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The Bolivia/Peru border is very close to Copacabana so we managed an early morning crossing. There was a market on at the border with people, carts full of merchandise, combi vans, dogs and children blocking the road and causing mayhem, as usual. The TC was mobbed, we could not leave the car unattended. I did my Bolivia exit procedure first, then Bob followed, then I did my Peru entry procedure which left Bob with the job of getting himself and the TC into Peru. I needed reinforcements to keep interested parties off the car. It was patently obvious that we could never leave the TC unattended in Peru; one of us had to stay with the car at all times and secure parking at hotels was first priority over our own comfort.

We had anticipated that someone might fancy stealing the car and had devised all manner of crafty tricks to make moving the car impossible without a hi-ab truck. We wasted our time. The most likely scenario was that bits of the car would disappear simply for scrap value; this would include body panels, engine parts, even chassis. If we left the car overnight without a security guard, there would be nothing left in the morning. These people are so poor that niceties like the TC being a period MG would never enter their heads.

We had great hopes of Peru and many fears, especially with “private enterprise” policemen. There were so many road blocks driving towards Puno, it was ridiculous. However, all we got from the police was a handshake, welcome to Peru, good luck, safe journey. What a relief. Our fears were not realised, but then again, neither were our hopes for Lake Titicaca. I in particular had visions of clear blue skies, crisp clean air, pristine habitat, sparse population, perhaps a few reed boats still in use, and Puno as a small town given over to tourism.

It was overcast and cloudy, the area around Lake Titicaca is densely populated by poor farmers and urban dwellers who have scant regard for the environment, the only reed boats are used to tempt the tourist. Puno is a large, dirty, busy town with traffic congestion which makes walking the narrow streets unsafe and polluted. The lakeside in Puno is given over to pedalos in the shape of giant yellow ducks. There are still a few reed islands inhabited by the Uro people, but they are like floating souvenir stalls so we gave them a miss.

We went for a walk around Puno and found a huge market selling anything and everything. The food stalls were particularly unappetising. If an EU health inspector saw this he would close the lot instantly! Hygiene is an alien concept and means as much as the Black Hole theory. You need the constitution of an ox and a cast iron stomach to survive Peru. Some tourists in our hotel were on the oxygen cylinders struggling with altitude sickness. We managed without; maybe we were getting used to it already.

The trip from Puno to Cusco would take a day, travelling NW on the Altiplana, roughly following the old railway line. The rural poor in Peru have absorbed the idea of the straight line, the right angle and the notion of tethering animals to free up time to produce something else to eat. Cultivated areas looked a bit more organised than Bolivia, but only just. The women dress slightly differently – skirts are shorter, petticoats fewer, legging are thick woollen affairs, shoes are more substantial and headgear comes in various forms from bowler hats, white top hats with blue ribbons, to satin embroidered and fringed fabric on some sort of frame that reminds one of those cloths that old ladies used to throw over budgies cages at night.

Again, we were expecting sparse population, which was the case for most of the time, but the towns! Juliaco came as a surprise. For some reason we followed a bus into the town and bitterly regretted that. What a dump; it was literally an open sewer. Side roads off the tar seal, if that is what you can call it, looked like exploded mine fields. The place stank. Stray dogs were everywhere, flies everywhere, landing on food unprotected and for sale on market stalls, eaten by humans who hopefully have developed a resistance to the prolific germs.

As we got closer to Cusco, the villages were closer together, the terrain changed from flattish to hilly to mountainous and the population seemed to get poorer. We passed a car wash (the middle of shallow river), and a river bank full of people doing their washing and drying it by draping it over bushes, fencing or just spread out over grass. We also passed through what you would call the disenfranchised poor, one of whom threw a bottle at the TC. Luckily it didn’t do any damage.

Peru is not good at road signs; neither does it sign one way roads. All we could do at any junction was wait to see which way traffic moved. Cusco is a nightmare to drive – the roads are narrow, cobbled, slippery affairs of ferocious gradients. We followed our primitive road map of Cusco along the named streets to get to our hotel and ended up struggling up a 1:3. I won’t go into the details of a near punch-up with a belligerent taxi driver but I had to adopt the role of screaming fishwife to get the point across and get him to back off. Roads and hotels, houses and churches cling to impossible mountainsides. You cannot get traction on these old cobbles and every street is like a hillclimb. If the TC came to a halt, we couldn’t get going again without some shoving from behind.

We had landed in Cusco at the start of Holy Week on Palm Sunday. The place was full, so were the trains to Machu Pichu. Had we come all this way to find that we couldn’t get to the biggest draw of all? After trawling around Cusco for hours we found a tour company who could get us the last two seats on the train for the following day. The next available seats were another 5 days hence. However, there was some sort of religious procession on Santa Luna (Holy Monday), a celebration unique to Cusco that started in the evening around the main square. We found a restaurant with a free table on a balcony overlooking the square so we could get a good view of what was going on.

We had been warned about pickpockets in Cusco. The square was packed with thousands of people, television crews, celebrities, priests, choirboys, police cars, ambulances, fire engines, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. You could barely move. It was while struggling to move through the crowd that I had my pocket picked. I have to confess to being a bit naughty. I had deliberately left my jacket pockets unzipped, but had my hands in the pockets. We were already in a state of anticipation so I took my hands out of my pockets basically to see what might happen. Stuff me if it didn’t happen immediately. All there was in there was a headscarf thingey, bulky and worthless. I felt the hand go in and out like lightening.

I don’t like pickpockets; my reaction was automatic. I spun round on my heels to see a young man carrying a tray of food suspended from his neck with a strap. The tray gave him cover from observation. His accomplice was an old woman who would presumably receive stolen items and then make a getaway. He didn’t expect to find nothing, silly boy, and he didn’t expect a reaction. I hissed Anglo Saxon at him straight in his face; he was already ducking backwards and downwards like a boxer about to take a right hook on the chin. I should have decked him; it would have been so easy.

The procession was certainly impressive and worth seeing. The restaurant was also colourful, full of tourists also wanting a bird’s eye view and willing to sample local cuisine. You could have guinea pig oven baked or spit roast, or alpaca steaks, or “cows head”. We played safe with a plain pizza. We think.

It is a bit of a mission actually getting to Machu Pichu. You start with a four hour train ride that takes you on an arduous switchback climb out of Cusco up onto the Altiplana; after over an hour of climbing the train takes you through deeply unattractive urban areas full of scruffy housing with roofs held down with anything heavy that comes to hand, garbage strewn all over the place; pigs, donkeys, cattle, goats, sheep wandering at will or tethered to the trackside. Then into rural poverty, then sparser population, into a ravine and then to Aguas Calientes, a tourist town given over to souvenirs and hotels.

This is where the fun starts. You then fight for a place on a tourbus that takes you up a series of hairpin bends up a precipitous slope on a muddy, slippery track barely wide enough to take a bus with no guard rail. It is not for the faint hearted. You cannot hold your breath for 20 minutes. At the top you find an entry gate to Machu Pichu, a good expensive hotel right outside the gate and a couple of stalls selling postcards and books. And your tour guide, complete with regulatory umbrella.

It was raining. Our expectations were limited – crowds of people, few photo opportunities and exploitation. A couple of moaning tourists exiting the gate did nothing to raise our spirits. The train had been full, the queues for the buses long. What we found was actually exactly what you see on the classic photos of Machu Pichu – an absolutely stunning piece of Inca architecture. It was not crowded, it was possible to take photos without anyone else on them, the rain/drizzle/clouds/clear periods gave a strange spooky atmosphere to the place. The tour guide was excellent and absolutely essential to get any sense of the place. You do not tour Machu Pichu, you climb it – up, down, in and around. The views are stupendous.

To give some idea of the area – take a couple of dozen walnut whips, you know, the cone shaped chocolate covered things – and set them close together but not touching, and in a random pattern. The gaps between are ravines with rivers, the cones are mountains about 1250m high. The walnut in the middle is Machu Pichu. The inclines are about 70 degrees, more in places. Why did the Incas choose this particular walnut whip? Why did they choose it at all? Did they like a challenge? Were they human even? Religion makes people do strange things and there is nothing stranger than Machu Pichu.

You can cheerfully spend all day there and still not get enough of it - the history; the religious significance that had more to do with agriculture and survival and when to sow and reap crops than any deities; the scientific agricultural research element of the terraces; the defensive nature of the place. It is worth the four hour train ride, the heart-stopping bus trip up and down, the four hour return train ride where everyone ends up trying to sleep sitting upright and the weary taxi ride back to hotels in the dark.

Next day was another early rise to do a bus tour of the Sacred Valley, the valley that runs between Cusco and Machu Pichu. The ruins of Pisac and Ollantytambo are amazing. It is easy to work out the theory of how the Incas shifted, shaped and assembled huge blocks but the practicalities of how they achieved it are beyond comprehension. In our occupation as builders we are accustomed to working with supersized blocks of stone and that is hard enough but on this scale? It would take hundreds of years to assemble structures of this complexity with the population base they had to work with.

As striking as the Inca ruins was the endemic poverty. Until you see it with your own eyes, you cannot get a grip on the scale and profound nature of poverty. The most important things in life are not where the next immitation Gucci handbag is coming from but where the next meal, water, heat, sanitation and shelter from the adverse weather is coming from. These people have not lost the link between survival and land management and food production. They live and breathe this link every minute of every day.

Rural Peruvians are re-learning the Inca way of life, of the idea of reciprocity between individuals and of the reciprocity between people and state. This time state is replaced by the commune principal where non-governmental organisations offer advise, financial and practical aid and education. Pisac for instance is taking on board the idea of hybridising alpacas to give much greater yields of wool. This new breed are known commonly as Bob Marleys with their Rastafarian hairdos.

They now plant eucalypts rather than native timbers – the roots hold the soil to prevent erosion, the trees grow quickly to give construction timber and fuel and they regenerate rapidly after coppicing. Groups of villagers help each other build houses. Differences can be made with a little outside help, but not of the international government aid variety. That ends up in the back pockets of corrupts government officials. You see graffiti that says, roughly translated, “assassinate the bastards, they are a bunch of thieves”. The same goes for Bolivia too.

Peru is not what we expected. If we thought that we had seen poverty, oh boy, did we have some seeing to do. Cusco, as it turned out, was the best of Peru. What was to follow was disturbing, and at times scary.