the final stretch up the valley back to the town. After a bite to eat and collecting our bags we ended up back on the train for the long journey back to Cuzco. This time we weren’t so lucky with the people opposite us though, I ended up crammed in with some big American guy!! Once back though we got a taxi straight to the bus station, which was another god awful place, ate some disgusting food and boarded our overnight bus which was old and dirty and looked nothing like the picture I’d been shown when buying the tickets!!

So there you have it. Machu Picchu - an staggeringly awesome and extraordinary place - absolutely un-missable, but, and it’s a very big but, ridiculously priced. It is apparently the most expensive UNESCO world heritage site in the world, in a country where most of the population don’t have two pennies to rub together. And that’s just the entrance fee. When you add

up everything else that you have to buy to get there, the price is just stupid. We spent more money in these two days than we did in the rest of the three weeks we were in Peru. We worked out from the number of visitors they get just how much money they were making a month, over a million UK pounds!! You really do have to ask yourself where is all that money going? It certainly doesn’t seem to be going to help the obvious poverty which is all around. I could go on but I think you get the picture. Don’t get me wrong, we were both very glad that we went there, and if you’re ever in Peru, you should go too, but the whole thing just left a very sour taste in our mouths, which was a great shame since our time in Peru up until Cuzco had been so fantastic. I don’t think we’ve been to any country where our opinions have been split so much from one area to another.

Anyway, onwards and