Day 5
While our dinner at the hacienda last night teetered on the bizarre, breakfast was quite good. We even had baked potatoes for breakfast. A little strange but you find a lot of potato and corn here. Strangest part of the trip was waking up to find a scorpion in the bathroom in the middle of the night. First scorpion I've ever seen in person. Hope it's the last!
Oddly enough on this tour nobody has been moving seats. So since I was the only one who wanted the front seat this is where I've been all week! Watching the Peruvian roads has been interesting to say the least. Center lines are merely a suggestion and the roads are empty enough to just hit the gas and go! Passing lines are also a suggestion. We had a moment with some motorcycles that had to pass us only to pull over 5 minutes down the road. It involved a lot of legitimite horn honking!
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| monolith |
There isn't a whole lot of big sites to see along the way, but they managed to find a few ruins for us to check out. We did stop by the sayhuite monolith. The strange part of all these sites is that they are in the middle of the fields so the locals just hang around and charge the visitors a few soles which are then shared in the towns. The monolith is covered with carvings that depict life in Peru. Some of them are quite detailed. And behind the stone ruins there are of course, terraces. The Incans love terraces. The entire country is filled with them. Most haven't been cleaned up but you can start to spot them on the nearby hills after awhile!
The Andes are a gorgeous place to drive through. Filled with lush valleys, corn fields and green as far as the eye can see. There are copious small villages on the sides of the roads with all sorts of farm animals wandering around. We are still steadily climbing up into the real altitudes, up with the clouds. And finally it feels like I'm adjusting a little bit.
To put the elevations in perspective, Edmonton is 645m above sea level, London is 251m, Banff is 1400m and Cusco is 3400m.
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| View from sayhuite |
Along the way we visited a second archeological site, Tarawasi. It's named after the tree because nobody knows what it was called. And beside the site there is the remains of another hacienda, which appeared to be a giant bee hive with all the bees flying around. The views were really incredible up here! While it was interesting to wander around and see the Incan stone work it does feel like it became a stop to give us a chance to get out of the bus. Not that I'm complaining!
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| Tarawasi |
One very familiar sight nearly everywhere in Peru are the 'unfinished' houses. Typically people build their own homes with help from family and relatives and will reciprocate at a later time. I don't think that many qualify for a mortgage like we do at home. So you build what you can afford. And quite likely the kids will live with their parents after they get married so they'll build another level as needed. So to prepare for a child, or for when the money is available they will prepare the next level, typically with rebar sticking out. Which gives the houses a very strange unfinished look. Also, the unfinished levels mean a cut in taxes. And despite what some people have done, sticking pop bottles on the top doesn't really improve the aesthetic.
Arriving in Cusco was an interesting time. The city is huge and build way up onto the hills. Cusco is in a large valley and the lower you live the better. Opposite from home. But many houses on the hills don't have roads, just massive staircases that appear to never end. The city is filled with narrow, winding roads up and down the hills. Some roads we got to know quite well with going up and down multiple times for tours over the coming days.
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| Cusco main plaza |
The hotel is centrally located on a tiny street with an even tinier sidewalk. And you have to ring the door bell to get in. And it felt like it was the same person letting us in everytime. This is a big trend we noticed. Very little internal security but not everyone gets inside. I keep thinking it's strange that nobody ever asks for a room number or ID but I suppose being a different color than the locals makes it very obvious we're tourists.
We had a little orientation tour in Cusco along with dinner. Saw the main square with all the churches. Cusco has a lot of churches, but more on that tomorrow. The altitude is still tricky, now with being more mobile. Slow walking is our friend. I figured doing regular hiking in the mountains would have helped but slight inclines here are tough. One of the ladies with a fitbit says that her resting heart rate has increased by 15 beats just being up this high. However, I've noticed that I've had a lot of energy since coming home so I'm enjoying that benefit while it lasts.
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