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.

In hot waters

A couple of days before going you have to buy tickets for the train to Macchu Picchu. This is really the only feasible ways of getting there when not doing the 4 day Inca Trek. That in itself is between $300-400. I didn't fancy it. Most people who do it don't even walk to the pub so why they feel the need to do this I don't know. Yes I do. It's because it sounds good. Balls to that, I'll get the train. Still, not easy. I did ask at the tourist office if it was possible to ride there on a hired motorbike, this would be considerably cheaper. They laughed.
There are no roads into the last town at the foot of Macchu Picchu so you have to take the tourist train. It's pretty expensive too and only an hour and half from the small village of Ollantaytambo. We wanted to take the train from there because it was considerably cheaper and we heard the village is worth a visit due to it's large Inca ruins. Ok.
To see Macchu Picchu before all the tourists arrive along with the walkers on the Inca trail you have to stop overnight at Aguas Calientes, the last town, to get an early bus to the top of the mountain. Again ok.
Right let's go. We take a taxi for half an hour to get to the bus station. Once the confusion of ticket buying is over we get on a bus to Urambamba for 2 hours. This stops randomly all over the middle of no-where to let people on an off on the rutted dirt road. Arriving in Urambamba we change immediately into a small combi mini-van with 18 other passengers crammed in. 30 more minutes on rough roads to get to Ollantaytambo. And still we've a way to go yet.
The village of Ollantaytambo is tiny but has a huge terraced set of walls rising above it in the mountainside. This is the site of an Inca victory over the Spanish. The Incas stood atop the terracing raining rocks, fire sticks and flooding the plateau below. It's an intricately carved set of terraces, mainly to enable the growing of crops on the steep cliffside, and walls which included houses and storage buildings as well as the obligatory temple thingy. A narrow path cut into the mountainside meanders precariously to a couple more huts before we take the steep steps down to the exit. It's hard work scaling hugely steep areas like this normally but we keep having to remind ourselves that it's much harder at this altitude.


You can see other buildings on an opposite mountain that have been built right on the edge of the steep cliff. It's insane that they even wanted to build this high up let alone actually achieving it.
After an excellent traditional wood-burning oven baked pizza we head to the train station. Our train is the cheaper night train so views are out of the question. We did see the incredibly expensive Hiram Bingham train, named after the first non-South American to discover Macchu Picchu as guided by a local boy in 1920 or there abouts. It's a very flash train and clearly not for the likes of us!
We also saw the comical sight of a Volkswagon campervan converted into a mini-train roll by. It seems this acts as a line clearer, a large v-shaped metal guard on front to shift debris.
Our train arrives in Aguas Calientes(Spanish for hot waters) an hour and a half later. It arrives right in the middle of a street too. People eat in restaraunts either side, it seems the main road is also the train stop. Odd.
After avoiding the typical hostel sellers trying to get you into their flea ridden hovels we end up in a nice hostel on the main plaza. Aguas Calientes gets a complete slating in Lonely Planet for being overpriced and ugly but it didn't seem too bad.
It's pitch black away from the main streets, of which there's about 3, but we walk over a footbridge arched over very loud gushing water. It's at this moment we notice we're stood at the foot of two very large dome shadows, aka mountains. One of them is Macchu Picchu mountain itself, I reckon.
Two very early starts follow, a 5am wake-up to buy entrance tickets and catch one of the first buses up the winding dirt road to Macchu Picchu through a tropical setting. Aguas Calientes in daylight was completley different. The main square is ok but with mainly unfinished rough looking buildings. Still, there are huge lush green mountains towering over the place with a smouldering early morning mist clinging to the trees as it climbs up them. It does look magical up there.
Shall we get to what we came for?

A history of Coca

We splashed out on a VIP bus to Cusco that had a tour thing thrown in. Meaning that the 8 hour bus ride included 6 stops and a buffet lunch so it wouldn't be too long just sat on our arses.
The next major town North of Puno was Juliaca. This is a large market town, mainly black market, that the government turns a blind eye to. You can get anything here but the main item for sale is Bolivian fuel. It's much cheaper than Peruvian and comes in yellow cans that are outside a fair few houses. The buildings here aren't finished either and in a further tax dodge the flash new bus station is unused due to the departure tax people have to pay. This means that all the buses are crammed on the street opposite. It's crazy really. It's an ugly place in general, dusty streets with flying litter abound.
The first real stop was at a village called Pukura. This is the site of some pre-Inka artifacts and a pyramid, not of the Egyptian scale however. This village was the site of many a sacrifice, all from the village itself and all had to be of pure blood and 'unblemished'. Many young virgins in other words. We saw a frog shaped alter that was thought to be used for chopping off the heads of the sacrifices. These sacrifices took place to get good weather to produce good crops and a harvest. No Micheal Fish on the BBC weather here then! Some of the walls here were built 2000 years ago and still survive today. When the Inkas arrived they continued to use the pyramid until the Spanish came along and built a church, typically.
We went high up onto the Altiplano again and stopped off at the highest point for photos of the surrounding mountains. Up here it's a rural life, but a good one, we are told. I can't quite see it myself but each to their own. People do live longer here than in the city due to less stress, larger lungs(gained due to the thin air up here) and more red blood cells(also a bi-product of living at altitude) that helps stave off infections and diseases. The land is mainly all owned by the farmers who are actually squatters here. They still use the old Inka system of one for all and all for one, sounds familiar. Every year the families of the community club together to build a new house for a selected family. It's mainly potatoes, Alpacas and Llamas up here. Not a lot else. Huge mountains too.
We stop further up the road at a place called Raqchi. This is an old Inka temple and has some unbelievable stonework that has lasted over 500 years with an original mud wall atop. The Inkas are so renound for their excellent stone masonary and you can see why. For the most important buildings, like this one, they didn't use any mortar. Instead they hand polish each stone to fit perfectly with the next, and not in the conventional way you see on modern houses. These huge rocks are carved with many angles and the effect is stunning. An Inka god is supposed to have arrived out of a nearby volcano and this temple is believed to be where that god was worshipped. It's a large site and has straight-as-an-arrow streets still intact. Many an earthquake and eruption rocks this area, as Peru as a whole, but theses mammoth rocks still stand the test of time.
We next stopped at another elaborate church that was full of 24 carot gold. The town surrounding it was very poor and it's annoying to see all that money go to waste in somewhere like this.
The tour guide was keen to stress the importance of Coca leaves. Peru is the biggest producer of Coca in the world. Many people look down on this, especially America, as it is from this plant that cocaine is made. To make it you'd need a hell of a lot and you also need to isolate one of the many alkaloids contained within the plant. You see Coca leaves all the time and their a huge part of the culture and have been well before the Inka times of the 1500's. This is partly due to the benefits you get from chewing coca leaves or having coca tea, of which we had loads. It really helps with altitude sickness, it sorted me out many times, as well as being beneficial for teeth and including many required daily vitamins. The leaf itself is so far away from cocaine, the grape and wine is much closer. The US government has tried to impose trade sanctions and other bribes to Peru to force them to stop producing the leaves. America is the biggest consumer of cocaine and Peru does supply a hell of a lot. But Peruvians are quite offended by this as the average joe on the street uses coca for totally different reasons that don't provide the high of cocaine. Now and again I see local women carrying huge bags of leaves bigger than themselves.
You can chew the leaves but you'll need a catalyst to make them work. This catalyst is a bit of hardened ash. You wrap the leaves around the ash and chew for about 40 minutes without swallowing the leaves. It numbs your mouth briefly but after that it's fine. Once in Cusco we did hear an American girl in a cafe complaing of altitude sickness. She refused coca tea believing it was cocaine, sniggers filtered around the place. If it was cocaine I'm sure there'd be even more tourists here.