Walking ATMs

Today we caught an early flight from the Juliaca airport to Cuzco.  Our taxi driver picked us up early to drive us the hour to the airport.

Sunrise over Puno and Lake Titicaca on our way to the airport.

Alipio has been our taxi driver throughout our time in the Puno area.  He picked us up at the airport on the first day, and his wife and 1 year old were in the front seat.  He told us he is Quechua and grew up on Isla Amantani, where his mother still lives.  She runs her house as a home stay, where tourists can come and live for one night like the locals, similar to what we did on Isla Quantati.  Alipio came to Puno to find work, and that is where he met his wife.  He gets to go back to Isla Amantani once a month to visit his family.  He also told us that growing up, people in the Lake Titicaca area speak only Quechua, but as soon as they go to school, the teachers teach in only Spanish, so that is how everyone ends up bilingual.  It is a good thing that Gavin and I have a decent knowledge of Spanish, as most people around here do not speak English at all.  Alipio also told us that he doesn't drive his taxi at night because people get into taxis, kill the drivers and go sell their cars in Bolivia, where no legal papers are necessary to sell cars.  This happened to a friend of his recently.

After we went through security at the airport, we noticed a few guys in traditional dress coming through the security line putting various musical instruments through the x-ray scanner.  As we sat waiting for our flight, the instrumentalist set up a little band and played traditional Peruvian music for us!  How fun!

Once we arrived in Cuzco, our taxi driver took us to our apartment called Renacimiento.  It is in a completely unmarked building about 5 blocks from the center of Cuzco, Plaza de Armas.  The place is BEAUTIFUL!  The apartments all open out into an outdoor courtyard; it used to be a colonial mansion.  Our apartment is full of natural light from skylights in every room, and has a lot of charmingly shabby furniture and decor.  The disadvantage?  NO HEAT...  Once again we will be covered in several alpaca wool blankets when we sleep...   :)

Our beautiful, sunny apartment in Cuzco.

After settling in at Renacimiento, we headed toward Plaza de Armas.  On the way, we stopped at Plaza Recocijo, since there were a few nice looking cafes with outdoor seating.  After very little breakfast, we decided to split a sandwich as a snack at a place overlooking the little Plaza.  No sooner had we sat down, than people kept wandering by asking us to buy stuff: carved gourds, paintings, jewelry, woven dolls, shoe shines and more.  Once our sandwich came, we could barely take a bite without having to say "No, gracias" repeatedly to particularly persistent sales people.  We found this to be common throughout the day; every time we paused a bit to look at a map, every time we stopped to rest at a park bench somebody wanted to sell us something.  Gavin quipped that we must look like "walking ATMs."  :)

After our snack, we decided to follow Lonely Planet's walking tour of Cusco, which started at Plaza de Armas and ended at Sacsayhuaman (otherwise nicknamed "Sexy Woman"), the best ruins of Cusco.  This tour took us past ole colonial buildings like huge cathedrals, mansions, etc, but architecture is not my favorite part of the walking tours; just experiencing the culture of the area is.  (okay, okay, I'll admit to liking shopping, too...  :)  )

Plaza de Armas in Cuzco.

As we walked, one of my favorite parts of the walk was when a school bus (well, large van) full of little boys drove by us, and one little 5 year old yelled "Chica bonita!!" (Pretty girl!) at me as they passed.  Bless you, kid.  Nobody has called me pretty or a "girl" for a long time. (excluding my loving husband, of course.  :)  )  I'm at the stage where "ma'am" is becoming the norm and fewer and fewer people check my ID at bars anymore.  :)

Our walk took us by the Mercado Artesanal, a sleepy little market of people selling supposedly handmade goods (though there were some Columbia backpacks...  :)  ) to tourists.  Or course, Gavin and I can never walk by a market...  We ended up with a nice ceramic painted vase, one of the carved gourds like people had been harassing us to buy in the Plaze (but much better and more detailed!) and another hand knit alpaca scarf.  Gavin also insisted on buying bookends that were stone carvings of Pachamama and Pachapapa - Pachamama a busty carving holding onto her own breasts, and Pachapapa rather "excited," if you catch my drift....  Nice, Gavin.  :)  While we were negotiating prices, it started POURING rain outside!  Luckily, the market was covered and we stayed dry.  The keeper of the stall told us the rain comes and goes very fast, and sure enough it stopped in about 5 minutes.

We continued our walk, which took us back to Plaza Recocijo just in time... Right as we reached the covered area where we had eaten lunch, it started to HAIL - heavy, pea-sized hail!  One whapped me while I was trying to take a video, and it definitely stung!  :)  The hail also only lasted about 5 minutes.

We continued on to the Mercado Central, a HUGE covered market of stalls selling everything from produce, to seafood, to traditional Peruvian garb, to kitchen supplies and more!  I bought a cheap reusable grocery bag to carry our souvenirs as a carry on on the way back to the US.  We also stopped at one of the many juice stalls to have some fresh juice; Gavin and I shared one of pineapple, apple and watermelon - YUM!!!  As we wandered through the produce section, the smell of garlic permeated the air; keepers of the stalls were peeling raw garlic to sell!

The bustling and colorful Mercado Central.

The many juice stands of Mercado Central.

At the opposite end of the market were the food stalls, where dozens of locals hunched over lunch counters eating fish, chicken, beef...  I can never resist food stalls; in any country we visit, they tend to be my favorite meals.  :)  I sat at a counter and ordered a mixed ceviche.  (yes, I ate raw fish in Peru, one of the no-nos in Lonely Planet, but I tend to be a bit liberal with my food choices.  :D  )  It was the best ceviche ever!  Soft, fresh fish, the perfect hint of lime juice and just a touch of spiciness.  I was definitely the only tourist seated at ANY of the food stalls, though many walked by.  They're missing out!  :)

After Mercado Central, we continued on the walking tour.  We happened upon a bank where we could pay for our Machu Picchu tickets.  Lonely Planet had recommended we buy the tickets online before arriving at Machu Picchu to avoid crazy long lines.  "Buying online" we a bit of a misnomer.  Yesterday we had tried to make reservations online, and the website informed us that we have go to a bank to pay for the tickets.  We wandered into this particular bank (Banco de la Nacion) in Cuzco and walked up to the teller to pay for the tickets.  The teller informed us that the confirmation code had expired - after reserving the tickets online, they have to be paid for in six hours!

So now we had to detour back to Renacimiento to use the internet and reserve tickets AGAIN, then head back to the same bank to pay for them.  Once we arrived, they told us we couldn't pay for the tickets with a credit card; luckily we had enough cash with us...  After that, we had to find an internet cafe to PRINT the tickets!  What a pain!  I hope it is worth it!

We headed back to Plaza de Armas to continue the walking tour.  It was time to start the climb up to Sacsayhuaman. We climbed up the lovely Spanish-style cobblestone streets through Cuzco, ambled across a higher point in Cusco on the street Tanda Pata, then started climbing stairs.  :)  We huffed and puffed our way up in the high altitude, and when we got to the top, we were rewarded with our first few of the incredible Inca mortarless mason work; huge stones put together so tightly that one can't even slide a credit card between them!  We continued to climb to get in to see rest of the ruins, and the guard at the top informed us that we have to buy tickets for about $50 apiece, even though the site was closing in a half hour!  We decided it wasn't worth it, and instead climbed the hill opposite the ruins to get a view of Cusco and see some of Sacsayhuaman from afar.  At the top of this particular hill was a Christ Redeemer statue similar to the one in Rio de Janiero, but not even close to as grand a scale.  But this hill provided an incredible view of all of Cusco and the mountains surrounding it as the sun started to set...  An instrumentalist in traditional costume sat playing a ukelele-like instrument and singing happily.

Inca mortarless mason work; each stone weighs around 100-200 tons!

Cuzco in the evening.

The view of Cuzco from this high is definitely something to sing about!  :)

Once the sun set over the mountains, we were able to get a few pictures of Sacsayhuaman from the side.  Then we tried to descend quickly, as we didn't want to be left without light in a somewhat deserted area of Cuzco.  On the way down, we happened to wander in to a little area selling paintings; the woman inside informed us they were all from Cuzco's art school.  We immediately fell in love with some paintings of Ollantaytambo, beautiful red colors accented with thickly textures white mountains...  The woman informed us that she was the one who had painted them.  (we are never sure when people tell us this if it is true or not, I think people know that tourists LOVE to buy stuff from "the original artist" and sometimes BS about being the artist, but I think she was telling the truth in this case.  :)  )  We ended up with a pretty large two-panel painting, which the woman informed us she had mixed bits of wood into the paint to get the thick textures that attracted us to this particular painting.

Sacsayhuaman after sunset.

After the climb, we were really hungry, so we tried to stop by Lonely Planet's highest recommended restaurant Ciccolina.  The restaurant was packed and had an hour wait, so they recommended we go to their newest restaurant owned by the same people called Baco; it was only a few blocks away and we got seated right away.

I was super excited to see really nice salads on the menu (another no no - raw veggies washed in Peruvian water... but I was feeling so veggie-deprived I didn't care!).  We ordered caramelized pork ribs for an appetizer, and I tried another pisco sour; this one was MUCH better than the one in Puno!  My salad had BBQ calamari and shrimp in an AMAZING ginger dressing.  Gavin had some delicious steak (I guess Argentina wasn't enough steak for him.  :)  ).  For dessert, we tried some bread pudding, which also would have been really good, except for too many raisins.  :)  As we sat, I suddenly lost all my momentum and energy, so we walked back to Renacimiento to huddle under alpaca blankets and sleep.  :)