I have a lovely friend, Chiara, who I know from high school, who is Peruvian and was living in Lima with her grandparents. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see her in Lima so we took advantage of our eight-hour layover to go out with her in the city. We ate anticuchos (cow heart on skewers!!) and had pisco sours (pisco with egg white, lemon and cinnamon) We stayed in the city until around 3 a.m. and then headed back to the airport (45 minutes away) for the last leg of our flight. We arrived in Cusco, Peru at 7:00 a.m. but at that point I was so tired, I hardly knew my own name.
Day 1-Cuzco
Brad slept until about 3 p.m. but since I slept on the plane a bit more than he did, I went out and explored. By the way, we stayed in a four-person dorm (four bunk beds in a room) and the other couple in the room was from Raleigh, N.C. What are the chances!! They warned us that the tickets to Machu Picchu were actually sold out until Thursday so I ran around town all day changing our train tickets, buying our Machu Picchu train tickets online, rebooking hostels, etc. It was a mess, but luckily by the time Brad woke up, I had mostly figured it all out.
We stayed pretty low key at night since Brad had a cold. Also, Cuzco is at a very high altitude so when you get there you have to rest for a few days and drink tea with coca leaves.
Day 2
We got up with plans to head to the Sunday market and ruins in Pisaq, a small pueblo just outside Cuzco. We walked past the bus station four times because it was nothing more than a small gated gravel driveway, and the buses are actually small white 12-passenger mini-vans. We got in the van and chatted with a local for the whole time. Once we got there, we decided to go local and eat at a picnic table where a woman was cooking a pasta dish. It was good but my American cultural background really jarred against our cook's cultural background as she was serving the food with her bare hands and I saw no antibacterial hand sanitizer. However, we both decided to loosen up and just enjoy the meal, thinking perhaps it adds a little flavor…;)
No one ever talks about the Pisaq ruins, but they’re absolutely amazing.
Day 3
We visited some nice museums on Monday to try to get the most of our tourist museum pass. Photos (from top left to bottom right):
- Recipe for Pisco Sour
- Reenactment of how Peruvians cook the guinea pigs (yes, guinea pig is part of local cuisine)
- Another view of the main plaza—it was nice and warm while we were there which is a nice contrast from Mendoza’s winter;
- At the Chocolate museum they serve a clear/yellowish tea that is made from cocoa and tastes wonderfully like chocolate tea. We also splurged for hot chocolate. Brad knows how to make me happy
Day 4
We left Cuzco to start our voyage up to Machu Picchu, stopping at Ollantaytambo on the way. We stayed at the BEST HOSTEL called Casa de Wow, which is actually run by a woman named Winn from Asheville. Seems North Carolinians are loving Peru. Wow, the owner of the hostel, pretty much built the place and made all the furniture inside, but he was quite a mysterious guy as we only caught a glimpse of him once the whole time; he was drinking tea and pondering life and didn't say a word to us. I think it added to his mystique.
We got to the Ollantaytambo ruins and climbed the ruins immediately. Absolutely amazing—and we got lucky because right when we reached the base again, three or four tour buses showed up with hundreds of tourists pouring out. We quickly returned to our hostel to avoid them.
Ollantaytambo (48 miles from Cusco): A beautiful town that preserves Inca urban planning of houses, streets and waterways, safeguarded by a breathtaking fortress with temples, hillside farming terraces and walls. The Incans built this military, religious, administrative and farming complex strategically on top of two mountains to view the whole valley.
Look for Peru Part 2 later this week!
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