So we´re back from our little trip to the big canyon. I know I´ve used the Motley Crew analogy a couple of tiems so far, but I feel it´s been long enough since the last one and I am going to again. Think of Motley Crue and what do you think of...? Dodgy mullets, bad mysogynistic soft rock etc...who were even worse than these muppets? Poison? Europe? No idea, but anyway if you can think of a bad soft rock band worse that THE CRUE then enter their name here .... --------- because the group of people we´ve just spent 2 delightful (not) days with were worse than the worse motley crew you could ever imagine. For starters, and the best of a very bad bunch, 2 Italians who fashionwise were old enough to know better. Perms, tattoos and bad sunglasses DO NOT GO no matter how you dress them up, especially when you´re in your mid 40s. Now, stage left, enter Carolyn (who was really nice but that´s not the point) with her newly found Spanish boyfriend and his two friends. I´ll start with Carolyn´s beau hereon in known as ´Knifeboy´. For a start all he did was slobber over her constantly, in a packed minibus. He had more (scary) tattoos than you could shake a stick at, smoked like a chimney (seemingly deliberately in our faces at times), drank (beer, pisco sour, meths) all day, was incredibly rude, looked like a drug addict/devil worshipper, and carried a massive flick-knife which he used to peel a banana...what a man, a big knife, wow! He also, later on the trip bought a knuckle duster from a market stall ´para este noche´ his words not mine...nice chap. He also took turns in taking the piss out of me, Jen and the other non-Spanish speaker and egged the others on to do so. In short he was an utter prick of the highest order. What Carolyn was doing with him we´ll never know, but I guess they do say something about all women loving rogues...Knifeboy´s 2 mates were a mid 40´s arrogant hairy monster, who looked a bit like Yanni, and the ugliest woman I have ever seen. If she stood next to Anne Widdicombe you´d swear the die-gard Tory had just been voted Miss Universe. Apart from the fact she was uglier than all 7 sins, she was rude, obknoxious, another inconsiderate heavy smoker, and just plain strange. I nicknamed this couple ´Beardy and Weirdy´.
The group was topped off with some upper-class snob of a woman from London. For this lady everything was wrong; worng tour, wrong guide, wrong country, wrong trip to the jungle etc etc...she didn´t even stay with the group for tea, she was staying at a 70USD a night place, so she obviously took the brunt of the Spaniard´s pisstaking.

Oh and to our guide, Lady (I kid you not this was her name). Bless her. She tried. I think Osama Bin Laden would have made a better English speaking tour guide, as her grip of the English language was, erm how to put it politely, SHIT. She had been told by her boss, and thus completely stitched up by her boss, that the whole group spoke Spanish. She did try to speak English but we would have learnt more if we´d sat in the pub for 2 days.

Hey the driver was a nice guy though. Didn´t catch his name, or give him a nickname so we´ll call him, erm, driver.

We set of on the long, gruelling drive with Carolyn doting on Knifeboy´s every command, at one point I thought she was going to follow him to the loo to wipe his arse for him...the non-aircon bus was completely full and getting hotter by the second, and with those too all over each other next door to us we knew we were in for a long journey. We couldn´t open the windows due to the dusty roads so we had to suffer the heat and the people...The first day was a real letdown, we basically drove to Chivay, via some llamas, cute kids, cute kids with llamas, and some coca tea (for altitude sickness) climbing to over 4800m (15,600 ft) in the process. Chivay was a little lower at 3681m (still nearly 12,000 ft) and we all felt a bit out of puff as we climbed the hotel steps. Entering the hotel bar and hearing Celine Dion ´My heart will go on´we did what any self respecting English couple would do, and went to bed for 3 hours, only to be woken by the same song, which was then played for another hour or so. During this time everyone else went to the nearby hot springs, seen it done it we thought and caught some shut-eye. The meal at a local restaurant would best be described as bad, and the ´entertainment´of a few locals and some panpipes best be described as ´very bad´. Hell but at least we didn´t get dressed up in local costume like a German couple on the next table. They were both over 6 ft tall, and they looked liked they´d hired their clothes from a Peruvian school outfitters. Funny without meaning to be...bed came at 9.30pm, not a moment too soon.

So, to today. Up and out by 6am we arrived at the Colca Canyon at around 7.30 after a couple of pointless stops at craft stalls and the like. The drive was a little more scenic than the previous day, as we passed numerous estancias (farms) and the famous terraces, resplendent with green healthy looking crops. The canyon itself was quite a sight, dropping from a peak of 5,800m down to below 1,000m (this may be incorrect, this was what I managed to decipher from Lady) - a drop of 3 miles. The condors came out in full flight, although nowhere near as close to us, or as great in number as when we were in El Calefate or Rio...at that moment anyway. After an hour at the acnyon we headed a bit further along the road and walked for about 30 minutes away from the crowds at the first viewpoint. Here we were really lucky as just as we were about to head back to the van 6 condors came out of nowhere and circled about 30 ft above us. I was tempted to injure Kinfebiy and let the birds do the rest but he was much bigger than me, and he had a knife. So back on the bus, and home some 5 hours later. The trip for me was almost worthwhile due to the condor moment, but for Jen it was a complete washout, ´as bad as the floating market´...harsh words indeed. We´re off out tonight to try and avopid the people we´ve just met. Hopefully they won´t ever read this either...