Up the coast in 5 days

We left Cuzco in a night bus and arrived in Nazca in the morning. Finally we got away from the cold. It was the first day I could wear a shirt again since Rurrenabaque. We had mad a reservation for a flight from Cuzco, but when we got out of the bus we were met by the obligatory group of people yelling at you to sell you something. Well, one of them had a flight on offer, which was cheaper than the flight we wanted to take, so we decided to go with them. Once we arrived at the office it became clear that he actually wanted to sell us a longer and a little bit more expensive flight, but he did a good job convincing us, so we went on a 40 minutes flight with 3 other girls. To cut a long story short: I think a 20  minutes flight would have done it for me as well and probably for everybody else as well as we all got sick on the plane. In the end Flo was the only one who was still able to take pictures.

We didn't stay in Nazca for the night, instead we took a bus to a small seaside town called Paracas from where we would make our trip to "poor mens Galapagos", las Islas Ballestas. Unfortunately on the day we went the weather was not so nice, but that probably saved me from a sun stroke and we still got to see lots and lots of bird, seastar, sealions and penguins.

After two days we had to leave for Lima and were shocked when we arrived. Such a big and modern city. After being out of the modern world for such a long time, it was a bit stressful, but luckily the benefits of civilisation (junkfood) made up for it. We went into the city center one day and walked around Miraflores, the seaside neighbourhood where our hostel is, the next day.

This is my favorite statue. The order was given in Spain to put llamas on the head of the lady. Now this word does not only mean Llama, the animal, but also Flames, which was probably what they had in mind, but the craftsman didn't know that meaning, so not mother Patria is balancing a little llama on her head.

We also visited more ruins from yet a diferent culture, the Lima culture. It's amazing how each pyramid looks totally diferent to the other and how yet each culture developed diferent techniques for the same problem, ike earthquakes. I wish we had more time to visit more archeological sites.

Now we are waiting for our next night bus to Trujillo where we plan to lay on th beach, get tanned and relax. It has been a long time of travelling already without any real breaks and I think at the moment we need kind of a time out to recharge our batteries.

At the belly button of the world

On our first day in Cuzco we met our friend Mel who we worked with in Perth last year. We checked into the first hostel and went on a free walking tour which was quite diferent to most other tours we have done so far as it was very gastronomy focused. So we got the chance to try chicha morada (pink fermented corn "beer"; sweet, but very good), pisco sour (perus national drink made out of grape licor, egg and lemon juice; sour and also very good), chocolate tea, alpaca meat etc. etc. We even got free Sushi which was the highlight for me.

Two days after we arrived a mayor event in the city took place, a religious celebration called "corpus christi" where the statues of 15 saint that normally stand in diferent churches around the city, get carried to the cathedral, then carried around the main square, back into the cathdral and home to their original churches the on next day. As we found out later, this is actually an old inca tradition: They used to take the mummies of the deceased incas and their wives out of their tombes an carry them around the main square in Cuzco. The whole celebration is actually a syncretism between old incaic believes and catholicism. During the celebration the square gets decorated with rainbow-flags which makes it look like a gay pride parade would take place the next day but actually the rainbow is one of the sacred manifestations of nature to the indigenous people. Also a traditional food is eaten only during this celebration: It consists of fisheggs, seaweed, chicken, guinea pig, omelett, sausage, some other unidentifiable meat, dried corn and cheese all stacked up on a huge pile on a tiny plate (we shared one plate between the three because it was way too much for one person). The dish is called Chiriuchu and it was not really good. Maybe you have to be religious to like it.

We visited a few of the standard tourist atractions like the cathedral, the inca museum etc. and on one day we also did a trip outside of the city to some archeological sites where we had a wonderful encounter with the friendliest alpaca on the planet.

And of course we visited the ruins as well.

After one week in Cuzco it was time to visit the famous ruins of Machu Picchu. We decided to skip the expensive tourist train and instead took two buses that brought us as close to Machu Picchu as possible by car and then walk along the railway for a few hours. We stayed in a really nice small hostel called Los jadines de Mandor, about 1.5 hours from Machu Picchu. 

The next morning we left extremely early as we had decided to save money again and hike from 1800m above sea level to 2400m where the ruins are. It resulted to be much more dificult than expected and I started regretting my stingyness, we should have just paid 25 Soles for the bus. We also had a ticket to climb Machu Picchu mountain (which is not the one showing in all the postcards, that's Huaynapicchu, but the one that is behind you when when you take a picture in the postcard-perspective. It was another 600m up, but finally we were on 3000m and could open our bottle of wine that we brought with us to celebrate this achievement. The view from the top was just spectacular. In general I liked Machu Picchu a lot, there were not as many tourists as I expected and the surrounding mountains are just incredibly beautiful, even after seeing it so many times on tv and postcards etc. 

On the next day my legs took revenge to torturing them so much on the day before. I couldn't walk stair at all without pain and almost all normal movements were impossible. We had dinner in the resturant next to our hostel because I refused to walk further than necesary and even like that it took me 20 minutes to get there and Florian had to help me climb down the stair. The pain stayed for three days, so we were forced to be much less active but now (5 days after the trip) I can walk normally again.

-sandra