One of my Israeli friends lost his passport so we parted because they had to go to Lima to get a new passport. It is so bizarre: you travel with some people for a certain amount of time, spending basically 24 hours with them doing things that you do not usually do with your "real" friends and then you just never see them again in all likelihood. I stayed here and found two American jewish guys to replace them, who are very smart and interesting, but it is not quite the same...It is though a great opportunity to watch myself adapting to new people. My sister and brother always make fun of me for being like Zelig, the Woody Allen character who morphes into whoever he is with, and I must say that they do have a point. Maybe I should be a politician after all.

So now Cuzco is turning into what Salvador was for me, I cannot seem to be able to leave it just because it is so easy to be here. I am at a nice hostel and the sun is shining all day. And I meet cool people. Today I bonded with a Chilean young man whose father spent 5 years in prison under the Pinochet regime and we shared our experiences of living under a dictatorship as the child of an opposition leader. The guy, Miguel, knows perfect French because his family eventually got asylum in Belgium, so we talked in French about these things. The Chilean military dictatorship of the 70s and 80s was much more brutal than the Hungarian communist equivalent in the 80s: I was never kidnapped or questioned by the police as a child, and noone planted bombs in our apartment, but still, there were similar situations, experiences and emotions involved, which were interesting to share.

I will fly back to Brazil via Buenos Aires in the end because it was much cheaper this way. So I have another 10 days in Peru to explore the rest of the south - better get my act together!