ANYWAY, it looks like I left off at Cusco, so that means I get to talk about Machu Picchu. BUT first I have to go over what we did beforehand!! Well, after an amazing breakfast at the kickass hotel in Cusco (Marc Hess, I tagged you in a picture of their omelets), we got on this bus where we met Alan, our own personal Peruvian tour guide! He was super funny and nice and spoke English and Quechua, which was cool because he would translate all of the words in Spanish we didn't understand when he was giving us our tour. Or, in the case of our first stop, the ancient Inca Skycity of Sacsayhuaman, what they sounded like in English equivalents ("Sexy woman"). Sacsayhuaman was really cool, it's a complex above Cusco that used to be used for sacred festivals dealing with the sky/"puma". It was absolutely insane to see the size of the stones used for this place... they were more than 300 tons!! And brought from the ocean, 14,000ft lower and hundreds of miles away!! Add that to the fact that every one was specifically cut, dragged up by hand, placed without any type of binding/mortar, and done WITHOUT slavery, it's crazy to think that something of that magnitude was possible!!
After that, Alan had a "surprise" for us: llamas. LLAMAS!!!! It was this random little NGO on the side of the road that let us go and pet/feed all their llamas for free, in the hopes that we would buy some of their ridiculously-overpriced alpaca products. I must say though, watching those Andean women there weaving blankets... I have a WHOLE new respect for how cheap they usually sell the stuff to get by. I mean, I was considering purchasing a hand-made Andean tablecloth in Cusco for 50 soles -- which is like $20 -- but after talking to the weaver I found out one of those would take about a month and a half to make. A month and a half for $20!! Talk about being underpaid....
After that, we drove through the Andes for a while, until we reached the historic (but still occupied) Inca town of Pisac, right in the Sacred Valley. In a word? AWESOME. It was everything I imagined one of those towns would be: small, cobblestone streets, little niches and markets everywhere, whole-in-the-wall establishments with specific items to buy... SO COOL. It was even cooler due to the fact that right above the town was the ancient terraces of Pisac, which were (and still are to an extent) used by the Inca for agriculture. It was really impressive to see how these people legitimately just cut up the mountain to suit their own purposes, and the fact that it seems so simple, yet is such a powerful and effective technology.
After that, we went to Ollantaytambo, the Inca city at the end of the Sacred Valley and the place where the Inca made their last stand against the Spanish during the conquest. We were running late on time, so we weren't able to climb the terraces and see the rest of the city. Still, it was crazy to think, looking up at the terraces from the ground, just how insanely terrifying it must have been to have thousands of pissed-off Inca shooting arrows at you from hundreds of feet vantage point without being able to do anything... Add that to the fact that by this time, the Inca had stolen a bunch of Spanish technology (horses, guns, etc), so their advantage was kind of gone. Yikes.
After Ollantaytambo, we hurried back to the bus, preparing to go straight to the train station for Machu Picchu, but this little Quechua boy asked if it was ok if he could join our bus ride and sing to us all the way to the station. Of course we said YES, and he was sooo adorable... It was just kind of sad to think that the +/-50 soles he made from us in tips probably went straight back to his family to be able to buy food for a week.
And then we were off for Machu Picchu!
So how was it, you ask me: Was it as awesome, breathtaking, and just generally worthy of the "World Wonder" status? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum.... FREAKING YES. So we get into the town of Aguascalientes (which means "hot springs" for you Spanish-people) after the awfully-long and hot train ride, into this kind-of-sketchy hotel in the DOWNPOUR rain. We're all soaked, but hungry, so we went to one of the only open restaurants in the whole town for some overly-priced, average food. Alan then told us we had a choice: we could either meet him at the bus station at 8am to ride up to Machu Picchu for his tour; or, if we were REALLY hardcore, we could wake up at 3:30am and stand in line at the bus stop for 2 hours in the freezing cold in order to be one of the only 200 people to get a ticket to hike Huayna Picchu, the "little peak" that you all see in the classic pictures of Machu Picchu behind the city that offers a slightly-better view of the ruins. Naturally, I slept, because I'm not a freaking idiot. Plus I had kind of a head cold, and my asthma was a little haywire. But yes, Machu Picchu was EVERYTHING they say it is... there really are no words for the way you feel when you go there. Alan said it has something to do with the granite they used to construct it before abandoning it (yes, for all of you who don't know, Machu Picchu is an unfinished skycity); apparently, granite has the ability to capture and store electrical energy that is in the air, so when you touch the walls of a building in Machu Picchu, or just walk through the narrow streets, there is legitimately energy all around you. Plus, you just feel so amazing being there... you take a bus up this long, winding path, and you kind of know what to expect, but there is nothing, nothing, like that feeling of when you first see it, when the clouds part and there's this whole amazing complex laid out before you, with a 360-degree view of the Andes on all sides that legitimately kiss the sky... Ugh, SOOOOO AMAZING.
Well, after that, the rest of the trip was spent pretty much traveling, so not much else to report... Sam, Sean, Jonathan and I DID get to visit the highest Irish pup in the world (that one's for you too, Marc Hess... AND it's called Paddy's Irish Pub!! Doesn't get much better than that), and then I got to eat alpaca, which was delicious, but other than that nothing else as epic as Machu Picchu really happened. Flying back from beautiful, sunny Cusco into the grayness of Lima was extremely depressing though--not because I hate the city, just the weather.
Since then, I've had some other small adventures, like getting lost by myself in sketchy Surco at 10pm at night because the cobrador was a racist bitch and having to find my way to a party thanks to the help of a nice old man... hahaha, I sooo love the Peruvian elderly. I visited the coolest house I've ever seen, including a personal wrap-around library, open-air dining room, and bird sanctuary. I KNOW. AND I played the spring break picture game there... I can't remember what's it's called, but it was a really cool cross-cultural thing. What else... I FINALLY got to talk to my best friend on Skype after like 324457394 days, it was just as entertaining as I thought it would be hahaha. Especially considering the time difference means that one of us is partying/drunk/generally incapacitated while the other is well-within sober-range... It makes for some interesting conversations lmfao.
(*insert drunk screencapture here*)
The big news of this week is: I'M GOING TO THE RAINFOREST IN LESS THAN 2 DAYS!!! AAAAAAAAAAH!!! So Mama is part of this club here, like an Elks Club type of thing, and they put together this discounted 9-day expedition to the rainforest to go see all of these cool sites. Naturally, being her "daughter", she invited me to go, and she said one of my friends can go too, so: Enter Sam!! Hahaha. I'm super excited, I looked at the itinerary and there is some awesome stuff on there: horseback riding, pre-Inca fortresses, caving, and ancient mummies and burial sites are just some of the wonders I'm going to experience. Not to mention the bus ride up there is apparently beautiful, since we have to cover most of the country to get to northern Peru, where Chachapoyas (the capital of the Amazon region!) is located, and which will be our homebase. I think I'm even more excited about this trip than I was about Machu Picchu... although doing the schoolwork to make up for the week I'm going to miss is really a pain in the ass.
Until then, it's TENNIS TIME with Mama! Chau everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment