After the Saltkantay trek we spent a well needed few days chilling in Cusco and exploring the city. On our first night back we went for a farewell dinner with Ryan and Ngara (who we met on the trek) to a beautiful little French restaurant. Every single dish was Instagram worthy and it was the perfect way to celebrate surviving the trek and say goodbye to our new friends.
The next night we met up with another guy, Slobodan, from the trek and Kristina, a girl from his hostel and experienced our first night out in Peru. After trying out a few of the local pubs and bars we decided to head to a club. The nightclubs were all situated around Cusco's main square and as soon as we stepped towards it there was a fluster of PRs trying to get us to go in to the clubs, as annoying as it was it reminded me of Glasgow, which is always nice. We ended up opting for a club called Mumma Africa as we got our first drinks for free. When we got in it was NOTHING like I'd ever seen before. The dance floor was at the front of the club and all of the locals were at the front of the dance floor doing a synchronised dance lead by the DJ. The weirdest thing was all of these people thought they were great (to be fair, it was a pretty good dance) so they were obviously Cusco's answer to townies. This went on for the whole night so after a few more drinks, we decided to join in - because obviously standing at the bar chatting and laughing was weird. The drunker we got the more we danced around like idiots and we were gutted when the club closed (unfortunately one more tune doesn't work in peru) but obviously we got a MWI McDonald's before going back to the hostel.
The next day, in our hungover state we explored the city a little more (by explore I mean got on a tour bus and got off twice to be sick) before getting a night bus to our next destination, Huacachina. Huacachina is a tiny little town (like half a mile long) in the middle of the desert that people go to for sand boarding and to drive around the dunes in a sand buggy, the only thing there is hotels and restaurants/bars so it really lives off of this tourism. We decided to go for a sand buggy tour in the afternoon so we could watch the sunset over the town. Although it was probably stupidly unsafe we had so much fun as the crazy driver sped around all of the sand dunes.
After a while we stopped to sand board. As both of us had never done anything like that before we decided to start with the smaller one, which wasn't really that small at all. After a few times we decided to head for the bigger one, which literally just looked like a vertical drop. I was slightly hesitant to do it so I let Chris go first. As he went down I could see him getting faster and faster and I almost had a heart attack when I saw the board flip over and Chris fall into a lump. I honestly thought he was dead for about a minute and made the driver (who really didn't care) drive us down to see if he was ok. Luckily the other people in the buggy who had already gone down raced to help him so by the time I got there he was disorientated and a little battered and bruised but he wasn't dead, so that was good. We'd planned to go out drinking but as Chris had sand in his eyes for the next few hours we decided against it and just went for dinner instead.
Next up was Paracas, a beautiful tiny coastal town on the way to Lima. People call it a poor mans Galapagos because the nearby islands are full of wildlife and the main thing to do there is take a tour to these islands. But we're not really that into birds so we got drunk on the beach and chilled out for a couple of days instead. It was exactly what we needed after constantly being on the move in Bolivia and Peru.
Our last stop in South America was Lima. We'd heard mixed reviews about it, with some people raving about it's nightlife and restaurants and others telling us to avoid it like the plague, but as our flight was from there we decided to spend a few days exploring it ourselves - in reality it's a nice place, but it's just full of cats. Everywhere. One park is actually dedicated to cats but they also frequent the nightclubs and bars (not even kidding).
As the champions league final was on while we were there we got to dedicate a day to watching that and getting drunk (cause I pure love football). The rest of the time we explored the city on a tandem bike (which was hilarious because we were terrible at navigating it) and ate too much of the local food as we were starting to feel gutted about leaving South America!
