Last bit of Cusco

The last week in Cusco was fairly regular. More work and walking and seeing friends. I had a day off Monday and went with a fried to Andahuaylillas. The main plaza had a lot of really old, large and flowery trees that were reall pretty. The climate there is slightly warmer than the surrounding area so they can grow slightly more tropical fruits. Thursday I was going to borrow my friend Camilo's bike and bike around before work for a while, but he was out at the time I went by. He lives in San Blas so I decided to just keep walking up and see where it went. Turns out the Temple of the Moon (Laqo) is above San Blas. The big rock on the left is the temple.

Since I did not have much time to get back down before work, I didn't have time to explore the area or actually go to the temple. The next day I left in the morning and went with a Camilo to walk around more. There was a trail that seemed to go somewhere behind the temple that we started walking on. It had signs so we figured it was okay to walk. We walked quite a long time and got slightly lost. But it was so nice to spend some time alone with Camilo, normally there's a bunch of other people, well, at least his brother William. There wasn't a single tourist after we left the area of the temple. It seemed odd that the tourists don't wander from the main attraction, but it was nice for us. I arrived at work a half an hour late, but they didn't care. 

On Saturdays there is a giant second hand market that is in the street for many blocks. It's notorious for getting your stuff stolen at. Apparently they will throw confetti in the air so you get distracted and look up and that's when they grab stuff in your pockets. I didn't take my phone with me. They sell absolutely everything, even used beer bottles. I don't know how people make any money. There are some good items and good deals though. Every Sunday there is some form of parade in the main plaza. I never know what it's for...

More Cusco

Its not the best picture, but thats the field we play soccer on... some people have some good scrapes from falling on the concrete. We play every Thursday. I didnt really play last week because my lungs werent up for it. Im pretty much better now, so Ill try again tonight. (The apostraphe button doesnt work on this machine..)

Ive mainly been working or just walking around the city with friends everyday, so not much to report. Here are a bunch of pictures from it.

Yesterday I had most of the day off, so I decided to walk up, and up, and up... I went up to the Cristo Blanco (White Christ) which looks over the city. I ended up walking around up there a bit more and ended up at Saqsaywaman, some old ruins just above the city. Apparently you need a tourist ticket to go, so they stopped me and asked what I was doing there without a ticket. So back down I went. The route I took on the way up involved a lot of stairs.

The main Plaza de Armas where the church is.

A woman was weaving some textiles when I walked by. It was very intricate and then she tried to get me to pay her to take a picture of her with her llama. No gracias...

Part of Saqsaywaman, so many tourist buses...

This is in the market San Pedro (pictures not in focus, but oh well). This is the jugos (juice) section of the market. Every lady sells the same thing next to each other and they wave and yell at you to come to them. The juice is always amazing and fresh and cheap and large. You usually get at least 2 glasses full, even three depending on how much they make, for about 4 soles (about $1.25).

This is the entrance pathway down to the hostel rooms we stay in. The area has a bunch of local houses as well.

The band Amaru Pumac Kuntur. They are an Andean fusion band from Cusco that is very popular in the area. They are some of the finalists on Perus Got Talent. They are really fun to watch and have a lot of different instruments they switch during the songs. The second picture is them playing in our bar for the opening night. They are going to play here every Saturday night, and they also practice here during the day sometimes. The fire has something to do with a pachamama ritual they do at the beginning of each performance.

All of my coworkers on the night of Perus world cup qualifying match (they lost...) from left to right: Ismael, Jacob, Mathias, William, Camilo, Martin and Manon.

Sunday BBQ! William and Martin cooking some yummy stuff

Mi vida cusqueña

I've now been in Cusco for a little over a week. I feel like I haven't really done anything exciting because its normal day to day stuff that I would do back in Canada. Last week was lots of school in the mornings, home for a giant lunch and then volunteering at the cafe for the afternoon and seeing friends in the evening. Lunch always consists of a soup and then segunda. The soup almost always full of pasta or rice or some grain and its not a small portion. Then with segunda you get a giant pile of rice and generally potatoes and some meat. It's usually overly filling and you don't want dinner. This is typical all vet Peru. They seem to love their rice and potatoes here.

The school was useful and I think I can speak a little more Spanish, but it's still pretty rusty. There's a lot of German and Swiss students at the school right now. There is one guy from France who doesn't really speak English, so we try to communicate in broken French/English/Spanish because I don't remember enough French to properly pen sentences so it usually comes out half in French and half in Spanish with a few English words. It's pretty entertaining and takes a while to get a point across. 

One of the teachers at the school organizes football (soccer) on Thursdays, so a bunch of us went. There was a fair amount of people there that we had a bit more than 5 teams worth, there were a lot of locals too. The field is concrete and they play 6x6. I didn't play the rest couple games as I watched all the non-Peruvians gasping for air after 2 minutes of running. While we were watching some guys on the other court said they needed 2 more people to play 4x4, so an American guy and I went over, I was only girl. Everyone else on the other side was switching out and the teams changed every 10 min or so. But our side, since there were no subs and no one else came over, ended up playing almost straight the through or at least an hour and a half, with about a 5 minute break I took at one point. I have no idea how I managed to run for that long in the altitude. I thought my lungs might burst. I haven't really played soccer in a few years, so it was a lot of fun, especially being able to keep up with the locals, I think they were really surprised (well I was). Man, did my legs hurt the next day! I think I might have stressed my lungs, because now I have a pretty bad cough.

I started working a bit last week at Let's Go Banana's and all day starting yesterday. There's not a ton of people who come in here at the moment, but I hang out all day with William, Camilo and Martin, so it's fun. The street is super narrow and has a lot of cars rushing by. The sidewalks have just enough space for one person to walk. We're trying to figure out ways to get people into the cafe more. 

Seven years later, back in Cusco!

Somewhat last minute, I decided to head over to Cusco. Well the last minute part was deciding to go the direct route, leaving the day after I had decided to go. I spent part of the day last Thursday in Huaraz trying to figure out a way to get to Cusco from Huaraz without having to go through boring ol´Lima. It´s do-able to go through the mountains instead of heading back to the coast. The route would have been Huaraz - La Union - Huanuco - Huancayo - Ayacucho - Cusco. I calculated that in total the bus travel time would be 53 hours. I would have stopped for a night or two in each place along the way to break it up a bit, but in the end I decided it was a bit too much hassel. A fellow traveller is doing that route right now, so when he arrives in Cusco, I´ll ask how it went and maybe I´ll take that route if I ever head back up north.

The bus ride from Huaraz - Lima - Cusco was about 36 hours in total, with a layover in Lima. It really didn´t feel long at the time. I went with the bus company Flores again. The tourist bus is Cruz del Sur and they are super nice and super expensive (for Peru...). The nicer buses of Flores are basically the same as Cruz del Sur but much cheaper. I got a large comfy seat, was fed along the way and watched a bunch of movies dubbed in Spanish. The scenery along the way was quite nice, so it really wasn´t a boring trip. In total, it took us 21 hours. The distance is about 1000km, but the road goes all the way up the mountainside then all the way back down - it´s a very long and windy road. We´d go all the way up the above the clouds, then descend back through them. Stop in a city, then slowly watch it shrink as we went back up. There were usually large snowy mountains in the distance once we were farther away from the coast.

I arrived a bit earlier than I had thought, so I went straight to the Amauta Spanish school near the Plaza de Armas. I had arranged to do Spanish lessons for the week and stay with a host family. Some of the family members came to get me around 12:30 and off to their place we went. They live about a 50 minute walk from the school. At first I was a bit annoyed considering I have morning classes, but the walk is quite nice. It´s very easy to get the bus when I´m feeling lazy, though the buses here are always a bit of an adventure. I´m not totally sure how many people live at the house I´m staying or what the main lady does, she might be retired. They have been a host family for almost 15 years now. I already feel like my spanish is improving. The last 3 weeks I´ve mainly been hanging around English speakers, so it´s good to really immerse myself for the week. I started lessons this morning and a lot of the grammar is starting to come back too.

Yesterday I went to a cafe/restaurant/hostel for an ´interview´ called Let´s Go Bananas. I´m going to trade labour for food and accomodation. It´s a small place that mainly does vegetarian food, breakfasts and lunches. Starting next Monday I´ll be working there 8-4 most days of the week. The days I work I get free breakfast and lunch and accomodation every night. There is one other Canadian, a guy from France and a couple Peruvians. It should be a fun experience beacuse they are in somewhat of a transition mode, so I get to help them re-organize some stuff and help them get more people in the cafe, plus one of the cute Peruvian guys really intrigues me - he does breakdancing. They typically want people to stay for at least a month when they start, but they are desparate for some help at the moment, so I´m only committing to till the end of the month.

Cusco itself hasn't really changed that much. Well, the main square (Plaza de Armas) has. It used to be more geared to the backpacker with a few more posh places, whereas now it's almost all upscale stores and American chains, like McDonalds and Starbucks. I went into the Starbucks this morning because I wanted a quick coffee to go. Inside the place I thought it seemed really familiar and I realized that it used to be a fun bar that travellers went to. It's probably the nicest Starbucks I've ever been to. I won't be going back there though, time to cut out coffee again. The rest of the city seems to be a bit cleaner and more touristy than before. It's just as busy and slightly more expensive than the rest of the country. A lot of stores and restaurants are still open, so it's easy to navigate around.

Laguna Churup day hike

On Friday, we decided to tackle the hike up to Laguna Churup. We were told it was harder than Laguna 69 so we left earlier, out the door at 6 am. It is closer to Huaraz than Laguna 69, so we figured we had lots of time to get to the top. We went without a tour again, which is super easy with this day hike. We got breakfast in the street on the way, as well as some sandwiches to take with us. They sell this amazing hot quinoa beverage type thing in the mornings all over Peru, it's boiled down with fruit and spices and is a bit thick - it's better than I just described... We found the collectivo to take us up the mountain, there weren't enough people that wanted to go all the way to where we want so we just paid the difference. We got dropped off on te side of the road in the middle of no where and were told to start walking up the mountain until we see a big rock then turn right. We started walking and were a little weary about trusting these directions since there didnt seem to be a path or anything. Onwards we went. The view was spectacular so it didn't really matter if we were Imthe right spot. It was fairly steep and pretty hard to do at 7 in the morning. Around 8 we stopped to have more breakfast (apple pie we brought) and enjoy the warm sunshine and try to figure out which way to go. We manged to find the path after a bit. The guy dropped is off before the real entrance so we sent hve to pay the park fee of 5 soles and this also meant we skipped a long part of the path, so it worked out well. 

Once we found the actual path we thought it looked ridiculously steep and rocky, so we decided to stick to the route we were on, over the grassier, less inclined side of the mountain. It was still fairly difficult and we wondered if we made the right choice. I think it was gone, more steep than it looked, but manageable. I was more used to the altitude and I brought a large thing of coca tea. In the pictur below, where we need to get to was the snowy peak in the back. 

Finally we found the path again and then saw other people! So we knew we were going the right way. The others had also been dropped off where we had. We stopped for another break at the bottom of a small waterfall. The next part of the hike was up a cliff face that had cables to help us up and down. The seemed a little daunting at first but they were fairly easy to manage. Once we got up all the cables there was only about 5 minutes more of walking. The top was really beautiful. The water was super clear and dark blue, there were zero clouds almost all day and the wind was never bad. Hannah even went for a swim in the water. Overall it was a lovely walk that really wasn't too difficult. I'd say Laguna 69 was definitely harder and much longer. Getting back to Huaraz was really easy too, there were lots of collectivism waiting for all the people who went up. 

View up from the bottom: