Day 71 - last day in Cusco.

Discover that the porters’ manhandling of my rucksack during the Inca Trail has resulted in new alarming tears; sew them up the best I can and hope that it makes it to Lima.

Time to tie up loose ends. I methodically start higher up, in San Blas, and work my way down, checking map locations of everything, street by street. Stop by the South American Explorers’ clubhouse to thank Mary and Mark for their help. Find a new Dutch café on Choquechaka. Buy presents at the Coca Museum. Have the most awesome chicharrón de cerdo (spiced deep-fried pork) at Pacha Papa for my early lunch. Treat myself to ceviche at Chi Cha for my second lunch, since dinner on board the bus is bound to be less than exciting.

Get caught up in the parades going on in the main plaza. The last couple of days it’s been the Carnaval Cusqueño, which explains why I’ve seen kids practising dance routines by the cathedral at night. On the first day, little kids were dressed up and dancing in the streets, but today is clearly the main event; metal barriers are set up along the streets to keep the crowd at bay, there’s deafening brass band music everywhere, milling spectators with cameras, stilt walkers dressed in lurid colours, people blowing bubbles, kids carrying giant balloons…Each school has different costumes and dances; some kids are dressed in traditional ponchos, headdresses, embroidered woolly hats, while others are painted like Indians, dancing barefoot with spears. Others still are dressed as skunks, complete with fat tails sewn to their bottoms. Bizarre.

While I watch the spectacle, a street urchin offers to shine my hiking boots. Twice. "Where you fron?" he asks me with a strong accent. What does it matter? My boots still won't get shined. He then moves on to a gringo woman and offers to shine her white trainers. Scraping the barrel…

Finish viewing tour companies, places to eat; visit the Qorikancha site museum, which has a missable collection of pottery shards, though the trepanned skulls hold my attention, as always, particularly since there’s a detailed explanation as to why and how they were trepanned. Though they used coca leaves as anaesthetic, I’d hate to have my skull drilled with an obsidian implement.

Time to go. Time to bid farewell to the friendly chaos, the myriad people approaching you around the plaza, offering massage, bad artwork, cigarettes, the women in traditional dress carrying baby lambs and leading llamas, just in case you want your picture taken with them, the men dressed as Incas, who are happy to pose with you by the original Inca wall for a small fee, the two-inch wide pavements in San Blas, where you have to plaster yourself against the wall to dodge the traffic…It seems like I’ve been here forever, and am now getting itchy feet.

Hail a cab with a middle-aged driver across the street from Hostal Andrea. Cusco cabs are rumoured to be hit and miss in terms of robberies, but he looks like a friendly old chap. When I tell him that I’m from England, he goes on about the ‘woman of iron’. Ah, good old Maggie Thatcher. His son works as a tour guide in Arequipa and wants to marry a gringita. The driver himself is from Nazca and gets excited about my visiting his home town.

At the bus station I discover that I’ve left ‘The Last Juror’ by John Grisham back at the hostel. Curses! I’d just gotten to the part where everyone’s gonna start getting murdered. I hate being interrupted in the middle of a book!

Am somewhat distracted by ‘Women’, out in-flight chick flick. Have a front row seat upstairs and the night drive to Nazca is uneventful, unless you count my falling into someone’s lap on the way to the loo due the bus taking tight corners at speed.