Cusco

With Tina being confined to the room to rest her ankle I went out today to sort our tickets to Puno, same spot as yesterday and got full cama seats for 5 soles extra...sweet. I had to wait an hour to get the tickets so I hung around the square...not such a good idea. I had a kid beside me try and sell me some food for the birds, I said it's OK and he started to cry, I couldn't deal with it so I gave him a bottle of coke I had with me, he was delighted! At least he'll get to keep it at the end of the day.

Next was a middle-aged woman selling paintings, she sat down and chatted to me for a while and then started crying about her daughter who had cancer, I didn't know what to do! I had a look at her paintings, she only had a few but I bought a small canvas oil painting for 4euro off her after some negotiation! She said she'd give it to me for that price as she liked me...I don't know whether I was spun a yarn, but I'm happy with my painting...which will be given to my mother , I shouldn't have mentioned the price!

Seeing me buy something off one person, hoards of people flock and another lady sat beside, this time there was no tears, she tried to sell me everything from jewellery to jewellery boxes, I ended up buying 5 'brass' Inca bottle openers off her for EUR2.50! I'll have to drink alot to wear through 5 bottle openers! At that point I got out of there and 3 people started hounding me to but some of their wares! I was done at that stage and left it at that..one thing I'll say is that they are also useless at haggling! but offer a fair price from the word go, unlike alot of the highballing of prices we saw in Asia...

Well that took me most the night to get everything up to scratch, I installed Ubuntu on a USB stick and got Skype working at last, but it was too late to call home so I'll be in touch in the next day or 2.

Tomorrow we depart at 8:30am to Puno (Lake Titicaca) which is a 6 hour bus journey...Time for bed now!