inca cola

as the once-glorious inca capital, cuzco had alot to live up too, and in my eyes it did pretty well. despite being tourist-ready: think gringos on every turn, tour agencies outnumbering the peruvians themselves, indigenous women in full garb--wide colorful skirts, dark plaited braids and bowler hats--posing with alpacas on the street, the city managed to hold on to it´s ancient charm. narrow cobblestone streets wove through the town, slippery stone steps climbing to breath-taking views (literally and otherwise--the altitude strikes again!) of the adobe cityscape and surrounding verdant green hills of the sacred valley.

i was out of commission for the first couple of days, battling a particularly fearsome trifecta of exhaustion from long bumpy bus rides, altitude sickness and a stubborn parasite that just wouldn´t quit. but nothing good old fashioned sleep, copious amounts of mate de coca (coca leaf tea) and 8 cloves of raw garlic couldn´t fix (it´s a natural anti-bacterial, don´t ya know).

mmmm coca

cuzco is a tourist´s dream city, but jeanette and i managed to find a few diamonds in the rough to keep us grounded. dining on three course meals with food that actually has FLAVOR (quite the rare find) for under two bucks, chatting with the market ladies while eating river fish ceviche, chasing with a shot of leche de tigre. by the way, there is no milk or tiger in the leche de tigre, just like there is no cheese in queso helado. it´s actually the marinade from the fish, sometimes mixed with vodka. cheers! i somehow found a way to insult an entire table of locals when i casually commented that, in my humble opinion, i thought arequipeña beer was better than cuzqueña beer (nearly every big city in peru brews their own beer and are fiercely proud of it). once, we got sent a plate of chicharrones--that would be pork deep fried in pig fat, the specialty of the bar we were at, as it was called ¨bar chicharrones.¨only in latin america would guys send you a plate of fried meat as a ¨hey, i´m looking at you¨gesture. ¨dang it, why wasn´t the place called ¨bar pisco sour?¨

aw, you shouldn´t have. no really, you shouldn´t have!

and then there was machu picchu. our trek didn´t work out as planned, so jeanette and i decided to DIY and forge our own way. one microbus, one highjacked tour bus (to clarify, we did the highjacking, not the other way around. you never know) in ollantaytambo, and one severly overpriced train ride brought us to aguas calientas, the town at the base of the ruins. we bypassed the van that shuttles tourists up through the mountain and hoofed it instead--a mini mini mini-me version of the inca trail. steps, steps, steps that i thought would never end straight up the mountainside. as we gained alitude and the thunderous roar of the rushing vilcanota river became more and more faint, the stupifying views were testament to the incredible feat it was to build a mountain-top citadel. go incas. how did they do it?

incredible

and then, there she was, tucked away in the andes, in all her glory. words can´t really express. i was seeing something i´d wanted to see for my whole life, and it was even more __________ (insert adjective here, i´m out of them) that i could have ever expected. magical even. you could practically feel the spirit and energy of the incas. the clouds ebbed and flowed, sometimes shrouding the ruins in wispy capes and sometimes parting so that the sun shined brillantly on the stone. as i was too cheap to get a guide, we followed behind other tours to get snippets of info, but most of my time there was spent wandering aimlessly through the century old ruins, wondering who lived there, what they did, what they were like, where they went. pretty incredible, and probably the best way to end my stint in peru.

a couple of days later, jeanette and i parted ways, her back to canada and me to bolivia, and after a series of somewhat unfortunate events, make it to copacobana on lake titicaca. until next time, amigos!