Deepest, darkest Peru . . . the home of Paddington Bear!

And so we found ourselves heading towards our final continent, South America. Having only learnt of the devastating earthquake the day before our flight we felt quite apprehensive as we boarded the plane, especially as about a quarter of the people on our flight were aid and rescue workers. We started to wonder if this was such a great holiday destination . . .

All fears were soon abandoned though when we landed in deepest, darkest Peru. We found ourselves in an amazing city, full of history and culture.

Flicking through the ever trusted guide book I discovered a Monastery in Lima that is famous for it's catacombs which are thought to be the final resting place for an estimated 70,000 humans. So off we set. After an interesting tour of the monastery itself we ventured underground. I was starting to feel a little claustrophobic at being underground in these spooky hollowed out rooms and also a little nervous at the thought of suddenly being faced with thousands of human skeletons. Now, being faced with all those skeletons underground would have been daunting enough but some bright spark had decided it would be a good idea to count the bodies so that they could have a more accurate figure of exactly how many people were buried here. Good idea, I hear you say, except for the fact that to count the bodies they took them apart and counted each type of bone separately. As you walk around you discover a pile of skulls, then a pile of femurs etc. . . . pretty weird. Even more bizarrely someone had decided to use some of the bones to make a circular design which seemed to follow the pattern of skull, skull, femur, femur, skull, skull . . you get the idea. I found the whole experience rather bizarre and felt quite relieved when we emerged into the fresh air once again.

To recover from our spooky experiences we decided to hit one of the local outdoor bars and decided to warm ourselves up with a glass of the famous Peruvian national drink, Pisco Sour. Watching closely we discovered that the drink was a combination of Pisco, sugar, lemon juice and ice. It looked rather good until the raw white of an egg was added! Tasty! Adam thinks it resembles alcoholic, uncooked pancake mix in a glass!

And so it was onto our next city, Cuzco. Fearing that our bums wouldn't be able to withstand the 18 hour bus journey on a partly unpaved road we jumped on a plane and arrived in Cuzco very early one morning. Now, for those of you who don't already know, the city of Cuzco is at an altitude of 3326m, which is pretty high! As we'd flown in from sea level the altitude was a real shock to our systems and so we spent the next couple of days feeling kind of rough, very out of breath and trying to overcome these symptoms by devouring as many coca sweets and as much coca tea as is humanly possible!

To try to jolly ourselves out of this sluggish state of mind we decided some action was needed. We jumped in a bus and headed to the Urubamba River, we were going white water rafting. Now, I think at this point you should know that we had only been white water rafting once before and this experience had ended when our boat deflated mid journey and our guide tried to blow it up manually. Not the best experience . . . with this in mind, off we set.

The rapids were awesome, really spectacular and lots of fun, however, our guide was a bit of a madman. He decided that a great idea would be to paddle back to a set of rapids, all lie with our heads at the back of the boat and 'surf' the rapids in our raft. So, on his signal we all began to paddle furiously back towards the rapids. It was pretty hard going, we weren`t moving very quickly but we eventually managed it and with that our guide shouted 'back' at which point the 5 of us all leapt to the back of the boat. Well, the four boys did, I managed to leap over the side into the freezing cold, turbulent water! Whoops!