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Published: June 10th 2009
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Hello All. Once again apologies for the infrequency of the blog updates - I have to admit it is mainly through laziness and frustration with slow internet connections. We´ll we´ve travelled a fair way since we lef the Colca Canyon and are now in a rather lovely part of North West Argentina staying with some wonderful hosts Alex and Rijkje (spelling may not be quite right) of Casa Hernandez.
We´ve arrived here via Bolivia and Chile but I´d better start back in the distant past in Cusco, Peru. We weren´t that impressed wiith Cusco initially, the bus dropped us in a yard at 6am , nothing close to resembling a bus station, where they kept the big metal gates firmly closed to keep the hoards of taxi drivers at bay from the bleary eyed travellers. The hostel when we got there was fine but it was noticeably chillier than the balmy climes of Arequipa so we went to sleep as far as I can remeber until the sun had warmed things up. It took us a few days to get into the very touristy nature of Cusco, constantly being approached to buy this and that eat here etc etc was not
great and we both became fluent in "no gracias" very fast.
We organised a lovely day hike to see some slightly more off the beaten path inca ruins. The first site Moray is what they believe to be an old inca agricultural lab, terraced ampetheaters for testing crops and was in surprisingly good nick, overlooked by the conquistadors due to the lack of gold apparently. We then walked through the lovely countryside to some working salt pans originally started in inca times and have been worked ever since. They are run as a cooperative now for the villagers but it´s not a particulary lucrative line of work.
There are alot of inca ruins around Cusco as it was the capital of the empire so we did a day bus tour to have a look which was quite interesting. I also have to note hat Cusco cathedral is the most bling religious building we have ever been in. It is vast and loaded with ornate gold and silver plated decoration, no photos allowed inside I´m afraid so we can´t prove it to you. Anyway these side tours were all very nice but obviously the main reason for visiting Cusco is Machu
Picchu and that turned out to be more of an adventure than we anticipated.
Unfortunately our visit coincided with a farmers strike, social protest such as this is very common in Peru and they ahve alot going on in the Amazon at the moment. The ususal format seems to be people of the land vs the government. This one was about water rights being sold off to forgein companies. The campesinos basically blocked off all the roads for 48hrs and no transport runs be it buses or trains etc. As we managed to find out just in time we got an agency to arrange a 2 day trip out to Macchu Picchu for us. This worked ok except for the worst hotel we´ve ever stayed in, lets just say an internal room in a building with a massive damp problem is not a pleasant experience. Luckily we got up at 4am to catch the bus to get to the site, the buses don´t actually start running till 5am but the que was massive even at 4.30. You do que for everything there but it´s one of the biggest attarctions in the world so I guess it´s expected. Once we were
in the site we hiked up to the Sun gate, a good 45 - 50 mins uphill, the guide book was optomistic with it´s 30 min estimate. From here we watched as the sun came up over the mountains and the clouds cleared away from the site down below - it was a pretty awesome experience I have to say. The actual site is massive and we spent some time vaguely wandering round and some time sitting in a quiet location playing scrabble and taking it all in. The package also included a guided tour, this was good as the guide was very enthusiastic and informative showing us how the main plaza area had been acoustically engineered for maximum sound projection plus numerous other details which we would never have discovered on our own.
Getting back to Cusco after a very long day proved to be a bit of a problem as train delays overlapped with the beginning of the strike so we spent a few hours in a massive bus on the worst road ever, at least twice I thought it would tip over, Iain was asleep for most of this section which is not bad going for the
lightest sleeper I have ever met. The bus, in a convoy of many desperat to beat the strike and get back to Cusco, had to negotiate around two road blocks, actually at the second one all the drivers in the convoy just turned around and luckily found a different way through. We spent some time contemplating the walk back to Cusco, the conclusions were that it would be long and cold and not appealing in the slightest. We arrived back at 3.30am and no we ddin´t have to walk.
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