Cuzco, Peru and Machu Picchu

After school got out, the first week of November, we began our adventures in Cuzco, Peru. When I say we, I mean my friend John Barger who I studied in Buenos Aires with, Gabriel (my boyfriend who I met through John) and Trey, John’s friend from El Paso, Texas. We decided to go to Cuzco 3 days before our planned hike on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in order to acclimate to the altitude and avoid getting altitude sickness. I found a great direct-flight ticket price on studentuniverse (if you’re a student, that site will have the cheapest flights) yet waited until I received my new passport from the U.S. embassy to buy my ticket and found out that Gabriel had actually bought the last ticket for that flight. So while John and Gabriel’s flight was 6 hours, mine was 16 hours with a 12 hour layover in Lima. (Lima is definitely a horrible airport to have a layover in. When I arrived at 9pm there was nowhere to sit or a place to even think about sleeping as the airport was packed, in addition, I couldn’t check my bags in until 3am. So I went exploring for a place to take a nap until 3 and discovered a quiet chapel where I fell asleep on a pew with my head bowed, until a women woke me up saying it’s disrespectful to put your feet on the pew. I felt a bit guilty after that so I really didn’t get much sleep.)

 

Cuzco was a really old and cool city. It’s basically a ton of houses in between these huge and gorgeous mountains. I kind of felt like I was in one of the Bourne Legacy movies as I could envision myself running away from someone on the roof tops of these old houses in some foreign country where I stick like out red wine on a white shirt because I tower over everybody and am blonde. We found some GREAT food in Peru for great prices, where the locals would go. We also were able to rent hiking boots, sleeping bags and rainpants for our trek; I definitely learned how to bargain.

Our Inca Trail Group

 

I really don’t think I can explain Machu Picchu or the Inca Trail in words. Machu Picchu was my top thing to see in South America and was something that I never thought I would have the opportunity to do. The Inca Trail that we took was a 4 day hike and each night we would camp in sleeping bags and tents that our small, barely 5 ft Inca porters would carry up the mountains wherever we went. Our group consisted of a 60-something year old Norwegian couple who are cross country skiers, a girl from Boston who had just graduated and had just finished doing volunteer work in Panama, 2 young guys from Mexico, a guy from France and a middle aged women from Quebec, Canada who couldn’t speak Spanish, had horrible English and whose French could not be understood by the guy from France because it was so different from France's French. (I must add that the cross-country skiing Norwegians would always arrive first to the campsite everyday). We found out that if you don’t speak spanish (or if you go to the English websites) and book the trail in a non-spanish speaking country, the price for the Inca trail will be a lot higher than if you spoke spanish and booked it with an agency in a spanish speaking country.

 

The hike was a lot more strenuous than I thought it would be (I think because of the altitude) and John even got altitude sickness for 2 of the days and was throwing up all day/night. There are LOTS of really huge steps along the entire Inca Trail, which are really hard on your body but the cool Inca sites and beautiful scenery of the mountains inspire you to keep on moving and pursue your final destination, Machu Picchu. (I forgot to add that Gabriel did not book his trail soon enough so he was not able to go up with us on the Inca Trail and instead did another trail, to different Inca sites, that was even more strenuous with way more mosquitoes and in which he also got food poisoning/had diarrhea/was throwing up the whole time.) Yet no matter what happened, nothing could stop any of us from having a great experience. (Actually, the entire time we were in Peru and Bolivia, all of us were on diarrhea and therefore on Imodium as well, probably from all that really good food we ate…or maybe just the water. Yet when we arrived back in Argentina, everything went back to normal; just a heads up for those of you thinking about travelling here.) Machu Picchu looked so unreal; I felt like I was looking at a 3D picture on Google Images and not at real life. After spending about 5 hours at Machu Picchu, we hiked down to Aguas Calientes were we caught the 5 hr train ride back to Cuzco and then got on an overnight bus at 10pm to Copacabana until, where we arrived at 10am the next day.