Peru... the last country.

We got a bus out of Copa the next day to go to Puno, in Peru. In Puno there are “floating islands,” which are literally made out of mud and reeds and kind of float in shallow water. When the Inca showed up they pushed the local people out, and they made these islands. It was pretty cool, and we bought a couple hand made things. We met a couple from Louisiana on the boat who had just graduated from med school at Tulane, and were on a 3 week vacation before they went to their residencies in Sonoma, California. We had dinner with them that night. The next day my stomach wasn't great, and we were a bit hung over, so we just lounged around and watched TV. Then the next day we went to Cusco, so we could get to Machu Pichu.

We got a pretty good hotel in Cusco, only 50 soles for a room a night, including breakfast. My stomach got really bad the next day, and I couldn't walk around town much. It is a really really cool town. There are tons of old colonial churches, but what makes them cool is that a lot of them are built using Inca foundations and bottom stones, so you can see them along the bottom of a lot of buildings. Cusco was a major Inca city before the Spanish came and pillaged it. The Inca used gold as decoration, and there were whole plazas in gold with gold statues. Yeah, those got stolen. The huge Inca stones are incredible. They cut them so exactly to fit together so they didn't have to use mud or any other type of sticking substance. It's amazing how they did it.

The next morning we were planning to go to Machu Pichu, but we found out too late that the buses only left in the early morning. Which was fine with me, to have another day to recover from my stomach. We went to another museum, the indigenous art museum, and it was really good. Then we ate lunch at this super cool British pub. I had fish and chips of course! With mushy peas! Jesse had bangers and mash.Both really good. It was strange to be in such modern, comfortable surroundings like Cusco (even though Cusco is the most colonial looking place I've probab

We left early the next morning on an adventurous adventure to get to Machu Pichu for $28. This involved a 6 hour dirty bus ride up to the top of what felt like the tallest mountain in the world, winding around back and forth for hours, a cramped taxi ride along the edge of another mountain, but on an unpaved road, and then a 3 hour walk along train tracks, over bridges and under tunnels, half of which was in the dark and all of which was in drizzly rain.