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Okay so strap yourself in for another thrilling episode of Mills and Boon meets Skarsky and Hutch! We are sorry but it is a monster entry this time as we have done so much and met so many people, but please do read it as it has been an incredible journey for us. And a very special welcome to all the new travel people from the 4×4 Bolivia 4 day survival expedition. Our story is at the bottom of the page.

Well I’m glad to say I’m well on the road to recovery although I still look as skinny as a whippet (a type racing dog fancied by people who live in the North of England) and not kiting for 2.5 months has left me with baggy clothes and shorts that keep falling down at really inopportune moments.

Since leaving Machu Picchu and continuing our travels south and onwards into Chile we have had some really funny experiences which we’ll share with you. We took a bus ride for about 6 hours and they played a video of early 1980’s MTV stuff, I was singing away to a bunch of confused looking Peruvians to the likes of Billy Idol “Dancing With Myself”, Kim Wilde “Checkered Love” and Laura Branigan “Gloria” oooh Gloria and (Tony Hughes you’ll love this…) A Flock Of Seagulls and Human League ‘Sound Of the Crowd’!!! Do you remember the haircuts we had? Not many people know I was in a headlining band with Tony, called ‘The Universal Language Of Love’ which we reformed into ‘Destiny’ after a bust up over a girl with unfeasibly big knockers. God Bless Sun-In. One thing that I suddenly realised that shocked me was that despite many, many drunken nights singing at the top of my Stella Artois addled lungs to Dexy’s Midnight Runners, “Come On Eileen” that, in actual fact other than,’Woooah Come on Eileen yeah you know what I mean’ and ‘Ooooh rah oooh rah yayhhhh’ I do not actually know any of the words? For example it’s actually ‘Too-Rye-Ay’ and is a song about an old bloke. Ah what ever happened to Tenpole Tudor and Swords Of A Thousand Men (Youtube it if you are under 32 years of age).

Anyhoo, we headed out of Machu Picchu taking the Vistadome Train (a train with a glass roof) through the sacred valley and ended up back in Cusco where Karen and I shared a stunning bottle of ‘Petite Verdo’, bizarrely enough bottled not in France as we expected but from none other than, Peru. The food was some fresh Andean Mountain Trout, mmmmm and sitting next to a log fire. Due to the altitude and the fact that neither us drink much anymore, Blondie was a drunk as a badger within minutes and preceded to spend most of the night snoring like a chainsaw after performing her crocodile duvet death roll and nicking 90% of the Lama blankets. Cold butt cheeks I can tell you as the temperatures plunge at night to minus figures. Cusco is home to a factory of knock off North Face gear, so everyone is fully North Faced up. Even the street cleaners and homeless people are all snuggly wrapped up in the stuff. We bought 2 jackets that would cost close on £500 for the princely sum £7.20 each, bargain!! And micro fleeces which cost £125 each for, yes you’ve guessed it £4.50.

Another bus ride for 6 hours took us through the incredible heights of 5600 metres above sea level. To give you a clue that’s 15,128 feet or there abouts. To put that in real terms, stack 16 Eiffel Towers on top of each other or if you really want to stack 1061 London Double Decker Buses on top of each other (I can even tell you how long that would take to freefall)….er I guess I have too much time on my hands working stuff like that out on 6 hour bus rides. Well we ended up at Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the entire world. Apparently, the locals have heard the ‘Titi-ha-ha’ joke before and were not as amused as I was, chuckling away to myself like a school boy with his first copy of ‘Mega-Whazzo Jugs Monthly’ as Karen stood by looking apologetically at the now angry looking hotel reception women.

We took ourselves on a tour around an incredible 1862 British Gunboat ‘The Yavari’ that was made in Whippet Country (the north of England) and was then specifically chopped up into pieces of a maximum of 400lb and sent to Chile via Cape Horn, then thousands of km’s up to Arica in Chile. Then, get this, by donkey and Alpaca it took 6 years to carry all the bits and bobs through the Andes Mountains to the lake where she was rebuilt for the War between Peru and Bolivia in 1870. But by the time they had done so, yup, the war was over and she never had her guns fitted. She fell into ruins and turned her stern to the lake as if to say she wanted to sink. The photo is really quite sad. Until about 1980 when some posh English women who’s family owned the shipyards in which she was built, came to Peru and salvaged her. She’s now a stunner and one of the oldest serviceable metal seagoing vessels in the world. See the photo of me at the helm!! William - Was she from the Stephenson Yards? Michael Palin did a thing on her too as well interestingly.

The next day we took a tour out to The Floating Uros Islands. These are essentially a group of reed islands that have been inhabited by a hardy bunch of people for centuries. What they did was to build a raft or reeds by matting them together and then rafting those reeds to another raft, and so on until you have wodge of them, them overlay even more reeds et voila, you have an island and then anchor it with big sticks and rotated it until you have the best view and the neighbour you want. The photos speak for themselves and I can tell you that for top notch photography it was like shooting fish in a barrel with frame after frame of awe inspiring and hugely memorable faces. The classic imagery was so easy to capture as photographs leapt from real life into my camera. (Jessssh who writes this stuff!!)  The other Pro Photographers who view my site will understand when they see the images. I loved it and the people were just so lovely and inviting to their homes.

The boat ride there was hysterical as our boat would only turn to the right. The young driver was fighting with the wheel and kept crashing about the cockpit as he fought in vain to make the boat go to the left. The teleflex steering would slip and he would bang into the window, whilst we merrily wandered and chugged around in a circle. As we entered the narrow channel to go to the islands it became obvious that we had a real problem. He worked out that if he throttled up and then backed off we would drift to the left again, so the next 20 minutes was spent going - Vroooom, drifty drifty drifty, Vroooom drifty, drifty, drifty. Until, and this was so funny, the engine stopped and we experienced the slowest boat crash in history. I guess I didn’t help too much by screaming really loudly in an American accent, ‘Oh My Gawd we are all going to die’ before we slowly drifted at about half a knot into the side of the reed beds. Eventually after seeing the islands and going around in circles a few times we finally broke down for good, sideward’s across the channel and had to get towed back to the harbour. The best £8.00 we have spent to far.

We met an incredible family of Canadians on the boat. There are 6 of them travelling around the world together aged 6 to 13 (3 girls and 1 boy plus Mum and Dad) The strap line on their website is something that has sat and lodged itself into the dark recesses of my mind and is so true of me and Karen. It reads, ‘The Further You Go - The Closer You Become’.

As we left the lake we were riding in a Tuk Tuk that we almost broke. With my weight and Blondie’s combined plus 19 kilos or my backpack and 17 kilos of hers plus our day packs and the driver, the poor clutch didn’t stand a chance and as we reached a hill on a one way street the queue formed behind of honking angry taxis. We both had to resort to a sort of hip thrust to help the thing make it up the hill. The poor Peruvian driver was like,’you break my taxi’. We said sorry and ran off after paying.

We moved onto a town called Puno where we had an interesting experience. There was an underground market with all these little concrete booths hosting a vast range of stalls selling anything from food to washing powder through to shoes and broom handles, then there was the meat market section with yellow chickens and various bits of dead stuff and fish all adding to the smell and the noise and heat. The smell was vivid with mixtures of blood, water, sweat, bleach and rotten vegetables. Add to this the sweet smell of the spices and fruits and you get the general picture. The main sound from the stairwell came from a wedding celebration that was taking place in the entrance hall. Think, an area the size of 30 foot by 20 foot underground carpark with people dancing to a 14 piece brass band all standing crammed into the stairwell belting out Latin American Samba and Rumba tunes overfilled by the guys giving it up big time on the drums with the horns hooting out the most toe tapping rhythms, it was so loud that your kidneys were vibrating but an incredible sound and sight to see. I offered a quick chorus of “Bam-Ba-La-Bamba” and a quick shuffty of Ricky Martin moves before being told to bugger off by a 12 year old who had a beard.

Ariquipa saw a staring face to face with a 500 year old mummy in a $2,000,000 freezer! Juanita was found after the snow thawed due to global warming and she rolled down a mountain where an American dude was like, ‘woah ice lady chick’ and promptly robbed all the graves and stuffed her in a museum after a quick tour of the good old US of A. Juanita was a 14 year old girl who was linked to a famous family, who sent her on a 600km walk through the Andes before she was clubbed to death as a sacrifice to The Gods of the Mountains. Now she rests in a museum surrounded by ice for all to see. I was quite upset as seeing her, but then I guess it’s there or rot on a mountain top.

Yet another bus ride for 6 hours took us to Tacna where we headed closer to the border with Chile. They take a ‘proof of life’ video of you before you get on the bus due to so many ‘incidents’. I amused the latest guy videoing me by delivering a fine rendition of none other than MC Hammer and giving it up big time to ‘Woah-wooah-wooah- yeah, CANT STOP THIS…HAMMERTIME’, finishing with a quick moon walk. We must say that all the travel is taking it’s toll though. It is quite tough when you see a sign post that says 2058 km to Santiago and you know that means about 35 hours more on buses. I don’t think that we realised that 65 days on the road would mean about 35 different hotels spread across 5 countries with about 120 towns and with countless bus journeys and so many memories, that it all crams into your head but that it starts to become a bit of a blur. Karen is very good at remembering all of the details but I am starting to forget things and confuse places. Add to this the fact that in Chile for some bizarre reason the don’t speak the same Spanish that they do in Peru? They just look blankly at me as I stare at the counter mumbling stuff like, ‘well that used to work in Peru’.

We had 2 scares that notched the security level back to Level 10 (our highest state of alert) The first one was when we were on a bus along a mountain road and as we came around a corner (bizarrely I had a dream about this a few days before), we came across another bus that had left the road and crashed onto its side over the edge. Casualties were strewn cross the road and cliff side as we glided helplessly passed watching people emerge from the wreckage being helped by medics and people from the first bus on scene, an eerie silence befell our bus as each person sat in deep thought over what might have been. Our bus slowed for the rest of our journey. Then the second one came as we got to the bus station for our ‘Taxi’ across the border to Chile. The ticket touts were the most aggressive that we have come across and makes you realise why there are big signs in English saying , ‘BE FREEKIN’ CAREFUL HERE’. As we pulled into the carpark a man ran alongside the taxi and yelled in through the window ‘CHILE CHILE CHILE’ at the top of his voice in an almost panicked manner. Before we had come to a stop the door on Karen’s side was pulled open and a group of 7 or 8 men all started yelling ‘CHILE, CHILE, CHILE’.

It was quite a tense moment until I heard Karen’s voice yell at them to go away. Then the fear rose in me and I reacted the best way that I could at the time which was to throw my back pack on the ground and to yell, ‘BUGGER OFF ALL OF YOU’ as loud as I could before waving my fists around at all 8 of them in true posh English Hugh Grant and Colin Firth style like a scene from Bridget Jones Diary. ‘Would you mind awfully f******g off before I blooming well punch one of you one the nose’. Seriously though, as we walked inside the terminal there were about 30 men all screaming at us CHILE CHILE CHILE. We wedged ourselves in a corner and kept each other calm as we were both shaking with adrenaline and, fear I guess until one of them realised we were looking like bunny rabbits in a car headlights and thankfully lead the others away, whilst I gave them all my best Paddington Bear ‘Hard Stares’.

Finally a taxi took us the 55kms out across the border and into Chile. We stayed at a surf hostel owned and run by a big wave tow-in surfer who has a photo of him riding possibly the biggest wave I have ever seen, I took a shot of it so keep an eye out for it.

Oh and this was so funny. At the bus stations they all have these small shops stacked to the roofs with everything you can imagine from crisps to sunscreens through to squeaky dog toys. Well I walked into one of these at a pretty grotty bus station to get a bottle of water in readiness for our next 7 hour bus ride. Well, when I walked in I was struck by this incredible sound that sounded just like someone jetwashing a car. A real ‘PHWASHHHHHHHHHH’ (make a jet-wash sound now as it will add to the whole ambience of what is to come)….well I stood there looking around and then, suddenly this old women’s face appears around the bottom of the counter and sort of panically says,’momentito por favour’ (a moment please), at which point I realise that she is peeing like a mountain gorilla into a bucket!! She must have been 85 if she was day! So I stood there rooted to the spot not knowing what to do. She then calmly stands up and hands me my drink as if nothing has happened. Thank god for Glaxo Smith Klein 90% alcohol handwash, ewwwy.

Onwards we pushed catching bus after bus and cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway. The route we have chosen means that we see less and less travellers from Europe and in some places we are often the only Western faces, if that makes sense. We headed back into the Andes again from the coast climbing steadily back to 2440m, luckily we seem to have adjusted really quickly to the altitude, which was great as we were about to venture into the high Atacama desert peaking at a little over 6000m. To describe this place is difficult. It is a rugged as it is barren. If you think of the surface of the moon outside the window of the bus with vast emptiness and nothing apart from desert stretching off into the horizon with not so much as a bird or even a random dog. Nothing, nothing at all for mile after mile. Don’t think sandy desert, don’t think Sir Lawrence Of Arabia or the like (he died on a moped near Wareham, Dorset by the way!) The desert here is dirty grey/brown with rock like sand that is solid. Rolling down a sand dune here would tear you to shreds. Add to this a fine layer of grey dust that was spewed thousands of metres into the atmosphere when a volcano cracked one off and covered most of Peru/Chile/Bolivia with the stuff. Where the wind blows, the dust flows.

Okay so finally, hello to all our new travel buddies from all over the world. As this entry is already almost full I will write about this properly on the next one. But, from San Pedro Atacama we took a 4×4 trek high into the Chilean mountains and across the border into Bolivia. Each 4×4 took 6 people plus a driver with a vast range of nationalities from British (Hi Banana), Dutch (Hi Rick & Lisalotta), Belge (Hi Inga), Australian (Hi Carol), German (Mark & your lovely girlfriend), Canadian’s, Americans and a bunch of hysterically funny Frenchies (Hi to you all, Axel (You are the best funny bloke ever) , Quentin, Pascoline and the possy of other chicks).

We trekked high into the Bolivian Mountains facing daily temperatures touching on the high 30’s and nights of crashing temperature down to -10c, so they said. We had ice on the inside of our trucks in the mornings and the drivers had to get up at 2am, 3am and 4am to keep the vehicles from freezing over. In 4 days and 3 nights we covered a total of 500 kms of totally off road desert. We saw sights that left us speechless, we ate Llama and we believe we ate Flamingo! We joked about it, but I know the bone structure of chickens and what we were eating was a different shape all together. Still it tasted like chicken though. We stayed in very basic, 6 to a room hostels and even had a night in a hotel in the desert made of only salt! We ventured into the Salar Da Uyuni salt flats where we visited Fish Island, (Simon Plummer I have such a respect for you after seeing what terrain you coped with on your tour). We visited the train graveyard and countless lakes on the most incredible beauty and bathed in thermal holes in the ground.

Okay, so there is loads to tell about this but I will write about it on the next entry in a few days.

Finally, I would personally like to thank the following ladies for making an old man very very happy indeed by notching up an all time top 10 fantasy. (Jo, Inga, Pascoline and Carole) Yes, ladies and gentlemen I would like to inform you all, that I, Christopher Skone-Roberts, aged 38 and 3/4 slept with, 5 women in one night in the same room!!! Wahoooo, not even Mark Evans could manage that. The fact that only Karen was in my bed does not detract from the fact that there were still 4 other women in my room! Okay they were all dressed in Polar expedition gear and most had been wearing the same clothes for 3 days and had not showered for 2 but 5 is still 5. Okay Okay, yes I bottled it and when boobies were whopped out, I looked at the floor and went red and started mumbling about going out and feeding the Llamas.

Thank you all for your patience as I know this has been a long entry. The images in W27 are amongst some of my best work yet and are so incredible that they transcend photography and border on becoming art. Some of the images of the mountains have appeared as paintings which, as a photographer is about as close to the Holy Grail of photography as you can get. (AS PER BELOW)

Happy travels to all and back again next week. Oh and just to let you know Karen had a really nasty fall getting out of the shower.She’s okay but as bruised as anything. She landed outside the bathroom with her back across the steps. She was so lucky to not break her ribs, wrist and probably neck. Yes, there were lots of tears on both parts as I thought she’d broken her neck at one point. The risks of foreign travel I guess. She’s okay just very sore and shocked.

Hugs

Chris and Blondie xxx

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     Fast link for photos CLICK HEREhttp://www.lazyblueskies.com/wp/wpg2-2?g2_itemId=9542&g2_page=2New Files W20 is on page 2, and these are on page 3 - W21, W22, W23, W24 and W25 (Quite a lot to look at as I have been ill so there’s a back log of images.)There it stood, towering above us, it’s face stretching up into the clouds as it had done for the last three hundred million years or more. The river crashed passed our feet and onwards over rocks the size of houses that remained, sunken into the swollen riverbed, where they landed after falling from the mountain top. We leaned back as far as we could with hands on our heads to stop sunglasses from falling off, and there, one thousand metres  vertically above our heads at a height of 3040 metres was, what they call ‘The Old Mountain’, or to you and me, ‘MACHU PICCHU’ (more about this later but first….)Boarding the Cessna light aircraft with the words, ‘You Gringo is my new co-pilot’ ringing in my ears was quite a good start to the day. Blondie had never flown in a small plane before but she took it all in her stride as we bounced down the run way with Pedro singing a song in my headphones about an Alpaca, a bottle of beer and a lonely night in the desert. The World famous Nazca Lines were quite a sight to see and can only really be appreciated from the air. Monkeys, Dogs, Hummingbirds, Spiders, Trees and Whales are all spread out and etched into the desert floor remaining as they have done for centuries upon centuries. The most interesting shape would be, the Astronaut carved into a hillside. Only really from a plane bouncing around the sky with a drunk pilot can you see and try to understand what this race of people were doing again 2000 years ago. Mulder and  Scully would definitely get a stiffy around these parts based upon what we saw. Why else would these people draw massive signs in the earth that can only be seen from the sky, er, like, 1700 years before Orville Wright and his trusty brother Willbur waddled off the side of a hill yelling ‘New York or Bust’ before promptly crashing into a cow 80 foot away.We headed up to Cusco (The most spiritual and most respected city in Peru). The worst bus journey of our travels befell us as we climbed for almost 15 hours with the air con stuck at 27c. We chose a night bus and I can tell you I have never been so sick in my entire life, (or so I thought). 3500 metres above sea level is where AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) really kicks in. Think about one of your worst hangovers in your life and then factor in not being able to breathe. Add to that the fact that I came down with some sort of flu thing where all my joints are really painful. So we stopped and stayed in a Hostel Convent run by Nuns for a few days. No TV, hot water every second day and bread for breakfast. So lots of Coca Tea which eases the symptoms and Mountain Sickness tablets (Yes it’s from the same plant as cocaine so I’m told and makes your lips go numb, er, moving on)As we got to Cusco we saw an horrific accident where either a bus or a lorry had quite literally dropped off the mountain and fallen hundreds of feet into a ravine. Nothing or no one could have survived as lots of locals stood around looking down into the ravine without any chance of getting down to help. A bit of a sobering wake up call for us after some 90 hours on buses so far, still, Nil Desperandum as they say in Boscombe.Sunday 28th September wasn’t a great day for me as it was just 2 short years ago that my Mum passed away after a short battle with brain cancer so we decided to make a special day of it to go on a horseback ride up into the highlands of The Andes. Blondie had never ridden a horse before so was really quite nervous but it was fabulous. What a stunning day it was as we visited 4 different archeological ruins on a horse. My horse way Gay apparently so our guide told me as he chuckled away to himself merrily. He was singing a song about a ‘Gay Caballero’ whilst chuckling at me. I responded with the universally recognised ‘Bird’ whereupon he whacked the horses bum and off I went like a cross between John Wayne and Frank Spencer in the Grand National.Just before we left there was an incredible phenomenon in the sky. Something very rare, called a ‘Moon Dog’. As you can see from the images this phenomenon is caused by ice crystals forming in the atmosphere at above 36,000 feet. The resulting sheet of air ice creates a solar halo thousands of metres wide. So funny to see 50 Japanese tourists all pointing to the sky like some John Travolta convention frozen in time.

Finally we moved on in a taxi because I just couldn’t do another bus. Quite cool when a 2 hour cab ride costs about £17, but we got our own personal chauffeur to take us around some ruins and drive us through the mountains, the photos in W24 speak for themselves and these are as they came off the camera!Without going into too much detail, the AMS just wouldn’t go no matter what we did and I felt sicker and sicker everyday for about 12 days until we finally got to Aguas Calientes (under the mountain of Machu Picchu) and, well, to put this in a way as least ewwwwwy as possible, I ended up vomiting quite a lot of blood and promptly collapsing. Karen bless her heart swung immediately into emergency Florence Nightingale and Nurse Gladys Emmanuel mode and headed off into the night at 01.30am running through the tiny village to scramble a medical team to me in the hotel. It was hugely scary for her as I was barely conscious and was shaking with a high fever. Incredible to think that miles from civilization in the rain forest I ended up with not one but two Doctors and a nurse plus Karen working on me all night. The hotel room turned into a mini hospital with drip stands, bags of IV Fluids, IV Antibiotics, IV Narcotics and numerous heart monitors and spygnometers and things being shoved in my ears (not up the Gary Glitter thank god!)In the middle of it all my blood pressure crashed and I think I gave them all a bit of a scare when my heart rate dropped a little below 50bpm and I looked liked I had stopped breathing by all accounts. 4 hours later and I was back in the land of the living after taking on board 4 litres of fluids through a drip. Apparently I was as weak as a kitten and 1.5 stone lighter than I was 12 days ago.(I now have a 32″ waist) Later I was told that I had picked up something that we call  ‘Michael Foelling Syndrome’ which apparently is a very nasty, sickness inducing and highly infectious parasite. The Doctors said it was called ‘South American Guardia’, something me and Simon Plummer now have in common, but hey at least I now have the start of a 6 pack at 38 years of age! I am glad to say that I am recovering slowly and drinking a special hydration fluid which tastes like flat, chalky, pink, milkshake…..mmmm nice.Moving on to nicer things, W21 file shows a day spent in Cusco when it was National Tourism Day. I was in my element sitting in the front row of the crowd with my 400mm Canon lens. Faces, Faces, Faces and the textures, lines and ages of people screaming at the camera lens, an absolute pleasure to shoot these people. File W24 produced some incredible sunsets with clouds and skies that made you feel as though they were made of candy floss and cotton. Er, I hope I don’t sound like I’m going to start chanting or hugging trees again. Well in the Sacred Valley of the Gods it was difficult to not get a bit carried away.I wish that I could tell you what the people that we keep meeting along our travels are like and how interesting the conversations are but there is so much to tell. A couple of examples are, we met a lovely and very interesting lady from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean who is a Commercial Psychologist who when she isn’t working, travels the world. She is an ex Pro Hanglider who stopped after having an horrific crash. Chatting to her about it, I got to ask this question, ‘How high were you when you realised that you were going to crash for certain and what went through your mind?’ The answer was quite incredible…….’I was about 300 metres up when I knew that I was going to crash into a field full of cows, and I did, and I survived, but I broke both of my knees after I crashed when the kite flipped over onto its back and dropped me onto the ground!’ Add to this countless interesting stories of boats, crashing 4×4’s and landing on hand brakes, and we meet people like this almost every day. Interesting people, very interesting. Also we meet cool people like super yacht captains and people who race across the Atlantic for a living! And bizarrely, a property developer bloke from Bournemouth of all places (our home town).The award for ultimate stupidity and, annoyance for want of a better word goes to, (Pash will be happy with this) yes you’ve guessed it, The Good ‘Ol US of A. Let me give you an example quickly of crass, death defying stupidity. Whilst walking around Machu Picchu (think one of the most spiritual and incredible sites in the entire world) this middle class, white American family of all ages were leaping on and off rocks and running up slopes marked ‘PLEASE KEEP OFF’ whilst yelling at each other in a whiny American accent. One of the thicko’s who I named Cleatus had his top off which was just not the sort of thing that you do at a place like this. He was about 35 years old. The guides were blowing whistles and waving at them but they just waved back. I pointed out politely that there were quite serious fines for behaving disrespectfully on the site. Cleatus looked at me with his 20 stone Mother and troop of thickos and asked what I thought he should do. ‘Well’ I said, ‘perhaps start by putting your shirt back on and not swinging around the site like a f******g monkey!’. But this is the best bit, about 15 minutes later, Doofus and Delilah, his brothers dragged their knuckles along the ground towards me and said this, ‘We are really sorry but we just don’t know how to act at places like this!’ I stared at both of them, then the whole family troop of monkeys and said, ‘Do you ever go to Church? Well act like that here you disrespectful idiots’. Never mind God Bless America, more like God Help American.But finally, let me tell you about MACHU PICCHU. Sitting at 3040 metres above sea level and 1000 metres straight up from the valley floor has to be one of the most incredible and spiritual places that we/I have ever been to. Stunning. Tear inducingly beautiful  with breath taking views at every turn. Clouds drift passed you and leave you slightly breathless as the sun then comes from behind them and warms your face. When you look at what they achieved all these hundreds of years ago it makes you stop. An engineering feat that would be almost impossible to achieve even in today’s world. Inca terracing thousands of feet up, carved into a mountain top that has stood the test of time with incredible ease. Lama’s and Alpaca’s stroll passed with nonchalant ease as you struggle to breathe and climb yet another flight of granite stairs. Someone tells you that the transit van sized granite 40 tonne block that you are resting on came from, not this mountain, but the one 3 mountains away! In fact most of the granite came from the other mountains.The second day that we went up there was train strike so the normal 2500 visitors per day was reduced to under 500. So, by the time we ventured up (I was still quite weak so it was gone 2pm), well there were no more than 100 people on the entire site, and then it rained. By the end of the rain there were maybe 40 people left. Yes we had Machu Picchu almost to ourselves. There is a part of the site called Wayna Pichu (the big green pointy thing  in the back ground of most of the classic photos of Machu Picchu) well only 400 people are allowed to climb it each day, sadly we didn’t think of this until it was too late, but by shear change and thanks to my Spanglish and bumbling Englishman, the guy on the security gate pointed at the infrequently climbed Hupua Picchu saying ‘Ariba - Up’. We scrambled up the sides of this peak even using ropes to climb one section.I could rave on for hours about this but I will close this story with what we saw when we got to the top. The clouds lifted briefly and there in the valley hundreds of feet below us, next to Wayna Picchu, was the start of a rainbow. As it grew and formed in shape the light from behind it started to push through and shine against the side of another mountain. Brilliantly bright sunshine burst through the clouds (remember that we are standing in the clouds) and then it happened, the rainbow arced into the sky and over the mountain. The brilliance of the light and the vibrancy of the colours of the rainbow coupled with the incredible vista and the greens of the mountainside tumbling into the ravines thousands of feet below, the greys and whites of the clouds drifting passed, the distant sound of the swollen river crashing through the valley floor, the slow pitter patter of rain drops hitting our jackets and then the utter silence of our surroundings, just me, me and Karen and the feeling that you just don’t get any closer to the Gods than this, or the feeling that my mum was there with us. Enjoy the photos, I know there are lots this time. Remember Page 2 and Page3.And I must say a very special thank you to one of my very best friends William Stephenson for being, well, for just being William and always being there for us when we need him - thank you.Love Chris and Karen x

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