cuzco - land of many stairs

ok we are back from an absolutely mind-blowing, incredible last several days! i will get to our hike and machu picchu in later posts since i never got the cuzco posts up. so time to rewind about a week...

cuzco, we loved you!!! this city is just as we expected and the exact type of place we love. a place with a lot of charm and just enough grit. our hotel was amazing and our main window opened up to quite a view of a large portion of the city! burnt-orange tiled roofed homes stack into the hillsides as far as the eye can see.

not a bad view

orange!

messages in the hillsides

walking around on cobbled streets there is no way you cannot encounter the dreaded staircases. i'm not talking a few stairs, i am talking entire blocks of stairs straight up the hillsides. ughhh...a simple one minute walk can leave you winded and entirely out of breath. we really felt the altitude issues here and the stairs were no help. we relied heavily on coca tea to combat the numbing headaches and just took the stairs in stride as they were a good warm up for our hike to come.

not so easy in high altitude

coca tea gets me movin'

no.more.stairs.

cool perro

getting here was a total bust. we caught a 'superior' overnight bus at 8:00 p.m. for the 11 hour journey from arequipa...what a sham! the bus was so damn cold our throats were burning and we had to pile on the clothing. we asked for an extra blanket and was told "no" and then they cranked the heat up so much almost to punish me for saying i was cold. we then had to strip down to nearly nothing and were sweating like pigs. strike numero uno. we were on the bottom floor of the two story bus and it had this red lcd screen monitoring the speed the driver was going and for some reason this this mo-fo beeped every 1-4 minutes. all.night.long. it was the bane of my existence and i think it nearly drove me mad at one point. we must have heard over 1000 beeps!!! we asked to turn the beeping off and again was told "no". strike numero dos. at some points we were driving on dirt roads and dust  filled the interior so bad we had coughing fits and had to breathe through our shirts. strike numero tres... but there is more! the bus driver drove like a maniac and i was losing my stomach on every sharp turn and envisioning us going over a cliff thelma and louise style, only this was a bus full of snoring peruvians that somehow could sleep through all of this! neither of us slept more than an hour or so and arrived to cuzco crabby as hell at 6:30 a.m.

peruvian taxi

enough negativity, cause cuzco is the jam! you can get lost for hours wandering the streets. again, like all peruvian cities we have visited, there is a main square with a park, churches and fountains. additionally, cuzco throws in all those little peruvian ladies that i love! it is extremely touristy but these ladies know that tourists like me are suckers for a good photo opportunity, so they scatter around the main squares wearing traditional garb holding little lambs and at times, have a llama or two for you to take pictures with or of. if jimmy would let me i would pose with them everytime but honestly these ladies can get a bit mean if you don't pay them enough soles (peruvian currency) for their pic! we both got our pic in the main square with 2 ladies and their little lamb and gave them a few soles each, which was all the small change we had anyways and they basically talked shit to us and im pretty sure called us cheap a-holes. it was the equivalent of around 2 bucks so im not sure what they expected to make, to me that was decent for two freaking pics. lesson learned. maybe...

i forced jimmy to do this

local ladies

tourist sweater pose on incan wall...notice how well the blocks fit together???

chicken and potato skewers street food style

familiar sight unfortunately

plaza de armas

another view de cuzco

for dinner we stopped into a tiny pizzeria showing the peru soccer game on tv. the team stinks and the locals were not amused by their play either. at halftime a pretty cool local band called pacha mama played several songs and i bought their cd they since they were pretty good. hopefully it wasn't the beer talking and their live music will translate well onto a cd when i get home...our first day was rounded off wandering the quiet back streets, stopping in for the occasional cusqueña beer and even hit up a few clubs where oddly enough mamba lessons were always going on. me and my two left feet just watched though. i know if i even attempted it, jimmy would take horrible blackmail pics of me.

super grande inka cola

backstreet