We're Learning for Free!

We´ve made it safely to Cuzco, no demonstrations or road blocks or any other obstacles that we noticed. Train from Puno was fantastic. Even though we were traveling ¨backpacker class¨we still enjoyed seats to ourselves with a table (complete with white, linenesque tablecloth) in the middle for our scrabble playing pleasure. There was even a functioning bathroom that was actually open to the passengers! (This is something literally every bus we´ve taken so far has lacked, even the ones that lasted 10 plus hours). As we relaxed and watched the amazing mountain scenery pass us by out the windows, bowtied porters passed back and forth taking drink and meal orders from the passengers. As much as I would have loved to sip a steaming hot cup of black coffee, I wasn´t quite ready to pay three dollars U.S. for it. As you can probably imagine, breakfast, lunch, and ¨tea¨ prices were even more ridiculous. I was quite content to eat the oranges and bananas we had bought in the market the night before. As nice as our car was, I could only wonder what was going on up in Ïnca¨(first) class. Padded, vibrating, recling chairs? Duck L'Orange? Personal Masseuses? Sensory deprivation tanks? Screenings of current theatrical releases? Gilded silverwear? Solid gold silverwear? I could only speculate. As nice as the train was, my only complaint was its seeming interminability. The agent initially told me that the ride would be 6 hours, so I based all my ¨get me off of this train¨expectations on this figure. The ride ended up taking about 10 hours, so needless to say I was quite antsy to get off by the end.

Got into Cuzco after dark, and after finding the two hotels we had preselected from our three years out of date Rough Guide (after this trip, I´m never traveling without Lonely Planet again) waaaay out of our price range we set out on a birth of christ llike series of follies. It seems there was ¨no room at the inn¨where ever we happened to try. We were getting very tired of lugging our stuff (which now includes a giant supplementary bag stuffed with souvenirs and bootleg DVDs) around, and we finally found a place that met our newly revised maximum per night price range of 50 soles (a little more than 8 dollars). Set off to find dinner and we were so hungry by this point (I take it back, I was NOT content to eat oranges and bananas, by this point I was STARVING.) that we settled on one of the first places we found. Dinner was over priced, under portioned, and really not that great. Nonetheless, I ate every scrap. It´s hard being back in Peru after Bolivia as now everything is literally twice as much as it was in Bolivia.

This morning, got up early and had a delicous cup of coffee, a suprising rarity in this coffee rich part of the world. We also moved hotels to a slightly cheaper place that actually seems nicer than last nights. Cuzco in the daylight is a lot different. Many of the buildings here retain either foundations or actual walls of leftover Inca construction. After the conquest, the Spanish razed many of the buildings (Cuzco was the Inca capital) but given the Inca´s unparalleled skill with stone working, they kept a lot of the bases for their admitedly less than inspiring baroque architecture. Even the Plaza de Armas is unique among the latin american cities I´ve visited. Instead of being a perfect square, the center of a rectilinear grid, it is more shaped like an ¨L¨conforming roughly to the layout of buildings the Inca had in their day.

We spent the morning hiking up to the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, a ruined fortress that at one time protected Cuzco to the north. The walk is tiring, but like so many walks we´ve done in South America, totally worth it. The first thing you see is a wall stretching off into the distance. Each block is at least 10 tons and fits into place with such exactitude that no mortar is neccesary. Even 500 years later this wall stands as ready as ever, challenging attackers to break themselves against it. As we reached the entrance to the main part of the ruins, we realized that the ¨Cuzco Tourist Ticket¨ we needed to buy was about 25 dollars, or 150% more than our (previously admited 3 years out of date) Rough Guide lead us to believe. I didn´t have the money on me, and before I could settle too deeply into my funk, Chris suggested that we just wander around until someone carded us (see email subject line). I immediately perked up, and sure enough, as a huge batch of complaining French tourists clogged up the ticket booth, we waltzed right by unnoticed. As you walk in, you realize how formidable a defense this fortress must have once been. Composed of ascending levels of walls, once again composed of that magnificent mortarless stone work, an attacking force would be constantly exposed to fire from above, even if one level was taken, the defenders could just retreat up to the next level. No one could possibly take Sacsayhuaman without suffering terrible losses. From the top of the fortress, we were afforded an incredible view of Cuzco as a whole, one of the best miradors I´ve ever seen in regards to viewing a city.

Heading back, we arranged a tour to Chiracarao, a little visited ruin accesible only by two day hike. Only a few hundred people visit it each year a opposed to the hundreds of thousands that visit Maccu Piccu. We are pretty excited to do that, but of course we´ll head to Maccu Piccu itself when we get back. After that, it´s pretty much time for us to head back home. There have been times when I have been daunted by the ammount of time we´ve spent traveling (although to the Europeans we´ve met with their 6, 8, 11, 23 month trips, 6 weeks is a tiny, tiny ammount of time, and when talking to them we´ve been forced to start saying ¨Just 6 weeks¨when asked how long we are traveling.) but now I can´t believe we´re almost done. Going to be out of email range for a while, but I´ll let you all know when I get back.