they´re going to hike up Huayna Picchu, this mountain at the back of the site which leads to the temple of the moon. I decide to do it too (only not with them because they´re all incredibly good hikers!) so set out on my own, the 23rd person on the mountain. This thing was so damn hard! The mountain summit comes in at just under 3000m, at some stages it is just bare arse rock and you have to climb up with your hands, sometimes there´s a rope to help you. Right up the top you have to climb these stairs that are about 15cms wide and there´s nothing there to help you. If you fall, that´s it, you go right off the mountain. I was so genuinely scared at that point that i wondered what the hell I was doing and knew intrinsicly this was by far the stupidest thing i had ever done! Three people died on Huayna Picchu last year, one woman got bitten by a poisonous snake, one woman fell off the mountain (i took a few slides i totally see how that happened!) and one guy had a heart attack getting to the summit. It took me two hours to reach the summit and it was phenomenally scary! i kept passing all these people who had to stop because they were suffering from vertigo. I´m glad i didn´t go with the girls because they made it to the top in an hour... i´d have died for sure!

Anyway, i got to the top and was monumentally proud of myself and then realised something that hadn´t occured to me before... how the hell was i going to get down again. Now i´m not going to lie to you, i did consider just staying up there and becoming the wise woman of Huayna Picchu, but considering that all i had to sustain me was three vegemite rolls and a handfull of lollies, i thought i´d better work out how to get down. It was so frightening! Coming up you don´t realise how steep, narrow and slippery it is. You bloody do coming down! So that took, me two hours too... i am nothing if not consistent!

Yesterday i caught the six hour bus to Puno, which is on the shore of Lake Titicaca (go on, get your giggles out now, i´m going to be saying it quite a lot in the next few days!). For those in the know, Puno is just like Padang. If the people here didn´t speak Spanish and spoke Bahasa instead you´d think it was the same town. Very weird. But it´s more like the South America I thought i was going to encounter than anything else so far. It´s poor, dirty and politically aware, but happy all the same. So I tried to walk around Puno yesterady and realise i physically couldn´t, so ihad a rest day in Puno today. I also got bitten by heaps of sandflys in Machu Pichu, so that coupled with the cold, soreness and the fact that my discman has mysteriously stopped working, i needed a day to just be quiet and do nothing! So, i´m ok now, and i´ll head off to the lake tomorrow.

Oh, some other things...
Slater: Congrats! When´s the wedding?
Kelly and Shane: Thanks for reading the blog, i miss you guys :)
Alex: I´m glad you have nothing better to do than mess about on the internet, reading my blog. At least it´s consistant with every other job i´ve known you to have :P
Andre: You´re mad bird, check your inbox.

I miss you guys heaps. Being away has made me think a few things through and I think this might be my last big trip for awhile and i´m going to join the landed gentry in a year or so. With a bit of luck. OK, a last few photos and i´ll talk to you guys soon...


Part of Machu Pichu as seen from Huayna Picchu.











Me, on top of a mountain. I was sitting where the guy in the green t-shirt is, quickly realised i didn´t have a death wish and so got down!








I saw this at Machu Pichu while i was hiking around. Is it a rabbit? Is it a squirel? Is it a possum? A dollar to the genius who works it out!