Today the world’s oldest hippopotamus died aged 53 in a Berlin Zoo and a Peruvian runner called John Lennon won his first professional race, imagine that.
No such excitement in Cusco, but it was sunny about half an hour ago.
We now have enough gas in the café, in fact we have more than enough gas after they turned up with two more cylinders this morning.
Like buses, you wait for ages then two come at once, apart from here where you wait for thirty seconds and eight come round the corner.
Esther was very impressed with my performance when we were without gas last night.
Two German backpackers came in and said they had half an hour to eat before catching their bus to Puno.
‘What’s the quickest thing on the menu, soup?’ they asked hopefully,
eyeing the kitchen and the lack of a blue flame flickering under the pots I had to think quickly,
‘In truth, the quickest dish is the salad, would you like that?’,
with their best quizzical Teutonic stare they ordered salad.
Sure enough, in moments they were on their way to the bus station and Puno.
There is still no sign of Ali, she rang at 7am yesterday to say she hadn’t left Ayacucho yet.
That’s the problem with people’s time off here, they go for the planned couple of days and then disappear off the radar.
Not that it’s always their fault, a lot can (and usually does) happen on a 24 hour bus journey.
I remember our infamous 60 hour round trip to Lima back in 2001.
Pushing a 60 seater bus out of a water filled crater in the Andes and watching a group of caged lions devouring a llama in the middle of nowhere (actually the world capital of aniseed Cotahuasi but I digress) were punctuation marks on a seemingly endless journey.
In the meantime we have heard from Ali, she is in Abancay, still 12 hours from Cusco but very close to the aniseed capital and the lions.
Hopefully she will be back tomorrow.
I am glad the Peruvian Immigration Service didn’t do this, because a lot of them were quite big, unpleasant blokes, it could have been an extremely painful experience.
Anyway now I’m going back to watching the Jungle Book with Salvador, a great film from the days before Disney went crap.