Return to the navel

Back to Cusco and it's still as good looking as ever. We spend a couple of days finishing off seeing the local sights. To see the Inca ruins on the outskirts of town you have to buy a boletto touristico, a tourist ticket. This ticket also includes loads of museums within Cusco itself so we thought we'd make use of it and have a nosey around, after eating more cracking food of course.
We visited a dire underground museum, a dire museum in a church with oodles of god(excuse the pun) awful Spanish religious art, a decent modern museum and another moderate popular art place.
Back in the day when the Spaniards were trying to convert everyone to become a Catholic they clearly had a language barrier, the locals of Cusco spoke a language called Quecha(some Peruvians still speak it as well as another called Aymar), so to overcome this reams of abysmal art was produced to tell the story of Jesus and the bible and all that tosh. Worshipping the sun to get a good harvest made much more sense. Anyway, this means that now there's plenty of pitiful museums claiming to have wonderful historical art that is really just pure garbage.

Saying that, we did see some great art in the tourist information museum which also included some old photographs of Cusco. Clearly a lot of money has been pumped into the place to renovate it. It's always looked beautiful but to varying degrees, many streets in the faded pictures looked like the buildings had suffered from large earthquakes. The main church on the main square, the Plaza de Armas, was half crumbled. What we see now seems a long way from the dirt streets and half tumbled buildings but there was clearly still a charm about the place. I just couldn't help but like it. But after over a week here, longer than we'd spent in one place anywhere else, it was time to get a move on. I didn't want to leave but there were other places to see. I'd come back even though I'm not sure what was left to see, other than the many church interiors but you have to buy a separate tourist ticket for that. I'd obviously stuff my face in one of the many great eateries on offer, even though I'd had a bad stomach for days that I couldn't shake off.
Okay so you get hassled to buy some piece of art, hats, sunglasses, t-shirts and books every five minutes of various street hawkers. But, they don't pester you too badly, well not as much as the guys trying to get you into their bars and restaurants. It's also full of tourists, for the travel purist/idiot this is a bad thing. For me this doesn't bother me a jot, in fact it takes the pressure of the blond boy anyway. For me this is one of the best places we've been. The people are friendly, the place has winding cobbled narrow streets with well crafted stonework buildings, it's got history coming out of it's belly button and has good food and views a plenty. Forget Peru, this could be the best city in South America.

But onward we go. Arequipa next. This place looks great from the photos and we've heard it's stunning. Will it live up to Cusco though? It's also home to the two deepest canyons in the world. Should be interesting.