and we were starting to steam!! Just then a lady appeared and asked us if we wanted a cold fruit juice - we nearly bit her hand off and were overjoyed when she brought us a couple of South East Asian style fruit shakes - heaven!! We had another quick dip after that but were thinking that we’d really had enough poaching for the day and went back in to get changed. Ominous clouds had been forming, and sure enough, just as we were ready to head back it started raining - so we opted for a taxi back to our hotel, for the princely sum of 55p!!

The rain persisted for most of the afternoon with a fair bit of thunder too so we stayed in our room. Hel made a start on the monstrous task of sorting out our photos from Antarctica - picking the ones for our website from a selection of around 3500 wasn’t going to be an easy or quick job!! Later on when hunger called we braved the rain and went in search

of some dinner. We decided to have a look around the market. It all seemed very meat based, but we found a stall selling fried chicken, chips and veggie noodles, and tucked into a plate of delicious noodles and chips for 50p each!! Chivay was shaping up to be one of the cheapest places we’d been to so far!! As it was still early and again getting chilly we decided to check out the local Irish pub (Yes really!!). We ordered a glass of wine each and played pool and generally hung out in the warmish bar for ages until we just couldn’t make the wine last any longer and headed home to bed!!

The next day we were planning to do a big walk down the valley to the next village, Yanque, where we planned to get the bus back up to Chivay. We had both decided that although the view from our room was really nice, it was a little too cold and damp for comfort and as Chivay was so cheap, we’d go and see