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Our guide clearly thinks we have the attention span of fruit flies. A 10-hour train ride awaits us and he has brought a backpack full of books, magazines and games.

“Usually two hours before the tour finishes people begin to ask when it will end,” he sighs. “So that’s why …”

But the 360 km first-class journey from Cuzco in the highlands of Peru to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca near the Bolivian border, is part of the Orient Express network and promises to be especially luxurious. And especially entertaining. A fashion show, dancing, singing, a three-course meal and free pisco sours (the national drink of Peru) are also on the menu. I look forward to seeing how they will manage this inside a travelling cigar.

In truth, though the train is roomy enough. Each carriage has two aisles of wing-backed chairs, a small table with a formal lamp and a tiny vase of alstromeria. Plus its own waiter. At the back of the train is the observation carriage which is glassy with seats in the middle and an open platform where photographers congregate competitively.

Photographers are as commonplace as llamas in Peru. Seems like everyone has a lens as big as a submarine and the sort of desperation you expect only from British paparazzi hoping for a pic of a royal at play. Except the subject matter is likely to be a llama and even the most avid cameramen admit that chances are their digital shots will never leave their hard drives.

Cuzco is on its way to work as we pull out of the station at 8am. The centre of this 350,000 inhabitant city is tiled and balconied and pretty but the beauty does not hold fast for long. Soon we are on the dry, plastic-bag riddled outskirts. Men in dusty jackets walk the streets or break rocks on the road. Someone else picks through some rubbish. We hurtle past women, typically bent forward with a load wrapped in colourful fabric, and wearing a bowler hat.

Keep-out cacti line the tops of adobe walls while further on we come across burning corn stalks. We pass entire villages devoted to making clay roof tiles, another specializing in adobe bricks.

The emerging pinkish hills on my right are as scrubby and dry as a camel’s back. On my left the icy blue of the Huatanay river appears against the backdrop of the vertiginous mountains which are, of course, part of the Andes, the longest mountain chain in the world. The river under a different name, has followed us all the way from Machu Picchu.

Just past 10 and already it’s time for happy hour. The bar is next to the observation carriage but the pisco sours are free right now. And here come the models, sashaying, occasionally lurching and but always bravely attempting the cat walk strut to Madonna’s “Get Into the Groove.” There are only two models, both dressed in one-piece black cat suits over which they drape expensive llama/baby llama/alpaca or vicuna knits.

They’re several cuts above the hippie-gringo-tassled alpaca jerseys you see in the markets and many dollars more expensive. Still, translated into NZ prices and compared with stylish knits at home and they come out well. A French family works this out quickly and snaps up the loose black and red jacket and a hat since there’s only one of everything.

As if this isn’t peculiar enough, the next item on the agenda is a man in traditional Peruvian dress chanting a welcome, blowing a conch shell and giving thanks to the mountains around him by kissing a handful of coca leaves three times before ingesting them.

Four days of chewing these dry leaves along with the agent ash or lime on the Machu Picchu trail have dispelled their mystique for us thoroughly. We know that all they really achieve is a kind of jaw numbness akin to novocaine.

The welcome cry is followed by a full-skirted brightly dressed Andean woman and a pan-flute playing partner. Her singing sounds more like girlish keening but she deserves a tip. Thing is, the entertainment is coming so thick and fast we’re running out of money for tips. The next act is a pan-flute and string singing quintet. They’re actually very good but they commit the cardinal sin of playing the song made famous by Paul Simon though originally a traditional Andean tune. Two weeks into Peru enduring El Condor Pasa as performed by antique lute, flute and guitar players from restaurant to mountain top and I’m tempted to stuff the pan-flutes up their noses.

Fortunately a compulsory stop breaks the impulse. We’re invited to disembark for 10 minutes of hard-sell and thin fresh air. At 4321m we are at La Raya, the highest point of the continental divide, and the locals have taken the stop as an opportunity to sell us their handicrafts. The 60% oxygen levels deplete our energy however and we walk and view their wares slowly and deliberately, as if wading through oil.

Lunch is good. Alpaca steaks in balsamic with guacamole and salad followed by tuna with mashed sweet potatoes and a garlic and veloute sauce though no one knows what veloute is. Then the ubiquitous cheesecake (dessert is always cheesecake in Peru).

The adobe houses now have corrugated iron rooves which are, miraculously, shiny and new-looking, evidence of the lack of humidity. The countryside has flattened out on both sides and I suppose it is a bit boring but the endless flattened sandy vista is broken sometimes by a Llama Research Station or the sight of women in frilled skirts, bowler hats and woollen leggings tending cows and as the journey draws to an end, a boggy wetland which is also a bird sanctuary.

Afternoon tea consists of tiny cakes as the day draws to a close. A few folk (not in our group) have succumbed to reading and playing cards while a young girl celebrating her 16th birthday is on her fourth blue Curacao cocktail but I’m still on the viewing platform when we chug through Juliaca, known colloquially as the Taiwan of Peru. It looks like a one great big Third World metal-work market. Stalls of screws, car parts, knitting machines and, on the track itself, even books are laid flat for sale.

It’s dark by the time we reach Puno so all we see in the distance are sparkling lights looking rather like a jewel-encrusted belt.

We return the books, magazines and cards to the guide as we disembark. He’s amazed no one complained about the length of the journey but he forgets we’ve spent the previous four days walking 10 hours a day on the Inca trail.

By comparison, sitting for 10 hours on a luxury train complete with surreal entertainment is a heavenly diversion.

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