Machu Picchu, Cusco, and Lima

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The day after the party, I ended up staying up all night packing for the trip. We then took a 5 hour flight to Miami and then a 7 hour flight to Lima. We spent the night in Lima and caught a 5 am flight to Cusco, which took 2 hours and was scary because the visibility was so bad that the pilot had to make several attempts at landing.

Cusco a city nearly 11,000 ft above sea level in the middle of the Andes Mountains and is the closest large city to Machu Picchu and was considered the capital of the Inca Empire until the Spanish conquistadors took over and replaced most of the Inca temples with churches (jerks!). There are some impressive churches that date back to the mid 1500s but the real impressive architecture is what remains from the Incas. One of the coolest buildings in the city was about a block from our hotel which was called Coricancha, or the temple of the sun. It was a church constructed over the site of an Incan temple, but many of the Incan walls still existed while many of the Spanish walls had to be reconstructed after an earthquake. Incas used stone to construct their buildings but ground the stone into interlocking pieces so that there were no spaces inbetween blocks, which made the structures really strong. There are 300,000 people that reside in Cusco and about 299,999 of them are either selling something to tourists or are begging, but overall the people were nice.

The next day we took a 4 hour train to Machu Picchu. We were in luck as the weather was perfect and the views from the top were amazing. Beyond appreciating the amount of work that went into constructing this site, considering that it is built on top of an insanely steep mountain in the middle of nowhere, the site is also a great place to just sit and appreciate the silence and the surrounding views.

I would have done a separate entry on Lima, since that was our next stop, but it was really a sketchy city. On the cab ride in, we saw collapsing structures, broken down cars, and shady characters on every block (worse than I had ever seen in Mexico) and I kept thinking it would get better once we hit the center of the city but it never did! I only took a couple pictures because I was afraid someone was going to steal my camera. From what we were told, some locals even consider it dangerous if you venture outside the main city squares. However, we did make it out to Miraflores, which is the beachfront district of the city and that was much safer and was cool to check out for a couple hours and grab lunch.

This was a really exhausting leg of the trip, since we were waking up early every morning and seeing as much as we could in the short amount of time we had budgeted. However, Machu Picchu made the trip well worth it.

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