really did look far more natural. We ended up on a kind of grassy ledge looking down about two thousand foot down to the river below, with an incredible view over endless mountains and even got a brief glimpse of some snowy peaks in the distance!! We’d now been here for over three hours and were still absolutely mesmerised by the vistas from every angle!!

We followed the signs round towards the terraces and couldn’t really decide which way were supposed to go - we knew we had to go up but it just wasn’t quite clear, so we walked along a terrace and decided to climb up the ancient stone stairway to the top of them. After around three steps I got the old vertigo feeling that I mentioned earlier - the steps were frighteningly similar to the ones at Angkor which had turned my head. When I took a quick look down I instantly regretted it as I caught sight of the river, around two thousand feet

below with precious little in between!! The next few steps seemed to go in excruciating slow motion and by the time we scrambled onto firmer land I was a shaking nervous wreck!! Vertigo really is the strangest thing, I can’t even put my finger on exactly what it is that causes it; I am fine with some kinds of heights but not others. It’s got nothing to do with how high it is either, I was only twenty feet up when I first experienced it at Angkor!!

We wandered back down to the main part of the ruins just in time to see another ridiculous phenomenon. One of the most ingenious things which the Incas built here was an irrigation system which supplied water to the whole place through stone cut channels. Only, we hadn’t noticed it as the channels were all dry. It turns out that the nearby hotel, a snip at $550 a night, channels the water for it’s own use, and they only feed it back to where it