CLUB . . . You're wrong and you don't even know it !

Hi,

Quite bored tonight - Paul has a cold and has gone to bed early and the streets in this town are too steep to do much more wandering about.

Have just come from the Cross Keys Cuzcos traditional English pub and I can confirm it is run down enough to be a genuine bar all right. Tonight the locals were celebrating some religious festival ( god knows what - Palm Sunday was yesterday ) which involves them parading a statue of Jesus through the town which is packed to busting point with people waving palms. The idea then seems to be to form conga lines and try to run quickly through the crowd thus creating impassable bottlenecks and huge crushes up and down steps. The end result is that you either cannot move at all or are being propelled at 90mph trying desperatley not to lose your footing.

Tomorrow we sort out what to do for the next two weeks in Cuzco. I am having second, third and fourth thoughts about whether to do the inca trail or not. This is 4 days of climbing pointlessly up hills only to come down again later at around 4000M above sea level. The altitude will ensure that every footstep is bought dearly with blood, sweat and curses and every breath dragged from my collapsing lungs will leave a trail of pain and suffering burnt deep into my fragile psyche. But it would be an experience.... hmmm.

Peruvian food is in the main pretty horrible, every single thing they seem to manage to infect with a distinctive Peruvian taste - this applies to tea and sugar also. On a slight tangent the tea they drink here ( not the coco tea of which I have drunk a lot ) has a list of about 7 ingredients on the packet. Surely to goodness the only ingredient in Tea should be Tea. Anyway this peruvian flavour tastes a bit like rotting corned beef and is ever present, I hate foreign food.

Our abilities in the Spanish language are if anything deteriorating, I can now say the phrases from my phrase book in a manner which is mostly understood but the resulting stream of gibberish is almost always totally meaningless. The thing I can now recognise without fail is the ineviatble "no hable epsanol" followed by hollow laughter and doom laden glances amongst the speakers.

Hope you are all having fun in Birmingham and the weather is being kind to you. I sunburned my hands yesterday and they are still hurting now - Peruvian weather seems to consist of stupidly powerful sunshine all day accomanied by a freezing wind so that in the shade it is too cold and in the sun it is too hot. At night it is just quite cold.