After stocking up on pancakes in La Paz to make up for our traumatic experience, we jollied along to Lake Titicaca, the highest fresh water lake on da planet. We made use of our time appropriately by topless sunbathing on the shore and destroying our chests. An error. We´re still peeling. Copocabana was very beautiful and notorious for its adjoining island Ísla Del Sol. On our last day Ocs and I decided to take the three hour boat ride across to the Inkan Island for an explore of its famous ruins. For a start the boat was the slowest form of transport we´d ever come across, we could probably swim faster than it. Prior to this Octavia and I had taken the liberty of wearing shorts thinking the sun would hold out for the day. No. It did not. We were sat at the top of the chug chug for three hours solid with icicles hanging out our noses and Octavia declaring hypothermia. Once we finally arrived, we were not particularly amused by the endless payments we had to make for just walking on the pier. Nevertheless we carried on, with waning optimism, excited about walking around the Inkan Island, only to find out that, oh, we had to pay an extra 25 Bolivianos to walk- talk about human rights. Seeing as though we had 10 Bolivianos on us to last our final day in Bolivia, we had to scrape by on this and skip our meals, not something we like to do. The ruins were not the most impressive thing we´ve seen, we couldn´t afford a guide so decided to take matters into our own hands and guess where the ´Sacred Table´was. As Octavia prominenetly said, "there´s only a certain amount of Inkan wall I can look at." So, several bricks later, and a "sacred table" which looked like it had been comissioned by Ikea that very morning, Rosie and I decided we had had enough, and contemplated throwing ourselves into the icy water to end our misery, and avoid paying an additional 300 Bolivianos for the privilege to be able to breathe. We hopped on a night bus for our last border crossing, and onto Puno to the Peruvian shores of the Lake. We arrived in the dead of night, no hostels booked, no map to hand and with only a few measly crackers lining our daysacks. Life was bleak. Lets just say, Puno was a dump. It had nothing going for it other than a shed load of cat litter and multiple Pollerias. The worst was yet to come. We were shoved into a marital suite in the nearest hostel we could find, "Hostal Palace" which consisted of a solitary hole in the ground in which to pee and someones name traced in poo on the walls. To quote R Whitcombe, our marital sheets smelt of "disinfectant, stale yoghurt and bum." Judging by the lilac wall it looked like some cretin had been through severe ´cold Turkey´ and furthermore, on reading the register book, no one had stayed in sweet Hostal Palace since 1988. We fled on the earliest bus to Cusco the next morn.

Our bus journey to Cusco was long and for the last hour we had some bloke selling laxatives in a packet, whilst repeatedly showing us images of mangled body parts and obese gringos. Occy considered investing in a sachet in which I politely declined for her, reminding her that, yes, this was Peru. With our bowels still in tact we arrived in Cusco, and reunited with the gals from La Paz. After seeing Cusco in the flesh, we were amazed, such a beautiful city with many a great cafe. We unwisely hit the toon, frequenting Peru´s most tragic club and sadly squeezing in a mere 2 hours sleep before hitting the jungle, and the far off fields of Macchu Picchu...