of grass cut, and to be honest, it makes it look unnatural. And to think that this is obviously done because they believe that that’s what the tourists want to see. Well some of them might, but certainly we would have preferred to see it in just a little more of a natural state. I mean hands up who think that the Incas scraped out the moss from between the stones!!!

By this time we had decided it was time for lunch. It was still only about ten o clock, but hey, we did have breakfast over four hours ago!! We thought we’d have a quick look in the café bar to see if they had anything tasty to supplement our avocado butties, and nearly fell over when we saw the prices in there!! Now we really had to laugh!! A cheese salad sandwich from this café cost more than our double en-suite room cost in Chivay!!! Can you believe that? We had to keep reminding ourselves that we were in the same

country!! Unfortunately we’d also done our usual trick of not bringing enough water, so we were forced to buy a bottle from there. Water from this place worked out at around five pounds a litre, them only selling it in tiny bottles for over a quid each!! I’m pretty sure that that’s the most expensive water I’ve ever seen - it even beats English motorway service stations!!!!

After refuelling we headed back in to have another look around and check out the bits we’d missed. There were a couple of “alternative” trails, one of which went round the side of the ruins and back up some terraces to the main site. It had said in the book that the alternative trails were more difficult than the others, but we thought we’d give it a go. It was at this point that once we were off the main herd trails we finally found some stones which had escaped the manicure treatment, and we were right, they