Cuzco - a combination of the architecture of the ancient Incas and the Spanish conquerors. It was only here that the Spaniards and their conquering methods started to get on my nerves.
A gorgeous city, which struck me as prettier than Prague or Paris.
We got to Cuzco an hour early, i.e. at 4:05 in the morning. I had only one thought, jump into a taxi and drive to the hotel recommended in the LP. But Patrik was testing our patience again and meticulously examining which hotel was the best deal, where it was on the map and god knows what else. Sometimes these analytical brains are enough to make you kill someone :) .
In the end the taxi driver took us to the hotel I had picked out ages ago and even at night Cusco was amazing. The hotel was on a hill above the main square, with a beautiful view. They even let me in, but they had no room :(. We tried two more, and finally we settled right on the beautiful Plazza del Armans square in a hotel for a surprisingly high $55 a night. Still, we're on the most photographed square in South America, there's WI-FI and breakfast in it and above all, off to bed. After the strong coca tea I couldn't sleep at all on the bus and I listened to Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy on my phone until three. So I passed out and didn't wake up until eleven. I had to go to a pub for breakfast, at the hotel it's only until ten.
Breakfast in a little pub round the corner, on the first floor by the window with a view of the square, the cathedral and the hill opposite. A decision ripened in me to steer clear of democracy today (i.e. the state where the three of us always have to agree in advance whether we go here or there, whether a taxi for 35 crowns is too expensive, whether we haven't been sitting on the bench too long and so on.) So I decided to spend the day completely on my own. We meet quite a lot of travellers here who spend months on the road alone, so I'll give it a try. Cusco is ABSOLUTELY gorgeous and it totally bowled me over. All day long I walked the route recommended by the LP, fascinated, and soaked up the life. I spent more than an hour in the market hall, then the narrow lanes of the old town, the climb up above the city to Sacsavaymán, all of it breathtakingly beautiful. For lunch I just bought a sandwich and sat for half an hour on the lovely little square of Carmen Bajo.
I was so thrilled by Cusco that I took about 400 photos. Sacsayvmann are the ruins of a huge Inca complex on the hill above the city, with an interesting building style. The stone walls are built from dressed, though irregular stones about 1 – 2m in size. The wall is merely stacked together from them, but you CANNOT slip a credit card into the gap between the stones! (not that I'd expect some old Inca to have built a card terminal in between the stones! I just mean that the stones fit together perfectly...) After I got back from the sightseeing I just loafed around at the computer and had dinner in the same little pub with a view of the square.
We did want to set off early in the morning, but it went a bit off the rails and we didn't leave until half past nine.
We caught a taxi on the square and for about 4 soles (28 crowns) it again threw us across half the city to the bus stop. It's about time I described how transport works here. Definitely 90% of all the cars in every city are taxis. About half of them are miniature little vehicles of the IZA brand, of unknown provenance. The rest are small Toyotas, sold in the USA as the Tercel, and because they're statistically rated there as the most reliable car in this class, I once bought one for Hana. Here the Peruvian lads have taken it much further, the cars easily have a million on the clock, thanks to the state of the roads they practically have no shock absorbers left, the steering and axles transmit such vibrations into the steering wheel that the drivers look like an extreme case of Parkinson's, but they keep on driving.
As for the driving style, as everywhere in warm countries it's a shambles. Three cars in one lane, right of way belongs to whoever is cheekier, but mainly they invade what I'd describe as personal space. So they're happy to drive bumper to bumper with a gap of 5 – 10 cm, but they're glued just as close side by side, and they'll even pull up that close to a pedestrian's legs. Another interesting phenomenon is the horn. At first I thought they honked completely pointlessly and nonstop. Then I figured out there's a system to it. They simply honk whenever we would slow down. Before a junction, when they see a pedestrian, when a car is coming the other way and so on.
So the taxi driver was supposed to drive us to the bus station in this style, but instead he took us to a taxi colectivo stop. In the end it didn't matter, because those 50 km cost 4 soles by taxi colectivo and 2 soles by bus. A taxi colectivo works like this: a van is parked in a designated spot, in front of it a guy calling out the destination, and you wait until the van is full to the last seat. And then for a few pennies off you go.
So we got to the town of Pisac, which lies down by the river, surrounded on all sides by the majestic peaks of the Andean hills. All the hills around were reshaped by the ancient Incas into terraced formations and in many places in this area the original settlements have survived. From the town we had one extra rattly Tercel drive us up to a hill high above the town, we paid 70 soles for a combined ticket to lots of monuments and spent the whole day walking from one Inca settlement to another. They're amazingly extensive structures, hundreds of terraces formed by stone walls and above it all sprawling stone settlements. All the walls again put together so absolutely perfectly that even after a thousand years you can't stick a credit card into the gap!
Since we spent the whole day moving between 3500 – 2500 m above sea level, we saw most of the settlements first from a great height, which is great for taking photos. A bit like first looking at Prague Castle from a plane and only then going for a walk around it.
In the afternoon we walked back down to Pisac and had a late lunch. The fact that I held out until three without lunch was only possible thanks to the miraculous effects of coca. We bought a bag of fresh leaves (1 sol) and chewed them experimentally. It works differently on everyone, I couldn't sleep from the tea and lost my appetite, while Patrik just got hot.
We didn't know how much of the leaves we should chew, so we tried just a few. The first sensation is disgusting, but then it gets better. All we achieved was that my tongue went slightly numb. And I wasn't hungry. Supposedly the effects of coca are multiplied if you chew calcium along with the leaves, which allows the alkaloids to be released better. The locals have a thousand years of experience with chewing coca and its uses are very wide. In the coca museum they described coca as a disinfectant, a local anaesthetic, a remedy for digestion, a performance booster, a cure for altitude sickness, an improvement of breathing and heart function, an antidepressant etc. I liked the quote from one Spanish priest whom the Vatican reproached for chewing coca with the locals. He wrote this: „God never does anything in vain, and when he sent coca to these regions, he surely did it so that the locals would make use of all its positive effects“.
After lunch we jumped on a bus (again we waited about 3 minutes) and zoomed back to Cusco. According to the information from the Czech travel agency that sold us the tickets for the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, we were supposed to have a briefing at five. Somehow they forgot to pass it on from the Czech Republic to Peru, so they rebooked us for six. So we still managed to run up above the city and take a few interesting shots of the centre in the setting sun from a tripod by the church on the hill. Cusco really is a gorgeous place surrounded on all sides by the Andes. The centre is at about 2700 m above sea level and the hills around reach up to 5 km.
Since a 4-day climb over Andean peaks awaits us, where we'll be going as high as 4200 m above sea level, it was damn important to pack as little as possible, but at the same time not to leave out anything important. We left the rest of our stuff stored at the hotel.
