I've been having a hilarious time with hotels.The one I'm based at has nice secure, shady parking for the bike (well away from The Alpaca Gang), but occasionally fills up with coachloads of Saga Louts. So they chuck me out for a night while perfectly happy to store my luggage and the bike.

When it happened last week I managed to coincide with the two-day trip out to the Colca canyon and Cruz del Condor; tonight I'm in a nice little place opposite the Monasterio Santa Catalina. Everything's within walking distance in this town, and anyway there are thousands of taxis. They're mostly little Daewoo Ticos (forerunner to the Matiz, I believe) which happily absorb 4 passengers and zip around at high speed very cheaply.

The monastery is amazing. It only opened to the public in 1970, I suspect mainly because the need the money to effect the ongoing earthquake repairs. It's a village within a town, completely enclosed, and it still accommodates Dominican nuns (a closed order).

I got trapped on the way to lunch yesterday. I'd forgotten about El Señor de los Milagros, silly me. When I was riding down from Ecuador I kept coming across groups of pilgrims dressed in purple dragging large crosses on little wheels at the side of the PanAmericana. This is all to do with the aforementioned Señor, whose feast day is on October 18th. More than that I'm not sure of, not being an RC, but it's a big one.

Anyway, there I was heading for one of the nice little restaurants on Calle San Francisco; the road was closed by the glamorous police, and various devotional designs and legends had been laid on the cobbles using sand, chalk and flower petals. The procession was forming outside the Church of San Francisco, loads of people in purple - some in formal robes, others in street clothes but also purple as far as they could manage, huge flower arrangements, and the most dirgelike, tuneless music I've ever heard.

Interestingly, while countries like the UK are busy devolving power to the regions, here in Peru there's a referendum soon on whether to join various provinces together for economic efficiency. And in the presidential elections next year the ex-pres Fujimori is definitely a favourite of the indigenous peoples and farmers as he apparently did good stuff for them towards the end of his previous term of office.