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Published: November 8th 2009
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We flew into Cusco from Quito. Another high altitude city - Cusco is at 2,400 metres above sealevel. Starting to notice that walking uphill is hard work!!
Being organised we checked into the hostal that we´d booked online in advance, but after one night in a dark cell with people tramping round the corridors from 5am, we promptly checked out again! We found a lovely hostal just around the corner with nice rooms, windows (!) and a flower-filled courtyard. This would be home for a few days until we headed off on our trek.
Cusco seemed like a nice town, very touristy though. The central plaza is pleaseant and bustling, the buildings are lovely old colonial style, often built on Inca foundations, and the setting in a valley surrounded by hills on every side, makes it very picturesque. If Machu Picchu didn´t exist, it probably wouldn´t even be on the map though.
As we´re only planning about 2 weeks in Peru, we thought we should make an effort to see some of the other sights around the city, so on our second day, we caught a local bus up the hill to some of the other sights. As
usual it was a rip-off price for tourists and the price was no different whether we were traveling for half an hour or the full hour and a half to the final destination. However, it saved us a 3 hour uphill walk, so we weren´t complaining (too loudly). This left us with an 8km downhill walk, visiting 3 sites on our way.
Our first visit was Tambo Machay, built by the Incas as a kind of weekend resort. Next was the hilltop fort of Puka Pukhara, offering great views across the surrounding valleys. Both were interesting, but, our final visit of the morning was Sacsaywayman, justifiably the most impressive building in terms of scale of the site and the size of the stones. Many many local people, Incas were massacred at Sacsaywayman by the Spanish at the time of the Spanish invasion.
The next day we spent preparing for our trek, (see separate blog).
After our trek, we needed a day to rest, recover and get our laundry done, so we had a chilled day in town, although the rainy season had once again caught up with us and it rained most of the afternoon. So we
decided we needed another day to relax and chill around town. On our final day in Cusco, we finally dragged ourselves away from the comfort of the city and headed out into the country to see more Inca ruins. We caught a small ´collectivo´minibus from town (collectivos seem to be everywhere in SA in the form of cars and minibuses run as cooperatives by local people, filling up with paying passengers either before leaving or along the way.) We travelled in style and found ourselves in a very dusty and windy Ollantaytambo, with a stiff climb up another hundred or so Inca steps. We had planned to visit Pisac on our way home (20km along the valley), but after a wander round and a sit down for a Coke, we decided that we were all Inca´d out and we´d head back to Cusco. We´re not great at being sightseeing tourists - we really prefer to be doing something active.
All the Inca stuff is interesting, but I had really thought that it was older. As it turns out, a lot of it dates back only to around 1500 and as Steve keeps pointing out, we´ve got older and more
interesting stuff in Europe - including some original Wonders of the World, and much of what we have from the 1500´s is still standing, in good condition and often still lived in, rather than the ruins here. That said, it is interesting to learn a bit about the heritage of the South American people and how indigenous and spanish cultures have mixed.
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