We got a Cruz del Sur night bus from Lima to Cusco that was scheduled to take 21 hours. We were armed with books, charged ipods and snacks and we had booked the luxury cama (aka bed, reclining) seats. However it was still quite a long bus journey along some very winding mountainous roads. We had a crazy bus driver that insisted on overtaking any other buses and trucks that were in our way, which resulted in a couple of near misses with on coming traffic. We literally had front row seats on the action (front of the bus), and in the end we elected to shut the curtains and try to get some shut eye, sometimes its better not to know.
The following morning when daylight broke we were rewarded with some beautiful mountain views on the way in to Cusco. The steep cliffs are covered in a golden coloured tussock (which reminded me of New Zealand), and looks beautiful in the sunlight. We were almost home and dry when the bus driver pulled over for an unscheduled stop. Apparently the bus tyre needed changing, which unfortunately changed the 21 hour journey in to a 24 hour journey (painful).
In the end we arrived at Cusco bus station and managed to get a taxi just outside to take us in to town. We later realised that the taxi driver ripped us off (gringos) as it is the most expensive taxi we took the whole time we were in Cusco. My first impressions of Cusco were that its an enormous, sprawling city. For some reason I had expected a small mountain village, more along the lines of a ski resort. In reality its a pretty large city, although still quite picturesque as it nestles in a valley surrounded by the pretty golden mountain slopes. The scenery had also started to look a bit more Machu Picchu-esque and we were starting to get excited /nervous at the prospect of the trek. If I won;t sound too racist, then the people in Cusco also look more Native Indian / Peruvian to me, than they did in Lima, and its quite cool to start to see people that look a little different on our trip.
Cusco itself is a maze of narrow one way, pebbled roads with very small pavements (like 2 feet wide) on either side of the pebbled roads. There are also a number of independent taxi drivers on the roads which leads to an interesting phenomenon. Basically the taxi drivers go motoring up the narrow one way roads and the pedestrians are forced to jump out of the way on to the narrow pavements on the sides (there is not enough room for you to pass someone coming down the other way). Cusco is also the first place that I have ever been to where the taxi drivers actually solicit business! We were sitting on the steps on the Plaza de Armas, and taxi drivers would actually stop next to us on the road and hoot to ask if we wanted a ride (I mean were weren’t even standing up! Lol).
We didn’t do a whole lot for the first few days in Cusco, other than strolling around to see the Plaza de Armas (central square), going to see a couple of churches and the Pre Colombian museum. Re the churches, the woodwork/carving of the altars in these churches is really ornate/ stunning and all covered in gold leaf. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let us take any photos inside the churches. We did get a guided tour around one of the churches and it was really interesting to see how the local artists incorporated local aspects in to their old religious oil paintings. For example the angels pictured had large macaw coloured wings, and the roman soldiers had Spanish soldiers helmuts (red feathers). We also got to see the famous painting of the last supper with the guinea pig being served up for dinner. Very cool to see how the paintings were influenced by the local painters, while essentially the same biblical stories are told, just with a bit of added local flair.
I should probably mention at this point that I did have a mild case of altitude sickness, which showed itself as a constant low level headache (rather annoying) and a complete loss of appetite - great diet! Not to mention the breathlessness and dizzy feeling when climbing up a few stairs. Our hostel Samy Wasi was in the San Blas area, which basically required us to climb a whole load of stairs each time we went down to the central Plaza de Armas area. Steve seemed to be less affected by the altitude than me, or perhaps he’s just less of a whinger! I was also still suffering from the travellers diarrhoea that I picked up towards the end of our Amazon trip, so I wasn’t exactly in tip top shape, but I was certain that all would be well in a couple of days. We had been told / read that it would only take about 2 nights to get over the altitude sickness. We had given ourselves 5 nights before we were due to set off on the Inca Trail on the Saturday morning. The hostel we were staying at was giving us free coca tea every morning with breakfast, although to be honest I cant say that I noticed much difference and my headache still persisted for days. What can I say, my body needs oxygen!
The following day we did a spot of shopping in preparation for the Inca Trail, and we found three outdoor shops around the Plaza de Armas, and managed to get some better trekking pants (trousers) and walking socks. We also booked ourselves in for a tour of the Sacred Valley the following day. There are scores of tour agencies dotted around the Plaza de Armas and they are all begging to give you information about their tours, so it wasn’t difficult to find a tour company and Steve managed to negotiate the price down a bit on an English guided tour bus. I cant talk about the Plaza de Armas in Cusco without mentioning the number of woman trying to sell you a massage. You literally cannot walk around the square without 6 different woman offering you their services. Massage is clearly big business in Cusco, for all the people coming back off their long treks with their aching muscles. However when you havent started walking yet, then all the people trying to sell you paintings/jewellery/Peruvian dollies/photos with a llama and massages are really just a bit of an annoyance. Oddly if Steve and I are walking along together and a woman asked him if he wanted a massage and he said No, then they would turn to me and ask me if I wanted a massage as well. Relentless! Now it was around this point on Wednesday that I started to get some serious stomach cramps, that were making it difficult to walk around town.
However on the Thursday morning we had an early start to meet the tourbus at 08h30 and headed off to see the Sacred Valley. The tour bus stopped at Pisac first were we had a walk around a big outdoor market, and bought a couple of souvenirs to send back home, and then Ollytaytambo, which was more impressive. Here we got our first real sighting of the famous Inka farrming terraces. Then one last stop in Chinchero where we visited some locals that gave us a demonstration on their hand weaving techniques, and went to see some more Inka terraces and an old church, before we headed back on the bus to Cusco. By the time we got back in to town it was around 7pm on the Thursday night, and with the stomach cramps having bothered me all day, I started to tally up how many days I’d actually had the diarrhoea. I was on the second box of Immodium, which probably should have set off some alarm bells. However with the combination of altitude sickness I wasn’t really sure which symptoms to associate with what problem! I managed to work out that I was on day 7, which seemed an unusually long time to have diarrhoea. So when we got back to the hostel, we asked them about finding a doctor in the area. I thought I could just pop by the doctors on the Friday morning and pickup a prescription for some antibiotics that would help to clear up the problem.
So on the Thursday night around 8pm, the guy at the hostel rather helpfully gave us a brochure for a local 24 hour clinic, and offered to call them on my behalf. He said they call out fee would be the same whether the doctor came out that night, or in the morning. So about 20 mins later I had an English speaking doctor in our hostel room, feeling around my stomach and asking me questions. At which point he said that he would like to take me in to the clinic for some tests, and asked us to go back with him in the ambulance. He said he would have the results within 45 minutes (Result!), so off we went with the lights flashing! They checked me in to the clinic and took some blood and a sample. Now I should mention that I am Not at all fond of needles and giving them blood was already a big ask for me. About 30 minutes later the doctor is back with a printout of my results and breaks the news that I have raging salmonella (a count of 320 for you doctors reading this, which he told us is as high as it can get). We informed him that we were set to start the Inca Trail in just over 24 hours, and he recommended that with the high count that I had, and the limited time we had left, that I should stay in overnight and take the antibiotics through an IV. Now again I refer you to my earlier statement that I really do Not like needles, and I had certainly never had to endure an IV before, which ranks up there with my worst nightmare scenarios, somewhere between being covered with tarantulas and going down in a plane crash.
However with the Inka Trail hanging in the balance I acquiesced and said that I would stay in overnight, rather than getting a prescription for the antibiotic pills. Steve had to head back to the hostel and get me my Pjs and toothbrush, bless him. At least I had cable TV to keep me company while he was away. The doctor implied that an overnight stay on the IV would pretty much sort me out, and we would still be able to do the Inca Trail, and that I would probably be able to check out just after breakfast on the Friday morning. So the nurse put the IV in my arm (I gritted my teeth and looked the other way again), and I settled down watching CSI while the antibiotics dripped away.
After a restless night with the IV in my arm, and breakfast the following morning, Steve came back to check on me at 9am. Shortly after which another doctor arrived with some more bad news, apparently the tests revealed that I actually had an amoeba parasite as well - well excellent I thought - best to get it all out the way at once! I am certainly getting the full South American experience here! However this meant that I would have to stay in the clinic until lunch time, and then take four big pills to knock the parasite out. It was around this time that the needle in my arm really starting bothering me, and I asked the doctor if they could take it out, but he said there were more antibiotics yet to come.
So the nurse hooks me up to the IV again and I idle the time away, whilst in the meantime Steve goes to meet the Inca Trail group for the pre trail talk. At this point I was still confident that I would be able to check out after lunch, and do the Inka Trail the following morning. The doctors assured me that the antibiotics would start to work pretty quickly and I would start to feel better already the following day. Unfortunately the IV stopped working and the nurse came in and said that she would have to change it to another IV, and this was the final straw for me - 3 needles - I didn’t sign up for that!? In the end she didn’t have to change the IV so I was very thankful for that.
Lunch came and went and I took the pills, however unfortunately the doctors shift had changed at the clinic. Now the new doctor that had just started wanted to observe me some more, and said I should be able to check out around 6pm. However 6pm came and went, and she returned to say that I would have to wait for the morning doctor to come back on shift to release me at 9pm. Also although I hadn’t had anymore antibiotics since before lunch time, she wouldn’t let them take the IV out of my arm - not my favourite person I can tell you. We were starting to realise that it’s a lot easier to get yourself checked in to a clinic than it is to get yourself checked back out again. With all the moving goal posts I was started to feel like an extra in One Who Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest! It also started to dawn on me that checking out of the clinic at 9pm, would mean getting back to the hostel around 10pm, which did not leave a lot of time to shower, and pack a bag for the Inca Trail the next morning. The tour company was all scheduled to collect us at 6am!
Anyway without much further incident we eventually got out of that clinic around 10pm, by the time we’d paid the travel insurance excess etc, and it was really late by the time we actually got into bed. However I was still keen to give the Inka Trail my best shot, and we set the alarm clock for 5h30, all the while thinking that the doctor had assured me I would feel much better in the morning.
So at 05h30 the alarm goes off and we get up, only instead of feeling better, within about 10 seconds of being vertical was overwhelmed by nausea and rushed in to the bathroom to be sick.
Whilst clinging on to the big white telephone around 05h45 on Saturday morning, the penny finally dropped that I was kidding myself, and I had to let my Inka Trail dreams fall by the wayside. It was a bitter pill to swallow after all the pre trek build up and the carry on with the clinic the day before, and I was in tears. I broke the news to Steve who took it very well, and it was then that the tour guide arrived to collect us, so Steve went and broke the news to him as well. Steve, despite my protests, rather gallantly gave up his own Inca Trail dream and decided to stay behind too and look after me. Frankly Im very glad that he did as I spent the whole day in bed exhausted, and someone needed to make arrangements with the hostel and fetch and carry my food from Jacks café, not to mention administering the raft of drugs from the clinic!
So after a day and half in bed, I started to feel a bit better and we ventured out around Cusco again. The tour company were actually very good and they then arranged for us to take the train over to Aguas Caliente on the Monday, so that we could meet the tour group at Machu Picchu and still have the guided tour of the site.
So on the Monday morning we got a taxi transfer to Ollantaytambo, and then got the Peru Rail train to Aguas Calientes. Aguas Calientes is the nearest station to Machu Pichu and really is an odd little place, that consists entirely of hostels and restaurants and is built around the railway line. It exists solely to ferry tourists to and from Machu Picchu. We’d decided to stay the night in Aguas Calientes the day before visiting Machu Picchu, so that we could get there first thing in the morning when the site opens. As it was we ended up getting up at 04h00 and getting in to the queue at the bus station at 04h30. There were already about 70 people in the queue in front of us. We wanted to get the first bus at 05h30 to the site, which opens at 06h00, so that we could get the Wayna Picchu stamps on our entry tickets. Only400 people are allowed to climb Wayna Picchu every day, so we didn’t want to be late and miss it.
As it turned out, we managed to get on the third bus up to the site, and got the stamp without a problem. Then we had some time between 06h00 and 08h00 to look around Machu Picchu before meeting up with the tour guide. After queing up to get through the gates, we had a short walk uphill before we got our first sight of Machu Picchu and it really is something to behold at 06h15 in the morning, when the mist/clouds are just starting to clear. We were really lucky with the weather that day, and we managed to get some great pics. The benefit of getting there early is that we managed to march around the site and get some pics before the crowds arrived, which makes it a bit more difficult. We then managed to get back to the entrance gate for 08h00 and got to meet the 4 other people that would have been on our trek, who were very friendly, and didn’t look as tired as I had expected them to.
Then the guide walked us around Machu Picchu for around 3 hours pointing out allsorts of interesting things, and I can tell you that those Inkas are an amazing bunch. I was surprised at how much planning had clearly gone in to the creation of the site, and how much work had clearly gone in to turning that mountain in to such a beautiful place. Everything from water fountains, to sacrificial rocks, to toilets, to terraced farming and gardens, to sculptures of nearby mountains, and guinea pig hutches, showed us just how intricately planned out the site had been.
After the informative tour we said goodbye to the group again and headed for the entrance of Wayna Picchu. It took us about 2.5 hours to do the round trip back to Machu Picchu and it was a steep climb, but the views of Machu Picchu were well worth it from the top.
After that we were pretty knackered and lay around on the grassy terraces for a time recuperating. Then we didn’t have much time left to walk around the site, before we had to get the bus down to Aguas Calientes and get the Peru Rail train back to Peroy (for Cusco).
That was an interesting train journey. I didn’t realise it was going to be 4 hours long (as we got the train out from Ollantaytambo instead), and we had a Chinese woman and her young daughter sitting opposite us, staring at us for most of the way. The train also rocked quite hectically from side to side, so it was a relief when we finally arrived at Peroy and got the taxi back to the hostel. All in all an awesome day, but pretty tiring as we were on the go from 04h00 to 22h00.
We have one days rest in Cusco to head back to the clinic for a check up, and book the onward journey, and then we are off to Puno to see the floating islands. The plan is then to head on to Copacabana and La Paz before making our way down to Uyuni to see the salt flats (goodbye Peru, hello Bolivia).
Well we have been away just over 2 months now, and there’s been a lot happening in the world since we left. Congrats to Cyril and Wendy, Christo and Anina and Jacqui and Leo on their new bundles of joy, and congrats to Matthew and Emma on their engagement!
Hope alls well with everyone at home.
Love Kirst x
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