A Condensed Fortnight of South American Hijinks

Ages since our last post so I'll just give the much-edited highlights. Our last full day in Cusco was the day of the Corpus Christi processions so we spent ages watching the various floats, brass bands, dancing school-children and people dressed up in brightly coloured woollen costumes. Another plus was that as part of the celebrations, everywhere served 'chirri uchu' which is a plate of chicken, pork, guinea pig, toasted corn, caviar and seaweed that you eat without cutlery. For some reason ours came with a glass of straight pisco that tastes like petrol so we subtly mixed it with coke to make it actually drinkable. After this Alex and I went to 'Paddy Flaherty's, the highest Irish pub on the planet!' which as promised was very high and fairly Irish.
Next day after a full English breakfast and some general Cusconian wandering we get a hefty night-bus to Arequipa and spend the following morning recovering in our hotel. For lunch we go to a Turkish place where we bump into Leela and Ellie! Bizarre how things like this keep happening. In the evening we meet up with them at the house they've been staying for the last month or so, for Chinese take-aways and a really long game of 'Ring of Fire', then more drinks at a club until the morning.
Alex and Franklin left for Puno a couple of days later while I stayed on in Arequipa (for more details of their time together see Alex's post, coming soon to a blog near you). My time alone was not as exciting as I'd been planning given that I was laid down by some stomach bug so rather than live the Arequipan high-life I spent most of my three days lying in bed watching crime shows. I have very little else to report other than that I went to a massive nunnery and spent half an hour in a park translating someone's English copy of National Geographic into Spanish.
Border crossing into Bolivia was successful other than the git of a border official who searched me "for drugs" and ended up nicking forty dollars from me. First Bolivian stop was Tiahuanaco, a massive archaeological site that is still being excavated by all of the Tiahuanacan locals. After that I bussed to La Paz and met up with Alex and Franklin at our hostel (which is insanely cheap, just like pretty much everything else in Bolivia). La Paz is a cool city with a decent cocaine musuem and a witches' market where you can buy basically everything from armadillos and llama foetuses to cat toenails and a candle for raising the dead. The rest of our time was spent finding a decent tour agency for the Death Road, which we booked for the following day (sorry Mum). Anyway, it was amazing - about four hours of mountain-biking down a narrow dirt-track with massive drops to our left. Luckily we only met two other vehicles on the way down. High-speed riding and some great views, then to finish off we had a massive buffet lunch at a high-class hotel. And no-one fell off, which is a plus.
After some more exploring of La Paz we got a bus to Uyuni, a freezing cold dead-end town which you'd never visit other than to book a tour to the salt flats, which we did without much hassle. And the tour was stunning. The salt-flats themselves are amazing and we got all kinds of crazy perspective-cheating photos, but they only made up a small part of the tour - as well as that there was the train cemetery, coloured lakes, volcanoes, geysers, the Salvador Dali desert and a surreal cave that looked like it was made out of papier-mache and fibreglass. Almost as surreal as that was the fact that in one of the dead trains we met Fenna, a Dutch girl who we last saw partway through Ecuador. Another highlight was the thermal baths, which were fun to get in but painfully cold to get out of. Our agency (Oasis) was great - they gave us cake and wine, and against all the odds our desert jeep didn't break down once.
After that we got out of Uyuni as soon as was humanly possible and now Alex, Franklin, Fenna and I are in a hostel in Potosi about to go out for dinner because all we've had to eat today is Pringles. Next stop Potosi mines, which are meant to be like 'hell on Earth'. So that should be a laugh.