Cusco

Sorry for the delay in posting this! I am determined to get caught up because there are new things happening that need blogging too. So here goes our vacation.

On the morning of the 26th we got up at 4:00 am to make it to the airport by 5:30. We were on two different flights to Cusco because of some rather frustrating mix-ups with the travel agent beforehand, namely, that she did not get back to me in time for us all to get on the same one. In retrospect it seems this was an omen of how the rest of the trip would go--one detail after another going just wrong enough to keep us from doing things all together, and us scrambling to somehow make things happen anyway.

The flight from Lima to Cusco was amazing. We got up through the cloud layer and out into the sun, and looking out the window I could see mountains hemming the clouds in, the natural barrier that keeps Lima covered by fog all winter. It looked like a white lake was lapping against brown hills. As we flew inland, the edges of the cloud-lake crept in little rivers up between the fingers of the mountains--and then, as the mountains got bigger and wider, the clouds stopped dead. At a certain point the blanket of white just ended, with one little poof like a cotton ball broken off from the rest and floating inland, and down below in the valley was a silvery road where people driving away from Lima would come out of the fog into the sun.

And we were over the sierra. I always thought of mountains as a long, narrow string that you crossed over and were done, but this was true highland--mile after mile of tumbled hills and shadowed valleys. The mountains were steep and brown and looked inhospitable, but as we went on some of the slopes turned greener and I could see towns and farm areas perched on them, reached by little ribbons of road winding over and up and down. The lakes looked like sheets of metal and flashed as we went by. Later I learned that I was lucky to be on the left side of the plane--the right side going inland is apparently tilted up and gets none of the same views. Mom and Marissa missed out for that reason. Chrissy and Catherine didn't seem to care about the vistas as much as I did, but maybe they were just being polite about my having taken the window seat.

In the airport at Cusco we all found each other. We were driven to our hotel by a pair of taxi drivers/tour guides who had a very comfortable minivan and kept offering us rides to all the sights in the Sacred Valley, until Catherine answered, "No, tour guides cost a ton! We're not made of money!" which seemed to get them off our backs... for the moment.

Mom and Marissa in our first hostel. It was cheap, no heat, but generally clean and the sun warmed the top floor where we were during the day. The only problem was that Mom's rooom smelled really bad because when the toilet flushed it kind of sprayed little drops out onto the floor... she didn't stay there for long.

The first day I was lightheaded and short of breath from the altitude. Coca tea, an infusion of the leaves that the native peoples chewed for extra energy in wandering through the mountains and modern people now refine into cocaine, helped. Marissa felt sick at lunch and so Mom took her back while Catherine and Chrissy and I wandered the city. Cusco is absolutely beautiful--all the buildings are white with orange-brown slanted roofs, and the mountains surround it on all sides. It's so isolated, and the air is so fresh and clear, that it really does seem like it might be the center of the world the way the Incas thought. It also helps that the city revolves completely around tourists now, so everything in the center is kept beautiful and entertaining. In our wanderings around the plaza at night, I bought alpaca socks and Catherine found a dress for her sister's wedding, of all things.

(Light and shadow in Cusco is amazing.)

On the first morning, Catherine felt a little sick to her stomach, but she stayed in bed and was better by lunch. The rest of us spent the morning in administrative details: first getting another hotel room for Mom, in the beautiful tourist hotel around the corner from the cheap hostel, then buying our train tickets to Machu Picchu, then our bus tickets for the end of the week from Cusco to Arequipa. It was beautiful and sunny and I was loving the incredibly clear, fresh air, even though we hadn't "seen anything" yet. Then after lunch Mom felt sick with a fever and chills. She went to lie down in her new (heated) room. Marissa and I went and bought the last of our many tickets, the "tourist ticket" that admits you to many of the sights around Cusco... but then discovered that it didn't let you into any of the churches, which was what we wanted to see. In retrospect, I should have just paid the 10 soles and taken my sister in to see something already, but I was so sick of spending money on tickets that I wanted to actually use one of them. So we walked through the museum of the Quorikancha temple site, where the Church of Santo Domingo now stands. It was small and not very interesting.

Iglesia de Santo Domingo, from the outside, with a random guy's head.

One thing we could use the tourist ticket for was a performance of native music and dance at the Cultural Center in the evening, so we did that. It was full of brightly colored costumes and traditional huayno music, which uses a lot of string instruments and high-pitched voices all on the same (often very repetitive) melody, and dances with a lot of little foot-stomping jumps and interesting interactions between the dance partners (at one point the men put ropes around the women, at another the women kicked the men to the floor). We hear a ton of huayno in Tupac, and it gets really old really fast when your neighbors play it really loud for twelve hours straight on a Sunday to celebrate their patron saint--but it wasn't annoying at all in its natural setting, so to speak, of Cusco and the traditional dances. I feel like I understand it better just from seeing the landscape it comes from.

On our second morning in Cusco, Catherine, Chrissy, and I woke up early to go hiking. At last we were going to really explore the city. We followed my guidebook's directions up small cobblestone streets between white walls, up to an old, out-of-use church with a view over the whole city. On the way was a street called Purgatorio. This is us in Purgatory.

This is us on the church's plaza overlooking the city. By this time we were all hopelessly addicted to chullo shopping; here we are wearing some of the first ones we bought. I bought a belt from a señora here who showed me how she weaves them by hand.

We contiuned up the road and out of the city, up a hillside, shopping for more chullos and other gifts at the tourist stands set up along the way, to the ruins of Sachsayhuamán. It was a beautiful day and we took our time rambling around the remains of the Inca fortress that once stood there...

...and we met llamas!

We walked down the road to another hill, where there are ruins of the ancient temple Q'enco which was used (I found out from eavesdropping on a tour guide) for ritual sacrifices and telling the future, among other things. You could go inside the temple underground and walk around the tunnels, and we saw where they would pour chicha into rivulets in the stone to predict the future by the paths it took. We took a picture of me as a sacrifice on the stone tables, but unfortunately it was on Chrissy's camera and not digital.

Meanwhile Mom (who was feeling better) and Marissa went out to see the inside of the Cathedral, which houses a famous painting of Jesus at the Last Supper eating cuy (guinea pig), a traditional Cusqueñan dish. By the time we met up it was evening. They were in yet another hotel, because the nice one they'd found had only one night available; this one was cold because the room got no sunlight, and now Marissa was sick with the same chills and fever.

I went out again to go to Mass and to bring foodstuffs back to the hotel, feeling very tired and anxious about us getting to Machu Picchu. The church on the Plaza had an altarpiece two stories high and so covered with gold leaf that it hurt to look at, especially after all the sun we'd gotten that day up on the hills. The plan was to set out early the next morning to take buses around the sites in the Sacred Valley, arriving by 7:00 at the town of Ollantaytambo, where our train would leave for Aguas Calientes, the little town at the foot of Machu Picchu itself. The buses don't go any farther into the mountains than Ollantaytambo because the hills get so close together that it would be too difficult to put in roads; everyone who goes to Machu Picchu goes by the train, which follows the river winding in through the mountains. I hated the idea of leaving Mom and Marissa behind, but the train tickets couldn't be moved to another day.

That night I myself got the chills, at which point my goal went from getting everyone to Machu Picchu, to not dying and leaving my mother and sister stranded in a cold hotel in Cusco. In the morning I felt fine, but now Chrissy was sick and Marissa was still not up for the journey. We called the taxi driver/tour guide who had given us a ride from the airport, Josué, and asked him to drive us to and from Ollantaytambo as an alternative to taking the bus. He said he could do it for $40 each way; then he came to talk to us, we agreed on a time, and he went from $40 to $50, because he could see we had no other option if we wanted to get to our train. So we said okay. Meanwhile Mom had managed to contact an English-speaking doctor through her travel insurance and get him to come see Marissa and give her medicine to take. In the afternoon we moved Mom and the still-feverish Marissa to their fourth and final hotel, upscale and heated like the second one and much more comfortable than the third, and left for Ollantaytambo with Josué, our luggage, a still-half-sick Chrissy, much angst and guilt, and those precious, non-transferrable train tickets that were going to take us to Machu Picchu.