Cusco is a really lovely city; although very much a tourist place in terms of street vendors and dodgily translated menus for pricey restaurants, Cusco was the capital of the Inca empire, and we arrived in the run up to the Winter Solstice (which is today) a huge Inca festival in celebration of the Sun called Inti Raymi, so there's been a lot going on here.
We stayed two days here, mainly wandering about and catching up on sleep. A notable visit was to Qoricancha, the remains of the temple of the Sun here in town - the workmanship was absolutely astonishing, and the mix between the Inca ruins and the Catholic church and convent that had been built on top of it was quite something.
On Saturday we began a two day tour - day 1 seeing some of the Sacred Valley, then a train to Aguas Calientes, otherwise known as the Machu Picchu town, to go and see Machu Picchu the second day.
In the Sacred Valley we visited two amazing places. The first, Pisaq, had some pre-Inca remains too, and also has the largest Inca burial ground, where what must be thousands of important people were mummified and buried into the side of the mountain in their own personal tombs. The second was Ollantaytambo, an original Inca town, amazingly well preserved and still in use today, and had the beginnings of the construction of a Sun Temple up one of the mountains where the people brought enormous rocks from the mines 8 miles away on the other side of another mountain.
The hour and 45 train to Aguas Calientes felt novel for about ten minutes but then was annoyingly slow and jolty, especially considering the hefty 80 USD return price. We went to bed at 9pm to be up the next day at 3.20am, and did pretty well with the early start, managing to get on th 2nd bus up to Machu Picchu at 5.30am when they start the service.
It's difficult to arrive at Machu Picchu without a preconceived idea of what it will be like, especially when everyone seems to take the same one photo of it. Thankfully, it was genuinely amazing, so well preserved and complete. We had a two hour tour round with our guide, before we started our climb up Wayna Picchu, the mountain behind the town in all the photos you see. Daisy got her stamina on and managed the climb in half an hour, while Rach, Phil and I took it slowly in over an hour. We were on the shade side of the mountain, thank God, otherwise the heat alone would have killed us. The whole path is stairs, but some of them are ridiculously steep, or narrow, or uneven, or rocks with holes carved into them. There was one section on the way down where I just went on my bum like a small child. Absolutely worth it though, the views were overwhelming and the climb was good fun too.
Arrived back in Cusco that night, Sunday, absolutely shattered. Yesterday we had a lazy one and watched a few films... Making the most of our nice hostel before we start another journey tonight - this time an overnight bus to Arquipa, getting picked up straight from the bus terminal to start a 2 day tour of the Colca Canyon, at the end of which we'll be getting another overnight bus to the border with Chile to start the return journey.
Home in one week!
Lots of love
XOX
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