Cuzco

The first thing I had to do in Cuzco was to buy a new camera. My other camera died in Lima. It just shorted out or something and would not work anymore. I looked all over town for a camera before I found an Olympus camera that would work for me. I bought a couple extra SD cards and I was off to the tour of Cuzco.

I know I am getting cynical about the city tours in Central and South America but come on they all go to the main square, look around at the ever present cathedral, then go to the government palaces before a lunch and the afternoon is all about taking you to their uncle's craft shops or something like that. This tour was a little better because we also went to see several old ruins around town. Yes we did start at the cathedral and the town square but then we went out to an area called Sacsahuamán that was a large area with huge stones cut and fitted into a gigantic series of walls over 400 meters long and 6 meters high. The largest stones were estimated to be almost 200 tons in size. It was my first real visit to see stone work like I was going to see at Machu Picchu in a few days time. We all got off the bus and wandered around the big stones taking pics and wondering what they were all about. Our guide speculated about the purpose of the big cut stone walls but the reality is that nobody really knows what they were all about or who built them or why they did. What we do know is that when the Spaniards came they destroyed most of the things built by the indigenous people. They used most of the stones from this site to build their big cathedral we went to earlier in the day. The Spaniards had some twisted ideas of how important their own lifestyle was over other peoples culture. I think they were mostly evil no matter how well intentioned they may have felt themselves. They just ruined everything they found and built churches on top of the ruins.

We went to another site when we were finished with the first one. The second site was a water reservoir and delivery system built of cut stones over five hundred years ago that still works perfectly today. It was pretty impressive engineering and building to make this system work so well for so long. There were indigenous people selling crafts near this site. The crafts were mostly knitted items or woven things made out of llama wool. They were dyed bright colors and the workmanship was very high. The next site we went to was a sacrificial altar carved out of a single huge stone. Again the guide speculated about the purpose and things of this altar but again it was just speculation, interesting but just speculation.

We had a great lunch during the day. Most of the same foods that I encountered in Lima were served with local Cuzco variations of course. They served roasted llama, alpaca, guinea pig and tons of potato and corn items from soup to salads and main dishes. I tasted many of the foods and the main thing I noticed was that most of it was pretty bland tasting. The creole fire and spice that I found in Lima was toned way down up here in the mountains. I was still eating and drinking lots of coca leaves to try to prevent altitude sickness. I was feeling fine. My chronic pain was even down. I think maybe all the coca leaves had something to do with my feeling better.

After the tour I hung out in downtown Cuzco. There were a lot of American students taking classes here and just like all the other centers of education the students were packed into the bars from mid afternoon until late at night. I hung out with them and we had a good time. Most of my time for the last few years has been spent hanging around twenty somethings. I was used to it by now. I made no attempt to keep up with their insane copious amounts of alcohol consumption but I still drank my fair share with them. I headed back to my hotel when they started to get real sloppy drunk because I am not a fan of that behavior anymore. I guess I am getting too old.

After Cuzco, for my next adventure I was heading down the Inca trail to go to Lake Titicaca. I was excited to be going there. So far my trip had been very entertaining for me. My constant attention from my personal guides was not how I was used to traveling over the years. Every hour of my day was preplanned by my travel agents before I left and they did a great job of it.

After my time in Cuzco I took a tour bus ride from Cuzco via the Inca Express to Puno near Lake Titicaca. I got up early and had my breakfast. The hotel I stayed at in Cuzco was small but they gave me great attention and helped me learn a lot about the area and its people. I enjoyed my stay there. I checked out of the hotel and a taxi took me to the bus depot where we were leaving from. The bus was a few minutes late leaving because some of the passengers were late getting there so they waited a few minutes. We finally pulled out of Cuzco and wound up through the narrow mountain roads to over 12400 feet. Then we were on a large plateau with mountains surrounding it on all sides.

Riding along in the bus we watched the farms going by one after another. They all seemed to have stone wall for fences and almost all the farmhouses were built out of stone too. The workmanship of the stonework was nothing like the old Inca workmanship but these buildings were functional. We rode along for hours before stopping for lunch. The lunch stop was very good. The food was varied and tasty and all you wanted to eat. They had a live group of musicians playing typical pipes of pan Andean style music. I bought a cd of the music from the group. When I was finished eating I wandered around the compound we were in. They had a guinea pig pen, several llamas and alpacas, some pigs, turkeys and chickens. Some older women were making handicrafts outside. I sat with them and we talked about their lives. They each had eight kids for some reason. They were carrying and nursing their youngest babies. I asked them to teach me how to knit like they were doing. They laughed and gave me a quick lesson in knitting. In about thirty seconds I picked up the knitting needles from them and tried to knit. I fumbled along and they laughed at me. Then I started to knit away while I was talking to them and they were shocked. I had been a professional knitter for almost ten years so I was only pretending that I needed lessons in knitting. They laughed at my joke about not knowing how to knit and told me that almost no men knew how to knit in Peru. I later found that that isn't totally true. I ran into several male knitters making good money knitting.

When everyone was done eating we climbed back in the bus and took off again. I expected another long stretch of riding along the good roads we were on but to my surprise we stopped again just up the road from our lunch stop. We climbed down from the bus to look at guess what...I know the tension is building...yep...another cathedral. I did enjoy this cathedral more than the others however because there was a strong indigenous influence on this one even though it was in a somewhat ratty condition. The typical paintings at the back of the church showing the path to salvation was all indigenous people and their lives portrayed. I enjoyed the change. We got back on the bus again and went a little further down the road and then stopped at Raqchi which is another Inca ruin. The stonework was much better quality then I had seen so far. The stones were very well cut and fitted tightly. The walls made of a combination of stone foundations with adobe above the stonework were almost 80 feet high! The temple these walls formed would have been huge with a roof on it. We wandered around the ruins and listened to the guide tell us their best guess as to what we were actually looking at. There were some botanical gardens there also with all the plants labeled. I learned the names of some plants I had been seeing but did not know what they were. There was a big Inca water reservoir there also with cut stone waterways to carry the water to the fields and homes and some Inca baths. I saw some fish in the water and wished that I had some fishing tackle to see what kind they were. I was guessing that they were tilapia or possibly trout but I never found out. Up on the hills above where we were we could see old stone fencing that marked off a huge area of the plateau we were on. The guide told us there was about 45 miles of this wall still standing. He claimed the Incas posted guards along this wall and defended their territory from invaders. I don't really believe that story because the wall was not high enough or strong enough to deter even slightly motivated invaders.

I stopped and talked to an elderly woman for a few minutes. She was resting from cleaning out the water canals. She was very friendly and talkative once I got her to start talking to me. She was an outcast because her spouse had died already and she was just waiting to die she told me. Kind of a sad story but she said it so matter of fact like her life and her pending death were pre-programed by fate already. I let it go and offered her some of my snacks I had with me. She turned me down at first, I think out of pride, but then she accepted my gifts and we parted ways. I could talk to these people because we all had poor Spanish since it was not the native language of any of us. Some of them butchered the language as badly as I did and we laughed about our mistakes together but we were able to communicate.

We piled back onto the bus and headed out to Puno near Lake Titicaca.

Lima to Cuzco

I was kind of tired from the trip from San Jose Costa Rica to Lima Peru. All the drinks I downed and food I ate just made me want to go to bed early. After I got checked into my hotel I sent out some emails to my family and walked around the neighborhood of my hotel for a short while before going back and watching tv and killing the night in bed alone. The one thing I did notice though while walking around was all the grilled guinea pigs in the restaurants as I walked around town. Peru and Ecuador both eat a lot of guinea pigs. Like people always say, it tastes like chicken so why not just eat chicken. Myself I just ate some potato soup and had a beer.

The next morning I went on a city tour of Lima. A bus picked me up at my hotel and after we picked up all the passengers we went to the main square and walked around looking at the government buildings and the architecture around the square. I liked the balconies with all the woodwork that looked almost like lace. It reminded me of Indonesia. Then we all piled back in the bus and went down to the ocean. There were some fishing boats circling around a big school of tuna just offshore. They had the helicopters and the spotter planes working the school too. The planes are spotters that direct the boats to the general area then the helicopters direct the traffic close up. The boats circle the school with a big net and then pull it in. It is a big operation with high revenue coming from the end product. Usually the fish are further offshore so we were lucky to see them working so close to shore. We stopped at a few more local tourist highlights that I will skip over, sorry but city tours all are starting to look the same to me. I must be getting jaded from seeing too many of them. We saw the cathedral, museums, main suburbs and drove past the rich and the poor areas of town to get a good cross section of how people live here. We saw a lot of indigenous looking people compared to other countries I have been to. The colorful clothes the indigenous people wore made them stand out. Personally I like all the hats they tend to wear here in Peru, usually too small of a hat at that. The guide explained that different groups wore different colors and styles so that you could easily tell where someone was from by their dress. The tour was in Spanish but I had no problem with the guide's explanations of things in Spanish. He also spoke some English and we had a few short talks about this and that. We stopped for a lunch that was meant to be a typical lunch. There were lots of different potatoes of course, some of which were stuffed with various things like meat, some quinoa grain, lots of colored corn, creole dishes with hot and sweet chilis, rice, soups, chicharon, empanadas, tamales, ceviche, grilled fish, guinea pig, chicken, and of course lima beans in salads and soups or as a side dish alone and then more foods that I did not know the names of. We washed it all down with local beer and a shot or two of pisco sours. I think the lunch was the highlight of the tour for me. I hung out with a Columbian mother and her daughter during most of the tour. I think mom was trying to set her daughter, who was about mid twenties, up with me but I never bit on all the cues she was dropping at me. I played ignorant. We had a good time talking and tasting all the different foods though. I bought them some rounds of drinks and they started acting like they were loaded but I am pretty sure it was just an act.

The tour ended mid to late afternoon and I was dropped off at my hotel. My guide called me almost as soon as I got back to my room to make arrangements for the next day. I was flying to Cuzco in the morning with my guide. She told me that usually they would have just met me in Cuzco but that she wanted to go to Lima to see some family so they had her meet me at the airport. She was sweet and fun to hang out with. I had another early night. I have some mobility problems and high chronic pain that things like airports and tours just seem to make my pain problems even worse so I need to rest. I don't sleep much but I rest in my room. I had a nice shower and then a warm bath to help soothe my sore body. In the morning I was escorted to the airport and we flew to Cuzco. The flight was very easy with no problems. The visibility was great and we could see all the mountains as we flew over them. I had to think about the plane load of people that crashed up in these mountains and ended up eating each other to survive. I was going from sea level to over 11,000 feet or 3,400 meters. That can be quite a shock to the body. To ease the shock there is coca tea everywhere around the airport and in all the stores and hotels and restaurants. There are also coca leaves that can be chewed but they were kind of bitter tasting to me. I could and did drink a lot of the tea. I think it helped me adjust to the altitude like it was supposed to do. After checking into my hotel, the next morning was scheduled for another city tour of Cuzco and the surrounding area. My guide and I went out for a few drinks after checking into our hotel and cleaning up. Cuzco was much smaller of a city than Lima had been and almost everybody looked to be indigenous. I was getting kind of a speedy buzz from all the coca I was eating and drinking. I had no problems from the altitude so far. I was warned by my guide that some people suddenly get very sick after seeming to be unaffected by the altitude. She kept encouraging me to do more coca. I asked her about cocaine and she told me the authorities were very tough on all illegal drugs so she advised me to not even talk about them or I could get in serious trouble or end up in prison. The general attitude so far in Peru was that the people all seemed very straight and serious. I was not seeing very much fun and laughter around town, even in the bars we were hanging out in. The people seemed contented with life, they were just not laughing much. My guide and I were doing our share of having fun together, she could sure laugh and we did.