DAY 68: Some people would say that the best invention since sliced bread is the "snooze" button. You know it and its contribution to Mankind -- why wake up and face reality when all you have to do is simply push a button and stay in dream land another ten minutes?

The one flaw in the snooze button is that is must be pushed for it to function and without doing so, the alarm just goes on and on until you wake up. Pushing the button is an easy enough task -- unless the alarm is coming from the room next door and you can't do anything about it. This is why I was up at some God forsaken hour after a late Christmas night out.

After a quick breakfast, I went for a morning stroll near the Plaza Regocijo to escape the Evil Alarm Clock. The weather was pleasant and nice for a stroll, but all I wanted to do was go back and sleep. I bought a new notebook and head back to the hostel -- luckily when I got there the Evil Alarm Clock had shut up and I went back to dream land for a couple more hours.

I VEGGED IN MY ROOM all afternoon with my notebook catching up on Blog duties, and then vegged in an internet cafe for four hours typing and uploading everything. Lara had been sick ever since the night of billiards before -- so sick that she had to drag a bucket to her bedside -- and we thought that maybe it was neither from the altitude or the alcohol. She took it easy by watching Bad Boys II in the DVD theater upstairs from the hostel while I went out with bad boys too: Tony and Adam from Ohio.

TONY SENT ME AN EMAIL saying that there was a rumor that Leonardo DiCaprio -- star of James Cameron's Titanic and Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can -- was in town, because he and Adam had stumbled upon a group of teenage girls out to stalk him outside his fancy hotel. I met The Ohio Boys at their hotel and we decided to see if maybe Leo would turn up at Fallen Angel, an ultra trendy lounge bar that I had heard about from a Canadian guy at my hostel. Fallen Angel wasn't in our books and we figured it was one of those places too cool to be widely known. Luckily Tony remembered seeing a flyer four blocks away from the plaza on some store's icebox.

Finding the hidden cool bar wasn't much of a challenge -- it was right across the Plazoleta de las Nazarenas from the fancy hotel where Leo was rumored to be in. Walking into Fallen Angel was like walking into a trendy bar in New York or Berlin, complete with the candles, downtempo music and gay waiters with a lot of attitude. Most of the tables were made out of old fashioned bathtubs with slabs of glass over them to show off the tropical fish swimming inside.

"Oh yeah. This is definitely Leo's scene," Adam said.

Apparently we weren't cool enough for one of the fish tables and settled for a plain one in the corner. Tony (whose last name is Alexander) ordered an "Alexander," which he smirked and described as "sweet and robust...like another Alexander I know." The only thing my tri-level red, yellow and green-colored "Machu Picchu" girly drink said about me was that perhaps I enjoyed Froot Loops in the morning, or that I might actually be the sixth guy on Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.

Over our trendy ambiguously gay drinks, we chatted and joked about this and that, and like Dustin felt the night before, it was nice to chat it up with fellow Americans for a change -- especially when they too appreciated the comic value of The Daily Show, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and the time when Saturday Night Live Weekend Update co-anchor Tina Fey quoted Bobby Brown telling Whitney Houston, "Damn woman, you can't be disrespecting a man's sandwich like that!" True, you can't have these kind of conversations with anyone but fellow Americans.

After a round we called it an early night -- The Ohio Boys were to leave for Machu Picchu at five the next morning -- and left the gay waiter with the attitude and the mostly German clientelle to walk back to the Plaza das Armas, lit up at night once again (picture above). "Every time I see this plaza, I just think what a cool city this is," Adam commented. I shared his sentiment.

I BID THE OHIO BOYS goodbye at their hotel and in less than thirty seconds I ran into Simon and Rich, who had just gotten back from their day train trip to Machu Picchu.

"Are you going to the pub?"

I had no plans. "Sure."

I chat it up with the gay couple at Cross Keys on their last night in Cusco. I primed them on what to expect in their next destination Iquitos, where they would continue to stay in the most expensive hotels and eat in the priciest places. Incidentally, they had been staying in the posh hotel that Leo supposedly just arrived in and had also checked out the "gay friendly" scene at Fallen Angel. One step in and Rich said that with the attitude, perhaps it might be even a little too gay for them. The three of us chatted over rounds about soccer, cell phones and WiFi internet security until last call, and then went our separate ways.

I never did catch Leonardo DiCaprio that night -- well, we barely made the effort -- proving that what my "Machu Picchu" cocktail said about me was that I might be more into Froot Loops than that other thing it implied (not that there's anything wrong with that.)