Quick Cuzco update!

We are finishing up our third day in Cuzco! It is a beautiful town which has a definite European feel, although as Sean says, "the demographics are a bit off." :) It feels like a slightly run-down small town in Spain, with tons of colonial architecture and, of course, INCAN architecture as well! One picture I posted here is of a random wall in Cuzco. In the middle is a patch of original Incan masonry. It´s very obvious and incredible. Remains of their structures are all over the place here. You can´t walk a few feet without seeing some Incan stonework.


We plan to do a big update in a day or two, but this is just a quick note to say how our past three days have gone. We arrived after the Purgatory Bus Ride, so took it easy that day, resting a ton and getting used to the thin air here. You feel winded just sitting down at first. It´s weird. So...... on our second (technically our first full) day here we did the following: had a big breakfast at some swanky café, went to a religious art museum, then to Qorikancha (important Inca palace), did a tour of the cathedral, had lunch in another café on the main plaza, went to an Andean dance performance (walked all over trying to find the theater - the first one we tried to find didn´t exist), and then went out for a few drinks afterwards. And all of this was on foot! Needless to say, we both fell prey to altitude sickness during the night!!! Sean´s hit first, and then mine. Headaches, stomachaches, nausea, etc. We didn´t do anything today until 1pm. NICE. Reading our tourbooks today, we saw that all the books recommend taking at least two days to adjust, resting, not walking a lot, eating light meals, drinking plenty of water, abstaining from alcohol, etc. So we did a real bang-up job on that.

Anyway, we feel better now and had a mellow day going to a Pre-Colombian art museum, eating some traditional Cuzqueñan food for dinner, and planning our next few days in the Sacred Valley (the valley outside of Cuzco).

Tomorrow we will be hiking to the Inca site Sachsayhuaman and surrounding ruins, some of the hike taking us through farmland and small towns. The day after we´re leaving Cuzco to trek further into the Sacred Valley to Urubamba, a town that will serve as our jumping-off point to Moray and Salinas, two towns in the middle of nowhere with some amazing Incan constructions. The next day is Ollantaytambo with... Incan ruins, and a quaint old town. Then comes the big one - MACHU PICCHU!!!! After that comes the transfer to Argentina.

More updates in the coming days. Hope everyone is doing OK!

-- Chris