Cusco!!

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We arrived at the bus station in Cusco at around 6:30pm and took a taxi over to our hostal (Pantastico Bed & Bakery) in the San Blas area. Whoa!! The taxi started driving down cobblestoned streets hardly wider than the taxi itself!! This place is beautiful!! We had called Pantastico earlier in the day when we passed into Peru and our phone started to work again and they had a 3 bed room for us all ready. After dumping our stuff, we went out across the street to eat in a small restaurant and then took a little walk around the San Blas Plaza! It was beautiful here. But we were exhausted from our bus ride so we crashed and woke early to take in the town.

Pantastico lived up to its name as early in the morning the smell of bread came wafting up into our room. After breakfast, we walked down from the San Blas Plaza to the main Plaza des Armas of Cusco!! It was gorgeous here! Alot of tourists, for sure, but tourists come to beautiful places and Cusco surely is a beautiful place.

We did a few errands like buying the train tickets for Aguas Calientes and tried for 2 hours to purchase the Machu Picchu tix online but I finally gave up and took a taxi to the Ministerio de Cultural, only to find it closed for a holiday!!! Boy, that was frustrating. So, i had to run back down there the next morning before we left for Ollantaytambo to get our tix since noone wants to take the train to Aguas without tix to MP!!!! But, it all worked out fine the next morning and the tix were soon in our possession.

The rest of that first day was spent over at the Museum of Sacred, Magical and Medicinal Plants, just a few blocks from the Plaza des Armas. It was a fascinating place and they had small posters in English to read so we took our time trying to read as much as we could. The Ayahuasca room was truly fantastic!!

Lisa wasn´t feeling so great in the evening so Rumi and I went out in the rain to Granja Heidi´s, where we had a great meal in a beautiful setting. We brought her back some brothy soup which she liked.

The next day (after buying the MP tix), after leaving about 1/2 of our luggage and all of our instruments at Pantastico, we wandered down to the Ollantaytambo collectivo area on Cuichipunco St. (it´s correctly identified in the book, more or less) and had a great scenic ride accross to Urubamba and then the short hop to Ollanta (about 1-1/2 hours - i think it was 4 soles each)....after having a bite to eat near the station, we walked down to the train station and were soon on our way to Aguas Calientes! This was exciting!!

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