Welcome BAck to Peru...Cuzco

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Hola,
So we finally made it back to Peru. We left Bolivia on April 15th. It was a 13 hour bus ride from Lap Paz to Cusco. The bus ride was so/so, not our best bus ride thats for sure. We left at 8am, well actually around 8.30am, and off we went. The first 4 hours were in bolivia and i think we had to stop for police checks about 5 times, and unlike other countries, here the police come on the bus and check all our passports each time,, very frustrating when your trying to sleep...So finally we made it back into Peru, our first stop and our last stop on the trip. Once in peru we were greeted with a live guitar playing peruvian to saranade us for 10 minutes while we cruised through the streets of Puno. Now i have no clue why this happens, or why the driver allows it, but he plays some bad songs, la bamba included and then expects tips. Well he got none from me, i was trying to sleep. Another great thing about this bus ride was once in Peru our driver amazingly started to drive like all the other whacko peruvians do,,, not fun. So we were told we would arrive at 7pm, but as the darkness came and 7pm rolled around we were still driving. Now driving on the windy roads in the dark is sooo much more fun,, not. Well on and on we went until sometime around 9pm we arrived in Cuzco. Luckily we had our hostel already booked so it was just a 2 dollar cab ride to sleep. So Cuzco is a pretty cool city, lots of old buildings, original inca walls still standing, cobblestone streets, and boy are they narrow. The weather has been great while here, Cuzco is still 11,500 feet high, but we havnt had any rain, nice partly sunny days, and cool nights. Our main purpose here is to go to Machu Picchu. Getting there is the hard part if your not doing an organinzed tour. There is a train that goes there, well close to it, and it leave every morning around 7.30am, its a 3hour train ride each way. Once there you have to get a shuttle bus up the mountain to the actual inca site. We wanted to go there on Friday, but to our suprise no seats left on the train,,, ughh. So saturday,,, umm nope, maybe sunday,, YES. Thankfully we got seats on the sunday train to machu picchu, since we are leaving for Lima on Monday this could have been quite a problem. On monday we will be flying back to Lima, and on tuesday we will be flying back home. We decided to fly to lima versus the bus for a few reasons, mainly we are sick of long bus rides, but logically we looked at our options, either a 27hour bus ride which most of it would be the same route we took out of lima, that made me wanna go grab the bus driver and ring his neck for the way he drove.. or they have a shorter 12-16hour bus ride to lima that goes through much windier and rougher roads, OR a 70 minute flight that costs about the same as flying to st louis one way,,, hmmmm tuff choice. So we will fly to Lima on Monday and spend the night, then head home tuesday late night, arriving home wednesday, when hopefully richard will be nice enough to pick us up, haha.

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